Sometime people in the US have to realize that the economy has changed. It contracted rather sharply which was really an adjustment that was coming for some time now. The US doesn't need as many low-skill people employed as before and even needs a bit fewer high-skill people as well.
There are a couple of things we can do. We could try to unionize a lot more places and guarantee everyone a cushy union job doing something completely unnecessary. Sort of like having two teams, one digging holes and the other filling them in. Of course, this would have to be government-supported. Your tax dollars at work.
We could just skip the make-work jobs and give everyone not working a fake job that pays $25,000 a year from the government.
We could encourage the unemployed to move somewhere else because the jobs aren't coming back. Unfortunately, there are very few places that need more workers of any skill level right now.
The idea that somehow we are going to find 8 million new jobs for people is laughable. They aren't there and there isn't anything the government can do to make them magically appear. So the unemployed are mostly going to stay that way and we have to figure out what to do with them. Just having them permanently collecting unemployment benefits doesn't make sense.
Fire isn't all that great unless you really get the disc up beyond the glass point of polycarbonate, which is around 230C. You can degrade the dye of recordable discs starting at 120F, but that isn't going to assure unreadability.
Turning the disc into a bent, folded mess is OK, but unless you go that far it isn't going to work.
Some folks had a fire and we were called on to evaluate the readability of the discs. Of the 30 or so they sent us, all but two were fine, even one with clear smoke damage to it. The guy was trying to claim thousands of dollars in lost software because of the discs. Upon getting the report it seems they settled with the insurance company for a lot less.
Remember, the drive is important. Just because your crappy drive can't read it does not mean a good drive can't. Sadly, there are very few good drives available.
Someone not too long ago thought that would work. The US Secret Service broke in on them and from across the room the guy said "You aren't getting this one!" and broke a disc in half.
The Secret Service called us and asked what could they do? We told them a couple of interesting techniques for putting a snapped disc back together and sent them a trial version of our software to assist with the task. An hour later they called back and ordered four copies of the software and never said another word about what the result was.
Do not count on breaking a disc in half. It isn't anywhere near good enough. If you get the pieces below about 1/8th of a disc I think you probably are safe, but you have to get all of the pieces this small.
Also, be very careful breaking discs. They tend to throw off microscopic pieces of polycarbonate which are very, very sharp.
For recordable discs, the data is in the dye. Lose the reflector (because of microwaving) and you lose the data. You cannot "reapply" the reflector - the dye is destroyed with the original reflector thus wiping out the data.
For manufactured discs it is true that the data is cast into the polycarbonate. But, you would need to get at it. It is sealed up in a lacquer coating, of which most of that remains. You aren't going to re-coat the polycarbonate with anything left there and by "anything" I mean anything down to a size of around 100 nanometers. It would be impossible to "clean" the disc in a manner that would allow reapplication of the aluminum reflector.
The aluminum reflector on manufactured discs is applyed using a vacuum ion depositation technique. The layer is a few molecules thick. We are talking about a scale that most people can't even imagine it is so small.
You need to put a cup of water in with the disc. Failure to do this can screw up the magnatron tube and ruin the microwave oven. 3 to 5 seconds is the limit - you can get flames for much longer than that and burning polycarbonate isn't good for anyone.
There is no "toxic gas" other than burning polycarbonate.
Recordable discs use gold or silver with negligable oxidation of the reflector. You might get some level of degradation of the dye and call that "oxidation" but we're talking about the reflector, right?
Manufactured discs use aluminum which does oxidize somewhat. In extreme environments with lots and lots of humidity you can get the aluminum to oxidize but only a very few people have ever actually seen it. Mostly this is a myth started by the folks proclaming "DVD rot" which has only occurred in some really odd circumstances.
The problem with shredded discs being put back together is that it will take the drive about 1/4th of a turn to regain tracking after a break. You are NOT going to be able to align the spiral across a break - wraps of the spiral on a DVD are around 1000 nanometers apart. They are a whopping 1400 nanometers apart on a CD so that might be as much as 40% easier.
Since visible light has a wavelength around 500 nanometers, we are talking about features that cannot be resolved by magnification. You might, and I say just barely might, be able to do this with an electron microscope and some sort of micro-manipulator. Maybe.
