Any time these conversations come up, the only real solution (reducing the population to about 2 billion) is ignored by everyone.
Which means, we really are not going to solve the problem before it blows up in our face.
Reduce the population to 2 billion and the earth becomes verdant and rich within 50 years.
It's possible to peacefully reduce the population to 3 billion in 50 years. Just stop saving people who have more than 1 child per 2 parents and stop providing tax incentives for second children.
But it's not going to happen. We are going to 9 and probably 11 billion people with all the hell that results from that. By my current math, it happens a little while after I die.
hahahahah. This is Houston. I think we range from 50' above sea level to 77' above sea level. We have one area of town we call "the heights". It is less than 30' higher than the rest of the city.
This mileage difference started a few months ago. It took me a while to isolate the source. It even lead me to hyper driving (coasting and stuff) a bit, but despite being very careful, the mileage fell back to 265 when not going to the magic stations. I discovered the second Shell station when I had to stop and fill up for a beach trip.
Once a person ahead of me at a shifted into reverse and BACKED INTO ME.
Then the other two (crazy! TWO) times, people suddenly rammed me from behind when we were sitting at a red light.
I mean-- the car is there. We are stopped. They are stopped. The light is still red. BAM.
So all were fairly low speed collisions. Just bumper damage from the front.
I had a spiky bike rack in the rear so in both cases the rear hits did a lot of damage to their hood, grill and a little bit to their radiator.
I have to think these partially occured because the durango was pewter colored- kind of a yellow silver which is similar to concrete in color. I think people just didn't register it the way they would a darker car. ---
In my new darker honda element, I had no hits tho two near misses. One a lady pulls out in front of me from a side street talking on the cell phone, and then seeing me coming- panics and stops. The ABS chattered and I stopped about 6' from her. Then she put down the phone and slooowly finished her turn.
The other, a car ran a red light and then stopped in front of me blocking the road. I was doing about 40 towards my green light with no way I could stop-- head on collisions to the left so I actually accelerated ahead of the car to my right and cut along the curb next to a ditch avoiding a pretty severe collision.
In my new new even darker honda element, no issues so far.
When I buy from two particular Shell stations (one on I-10 and the other on I-45), I get 25mpg (over 300 miles per tank). When I buy from the Shells elsewhere and from any other station in Houston, I get 23mpg (265 miles per tank). When I buy gas in College Station, I sometimes get 25mpg and sometimes 23mpg.
Ethanol has to be the difference. I suspect those two stations are selling 100% gasoline while the other stations are selling gasoline with "Up to 10% Ethanol". This means Ethanol (10% of the gasoline) results in OVER a 10% mileage loss. (35 miles lost on a 300 mile tank).
In both cases I have about.75 gallons left in the tank when I fill up.
When newspapers were local, each city needed a staff of newspaper people (let's say 100 tho it is larger and smaller in larger or smaller cities).
When newspapers became national, each really only needed a staff of about 100 (could be 200).
When english language newspapers become international, there is a similar order of magnitude decrease in the number of newspaper workers needed.
Write the article once, and distribute it on the web once, and you don't need to reprint or redisplay it in a hundred different local web sites/ newspapers.
Of course these people need to be paid fair salaries-- but say its $200k each (with benefits-- a very hefty salary). Given billions of people, it would only take pennies each to support the 1,000 to 2,000 newspaper article english language workers needed globally. But that would mean the entire business would be a $200,000,000 business. The current business is much larger.
It's going to be a long painful road of continuously shrinking demand for formal news articles.
As for "opinion", any blogger can give you that and they are able to get buy on a lot less than $200k a year.
There are degrees of perversion from kissing your sister to having sex with her in a bear costume on a pay webcam.
The market was previously traded by humans at human speeds.
The market is now traded by computers at superhuman speeds and there is pretty good evidence that they are breaking the law ("Front running" and using small orders to manipulate the price on low volume) too- but it is with computers so the government hasn't caught up yet.
I think they should restrict trades to 1% of portfolios and there should be restrictions on how many times you can cancel an order.
