Throughout much of the Rocky Mountain states, sugar beets were *the* cash crop from the late 1800's until the 1960's. Every small town in northern Colorado had or still has an old broken-down sugar refinery, originally owned by Great Western Sugar. (like the GW Sugar in the blue and white package at the supermarket.) Here are some pics of old sugar mills in Nebraska and Colorado. Some details on sugar beet agriculture. To sum up: cane sugar and corn syrup-derived sugar has lower production costs and drove sugar beet production out of business.
(I grew up in a sugar beet town and remember the Great Western railway running steam engines in the 1970's. A lot of my friends' parents were sugar chemists in the processing plants, and my family would ride our bikes at harvest time and find sugar beets that had fallen off the trucks, take them home, and bake them for very odd meals.)
I haven't gotten mine to work at *all*. When I try and launch it, it throws some screen up about how it can't open a new window. Do you have a firewall? What ports do you open? (I read what Linden sez about it and opened those, but still no good.) I'm almost desperate enough to make a Windows install just to see if the problem is my linux setup.
1. In '85-88 there wasn't much so I wrote my own. 2. That's just the box of mid-80's Amiga software. There's another for late-80's and another for early-90's, although by that time I'd gotten a CD drive for it and had access to a very early CD writer.
That's okay: any geek worth anything has boxes and boxes of them, unlabelled, to shore up the dwindling reserves. I think I have two cubic feet just of Amiga software from 1985 on 3.5" discs, and I don't even know how much from Win95 backups.
>That is, had only Bush asked congress for "authorization" -- which would surely have been forthcoming -- everything would have been okay.
I have mixed feelings about this. What Bush did was wrong, but the question is what part of it was wrong. It's not like he could go to the entire population of the United States -- or the whole world -- and say "can I spy on anyone, any time, without any given reasons?" If you grant that there's a reason for a government to spy on people -- and the US Constitution says that there are acceptable reasons to do that -- then the question is who decides those reasons. The point of FISA and the like are to make sure the person who wants to do the spying isn't the person who says it's okay to spy. I think I'd rather have Congress doing the oversight, since they're liable in a very direct way, by not being reelected, for abuse. Secret courts and anonymous judges are less liable, and more likely to just go along with the requestor, but even that's better than the Administration's self-regulation. But if the Administration says it has cause for spying, and Congress, or some reasonable subset of it, okays the decision, I can't see that there's any better system for oversight.
Although the previous poster was correct that you have to pay income on the most amazing things, like forgiven loans, bribes, or stolen goods -- iff the goods aren't returned to the legal owner within the tax year in which the theft occurred. I hadn't realized that hobbies have special status: you have to pay taxes on income derived from hobbies, but can't claim losses from those transactions.
I think the problem is that the actual cause/effect is the opposite of the perceived cause/effect. In many of the cases you mentioned, harder enforcement and heavier penalties make people more likely to do worse things for a whole variety of reasons (once you've done prison time you learn lots more about being a nogoodnik, fear returning less; drastic punishments for drug-related crimes make people more likely to use murder to try and cover up what they've done because the punishment isn't worse than what's already going to happen) but the general perception is that stronger punishment reduces crime. As a result there's pressure towards stronger punishment: society is seeking a setpoint by pushing in the wrong direction and getting further and further from what would actually minimize the problem. I say minimize because the problem isn't going to go away, and that's a problem in itself: if your goal is zero crime, you're going to fail, and that is, in fact, the goal. If society were to seek a minimal amount of crime, maybe we'd be able to accept that a softer justice system would get us closer to that point.
That works, too, but if you're commuting to work every day, you don't really want to let a pair of wet shorts sit for 8 hours and get manky and then ride home with them, do a bit of stuff at home, then go on a training ride that evening. If I ran the shorts through a washer/dryer cycle I'd either have to own about 24 pairs of bike shorts (at about $80 each) or run two loads of laundry a week. Or, microwave.
Have you tried this? I read that two years ago and have a (spare, ugly) microwave and some silicon carbide paste, but have yet to actually give it a shot, for lack of time. If it works, it could be a lot of fun.
Same here. Everyone I know has been using microwaves as ersatz autoclaves since, well, microwaves became common. I use them to sterilize my bike shorts, frankly, which is probably a disgusting habit. At least that's my girlfriend's opinion, and I can't say I disagree, but it beats the alternative.
I ask girlfriend and Google: Is the line "those are pearls which were his eyes" Shakespeare? Google says 'nope.' I ask girlfriend and Google: Is there more crime in the neighborhood where we're looking to buy a house than in the one where we're currently living? Google says 'nope.' I ask girlfriend and Google: Hey, want to go in the other room and make a bunch of loud, immoral sounds? Google says 'nope.' Google's so negative. Girlfriend for the win!
I thought that it was precisely because capacitors have fairly small changes in value over temp that they were being aggressively developed for use in cold-start as battery replacements or supplements, or even as APU replacements in trucks. I'll even quote from that last source (since it takes a bit of scrolling to find the relevant section): "Starting can be a problem if batteries are discharged too deeply, a situation all too common in extremely cold weather. Supercapacitors are devices with the ability to store large amounts of current and release it quickly at high energy levels. They replace starting batteries, allowing deep-cycle batteries to provide HVAC and hotel loads.