Having a piece of a sector doesn't do you any good really. The data isn't encoded as bytes on the disc and there is physical scrambling of the bytes to spread them out. For example, to read one sector on a CD you have to read three. On a DVD it is worse - you have to read 16 of them.
Jesse Jackson Sr. is very good at getting companies to knuckle under. He is famous for this and can trigger all sorts of things in the black community.
Jesse Jackson Jr. is probably playing on hopes that Apple will give him millions to shut up. Or, give iPads to all the inner city black students that are "oppressed" using some rule that excludes all but black inner-city youth without ever saying "black" in the specific rules guiding distribution. He might win in the end because he can certainly use the House as a forum to make himself heard.
The population of Detroit has dropped by around 70% in the last 20 years. Perhaps it is because it is cold there in the winter? Or could it be because the gangs have taken over the inner city and there are no more jobs?
I'd say you are an order of magnitude off of "paradise" - we need to get to around 250 million if we want "sustainable".
Even trying to cut the population in half (more than half, really) would require nearly preventing all births for 10-20 years. Sure, it is possible but it is entirely possible that you would wreck the motivation people have for having children completely. If you push too hard on this there is the possiblity that people will just give up.
This is a factor that some of the more radical environmentalists refuse to accept - that if you push hard enough the result will be that people will just give up entirely. All it takes is about 15 years of zero birthrate and you're not going to get it back, ever. Absolutely it is hard to disincent the drive to reproduce - but if you succeed the result could be catastrophic.
How hard would you have to push? Well, in the US and Western Europe today the population growth is negative. Many people feel that it isn't fair to bring children into a world of declining expectations and looming destruction of the environment. Mostly this is among educated young people. In the US we are left with immigration as the only population growth factor there is and I suspect Western Europe is pretty much the same way. This portends some very drastic changes in the coming decades as the population shifts away from educated European-extracted peoples and towards Latin American folks that have been subsistance farming for generations and no goals higher than survival. In most inner cities today the idea of the straight-A student is a subject of ridicule, as is the idea of going to college - what, do you want to be seen as trying to prove yourself better than your peers?
There are two kinds of non-compete agreements. The ones that say you can't work for Company X, Y or Z because they are direct competitors and likely have been trying to steal people for the last few years. The other kind says you have to starve for a year or so.
The first kind are very, very enforcible. Be aware of this and think carefully before signing. The second kind are a joke, so sign away as they are aren't enforcible at all.
In all cases I have seen if you go to Company X after having signed an enforcible agreement they will check you out and find out they would be violating the agreement. You never hear from them again. If you are persistent they might tell you why they stopped talking to you but in general you aren't going to know they have a back channel to your previous employer.
The pro-piracy people that I have run into seem to believe the only way anything will change is to first destroy the entire revenue model of digital goods. Once people realize that it is all out there for free they will stop paying. When the older folks (that still pay) die off there will be zero revenue coming in for anything digital. Zero. Nada.
It effectively puts everyone that it looking at revenue out of business. The "new business model" is very simple: there is no business to be had.
This is supposed to bring in a new age of plenty with everyone contributing to the great pool of entertainment media and no greedy companies involved. Some folks will band together to make really big productions out of the goodness of their hearts and to fulfill their huge egos -- and these will be as good or better than any current movie or TV production. Just not "commercial".
The thinking goes that after a few years of that maybe there will be some kind of "new business model" for what is left. I seriously doubt many people will be all ready to start paying again - ever - so the idea of the "new business model" sounds like an utter fantasy.
I have my doubts about the great abundance of new high-quality productions as well. I think we are likely to see a lot of crap from people that believe they are the most talented on Earth and everyone should be eternally grateful for their contributions to the worldwide culture of Man.
The problem is, nobody is going to rewire the US with transmission lines to distribute the power.
It is a combination of NIMBY and real fears about EMF radiation. The minute some techy or egghead says the word "RADIATION" all thinking shuts off and Joe Sixpack says he doesn't want any in his neighborhood. Talking about the sun or the speakers on his stereo aren't going to get you anywhere at all - this is after all RADIATION we are talking about.
There are plenty of articles published in the Weekly World News and other such places that talk about how power lines cause cancer, impotence, mental retardation and warts. Talk to anyone living in a house near a transmission line about how long it was on the market before they bought it, or how long it has been on the market and they can't sell it for $10.
