This isn't the Olympics, but when they run the Leadville 100 -- a 100 mile race that starts at 10,000 feet elevation and goes upwards -- a bunch of Native Americans from Mexico always show up to the race. Since they often win, they have expensive contracts with big running shoe manufacturers and they show up in their fancy white shoes, and start running. About 8 miles out of town, at the start of the Sugarloaf Mountain climb, they all ditch their fancy shoes and go back to what they're used to using, some barefoot and some just a rubber tire-like tread sandal. Then they *really* run. When they get back (it's largely an out-and-back run) they grab their shiny shoes, put them back on, and finish the race.
>people that should be having more kids (kind, intelligent, financially responsible) are not but those that should not (lazy, stupid people, with anachronistic religious views) are pumping them out like it's their job to overpopulate the world.
Oh, that's completely natural. Trout have zillions of babies. Monkeys have only a very few.
The smarter the parents, the fewer the offspring, because those offspring get more parental care and effort, and are likely to be much more successful as a result. This effect is significantly exacerbated in modern society, where the cost is not only effort, but money: a single-child family is much more likely to be able to afford Harvard than a 4-child family.
here's an article about how humans are designed precisely for very very long-distance running. No other animals I know of can run 100 miles in under 36 hours. The link has lots of discussion of indigenous people who regularly ran down wild animals to exhaustion and ate them. Most tribes who did this used relays rather than doing it individually, but there are people who have done it. There's even a book about it, called Running After Antelope about some marathon runners who try to run down antelope in Wyoming. That's probably the hardest animal there is to try this with (aside from, y'know, polar bears or tigers) because antelope regularly run 30 miles in an hour. (It's depressing to be riding a bike through Wyoming and get passed by a bunch of antelope, one of whom is lame and is only running on three legs -- and still going twice your speed.)
It's the complete exhaustion that's key. An elk surprised at close quarters can be lethal. A woman was killed a couple years ago in Rocky Mountain National Park because she walked right up to one and took a picture of it and the flash made it whip its head up and put a horn point through her throat and up into her head somewhere. (I admit that while that's horrible I still crack a cheap grin every time I think of it. Go Mother Nature!) But once they're sufficiently exhausted that they can't walk, they're not able to defend themselves: they need to be able to turn and whip their heads towards you/upwards to really be damaging. Plus, I note (having had a couple very close encounters with elk while I was on a mountain bike crashing through brush) that if you are lucky enough to get a hand on one of their horns you can keep them away from your face long enough for everyone to back off. Elk settle down in hollows when they sleep, and it takes them longer to get to their feet than you'd think.
On a somewhat related subject, my Alaska friends tell me that moose kill more people than bears do.
I can't tell you about broad deployment, but I can refer you to the pdf that the US National Renewable Energy Labs made -- although this is roughly 5 years old, by my memory. Their claim is that using the least efficient current market solar cells, and including the cost of installation and hardware, will have a payback time of 5 years in solar conditions slightly lower than average US conditions; using what they considered anticipated technology, that is optimistic but close to actual current tech (but still including hardware and installation) reduces it to about 14 months payback. This doesn't take into account opportunity cost, as best I can tell.
I love your summary (and it's intrinsically pleasing to me, as I've spent much of my life much closer to the bottom end of the scale than the bottom.) However, with that said -- the people on the top of the scale want to model the scale as being directly proportional: the more you make, the more you must've provided or be providing to your job (and that's why you deserve to make so much!) and obviously in the case of the ex-CEO of Enron or GM, that's a bunch of crap. The people on the bottom want to model the scale as being inversely proportional, along the model of Marx, where the people who are doing the production are the ones actually generating the money and the economy, and the further up you go, the more parasitical people are, and that's an emotionally enjoyable argument. From my observation, having actually gotten a real job, it's a non-linear system. The people at the bottom work their fingers to the bone for very long hours, for very low pay, usually because they're not too bright and that's the best job they can get. Then there's an increase in amount of money per unit time up well into the salaried positions, where people are getting paid quite well to work 40-50 hours a week. At that point the amount of time invested -- and the amount of energy and responsibility invested -- starts to rise steeply, where mid-level managers working 70 hours a week and always off on business trips where even after working hours they're still working, show up. Then the salary starts rising very rapidly, in the upper-level management and CEO range, and often the hours start dropping off as well, back towards the 40 hour level. I think that's mostly driven by a sense of entitlement: they figure they've worked themselves to the bone getting to where they are, and they deserve $100M salaries, conveniently ignoring the janitors who are working just as hard and for just as long but are making 1/1000 or even 1/50000 as much.
