You really think efficiency of wind turbines is anywhere near 100%? There is still much that can be done to increase wind-to-copper efficiency. It's been 100+ years of the internal combustion engine and we're still only using 1% of the energy in a gallon of gas to move the car forward.
I'll be the last person to bash nuclear. New designs are safe, efficient, and cost effective. But once you put enough solar and wind generation out there, and back it with proper storage/buffering facilities (large battery/flywheel banks, pumped storage, etc), the argument is moot.
The price of solar is dropping so fast, solar businesses are struggling to stay afloat. Their loss is our gain, and you'll continue to see the price per watt of solar plummet. Wind is only getting more efficient, as gearboxes are being replaced with more efficient magnetic bearings and transfer systems:
If you read my second link, you'll see GE is building 4 MW direct drive turbine systems. Yeah, 4 megawatts. As efficiency continues to scale up, you'll see windfarm nameplate capacity rival the largest coal and nuclear plants. Yes, yes, you'll still have to deal with generation peaks and valleys, but the energy is there for the taking!
Only older designs are vulnerable, where you need external power for several days to actively cool a shut down core until its cool enough that thermal runaway won't occur. Newer designs? I'd live on the farking property if I could. All the hot water and power I could ever want.
They just moved from free to pay API for Google Translate. The cost? $20 per MILLION characters (or about 5 cents/page). How do people bitch so much about something that provides so much value so cheap?
For an organization that runs 100K+ servers and has hundreds of GBps of private fiber running around, not to mention sweet peering and transit deals due to their data transfer volume, I wouldn't worry too much about what they're paying to move all that data around. Its *very* cheap for them.
Very, very true. The solution will be one of two things:
1) Price controls, similar to that done with healthcare in other first world countries. Your degree costs $10K, or $15k, and that's it. Currently, there is no force to stop the price of education from rising, because the demand for it is inelastic. You *need* a degree to get a decent wage (for the most part), so schools (both public and private) can charge whatever they want (just like OPEC can charge whatever they want per barrel of oil).
2) Mandatory taxation of businesses that require degrees. You say your secretary position requires a degree? The government taxes you for that and throws that money into the education fund. This prevents employers from simply requiring degrees since it has no economic impact on them. They would then only require degrees for positions that absolutely demand them.
I would argue that the laziest and others who are freeloading on the system are the minority out of everyone who needs help. I'm willing to let some people get away with it in order to help the majority who is desperately in need of help.
How about this. I didn't go to college. I started in the lowliest "junior admin" position and over the last 11 years, worked my way up to owning my own tech consulting firm. I put $20K down on a house that is worth $100K+ less than when I bought it, and have already paid in $116K in payments into it. It'll take over 28 years to recover its value. If I short sale it, I'm eligible for another home in 2 years. If I forclose on it, 7 years. If I play by the rules and pay for it until its worth the remaining mortgage value, I'll have wasted on hundreds of thousands of dollars and be stuck in the house for almost three decades.
Moral of the story? You don't need college finance to know when or how to get out of a bad/upside down deal.
I ran into a recently graduated EE that couldn't find work, and they were trying *really* damn hard (and from their CV, quality talent based on internships, etc). What would you consider a responsible major if not electrical engineering?
Huh, I never considered hedge fund managers or high frequency traders to be providing value via "creativity" and "inventiveness", but I'm sure happy to let them argue that before being hung in a public square.
In all honesty, I'm no hippy. I think innovation should be rewarded. On the other hand, you should never die because you make too little, nor should you have to lose your house to get medical treatment.
The time will come shortly where automation and software will do more of the work; why shouldn't everyone get to work a bit less instead of letting more wealth collect at the top 1%? It behoves the wealthiest to work with the rest of the world now, before they're up against against a wall with the pitchforks to their necks.
Can you really blame pension funds, city governments, etc?
Look at the housing bubble. It was caused by a giant pool of money chasing returns. Well, those investments that were supposedly AAA+ rated turned out to be shit and now everyone took a bath. So now no one is touching housing and we're still working through a backlog of shadow inventory and 12.9 million people still live in houses that they're underwater on and probably won't ever be able to sell or move from (they should really walk away, but that is an entirely different story).
So if housing is too dangerous, stocks are too dangerous, where do you invest? CDs? HAH! 0.1-0.3% interest. Bonds? Even sovereign bonds are having problems due to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe (you better *believe* Greece is going to default on its debt; negotiations already have bond holders taking a 60% haircut on the existing bonds, and 60% ain't too far from 100%).