Anyone, including Mr. Obama, that believes we are going to rewire the US with a superconducting "Smart Grid" needs to pass around what they've been smoking. It must be some really fine stuff. We are far, far more likely to see a complete breakdown of electric distribution in the US and everyone having their own solar system with batteries than we are any improvement in transmission lines.
Probably a good portion of that is because they break so often and are far less repairable than a desktop machine.
Convienent? Sure, but the price is lack of repairability and a fragile nature. End result is a lot more laptops just get "used up" in one way or another and they are treated as a disposible commodity.
The problem is there isn't any sort of completely "green" energy source.
The process of building a thermal solar generating system will produce a great deal of waste and it will likely use hazardous chemicals that will leak and cause environmental damage.
Certainly the process of making PV solar cells, wind turbines, or virtually anything else will involve great expenditures of energy, hazardous chemicals and lots and lots of waste. Just refining the metals alone is going to use tremendous amounts of energy, create massive piles of waste and use all sorts of hazardous substances.
Better face it, if you want an industrial society you are going to have to break some eggs. You can't conserve your way down to zero. The only way to be completely environmentally sustainable is to not play the game at all.
Yeah, except it was a huge money-loser for T-Mobile. They don't charge for UMA minutes if you pay $10 a month for the UMA unlimited feature. They recently yanked the ability to use it outside the US - now UMA calls are charged the same as wireless calls outside the US at like $1.29 a minute.
With T-Mobile having been bought it will be a very short time indeed until it goes away entirely. Too much money being lost on it.
Uh, if it was wired for phone lines then it is a series connection through all the jacks in the house. For network wiring you would need "home runs" for each jack independently. When I last bought a new construction house and got to spec the wiring the only guy the builder would allow to do it freaked out when he figured out what was really involved with CAT5 home runs to a central point in the basement. Then he wanted to charge $60 a jack to put the wall plates on.
Yes, we know how and have known for a long time. But the days of mega-engineering projects are pretty much over. The idea that some number of workers are known to be killed building some mega-project is enough to put anyone off these days. They would be sued, over and over. Worse, when the plantiff's attorney asks if they knew people would be killed - because of history of big projects - and the answer was yes the trial would be over.
Dig a really long deep tunnel? Kill a worker every 10 miles or so? You have got to be kidding!
The problem is that there isn't any real point in making anything in the US anymore - the labor costs are too high when compared with the rest of the world. If it costs a machine shop $100 to make some complicated part it can certainly be done for $20 somewhere else. Maybe not quite as good, but cheaper. And just about everyone is interested in cheaper. Quality is something that governments can think about but cheap and just barely good enough is fine for consumers.
The only ways to compete with cheap foreign labor are things that are going to look really bad or destroy the economy of the West.
Sure, we could just import all the cheap labor that is needed. Not H1B-type importation but real, honest immigrants in ghettos. Create a special class of workers (foreign) that aren't citizens and aren't subject to minimum wage, OSHA, worker's comp and a host of other things the competition doesn't have and isn't interested in. Then the US and Western Europe can have the jobs back. Right now in the US I would suspect that there would be plenty of people - citizens - that would happily take a job at 1/2 minimum wage just so they had a job, any job at all.
Certainly in the US we could make it clear that "exploitation of cheap labor" was the point of the entire program and there would still be people streaming in. Perhaps it might reduce it a bit when letters home started complaining that the foreign worker program wasn't paying people any more than they could earn in Guatemala or whereever they are coming from. This would affect the supply of cheap workers somewhat - but the US has always had a huge foreign worker influx. Look at the Chinese labor that was imported in the 1800s.
I'd say the only other way to "compete" is to not even try. Offshore and outsource everything that is possible to outsource and offshore. Realize that if it is possible to pay factory workers $0.25 a day that someone is going to take advantage of it and it might as well be people in the US that benefit from it. Understand that prison slave labor is cheap and effective for some types of work. All jobs in the US become high-skill, high-tech jobs mostly focusing on making use of the cheap overseas labor for the unskilled work. Make it a federal crime to outsource or offshore anything that allows IP to fall into foreign hands. Start a huge program of paying people to move overseas if they do not have the required skills, training or intelligence.