I've felt for a while that the programs are using 100 share orders to walk the price around on low volume. And they can continue it as long as they don't get close to where the baby boomers want to unload (about 12kish- but dropping-- lately my older boomer buds are talking about unloading at 11kish now- they just want to cash out, retire, and get the hell out).
Independent of the robots, the boomers overbid the market-- it looks like a "hunchback" from the mid 90's where they entered the market.
The market was challenging but tradable until about 2008. Since then, it regularly violates accepted behavior. It's gotten smarter than I am.
The only way to win is not to play unless the rules are changed.
Allowing goldman sachs to see incoming orders and then place buy and sell orders in the microseconds before those orders execute would be frontrunning (and illegal) if it was being done by humans at normal speeds. They are supposed to be the market maker for cripe's sake-- that's why they get the privilege of seeing the orders.
I have started to think that the collective expert rules system and robotic speed made the market unsafe for my money over the last two years.
I keep some in on the chance we get a wave of inflation. But the market mainly seems to exist to pump money out of the hands of most in to the hands of a few these days.
I gave away my last laser printer and it still had tons of toner in it.
I have two reasons ink jet doesn't work for me. 1) I print infrequently (the printer can sit for 60 days without a page) 2) Then i can print a few pages or a map and then I can print 30-50 pages.
Ink jet just doesn't cut it.
At a fairly reliable 4000+ pages per cartridge, i haven't looked back at an ink jet since at least 2002.
In a libertarian world, every dime of salary and stock over a fixed amount would also be lost by the employees and executives.
Corporate protection would be limited (say $1million inflation adjusted). So you can get some protection from the corporation but if the company does damage, the executives and employees are on the hook (mistake, intentional, doesn't matter).
If it costs $173,000 to make a CD, and pirate stores in china are selling it for $1.25 and not returning even a single penny of the profits to the people that made the CD, then how many new songs does the chinese market support?
Songs may have a fair price of 10 cents (sell a song at 10 cents with 1 cents for bandwidth, 1 cent for the band, 1 cent for the record company, etc) to 1 billion people and you are still talking enormous amounts of money for everyone in involved.
But the chinese are purely leeching.
And for that matter with our unfair I.P. laws in the US we are basically paying for music, movies, drugs, software development kits, etc for the rest of the world. Which means they can compete with us for jobs and live a good lifestyle for a fraction of what we are forced to pay.
And I'm getting a bit sick of it. If nothing else, we should let true capitalism run it's course and allow purchase and reimportation of legal products made by the parent companies and sold for 1/10th the price there. I shouldn't have to pay $5 for a pill that is sold for a profit at.10 in china and india. I shouldn't have to pay $20 for a movie that is sold legally for a profit for $2.49 in china.
For low frequency events, we underweight the potential damage.
The gulf should be fine by 2045. Life recovers pretty fast. All they have to do is stop fishing for 20-30 years and the gulf would be teaming with life.
Oh come on, the likely hood of an oil spill in the gulf is 1/10,000. Do we really want to block drilling based on the 1/10,000 chance of a 200 million barrel leak that could kill all life in the gulf and do substantial damage to most of the eastern seaboard and destroy the fishing industry in four states and potentially do a lot of damage to the atlantic ocean and carribean as well? Be reasonable.
I 'play', if you could call it that. Farmville isn't really a game but it makes for nice downtime conversation and has reconnected me with some of my friends. It also gives you a chance to have secret little side conversations about nails and puppy chow.
The premium items work like this:
You can have a Barn for 5,000c in game coins you earn in game. But you can have a COW PRINT Barn for 17 FV (about $1.70 cash.. or maybe 0.17c cash.-- I think it is 10 cents per FV tho).
You can get a pond for 5,000c. Or you can get a LAKE for 57FV.
Having gone through EQ... I swore I'd never spend a dime on this game. And there are ways to scam it... recently there was a glorious bug which allowed us to send unlimited gifts as long as you logged out/back in to facebook between each gift sending attempt. I eventually ran out of my alloted database slots for gifts (looks alike about 200). It was fun- as one friend said, "it feels like it's raining $100 bills".
The more you have, the worse your performance is however (and I mean for a 200 item farm, you are talking a 3 minute load time). It seems to help to exit and log back into Facebook and when I looked it dropped about a half a megabyte of memory (899,xxx to 217,xxx) so I suspect that Flash is terrible at garbage collection or has a huge memory leak.