Almost all the old HP silicon has artwork drawn on it. The hallways of the plant where Dad worked were lined with photomicrographs of chip art. It was easier to get away with this when the fab was in the basement, so your whole chip, from design to packaging, was in-house and you personally knew all the people involved in it.
My dad designed HP test equipment, along with some other clever people. When they had extra space in ROM they'd put in things that would trigger if you pushed the right buttons on power-up. One of my function generators plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" if you know what to push and when. (And you have an 8 ohm speaker plugged into the output.)
As it so happens, this was such a spectacular usage of the machine -- taking a single-output function generator and getting it to produce four-part harmony by synthesizing waveforms with embedded harmonics -- that when a sales engineer found out about it he started showing it off, and pretty soon it had stopped being an easter egg and started being a front-line sales demo.
is packaging. There is stuff in the potting epoxy that holds enough electric charge to make the FET's gate start to conduct a little, playing havoc with everything. We've been having to redo parts with an extra layer of metal over the top of the IC to protect it from an intermittent contamination in our packaging material. I believe I remember reading that Intel had problems with their water being mildly radioactive downstream of an old uranium mine, and running into the same problems (only much worse, since they're doing much finer geometry.) So this is a case where the FET hasn't failed, precisely: it's just getting messed up by external interference.
As an anonymous poster said, there's extensive evidence that Europeans had spent a fair bit of time in North America before Columbus sailed. There are well-characterized Viking ruins in Newfoundland at L'Anse Aux Meadows, as well as Icelandic minerals and metals and even Norwegian currency found in various Native American settlements across eastern Canada and even Maine. Icelandic and Basque fishing fleets regularly fished between Greenland and Newfoundland, leaving archaeological evidence of whaling activity in Newfoundland, prior to Columbus. I've read but haven't verified that in the year before Columbus set sail he sailed to Iceland, and the people who have written about this assume he did so to talk to the sailors and captains about how to miss the big chunk of land they knew was up there so he could hit Asia.
An LED should last at least 50,000 hours. But there's a catch: the drive electronics are the limiting factor, more specifically the electrolytic caps used in the input to the driver chip, and they're going to be lucky to last 1000 hours.
More or less the same thing is going on with CFL's: the tube itself would last for years if the front-end electronics weren't engineered to use the cheapest possible components.
The problem is that both CFL and LED are competing with a 100 year old technology that is as cheap as dirt, and they're competing mostly on price, so the successful consumer-grade designs are going to be the cheapest ones possible, and those are going to die in the 1000 hour range because of cheap components in the drive system.
LED's are going to take over commercial lighting, where people spend $100 a bulb and are thinking 10 years out. But individual consumers are always going to buy the cheapest things possible because they neither have the background to make judgments about quality nor even the motivation, because it's unlikely they'll stay in a house for 10 years. So it's pretty unlikely we'll ever see lighting systems for consumers that are light-source lifetime limited: they'll all be cheap input filtering capacitor lifetime limited.