Unfortunately, the first way looks really bad and the second way only works for a little while - maybe 100 years or so. The "goal" of the US and Western Europe would seem to be to eliminate cheap labor by raising the standard of living everywhere. The problem is that in places like Indonesia, China, and India the people really in charge there aren't interested in raising everyone's standard of living and the people are happy with the scraps they are getting tossed now. Sure, India is getting a few more scraps than before but in a country of 800 million with most of the people in abject rural poverty there is an awful lot of depth in cheap labor still to go. It will be a long, long time before the people in rural India are earning even 1/100th of a poor Westerner and that is a huge cheap labor pool.
Aha, there is the dicotomy. You can pay taxes, therefore you don't need anything from the government because you can pay for it yourself.
All the people out there that are not paying taxes, they require government support and everything should be given to them. This would eliminate their downtrodden state and allow them to rise up and achieve their full potential, right?
I suspect strongly that should something like that come to pass somewhere around 70-80% of the people that are currently out working at jobs they don't enjoy and struggling to pay their bills would just say "Bag it!" and apply for government support. After all, why not? If we can make having stuff and living a decent life a "right" that the government owes everyone why wouldn't a large percentage of the population actively decide to take them up on that offer?
We are a long, long way away from being able to afford that as a nation, but people keep thinking it is a good idea. People think that everyone deserves to have a job they like or to still have a nice standard of living even if they don't have a job. That works out fine - until people figure out they can still be a "have" (as in "I have a TV" and "I have a nice place to live" and "I have lots of games") without they hassle of the job they hate. I don't think it would take very long at all for that to work itself out.
Most of the homeless in the US are in that situation because of either bad decisions or an afffirmative decision to be homeless. Sometimes this makes sense - if you hate the regimented discipline in a shelter then maybe homeless is better for you.
A lot of homeless people get that way because they were living on the edge of society the way things were and with one bit of bad luck everything collapsed. If you have a job only because your uncle doesn't mind your coming in drunk and your uncle gets sick... well, maybe you don't have a job anymore. If that means you can't pay rent, don't jump through all the government hoops and shelter has no room for you, you can certainly end up homeless. The problem was that you never learned how to have a job, not that your uncle got sick. Although if you ask more than a few homeless people you will find that many of them got that way because of something they perceive as totally out of their control. The fact that they dropped out of high school and could never get a job that paid enough for them to live in their home town isn't something they see as a contributing influence.
Homeless shelters have rules and if you don't follow the rules - like no drug use - you get tossed out. Plenty of the homeless decide that it is better to be living in a box in an alley and do whatever they want than to "submit" to the rules in a shelter.
So what would happen in the US if every homeless person were given a place to live? They would be out on the street in less than a month in most cases. Would it help to give them $1000 a week to help with expense? Maybe, but that doesn't mean they would have food and nice clothes. There are a very small number of homeless people that got that way because of a whole collection of things that wiped them out. Those people could really be helped, but it is a very small percentage.
The big increase in the homeless population occurred in the US in the 1970s with the closing of nearly all state mental hospitals and dumping the people on the street to fend for themselves. In the 1950s these people would have been (a) arrested and (b) committed to a hospital. Some folks got caught up in this improperly and it did give the whole system a bad name. Today maybe 25% of the population in prisons are there because there is no state mental hospital to put them away in. Maybe more like 50% of the people in prisons are there because they don't function very well in normal society and they either gravitate toward crime or just made it clear to the police that they weren't going to get along with the rest of society - living on the street and using drugs can certainly lead to being arrested if you make a big nuisance of yourself.
I suggest nationalization of all Internet and computer related industries. It would make so much more sense to have people that know nothing about technology running things because they passed a civil service test 20 years ago.
The problem is what I really want is a cell phone that changes it IMEA in a random manner so it is free to place calls with all the time. Also, I want a 25 watt output so I can always make calls with it.
If I own the phone, I should be able to do these things.
Unfortunately, the FCC got a decision around 1976 that makes it clear manufacturers can make things but to modify the device in any way immediately revokes your authorization to use the device. This originally applied to CB radios but has been extended to practically everything.
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Sometime people in the US have to realize that the economy has changed. It contracted rather sharply which was really an adjustment that was coming for some time now. The US doesn't need as many low-skill people employed as before and even needs a bit fewer high-skill people as well.