They also try to get you into other games by offering cross game promotions (play "Mafia Wars to get the special tractor").
I've learned that most people never look at your farm- they stay zoomed in tight (to speed up the visit). Several friends have burned out recently so I imagine I'll cut back/stop myself.
Oh the worst thing recently was the stupid dogs. The 15,000c dogs had to be fed every 24 hours or they would run away. I started mine at 11:00 at night- so I had to get on and feed it every night. Now that it's done, it will harvest all my rabbits with one click on the dog. The 30ishFV dogs would get unhappy but not run away.
Oh oh.. and now they let you "FIND" a locked gift box which you can get the password to if you give them more private information. I just treat it as another decoration.
It's not a game- and I try to limit myself to 30 minutes a day max.
Be ready to pulled in for questioning with a presumption of guilt when the police get a 90% dna match on the 13 markers sometime in the next decade when the police are using records from that "temporary" database.
Slashdot Mirror
Legalize Hemp and you get huge amounts of hemp oil and plastics from hemp oil.
Until we legalize Hemp, we are not really being serious.
Any time these conversations come up, the only real solution (reducing the population to about 2 billion) is ignored by everyone.
Which means, we really are not going to solve the problem before it blows up in our face.
Reduce the population to 2 billion and the earth becomes verdant and rich within 50 years.
It's possible to peacefully reduce the population to 3 billion in 50 years. Just stop saving people who have more than 1 child per 2 parents and stop providing tax incentives for second children.
But it's not going to happen. We are going to 9 and probably 11 billion people with all the hell that results from that.
By my current math, it happens a little while after I die.
I use Noscript and ABP.
I donated to the noscript writer, G.Maone, today in fact. :-)
I think his program prevents a lot of viral infections and saves even people who do not use noscript from grief.
That's just crazy. What are these people thinking? Is it that they can't see the traffic light and they are going off of your car?
one of the ladies sort of floored it into me. Got up to 5-10 mph in 20' before ramming me.
It's just flat out weird!
Hey Fellow Houstonian!
I'm central around 610/290.
hahahahah. This is Houston. I think we range from 50' above sea level to 77' above sea level.
We have one area of town we call "the heights". It is less than 30' higher than the rest of the city.
This mileage difference started a few months ago. It took me a while to isolate the source. It even lead me to hyper driving (coasting and stuff) a bit, but despite being very careful, the mileage fell back to 265 when not going to the magic stations. I discovered the second Shell station when I had to stop and fill up for a beach trip.
I hope that trend catches on.
First, the ethanol gas is effectively $2-$3 more expensive (so about 10% more).
Next, I have to STOP and get gasoline a day sooner, costing me 15 to 20 minutes of my time.
When I had my Durango, I had three accidents.
Once a person ahead of me at a shifted into reverse and BACKED INTO ME.
Then the other two (crazy! TWO) times, people suddenly rammed me from behind when we were sitting at a red light.
I mean-- the car is there. We are stopped. They are stopped. The light is still red. BAM.
So all were fairly low speed collisions. Just bumper damage from the front.
I had a spiky bike rack in the rear so in both cases the rear hits did a lot of damage to their hood, grill and a little bit to their radiator.
I have to think these partially occured because the durango was pewter colored- kind of a yellow silver which is similar to concrete in color. I think people just didn't register it the way they would a darker car.
---
In my new darker honda element, I had no hits tho two near misses.
One a lady pulls out in front of me from a side street talking on the cell phone, and then seeing me coming- panics and stops. The ABS chattered and I stopped about 6' from her. Then she put down the phone and slooowly finished her turn.
The other, a car ran a red light and then stopped in front of me blocking the road. I was doing about 40 towards my green light with no way I could stop-- head on collisions to the left so I actually accelerated ahead of the car to my right and cut along the curb next to a ditch avoiding a pretty severe collision.
In my new new even darker honda element, no issues so far.
When I buy from two particular Shell stations (one on I-10 and the other on I-45), I get 25mpg (over 300 miles per tank).