Hey don't laugh about the radioactive americium scare. A dozen years ago a guy in Denver set up some sort of recycling project for smoke detectors, only he didn't actually have anything to do with them once he had them, so he had about 100,000 of them, mostly just the americium source/ionizer section, packed in a couple of semi trucks parked at a warehouse at Stapleton International Airport. As it turns out, it was a significant radiation hazard, and they got impounded and sat there all fenced off for several years before anyone could figure out what to do with them. I think they got shipped to Yucca Mountain.
>The other main complaint about LEDs is flickering, but that's trivially remedied; good bulbs are full-wave rectified
*Good* bulbs use an LED driver chip that current-limits the led by chopping the power going to the LED at a high kHz - low MHz speed, waaay above what humans can see. Only the crummiest LED lights use strings of LED's being driven directly by just rectified AC. (With that said, there are a lot of crummy LED lights out there.)
I have yet to see *any* LED's that are even close to a CFL in terms of lumens per watt, although some that are going to be hitting the market in a year, from Cree, are within 20% or so of most common CFL's.
You may be right, but I'd like to see that IC. Even with just a CFL, that IC would have to manage about 13 watts actively, which is possible but difficult, especially at 110V (here) or 220V (there.) There aren't many silicon fab processes that like combining good logic, 270V peak-to-peak swings, and integral fets with low rds(on) necessary to make the whole works run. Step up to a motor, where you're talking 1000W, and you have a very serious heat dissipation issue even with phenomenal efficiency. I can certainly imagine a $0.99 PFC controller that's switching an external FET through some external caps and inductors, but generally that kind of work is primarily the domain of big through-hole discrete components.
And yeah, separating the ballasts from the tubes is a good idea. What's the point getting a tube rated for 4000 hours when the electrolytics in most ballasts aren't going to last 200 hours? Actually, we're seeing a lot of the ballasts we're playing with (other companies' designs) have failures in the very front end, the ac-dc conversion part, either from failed rectification elements or blown-out transformers. The tube's the longest-lived component by probably 2x.
Yes... but the combination of it and the light, would cost more than a well-designed light that integrates the PFC, so it's unlikely to be a particularly great market. Add to that, that it's a very hard sell -- it's hard to explain to consumers, and even when you do, you're essentially telling them that they're burning more energy than they need to, but at little or no cost to themselves. And, as sad as it is, the large majority of people won't spend either the time or money to do something that doesn't directly benefit them.
It would, actually -- power factor correction isn't trivial. It's not bad for a CFL because you know that the load's fixed, but it's still a couple extra capacitors and an inductor (I'd have to model it but I think that'd work) and CFL's are *enormously* price-sensitive as they're trying to displace a cheap-as-dirt technology. I work in lighting design (in fact, I'm helping design a fluorescent ballast right now) and it's frightening how cheap many of the power supply designs are.
Oh yes you can, depending on your definition of 'to eat'...
Which reminds me of the old joke. guy's out driving in the country and he sees a pig with a wooden leg. He thinks that's weird so he goes up to the house and says "hey, I was wondering about the pig with the pegleg" and the farmer says "oh, man, let me TELL you about that pig -- he goes and gets the mail for me, he guards the house, he bites burglars, I'm even training him to drive my lawnmower!" "Okay, that's cool," says the guy, "but what about the artificial leg?" "Well, DUH," says the farmer, "a pig that smart you don't eat all at once!"
Hey! I live in Denver, you insensitive clod! And as such, I can tell you with complete assurance you wouldn't *want* to eat some of the things you'd kill.
>If the government were prohibited from interfering in the economy, there wouldn't be any incentive for a oil company to renovate a politician's house
While that's a nice thought, I challenge you to figure out how it would be implemented. If we force the federal government to do nothing other than exactly what the Constitution lets it, in the most conservative sense -- maintain armed forces for the defense of the land, regulate *actual* interstate commerce, which is to say only settling disputes between states and handling state-foreign state disputes -- the federal government would *still* interfere in the economy because it would be taking money out to pay for what it's doing, and it would be pumping money into some areas in pursuit of its duties. Both would be areas for corruption to thrive, just as corruption thrives now. If you rewrote the Constitution such that the federal government had zero funds and zero influence, if you essentially canceled it, then the individual states would provide similar functions and be just as full of corruption. If you get rid of them, then individual cities would do the same, and eventually down to homeowners' associations, I suppose. I read about graft and corruption involving parent-teacher association funding. *Any* form of government will interfere in economies. That's their reason for existence, is to interfere with economy on the behalf of the people who make the economy run and benefit from its productivity.