There are a couple of things we can do. We could try to unionize a lot more places and guarantee everyone a cushy union job doing something completely unnecessary. Sort of like having two teams, one digging holes and the other filling them in. Of course, this would have to be government-supported. Your tax dollars at work.
We could just skip the make-work jobs and give everyone not working a fake job that pays $25,000 a year from the government.
We could encourage the unemployed to move somewhere else because the jobs aren't coming back. Unfortunately, there are very few places that need more workers of any skill level right now.
The idea that somehow we are going to find 8 million new jobs for people is laughable. They aren't there and there isn't anything the government can do to make them magically appear. So the unemployed are mostly going to stay that way and we have to figure out what to do with them. Just having them permanently collecting unemployment benefits doesn't make sense.
Fire isn't all that great unless you really get the disc up beyond the glass point of polycarbonate, which is around 230C. You can degrade the dye of recordable discs starting at 120F, but that isn't going to assure unreadability.
Turning the disc into a bent, folded mess is OK, but unless you go that far it isn't going to work.
Some folks had a fire and we were called on to evaluate the readability of the discs. Of the 30 or so they sent us, all but two were fine, even one with clear smoke damage to it. The guy was trying to claim thousands of dollars in lost software because of the discs. Upon getting the report it seems they settled with the insurance company for a lot less.
Remember, the drive is important. Just because your crappy drive can't read it does not mean a good drive can't. Sadly, there are very few good drives available.
Someone not too long ago thought that would work. The US Secret Service broke in on them and from across the room the guy said "You aren't getting this one!" and broke a disc in half.
The Secret Service called us and asked what could they do? We told them a couple of interesting techniques for putting a snapped disc back together and sent them a trial version of our software to assist with the task. An hour later they called back and ordered four copies of the software and never said another word about what the result was.
Do not count on breaking a disc in half. It isn't anywhere near good enough. If you get the pieces below about 1/8th of a disc I think you probably are safe, but you have to get all of the pieces this small.
Also, be very careful breaking discs. They tend to throw off microscopic pieces of polycarbonate which are very, very sharp.
Uh, no.
For recordable discs, the data is in the dye. Lose the reflector (because of microwaving) and you lose the data. You cannot "reapply" the reflector - the dye is destroyed with the original reflector thus wiping out the data.
For manufactured discs it is true that the data is cast into the polycarbonate. But, you would need to get at it. It is sealed up in a lacquer coating, of which most of that remains. You aren't going to re-coat the polycarbonate with anything left there and by "anything" I mean anything down to a size of around 100 nanometers. It would be impossible to "clean" the disc in a manner that would allow reapplication of the aluminum reflector.
The aluminum reflector on manufactured discs is applyed using a vacuum ion depositation technique. The layer is a few molecules thick. We are talking about a scale that most people can't even imagine it is so small.
You need to put a cup of water in with the disc. Failure to do this can screw up the magnatron tube and ruin the microwave oven. 3 to 5 seconds is the limit - you can get flames for much longer than that and burning polycarbonate isn't good for anyone.
There is no "toxic gas" other than burning polycarbonate.
Recordable discs use gold or silver with negligable oxidation of the reflector. You might get some level of degradation of the dye and call that "oxidation" but we're talking about the reflector, right?
Manufactured discs use aluminum which does oxidize somewhat. In extreme environments with lots and lots of humidity you can get the aluminum to oxidize but only a very few people have ever actually seen it. Mostly this is a myth started by the folks proclaming "DVD rot" which has only occurred in some really odd circumstances.
The problem with shredded discs being put back together is that it will take the drive about 1/4th of a turn to regain tracking after a break. You are NOT going to be able to align the spiral across a break - wraps of the spiral on a DVD are around 1000 nanometers apart. They are a whopping 1400 nanometers apart on a CD so that might be as much as 40% easier.
Since visible light has a wavelength around 500 nanometers, we are talking about features that cannot be resolved by magnification. You might, and I say just barely might, be able to do this with an electron microscope and some sort of micro-manipulator. Maybe.
Having a piece of a sector doesn't do you any good really. The data isn't encoded as bytes on the disc and there is physical scrambling of the bytes to spread them out. For example, to read one sector on a CD you have to read three. On a DVD it is worse - you have to read 16 of them.