When I buy from the Shells elsewhere and from any other station in Houston, I get 23mpg (265 miles per tank). When I buy gas in College Station, I sometimes get 25mpg and sometimes 23mpg.
Ethanol has to be the difference. I suspect those two stations are selling 100% gasoline while the other stations are selling gasoline with "Up to 10% Ethanol". This means Ethanol (10% of the gasoline) results in OVER a 10% mileage loss. (35 miles lost on a 300 mile tank).
In both cases I have about .75 gallons left in the tank when I fill up.
I think the issue is this.
When newspapers were local, each city needed a staff of newspaper people (let's say 100 tho it is larger and smaller in larger or smaller cities).
When newspapers became national, each really only needed a staff of about 100 (could be 200).
When english language newspapers become international, there is a similar order of magnitude decrease in the number of newspaper workers needed.
Write the article once, and distribute it on the web once, and you don't need to reprint or redisplay it in a hundred different local web sites/ newspapers.
Of course these people need to be paid fair salaries-- but say its $200k each (with benefits-- a very hefty salary). Given billions of people, it would only take pennies each to support the 1,000 to 2,000 newspaper article english language workers needed globally. But that would mean the entire business would be a $200,000,000 business. The current business is much larger.
It's going to be a long painful road of continuously shrinking demand for formal news articles.
As for "opinion", any blogger can give you that and they are able to get buy on a lot less than $200k a year.
Sure you can...
There are degrees of perversion from kissing your sister to having sex with her in a bear costume on a pay webcam.
The market was previously traded by humans at human speeds.
The market is now traded by computers at superhuman speeds and there is pretty good evidence that they are breaking the law ("Front running" and using small orders to manipulate the price on low volume) too- but it is with computers so the government hasn't caught up yet.
I think they should restrict trades to 1% of portfolios and there should be restrictions on how many times you can cancel an order.
I've felt for a while that the programs are using 100 share orders to walk the price around on low volume. And they can continue it as long as they don't get close to where the baby boomers want to unload (about 12kish- but dropping-- lately my older boomer buds are talking about unloading at 11kish now- they just want to cash out, retire, and get the hell out).
Independent of the robots, the boomers overbid the market-- it looks like a "hunchback" from the mid 90's where they entered the market.
You should read on. Especially the cited material.
The market was challenging but tradable until about 2008. Since then, it regularly violates accepted behavior. It's gotten smarter than I am.
The only way to win is not to play unless the rules are changed.
Allowing goldman sachs to see incoming orders and then place buy and sell orders in the microseconds before those orders execute would be frontrunning (and illegal) if it was being done by humans at normal speeds. They are supposed to be the market maker for cripe's sake-- that's why they get the privilege of seeing the orders.
I have started to think that the collective expert rules system and robotic speed made the market unsafe for my money over the last two years.
I keep some in on the chance we get a wave of inflation. But the market mainly seems to exist to pump money out of the hands of most in to the hands of a few these days.
Ditto, Ditto, Ditto.
I gave away my last laser printer and it still had tons of toner in it.
I have two reasons ink jet doesn't work for me.
1) I print infrequently (the printer can sit for 60 days without a page)
2) Then i can print a few pages or a map and then I can print 30-50 pages.
Ink jet just doesn't cut it.
At a fairly reliable 4000+ pages per cartridge, i haven't looked back at an ink jet since at least 2002.
In a libertarian world, every dime of salary and stock over a fixed amount would also be lost by the employees and executives.
Corporate protection would be limited (say $1million inflation adjusted). So you can get some protection from the corporation but if the company does damage, the executives and employees are on the hook (mistake, intentional, doesn't matter).
If they start cutting people off, then many will no longer need high speed internet services. Inexpensive DSL ($15 to $20) is fine for most crap.
Yea. It doesn't seem to happen as much as it used to.
Some times I'd back up and then drive forward over the sensor again.
Sometimes, I'd take a right turn, make a U-Turn, then make a left turn.
I've read of people being at lights and being told by the police "I'm saying it is okay for you to go through now- because it is stuck."
Okay- while I AGREE with you...
If it costs $173,000 to make a CD, and pirate stores in china are selling it for $1.25 and not returning even a single penny of the profits to the people that made the CD, then how many new songs does the chinese market support?