As it happens, I just bought a big can of "Bamboo Carterpillars" (their spelling) at the local Laotian Grocery Store. It was, however, a joke gift. A gag, if you will.
>1938? I wonder what the real intent of this law was.
It was probably part of the ongoing reaction to the publication of Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle", where he documented/alleged pretty horrific working conditions and product control in the Chicago meatpacking industry, all of which were later factually verified by federal investigators except for his claim that workers who fell into boiling rendering tanks were left there and their rendered fat sold along with the cattle fat. (And that was after the meatpacking companies were warned that they were going to be inspected, and had cleaned up.) Also, the banning of 'non-nutritive items' is not actually a ban but a threshold: there is an acceptable quantity of insect parts allowed in foods. (Since the raw materials have insect parts, that's pretty much unavoidable, no matter how much some safety-obsessed people natter on about it.) However, in the 1800's and early 1900's, it was common to pad foodstuffs with anything that was cheap and added weight: plaster, ground-up horsehair, you name it. It's really no different than last year's Chinese melamine scare. Sinclair's book is why the FDA came into being, by the way: public demand for government regulation of foodstuffs. When companies were self-regulating, they dumped in some pretty amazing things to keep their profit margins high and satisfy consumer demand as cheaply as possible. Many foodstuffs were dyed to match consumer expectations, using cheap, known-toxic dyes. I believe copper/arsenic salts were used to color American-made absinthe, for instance.
As for Kinder eggs, the italian restaurant down the street has boxes of them. My girlfriend loves them. There was a period two years ago where all they could get was kinders with plastic shells with the toys beside the chocolate -- presumably as legal imports -- but now they've gone back to the original stuff with the chocolate outsides and the labelling all in German. We went to a grocery store specializing in Balkan stuff a while back and got some ripoff Kinders -- they looked similar, but they tasted like gubmint chocolate (burnt) and had really crappy toys.
I make chainmail gloves. They'd stop some of the slicing but the cat's claws will go through the rings, into your skin, and unless the gloves are very tight, the cat will then drag the gloves far enough you'll still have lots of cuts, just shorter than they would have been. Try mittens. Something that's deeper than the cat's claws are long, will get torn up but prevent you getting cut up. I'm told that this is the reason spiders aren't poisonous to people: they *are* poisonous, but very few can get their poison through the thickness of a human's skin.
My understanding of the origin of this term -- which may be wrong -- is that it, along with 'room to swing a cat' both came from a particularly weird form of medieval amusement. (The phrase 'enough room to swing a cat' originated 200 years before a cat-of-nine-tails whip was called that, just to fend off anyone who is going to claim that.) There was a bar game. They put a cat in a bag, and hung it (swung it) from the low ceiling of the bar, and then people tried to kill the cat by bashing it before it managed to claw its way out of the bag. If the cat got out of the bag, the game was over. Another variant of this was to tie the cat to a fencepost at face height, so it still had use of its legs, and farmers would, again, try to bash it to death using only their heads. That was apparently very popular at fairs, as a spectator sport.
>I wonder whether the inability to admit this and work with it is a special trait of media companies or if it's just true of large organizations in general?
It is a characteristic of companies who are large enough that they think they can force their view of desired reality onto the world at large. This is one reason why competition is such a good idea (although, as the RIAA shows, at some point the competing companies start colluding to protect themselves against their customers.)