Jesse Jackson Sr. is very good at getting companies to knuckle under. He is famous for this and can trigger all sorts of things in the black community.
Jesse Jackson Jr. is probably playing on hopes that Apple will give him millions to shut up. Or, give iPads to all the inner city black students that are "oppressed" using some rule that excludes all but black inner-city youth without ever saying "black" in the specific rules guiding distribution. He might win in the end because he can certainly use the House as a forum to make himself heard.
The population of Detroit has dropped by around 70% in the last 20 years. Perhaps it is because it is cold there in the winter? Or could it be because the gangs have taken over the inner city and there are no more jobs?
I'd say you are an order of magnitude off of "paradise" - we need to get to around 250 million if we want "sustainable".
Even trying to cut the population in half (more than half, really) would require nearly preventing all births for 10-20 years. Sure, it is possible but it is entirely possible that you would wreck the motivation people have for having children completely. If you push too hard on this there is the possiblity that people will just give up.
This is a factor that some of the more radical environmentalists refuse to accept - that if you push hard enough the result will be that people will just give up entirely. All it takes is about 15 years of zero birthrate and you're not going to get it back, ever. Absolutely it is hard to disincent the drive to reproduce - but if you succeed the result could be catastrophic.
How hard would you have to push? Well, in the US and Western Europe today the population growth is negative. Many people feel that it isn't fair to bring children into a world of declining expectations and looming destruction of the environment. Mostly this is among educated young people. In the US we are left with immigration as the only population growth factor there is and I suspect Western Europe is pretty much the same way. This portends some very drastic changes in the coming decades as the population shifts away from educated European-extracted peoples and towards Latin American folks that have been subsistance farming for generations and no goals higher than survival. In most inner cities today the idea of the straight-A student is a subject of ridicule, as is the idea of going to college - what, do you want to be seen as trying to prove yourself better than your peers?
There are two kinds of non-compete agreements. The ones that say you can't work for Company X, Y or Z because they are direct competitors and likely have been trying to steal people for the last few years. The other kind says you have to starve for a year or so.
The first kind are very, very enforcible. Be aware of this and think carefully before signing. The second kind are a joke, so sign away as they are aren't enforcible at all.
In all cases I have seen if you go to Company X after having signed an enforcible agreement they will check you out and find out they would be violating the agreement. You never hear from them again. If you are persistent they might tell you why they stopped talking to you but in general you aren't going to know they have a back channel to your previous employer.
The pro-piracy people that I have run into seem to believe the only way anything will change is to first destroy the entire revenue model of digital goods. Once people realize that it is all out there for free they will stop paying. When the older folks (that still pay) die off there will be zero revenue coming in for anything digital. Zero. Nada.
It effectively puts everyone that it looking at revenue out of business. The "new business model" is very simple: there is no business to be had.
This is supposed to bring in a new age of plenty with everyone contributing to the great pool of entertainment media and no greedy companies involved. Some folks will band together to make really big productions out of the goodness of their hearts and to fulfill their huge egos -- and these will be as good or better than any current movie or TV production. Just not "commercial".
The thinking goes that after a few years of that maybe there will be some kind of "new business model" for what is left. I seriously doubt many people will be all ready to start paying again - ever - so the idea of the "new business model" sounds like an utter fantasy.
I have my doubts about the great abundance of new high-quality productions as well. I think we are likely to see a lot of crap from people that believe they are the most talented on Earth and everyone should be eternally grateful for their contributions to the worldwide culture of Man.
The problem is, nobody is going to rewire the US with transmission lines to distribute the power.
It is a combination of NIMBY and real fears about EMF radiation. The minute some techy or egghead says the word "RADIATION" all thinking shuts off and Joe Sixpack says he doesn't want any in his neighborhood. Talking about the sun or the speakers on his stereo aren't going to get you anywhere at all - this is after all RADIATION we are talking about.
There are plenty of articles published in the Weekly World News and other such places that talk about how power lines cause cancer, impotence, mental retardation and warts. Talk to anyone living in a house near a transmission line about how long it was on the market before they bought it, or how long it has been on the market and they can't sell it for $10.