Songs may have a fair price of 10 cents (sell a song at 10 cents with 1 cents for bandwidth, 1 cent for the band, 1 cent for the record company, etc) to 1 billion people and you are still talking enormous amounts of money for everyone in involved.
But the chinese are purely leeching.
And for that matter with our unfair I.P. laws in the US we are basically paying for music, movies, drugs, software development kits, etc for the rest of the world. Which means they can compete with us for jobs and live a good lifestyle for a fraction of what we are forced to pay.
And I'm getting a bit sick of it. If nothing else, we should let true capitalism run it's course and allow purchase and reimportation of legal products made by the parent companies and sold for 1/10th the price there. I shouldn't have to pay $5 for a pill that is sold for a profit at .10 in china and india. I shouldn't have to pay $20 for a movie that is sold legally for a profit for $2.49 in china.
Also, what about ambulances, police, pregnant ladies being rushed to the hospital.
And what about that STUCK red light at 3am in the morning. (motorists drive in, but they don't drive out).
Stopped newspapers a few months ago.
Haven't found a good replacement.
Part of the problem has to be the local staff making six figures and the spectrum being bid up.
TV used to be cheap to make. But it can't go backwards so it will die instead.
There is more entertainment and news available than I can consume. I fall a hundred hours behind every week despite occasional binges.
Choose your rate.
Let's say 1/10,000 per year per rig.
Let's say 1/10,000 per year per thousand rigs.
Does it really make a difference?
For low frequency events, we underweight the potential damage.
The gulf should be fine by 2045. Life recovers pretty fast. All they have to do is stop fishing for 20-30 years and the gulf would be teaming with life.
Oh come on, the likely hood of an oil spill in the gulf is 1/10,000. Do we really want to block drilling based on the 1/10,000 chance of a 200 million barrel leak that could kill all life in the gulf and do substantial damage to most of the eastern seaboard and destroy the fishing industry in four states and potentially do a lot of damage to the atlantic ocean and carribean as well? Be reasonable.
I 'play', if you could call it that. Farmville isn't really a game but it makes for nice downtime conversation and has reconnected me with some of my friends.
It also gives you a chance to have secret little side conversations about nails and puppy chow.
The premium items work like this:
You can have a Barn for 5,000c in game coins you earn in game.
But you can have a COW PRINT Barn for 17 FV (about $1.70 cash.. or maybe 0.17c cash.-- I think it is 10 cents per FV tho).
You can get a pond for 5,000c. Or you can get a LAKE for 57FV.
Having gone through EQ... I swore I'd never spend a dime on this game. And there are ways to scam it... recently there was a glorious bug which allowed us to send unlimited gifts as long as you logged out/back in to facebook between each gift sending attempt. I eventually ran out of my alloted database slots for gifts (looks alike about 200). It was fun- as one friend said, "it feels like it's raining $100 bills".
The more you have, the worse your performance is however (and I mean for a 200 item farm, you are talking a 3 minute load time). It seems to help to exit and log back into Facebook and when I looked it dropped about a half a megabyte of memory (899,xxx to 217,xxx) so I suspect that Flash is terrible at garbage collection or has a huge memory leak.
They also try to get you into other games by offering cross game promotions (play "Mafia Wars to get the special tractor").
I've learned that most people never look at your farm- they stay zoomed in tight (to speed up the visit). Several friends have burned out recently so I imagine I'll cut back/stop myself.
Oh the worst thing recently was the stupid dogs. The 15,000c dogs had to be fed every 24 hours or they would run away. I started mine at 11:00 at night- so I had to get on and feed it every night. Now that it's done, it will harvest all my rabbits with one click on the dog. The 30ishFV dogs would get unhappy but not run away.
Oh oh.. and now they let you "FIND" a locked gift box which you can get the password to if you give them more private information. I just treat it as another decoration.
It's not a game- and I try to limit myself to 30 minutes a day max.
Once it's recorded, it is recorded for life.
Be ready to pulled in for questioning with a presumption of guilt when the police get a 90% dna match on the 13 markers sometime in the next decade when the police are using records from that "temporary" database.