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This isn't the Olympics, but when they run the Leadville 100 -- a 100 mile race that starts at 10,000 feet elevation and goes upwards -- a bunch of Native Americans from Mexico always show up to the race. Since they often win, they have expensive contracts with big running shoe manufacturers and they show up in their fancy white shoes, and start running.
About 8 miles out of town, at the start of the Sugarloaf Mountain climb, they all ditch their fancy shoes and go back to what they're used to using, some barefoot and some just a rubber tire-like tread sandal.
Then they *really* run.
When they get back (it's largely an out-and-back run) they grab their shiny shoes, put them back on, and finish the race.
>people that should be having more kids (kind, intelligent, financially responsible) are not but those that should not (lazy, stupid people, with anachronistic religious views) are pumping them out like it's their job to overpopulate the world.
Oh, that's completely natural.
Trout have zillions of babies. Monkeys have only a very few.
The smarter the parents, the fewer the offspring, because those offspring get more parental care and effort, and are likely to be much more successful as a result.
This effect is significantly exacerbated in modern society, where the cost is not only effort, but money: a single-child family is much more likely to be able to afford Harvard than a 4-child family.
here's an article about how humans are designed precisely for very very long-distance running.
No other animals I know of can run 100 miles in under 36 hours. The link has lots of discussion of indigenous people who regularly ran down wild animals to exhaustion and ate them.
Most tribes who did this used relays rather than doing it individually, but there are people who have done it. There's even a book about it, called Running After Antelope about some marathon runners who try to run down antelope in Wyoming. That's probably the hardest animal there is to try this with (aside from, y'know, polar bears or tigers) because antelope regularly run 30 miles in an hour. (It's depressing to be riding a bike through Wyoming and get passed by a bunch of antelope, one of whom is lame and is only running on three legs -- and still going twice your speed.)
It's the complete exhaustion that's key. An elk surprised at close quarters can be lethal. A woman was killed a couple years ago in Rocky Mountain National Park because she walked right up to one and took a picture of it and the flash made it whip its head up and put a horn point through her throat and up into her head somewhere. (I admit that while that's horrible I still crack a cheap grin every time I think of it. Go Mother Nature!)
But once they're sufficiently exhausted that they can't walk, they're not able to defend themselves: they need to be able to turn and whip their heads towards you/upwards to really be damaging.
Plus, I note (having had a couple very close encounters with elk while I was on a mountain bike crashing through brush) that if you are lucky enough to get a hand on one of their horns you can keep them away from your face long enough for everyone to back off. Elk settle down in hollows when they sleep, and it takes them longer to get to their feet than you'd think.
On a somewhat related subject, my Alaska friends tell me that moose kill more people than bears do.
I can't tell you about broad deployment, but I can refer you to the pdf that the US National Renewable Energy Labs made -- although this is roughly 5 years old, by my memory. Their claim is that using the least efficient current market solar cells, and including the cost of installation and hardware, will have a payback time of 5 years in solar conditions slightly lower than average US conditions; using what they considered anticipated technology, that is optimistic but close to actual current tech (but still including hardware and installation) reduces it to about 14 months payback.
This doesn't take into account opportunity cost, as best I can tell.
I love your summary (and it's intrinsically pleasing to me, as I've spent much of my life much closer to the bottom end of the scale than the bottom.)
However, with that said -- the people on the top of the scale want to model the scale as being directly proportional: the more you make, the more you must've provided or be providing to your job (and that's why you deserve to make so much!) and obviously in the case of the ex-CEO of Enron or GM, that's a bunch of crap.
The people on the bottom want to model the scale as being inversely proportional, along the model of Marx, where the people who are doing the production are the ones actually generating the money and the economy, and the further up you go, the more parasitical people are, and that's an emotionally enjoyable argument.
From my observation, having actually gotten a real job, it's a non-linear system.