Anyone, including Mr. Obama, that believes we are going to rewire the US with a superconducting "Smart Grid" needs to pass around what they've been smoking. It must be some really fine stuff. We are far, far more likely to see a complete breakdown of electric distribution in the US and everyone having their own solar system with batteries than we are any improvement in transmission lines.
Probably a good portion of that is because they break so often and are far less repairable than a desktop machine.
Convienent? Sure, but the price is lack of repairability and a fragile nature. End result is a lot more laptops just get "used up" in one way or another and they are treated as a disposible commodity.
The problem is there isn't any sort of completely "green" energy source.
The process of building a thermal solar generating system will produce a great deal of waste and it will likely use hazardous chemicals that will leak and cause environmental damage.
Certainly the process of making PV solar cells, wind turbines, or virtually anything else will involve great expenditures of energy, hazardous chemicals and lots and lots of waste. Just refining the metals alone is going to use tremendous amounts of energy, create massive piles of waste and use all sorts of hazardous substances.
Better face it, if you want an industrial society you are going to have to break some eggs. You can't conserve your way down to zero. The only way to be completely environmentally sustainable is to not play the game at all.
Yeah, except it was a huge money-loser for T-Mobile. They don't charge for UMA minutes if you pay $10 a month for the UMA unlimited feature. They recently yanked the ability to use it outside the US - now UMA calls are charged the same as wireless calls outside the US at like $1.29 a minute.
With T-Mobile having been bought it will be a very short time indeed until it goes away entirely. Too much money being lost on it.
You need a fiber card. Plenty of organizations are on fiber networks.
Visit your nearest FBI office and check out their networking. All fiber.
Uh, if it was wired for phone lines then it is a series connection through all the jacks in the house. For network wiring you would need "home runs" for each jack independently. When I last bought a new construction house and got to spec the wiring the only guy the builder would allow to do it freaked out when he figured out what was really involved with CAT5 home runs to a central point in the basement. Then he wanted to charge $60 a jack to put the wall plates on.
Yes, we know how and have known for a long time. But the days of mega-engineering projects are pretty much over. The idea that some number of workers are known to be killed building some mega-project is enough to put anyone off these days. They would be sued, over and over. Worse, when the plantiff's attorney asks if they knew people would be killed - because of history of big projects - and the answer was yes the trial would be over.
Dig a really long deep tunnel? Kill a worker every 10 miles or so? You have got to be kidding!
The problem is that there isn't any real point in making anything in the US anymore - the labor costs are too high when compared with the rest of the world. If it costs a machine shop $100 to make some complicated part it can certainly be done for $20 somewhere else. Maybe not quite as good, but cheaper. And just about everyone is interested in cheaper. Quality is something that governments can think about but cheap and just barely good enough is fine for consumers.
The only ways to compete with cheap foreign labor are things that are going to look really bad or destroy the economy of the West.
Sure, we could just import all the cheap labor that is needed. Not H1B-type importation but real, honest immigrants in ghettos. Create a special class of workers (foreign) that aren't citizens and aren't subject to minimum wage, OSHA, worker's comp and a host of other things the competition doesn't have and isn't interested in. Then the US and Western Europe can have the jobs back. Right now in the US I would suspect that there would be plenty of people - citizens - that would happily take a job at 1/2 minimum wage just so they had a job, any job at all.
Certainly in the US we could make it clear that "exploitation of cheap labor" was the point of the entire program and there would still be people streaming in. Perhaps it might reduce it a bit when letters home started complaining that the foreign worker program wasn't paying people any more than they could earn in Guatemala or whereever they are coming from. This would affect the supply of cheap workers somewhat - but the US has always had a huge foreign worker influx. Look at the Chinese labor that was imported in the 1800s.
I'd say the only other way to "compete" is to not even try. Offshore and outsource everything that is possible to outsource and offshore. Realize that if it is possible to pay factory workers $0.25 a day that someone is going to take advantage of it and it might as well be people in the US that benefit from it. Understand that prison slave labor is cheap and effective for some types of work. All jobs in the US become high-skill, high-tech jobs mostly focusing on making use of the cheap overseas labor for the unskilled work. Make it a federal crime to outsource or offshore anything that allows IP to fall into foreign hands. Start a huge program of paying people to move overseas if they do not have the required skills, training or intelligence.