Developed in Siberia to start construction equipment in frigid climates, supercapacitors quickly recharge from batteries too weak to start a truck's engine. Although they cost close to $1,000 each, only one is needed and they are still substantially less costly than APUs.
With supercapacitors, batteries can exclusively power both 12-volt and 120-volt appliances using an inverter. Dollar-for-dollar, battery power may be less expensive than APUs, in terms of both initial and operating costs.
The ability of batteries to accept a recharge is inversely proportional to ambient temperature. As the climate gets colder, the batteries accept less recharging current. Over time, their state of charge may severely degrade. Cold doesn't affect a supercapacitor." [emphasis mine.]
I live right next to the Largest Wal-Mart In The Entire United States, which is in a suburb of Denver. There are bike paths less than a mile north and south of it, and there are a surprising number of people walking to and from Wal-Mart. Primarily, I grant you, it's an enormous parking lot -- much larger than the large industrial facility where I work -- completely filled with beat-up SUV's, and I mean *completely* filled, but there is always a group of pedestrians on the nearest major corner heading out south and west, waiting for buses.
I haven't, however, ever seen anyone riding a bike to/from that Wal-Mart.
I guess the point is: even the Wal-Mart crowd needs, and probably wants, mass transit and walking paths. The downside is that much like kids riding bicycles, the moment the people who currently need mass transit make enough money they'll be buying SUV's they can hardly afford so they can drive to Wal-Mart, because the appearance of affluence is much more alluring than actually having money. It takes a whole different mindset about social order and quality-of-life to aspire to walking, bike-riding, and mass transit rather than using them as a stopgap until you can afford a car.
This is one of the more short-sighted, egocentric proposals I've seen lately. What makes them think that people in 1 or 10 kY from now are going to give a tinker's dam about us? There have been big chunks of human existence where nobody has had any perceptible curiosity about human history, or history at all.
What makes them think that people 1 or 10 kY from now will need their help? Let's pretend, for just a second, that we're a bunch of Cro-Magnons sitting around in a cave, grunting about how we should preserve our culture for people 10kY down the road, so we argue about the symbolism behind the alignment of the bat dung we've smeared on the wall as compared to the angle between the horns of the antelope we've scratched on the wall. Maybe in 10 kY they'll have a magnetooptic synaptosynergistic homologenizer that can scan corroded magnetic tape in a mass of dirt in a landfill in Queens, from their orbiting remote-control robot, or maybe they'll have bombed themselves back into the stone age and wouldn't recognize anything but bat dung and antelope etchings.
And, most of all, what makes them think people 10kY from now will give even the merest consideration to what we currently consider important? Why would they care about mpeg codecs or books on maritime law? Maybe they will: I certainly don't know, but neither do the people who are proposing this.
Maybe it's a good idea, but to me it sounds like it's going to end up as the equivalent of Citizen Kane gasping "Rosebud!": information without context.
I think the Morris Bishop version of the poem might be even more apropos:
"And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Also the names of Emory P. Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay."
>The amount of solid sulfur removed per day was quite a bit.
Which, presumably, has significant value, right? As I recall, the scrubbers in coal-fired power plants, which the operators fought like demons to avoid having to install, produce LOTS of sulfuric acid, which, when resold, pays for the cost of the scrubbers pretty quickly. Likewise, people are spending good money extracting sulfur and arsenic from the ground to use in rubber and semiconductor industries (and plenty more I don't know off the top of my head) so a waste stream filled with them might be someone else's treasure.
Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 1
One thing I loved was the ads: Amiga: "The computer for the creative mind!" Mac: "The computer for the rest of us."
Okay, so where's the line? If your friend stumbles in, drunk, yelling about how his girlfriend just dumped him and he doesn't want to go on living, and asks you for a gun, and asks you to load it, and asks you to hold onto the barrel and keep it aimed at his head while he pulls the trigger -- are you largely liable for his death? I'd say yes. There isn't a line between nanny-state and personal responsibility, but a gradiation, and what we're discussing is where the line we feel it necessary to draw, should fall on that gradiation. *I* think it's stupid to try and hold MySpace responsible for what happens there, any more than holding a pool hall responsible for a guy's savings loss when the woman he met there and subsequently married sues him for divorce and takes everything he has. But when a bartender gives someone a drink when the person is unable to walk correctly, I think the bartender is somewhat responsible for what happens next. Not entirely: the bartender didn't start the person drinking. But the bartender did choose to keep giving the person alcohol, when generally speaking, people are not obligated to sell something just because they can.
I *love* the stuff that guy does. "Wrong Trousers" is one of my all-time favorite films, and some of his short stuff, particularly the one with the zoo, also ranks up there.
By the way, I liked your posts over on the solar house discussion.