The people at the bottom work their fingers to the bone for very long hours, for very low pay, usually because they're not too bright and that's the best job they can get. Then there's an increase in amount of money per unit time up well into the salaried positions, where people are getting paid quite well to work 40-50 hours a week. At that point the amount of time invested -- and the amount of energy and responsibility invested -- starts to rise steeply, where mid-level managers working 70 hours a week and always off on business trips where even after working hours they're still working, show up. Then the salary starts rising very rapidly, in the upper-level management and CEO range, and often the hours start dropping off as well, back towards the 40 hour level. I think that's mostly driven by a sense of entitlement: they figure they've worked themselves to the bone getting to where they are, and they deserve $100M salaries, conveniently ignoring the janitors who are working just as hard and for just as long but are making 1/1000 or even 1/50000 as much.
Almost all the old HP silicon has artwork drawn on it. The hallways of the plant where Dad worked were lined with photomicrographs of chip art. It was easier to get away with this when the fab was in the basement, so your whole chip, from design to packaging, was in-house and you personally knew all the people involved in it.
My dad designed HP test equipment, along with some other clever people. When they had extra space in ROM they'd put in things that would trigger if you pushed the right buttons on power-up.
One of my function generators plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" if you know what to push and when. (And you have an 8 ohm speaker plugged into the output.)
As it so happens, this was such a spectacular usage of the machine -- taking a single-output function generator and getting it to produce four-part harmony by synthesizing waveforms with embedded harmonics -- that when a sales engineer found out about it he started showing it off, and pretty soon it had stopped being an easter egg and started being a front-line sales demo.
is packaging. There is stuff in the potting epoxy that holds enough electric charge to make the FET's gate start to conduct a little, playing havoc with everything. We've been having to redo parts with an extra layer of metal over the top of the IC to protect it from an intermittent contamination in our packaging material.
I believe I remember reading that Intel had problems with their water being mildly radioactive downstream of an old uranium mine, and running into the same problems (only much worse, since they're doing much finer geometry.)
So this is a case where the FET hasn't failed, precisely: it's just getting messed up by external interference.
As an anonymous poster said, there's extensive evidence that Europeans had spent a fair bit of time in North America before Columbus sailed.
There are well-characterized Viking ruins in Newfoundland at L'Anse Aux Meadows, as well as Icelandic minerals and metals and even Norwegian currency found in various Native American settlements across eastern Canada and even Maine. Icelandic and Basque fishing fleets regularly fished between Greenland and Newfoundland, leaving archaeological evidence of whaling activity in Newfoundland, prior to Columbus. I've read but haven't verified that in the year before Columbus set sail he sailed to Iceland, and the people who have written about this assume he did so to talk to the sailors and captains about how to miss the big chunk of land they knew was up there so he could hit Asia.
An LED should last at least 50,000 hours.
But there's a catch: the drive electronics are the limiting factor, more specifically the electrolytic caps used in the input to the driver chip, and they're going to be lucky to last 1000 hours.
More or less the same thing is going on with CFL's: the tube itself would last for years if the front-end electronics weren't engineered to use the cheapest possible components.
The problem is that both CFL and LED are competing with a 100 year old technology that is as cheap as dirt, and they're competing mostly on price, so the successful consumer-grade designs are going to be the cheapest ones possible, and those are going to die in the 1000 hour range because of cheap components in the drive system.
LED's are going to take over commercial lighting, where people spend $100 a bulb and are thinking 10 years out. But individual consumers are always going to buy the cheapest things possible because they neither have the background to make judgments about quality nor even the motivation, because it's unlikely they'll stay in a house for 10 years. So it's pretty unlikely we'll ever see lighting systems for consumers that are light-source lifetime limited: they'll all be cheap input filtering capacitor lifetime limited.
Hey don't laugh about the radioactive americium scare. A dozen years ago a guy in Denver set up some sort of recycling project for smoke detectors, only he didn't actually have anything to do with them once he had them, so he had about 100,000 of them, mostly just the americium source/ionizer section, packed in a couple of semi trucks parked at a warehouse at Stapleton International Airport. As it turns out, it was a significant radiation hazard, and they got impounded and sat there all fenced off for several years before anyone could figure out what to do with them. I think they got shipped to Yucca Mountain.