Unfortunately, the first way looks really bad and the second way only works for a little while - maybe 100 years or so. The "goal" of the US and Western Europe would seem to be to eliminate cheap labor by raising the standard of living everywhere. The problem is that in places like Indonesia, China, and India the people really in charge there aren't interested in raising everyone's standard of living and the people are happy with the scraps they are getting tossed now. Sure, India is getting a few more scraps than before but in a country of 800 million with most of the people in abject rural poverty there is an awful lot of depth in cheap labor still to go. It will be a long, long time before the people in rural India are earning even 1/100th of a poor Westerner and that is a huge cheap labor pool.
Aha, there is the dicotomy. You can pay taxes, therefore you don't need anything from the government because you can pay for it yourself.
All the people out there that are not paying taxes, they require government support and everything should be given to them. This would eliminate their downtrodden state and allow them to rise up and achieve their full potential, right?
I suspect strongly that should something like that come to pass somewhere around 70-80% of the people that are currently out working at jobs they don't enjoy and struggling to pay their bills would just say "Bag it!" and apply for government support. After all, why not? If we can make having stuff and living a decent life a "right" that the government owes everyone why wouldn't a large percentage of the population actively decide to take them up on that offer?
We are a long, long way away from being able to afford that as a nation, but people keep thinking it is a good idea. People think that everyone deserves to have a job they like or to still have a nice standard of living even if they don't have a job. That works out fine - until people figure out they can still be a "have" (as in "I have a TV" and "I have a nice place to live" and "I have lots of games") without they hassle of the job they hate. I don't think it would take very long at all for that to work itself out.
Most of the homeless in the US are in that situation because of either bad decisions or an afffirmative decision to be homeless. Sometimes this makes sense - if you hate the regimented discipline in a shelter then maybe homeless is better for you.
A lot of homeless people get that way because they were living on the edge of society the way things were and with one bit of bad luck everything collapsed. If you have a job only because your uncle doesn't mind your coming in drunk and your uncle gets sick ... well, maybe you don't have a job anymore. If that means you can't pay rent, don't jump through all the government hoops and shelter has no room for you, you can certainly end up homeless. The problem was that you never learned how to have a job, not that your uncle got sick. Although if you ask more than a few homeless people you will find that many of them got that way because of something they perceive as totally out of their control. The fact that they dropped out of high school and could never get a job that paid enough for them to live in their home town isn't something they see as a contributing influence.
Homeless shelters have rules and if you don't follow the rules - like no drug use - you get tossed out. Plenty of the homeless decide that it is better to be living in a box in an alley and do whatever they want than to "submit" to the rules in a shelter.
So what would happen in the US if every homeless person were given a place to live? They would be out on the street in less than a month in most cases. Would it help to give them $1000 a week to help with expense? Maybe, but that doesn't mean they would have food and nice clothes. There are a very small number of homeless people that got that way because of a whole collection of things that wiped them out. Those people could really be helped, but it is a very small percentage.
The big increase in the homeless population occurred in the US in the 1970s with the closing of nearly all state mental hospitals and dumping the people on the street to fend for themselves. In the 1950s these people would have been (a) arrested and (b) committed to a hospital. Some folks got caught up in this improperly and it did give the whole system a bad name. Today maybe 25% of the population in prisons are there because there is no state mental hospital to put them away in. Maybe more like 50% of the people in prisons are there because they don't function very well in normal society and they either gravitate toward crime or just made it clear to the police that they weren't going to get along with the rest of society - living on the street and using drugs can certainly lead to being arrested if you make a big nuisance of yourself.
I suggest nationalization of all Internet and computer related industries. It would make so much more sense to have people that know nothing about technology running things because they passed a civil service test 20 years ago.
The problem is what I really want is a cell phone that changes it IMEA in a random manner so it is free to place calls with all the time. Also, I want a 25 watt output so I can always make calls with it.
If I own the phone, I should be able to do these things.
Unfortunately, the FCC got a decision around 1976 that makes it clear manufacturers can make things but to modify the device in any way immediately revokes your authorization to use the device. This originally applied to CB radios but has been extended to practically everything.
But just think of the revenue in making an animated XXX feature staring Mickey Mouse! I know you want to see what Minny has under that skirt.
I have a deep suspicion that there are still Disney executives that have been having nightmares about "Deep Throat Minny" since around 1974.