As I said when I started, you have this huge pool of capital in the world trying to chase investments with returns, and now they're chasing collateralized student loans (which, of course are going to pop, but its going to be way more painful than stocks and houses. You can at least walk away from a mortgage. A student loan? Not so much). So! If stocks suck, housing sucks, student loans suck, and growth in most of the world is coming to a halt, where do you put your money?
Trick question of course. There is nowhere to put your money that will earn any appreciable amount of interest (no, not even commodities like oil are safe, what with consumers having less and less income to buy it with). So what you're seeing is desperation in the market to chance anything that looks like a substantial return on investment.
Also, keep in mind that some drugs are more addictive than others based on a person's genetic makeup. According to 23andMe, I'm more prone to heroin addiction than an average person (2.5 to 9.9 times more likely to become addicted vs the typical individual). Due to the same genetic marker (RS1799971), I'm much more likely to become an alcoholic than the typical person (which makes sense, since my mother was an alcoholic, so I most likely inherited the gene from her).
Conversely though, this genetic marker is also tied to pain tolerance (I have a much higher pain tolerance than a typical person; I was able to go under epi-lasek corrective eye surgery and required no pain medications whatsoever during my recovery period, even though the doctor expected me to need upwards of 20 doses of oxycodone).
Which exactly is what they do, using Xen instances. Duh. RedHat built out their environment for them. This is not rocket science, and is all out on the web if you know how to Google, use LinkedIn, etc.
On top of that, their "Elastic Load Balancer" (just another bullshit "cloud" marketing term for their cluster of F5 load balancers at each availability zone) is just, as I mentioned, an array of F5 load balancers. They either a) don't support the functionality OP is speaking about, or, more likely, Amazon chooses not to support handling traffic in that way to simply operations.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, how much do you have to pay for an Android developer licenses to do the same thing? $100. Shocking.
Or you just pay $240 (3 drives * $80/drive) to keep extra drives on hand while they go through the replacement cycle.
You really think efficiency of wind turbines is anywhere near 100%? There is still much that can be done to increase wind-to-copper efficiency. It's been 100+ years of the internal combustion engine and we're still only using 1% of the energy in a gallon of gas to move the car forward.
Belgium has quite a bit of a renewables coming online:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Belgium#Renewable_energy
I'll be the last person to bash nuclear. New designs are safe, efficient, and cost effective. But once you put enough solar and wind generation out there, and back it with proper storage/buffering facilities (large battery/flywheel banks, pumped storage, etc), the argument is moot.
The price of solar is dropping so fast, solar businesses are struggling to stay afloat. Their loss is our gain, and you'll continue to see the price per watt of solar plummet. Wind is only getting more efficient, as gearboxes are being replaced with more efficient magnetic bearings and transfer systems:
http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/super-smooth-magnetic-bearings-glide-closer-to-the-mainstream.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25188/page1/
If you read my second link, you'll see GE is building 4 MW direct drive turbine systems. Yeah, 4 megawatts. As efficiency continues to scale up, you'll see windfarm nameplate capacity rival the largest coal and nuclear plants. Yes, yes, you'll still have to deal with generation peaks and valleys, but the energy is there for the taking!
+1
Only older designs are vulnerable, where you need external power for several days to actively cool a shut down core until its cool enough that thermal runaway won't occur. Newer designs? I'd live on the farking property if I could. All the hot water and power I could ever want.
As long as profit can be made where capital needs to be invested (large scale manufacturing/industry, IT, etc), investments will exist.
They just moved from free to pay API for Google Translate. The cost? $20 per MILLION characters (or about 5 cents/page). How do people bitch so much about something that provides so much value so cheap?
For an organization that runs 100K+ servers and has hundreds of GBps of private fiber running around, not to mention sweet peering and transit deals due to their data transfer volume, I wouldn't worry too much about what they're paying to move all that data around. Its *very* cheap for them.
And if you're smart about it, you can cache that routing data in your own database. How often does a route change between two points?
Very, very true. The solution will be one of two things:
1) Price controls, similar to that done with healthcare in other first world countries. Your degree costs $10K, or $15k, and that's it. Currently, there is no force to stop the price of education from rising, because the demand for it is inelastic. You *need* a degree to get a decent wage (for the most part), so schools (both public and private) can charge whatever they want (just like OPEC can charge whatever they want per barrel of oil).
2) Mandatory taxation of businesses that require degrees. You say your secretary position requires a degree? The government taxes you for that and throws that money into the education fund. This prevents employers from simply requiring degrees since it has no economic impact on them. They would then only require degrees for positions that absolutely demand them.