>The other main complaint about LEDs is flickering, but that's trivially remedied; good bulbs are full-wave rectified
*Good* bulbs use an LED driver chip that current-limits the led by chopping the power going to the LED at a high kHz - low MHz speed, waaay above what humans can see.
Only the crummiest LED lights use strings of LED's being driven directly by just rectified AC.
(With that said, there are a lot of crummy LED lights out there.)
I have yet to see *any* LED's that are even close to a CFL in terms of lumens per watt, although some that are going to be hitting the market in a year, from Cree, are within 20% or so of most common CFL's.
You may be right, but I'd like to see that IC. Even with just a CFL, that IC would have to manage about 13 watts actively, which is possible but difficult, especially at 110V (here) or 220V (there.) There aren't many silicon fab processes that like combining good logic, 270V peak-to-peak swings, and integral fets with low rds(on) necessary to make the whole works run.
Step up to a motor, where you're talking 1000W, and you have a very serious heat dissipation issue even with phenomenal efficiency. I can certainly imagine a $0.99 PFC controller that's switching an external FET through some external caps and inductors, but generally that kind of work is primarily the domain of big through-hole discrete components.
And yeah, separating the ballasts from the tubes is a good idea. What's the point getting a tube rated for 4000 hours when the electrolytics in most ballasts aren't going to last 200 hours? Actually, we're seeing a lot of the ballasts we're playing with (other companies' designs) have failures in the very front end, the ac-dc conversion part, either from failed rectification elements or blown-out transformers. The tube's the longest-lived component by probably 2x.
Yes... but the combination of it and the light, would cost more than a well-designed light that integrates the PFC, so it's unlikely to be a particularly great market.
Add to that, that it's a very hard sell -- it's hard to explain to consumers, and even when you do, you're essentially telling them that they're burning more energy than they need to, but at little or no cost to themselves. And, as sad as it is, the large majority of people won't spend either the time or money to do something that doesn't directly benefit them.
It would, actually -- power factor correction isn't trivial. It's not bad for a CFL because you know that the load's fixed, but it's still a couple extra capacitors and an inductor (I'd have to model it but I think that'd work) and CFL's are *enormously* price-sensitive as they're trying to displace a cheap-as-dirt technology. I work in lighting design (in fact, I'm helping design a fluorescent ballast right now) and it's frightening how cheap many of the power supply designs are.
Oh yes you can, depending on your definition of 'to eat'...
Which reminds me of the old joke. guy's out driving in the country and he sees a pig with a wooden leg. He thinks that's weird so he goes up to the house and says "hey, I was wondering about the pig with the pegleg" and the farmer says "oh, man, let me TELL you about that pig -- he goes and gets the mail for me, he guards the house, he bites burglars, I'm even training him to drive my lawnmower!"
"Okay, that's cool," says the guy, "but what about the artificial leg?"
"Well, DUH," says the farmer, "a pig that smart you don't eat all at once!"
Hey! I live in Denver, you insensitive clod! And as such, I can tell you with complete assurance you wouldn't *want* to eat some of the things you'd kill.
>If the government were prohibited from interfering in the economy, there wouldn't be any incentive for a oil company to renovate a politician's house
While that's a nice thought, I challenge you to figure out how it would be implemented.
If we force the federal government to do nothing other than exactly what the Constitution lets it, in the most conservative sense -- maintain armed forces for the defense of the land, regulate *actual* interstate commerce, which is to say only settling disputes between states and handling state-foreign state disputes -- the federal government would *still* interfere in the economy because it would be taking money out to pay for what it's doing, and it would be pumping money into some areas in pursuit of its duties. Both would be areas for corruption to thrive, just as corruption thrives now.