They could've migrated away from them as part of their platform. My knowledge about it is 18-24 months old.
https://www.23andme.com/store/cart/
$99 + $9/month
It was 1am local time when I typed that out. Didn't think about it working both ways, but you're right.
I would argue that the laziest and others who are freeloading on the system are the minority out of everyone who needs help. I'm willing to let some people get away with it in order to help the majority who is desperately in need of help.
The problem is not with our financial industry, it is with us and our inattentiveness to managing our own government.
I believe we agree that the financial industry is one (of many) of the symptoms. I also fully agree with your last point above.
How about this. I didn't go to college. I started in the lowliest "junior admin" position and over the last 11 years, worked my way up to owning my own tech consulting firm. I put $20K down on a house that is worth $100K+ less than when I bought it, and have already paid in $116K in payments into it. It'll take over 28 years to recover its value. If I short sale it, I'm eligible for another home in 2 years. If I forclose on it, 7 years. If I play by the rules and pay for it until its worth the remaining mortgage value, I'll have wasted on hundreds of thousands of dollars and be stuck in the house for almost three decades.
Moral of the story? You don't need college finance to know when or how to get out of a bad/upside down deal.
I ran into a recently graduated EE that couldn't find work, and they were trying *really* damn hard (and from their CV, quality talent based on internships, etc). What would you consider a responsible major if not electrical engineering?
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." -- Ghandi
Huh, I never considered hedge fund managers or high frequency traders to be providing value via "creativity" and "inventiveness", but I'm sure happy to let them argue that before being hung in a public square.
In all honesty, I'm no hippy. I think innovation should be rewarded. On the other hand, you should never die because you make too little, nor should you have to lose your house to get medical treatment.
The time will come shortly where automation and software will do more of the work; why shouldn't everyone get to work a bit less instead of letting more wealth collect at the top 1%? It behoves the wealthiest to work with the rest of the world now, before they're up against against a wall with the pitchforks to their necks.
Darn, and I just walked away from the mortgage (luckily though, no student loans).
chance in the last sentence should be "chase".
Can you really blame pension funds, city governments, etc?
Look at the housing bubble. It was caused by a giant pool of money chasing returns. Well, those investments that were supposedly AAA+ rated turned out to be shit and now everyone took a bath. So now no one is touching housing and we're still working through a backlog of shadow inventory and 12.9 million people still live in houses that they're underwater on and probably won't ever be able to sell or move from (they should really walk away, but that is an entirely different story).
So if housing is too dangerous, stocks are too dangerous, where do you invest? CDs? HAH! 0.1-0.3% interest. Bonds? Even sovereign bonds are having problems due to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe (you better *believe* Greece is going to default on its debt; negotiations already have bond holders taking a 60% haircut on the existing bonds, and 60% ain't too far from 100%).
As I said when I started, you have this huge pool of capital in the world trying to chase investments with returns, and now they're chasing collateralized student loans (which, of course are going to pop, but its going to be way more painful than stocks and houses. You can at least walk away from a mortgage. A student loan? Not so much). So! If stocks suck, housing sucks, student loans suck, and growth in most of the world is coming to a halt, where do you put your money?
Trick question of course. There is nowhere to put your money that will earn any appreciable amount of interest (no, not even commodities like oil are safe, what with consumers having less and less income to buy it with). So what you're seeing is desperation in the market to chance anything that looks like a substantial return on investment.
Also, keep in mind that some drugs are more addictive than others based on a person's genetic makeup. According to 23andMe, I'm more prone to heroin addiction than an average person (2.5 to 9.9 times more likely to become addicted vs the typical individual). Due to the same genetic marker (RS1799971), I'm much more likely to become an alcoholic than the typical person (which makes sense, since my mother was an alcoholic, so I most likely inherited the gene from her).
http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs1799971
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1799971
http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/09/20/snpwatch-genetic-variation-influences-how-we-respond-to-reinforcement/
Conversely though, this genetic marker is also tied to pain tolerance (I have a much higher pain tolerance than a typical person; I was able to go under epi-lasek corrective eye surgery and required no pain medications whatsoever during my recovery period, even though the doctor expected me to need upwards of 20 doses of oxycodone).
The more you know.
Which exactly is what they do, using Xen instances. Duh. RedHat built out their environment for them. This is not rocket science, and is all out on the web if you know how to Google, use LinkedIn, etc.
On top of that, their "Elastic Load Balancer" (just another bullshit "cloud" marketing term for their cluster of F5 load balancers at each availability zone) is just, as I mentioned, an array of F5 load balancers. They either a) don't support the functionality OP is speaking about, or, more likely, Amazon chooses not to support handling traffic in that way to simply operations.