If you rewrote the Constitution such that the federal government had zero funds and zero influence, if you essentially canceled it, then the individual states would provide similar functions and be just as full of corruption. If you get rid of them, then individual cities would do the same, and eventually down to homeowners' associations, I suppose. I read about graft and corruption involving parent-teacher association funding.
*Any* form of government will interfere in economies. That's their reason for existence, is to interfere with economy on the behalf of the people who make the economy run and benefit from its productivity.
As it happens, I just bought a big can of "Bamboo Carterpillars" (their spelling) at the local Laotian Grocery Store.
It was, however, a joke gift. A gag, if you will.
However, a guy I know distantly has a eaten canned silkworm pupae on video if you'd like to watch.
>1938? I wonder what the real intent of this law was.
It was probably part of the ongoing reaction to the publication of Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle", where he documented/alleged pretty horrific working conditions and product control in the Chicago meatpacking industry, all of which were later factually verified by federal investigators except for his claim that workers who fell into boiling rendering tanks were left there and their rendered fat sold along with the cattle fat. (And that was after the meatpacking companies were warned that they were going to be inspected, and had cleaned up.)
Also, the banning of 'non-nutritive items' is not actually a ban but a threshold: there is an acceptable quantity of insect parts allowed in foods. (Since the raw materials have insect parts, that's pretty much unavoidable, no matter how much some safety-obsessed people natter on about it.)
However, in the 1800's and early 1900's, it was common to pad foodstuffs with anything that was cheap and added weight: plaster, ground-up horsehair, you name it. It's really no different than last year's Chinese melamine scare.
Sinclair's book is why the FDA came into being, by the way: public demand for government regulation of foodstuffs. When companies were self-regulating, they dumped in some pretty amazing things to keep their profit margins high and satisfy consumer demand as cheaply as possible. Many foodstuffs were dyed to match consumer expectations, using cheap, known-toxic dyes. I believe copper/arsenic salts were used to color American-made absinthe, for instance.
As for Kinder eggs, the italian restaurant down the street has boxes of them. My girlfriend loves them. There was a period two years ago where all they could get was kinders with plastic shells with the toys beside the chocolate -- presumably as legal imports -- but now they've gone back to the original stuff with the chocolate outsides and the labelling all in German. We went to a grocery store specializing in Balkan stuff a while back and got some ripoff Kinders -- they looked similar, but they tasted like gubmint chocolate (burnt) and had really crappy toys.
I make chainmail gloves. They'd stop some of the slicing but the cat's claws will go through the rings, into your skin, and unless the gloves are very tight, the cat will then drag the gloves far enough you'll still have lots of cuts, just shorter than they would have been.
Try mittens. Something that's deeper than the cat's claws are long, will get torn up but prevent you getting cut up.
I'm told that this is the reason spiders aren't poisonous to people: they *are* poisonous, but very few can get their poison through the thickness of a human's skin.
My understanding of the origin of this term -- which may be wrong -- is that it, along with 'room to swing a cat' both came from a particularly weird form of medieval amusement. (The phrase 'enough room to swing a cat' originated 200 years before a cat-of-nine-tails whip was called that, just to fend off anyone who is going to claim that.)
There was a bar game. They put a cat in a bag, and hung it (swung it) from the low ceiling of the bar, and then people tried to kill the cat by bashing it before it managed to claw its way out of the bag. If the cat got out of the bag, the game was over.
Another variant of this was to tie the cat to a fencepost at face height, so it still had use of its legs, and farmers would, again, try to bash it to death using only their heads. That was apparently very popular at fairs, as a spectator sport.
>I wonder whether the inability to admit this and work with it is a special trait of media companies or if it's just true of large organizations in general?
It is a characteristic of companies who are large enough that they think they can force their view of desired reality onto the world at large.
This is one reason why competition is such a good idea (although, as the RIAA shows, at some point the competing companies start colluding to protect themselves against their customers.)
Hey, now...