English is growing and changing, and I think Coop is fine, and probably joins the list of words that changes pronunciation when capitalized. (Which would make it the only non-proper-name one I know of.) 'Coax' often gets me, too. Words like minute and console I parse without thinking about it, but lower-case coop and coax take me longer, particularly when it gives rise to such great images as these little neurotic chickens cowering in the center of a shed, with eerily glowing walls (for dramatic effect.)
MAN did I misread that. First I imagined that you were keeping chickens in an electrified cage, and then I thought maybe you meant that it was a normal chicken house that was wired so that it would email you if the chickens did something and THEN I finally managed to parse it correctly. Isonyms are weird.
One of the interesting things about technology is that it rarely gets worse, which is to say: *today* the reader can scan you from about four feet away. What about next month when a new design can do 8 feet? and next year when it can do 40? At what distance do you get nervous about any arbitrary stranger being able to unambiguously identify you without your knowledge? For me, *any* distance is too far. But, hey, maybe you've never had a stalker.
I'm not saying the word was wrong. The problem is that you can't use that word in that place, because it says that Mark James was incredulous -- with that sentence structure, 'incredulously' seems to modify 'mark james'. 'Incredibly' would do what the writer intended without ambiguity. If the writer really, truly wanted to use the word 'incredulously', which is a cool word, it would work to start the sentence, "In a move that leaves observers incredulous, Mark James..." although even that kind of sucks. 'Incredibly' or 'Unbelievably' fit in that space. 'Incredulously' doesn't.
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Throughout much of the Rocky Mountain states, sugar beets were *the* cash crop from the late 1800's until the 1960's. Every small town in northern Colorado had or still has an old broken-down sugar refinery, originally owned by Great Western Sugar. (like the GW Sugar in the blue and white package at the supermarket.) Here are some pics of old sugar mills in Nebraska and Colorado. Some details on sugar beet agriculture.
To sum up: cane sugar and corn syrup-derived sugar has lower production costs and drove sugar beet production out of business.
(I grew up in a sugar beet town and remember the Great Western railway running steam engines in the 1970's. A lot of my friends' parents were sugar chemists in the processing plants, and my family would ride our bikes at harvest time and find sugar beets that had fallen off the trucks, take them home, and bake them for very odd meals.)
I haven't gotten mine to work at *all*. When I try and launch it, it throws some screen up about how it can't open a new window. Do you have a firewall? What ports do you open? (I read what Linden sez about it and opened those, but still no good.) I'm almost desperate enough to make a Windows install just to see if the problem is my linux setup.
1. In '85-88 there wasn't much so I wrote my own.
2. That's just the box of mid-80's Amiga software. There's another for late-80's and another for early-90's, although by that time I'd gotten a CD drive for it and had access to a very early CD writer.
That's okay: any geek worth anything has boxes and boxes of them, unlabelled, to shore up the dwindling reserves. I think I have two cubic feet just of Amiga software from 1985 on 3.5" discs, and I don't even know how much from Win95 backups.
>That is, had only Bush asked congress for "authorization" -- which would surely have been forthcoming -- everything would have been okay.
I have mixed feelings about this. What Bush did was wrong, but the question is what part of it was wrong. It's not like he could go to the entire population of the United States -- or the whole world -- and say "can I spy on anyone, any time, without any given reasons?"
If you grant that there's a reason for a government to spy on people -- and the US Constitution says that there are acceptable reasons to do that -- then the question is who decides those reasons. The point of FISA and the like are to make sure the person who wants to do the spying isn't the person who says it's okay to spy.
I think I'd rather have Congress doing the oversight, since they're liable in a very direct way, by not being reelected, for abuse. Secret courts and anonymous judges are less liable, and more likely to just go along with the requestor, but even that's better than the Administration's self-regulation.
But if the Administration says it has cause for spying, and Congress, or some reasonable subset of it, okays the decision, I can't see that there's any better system for oversight.
"The person who receives your gift does not have to report the gift to the IRS or pay gift or income tax on its value."
Although the previous poster was correct that you have to pay income on the most amazing things, like forgiven loans, bribes, or stolen goods -- iff the goods aren't returned to the legal owner within the tax year in which the theft occurred. I hadn't realized that hobbies have special status: you have to pay taxes on income derived from hobbies, but can't claim losses from those transactions.
I think the problem is that the actual cause/effect is the opposite of the perceived cause/effect. In many of the cases you mentioned, harder enforcement and heavier penalties make people more likely to do worse things for a whole variety of reasons (once you've done prison time you learn lots more about being a nogoodnik, fear returning less; drastic punishments for drug-related crimes make people more likely to use murder to try and cover up what they've done because the punishment isn't worse than what's already going to happen) but the general perception is that stronger punishment reduces crime. As a result there's pressure towards stronger punishment: society is seeking a setpoint by pushing in the wrong direction and getting further and further from what would actually minimize the problem. I say minimize because the problem isn't going to go away, and that's a problem in itself: if your goal is zero crime, you're going to fail, and that is, in fact, the goal. If society were to seek a minimal amount of crime, maybe we'd be able to accept that a softer justice system would get us closer to that point.
That works, too, but if you're commuting to work every day, you don't really want to let a pair of wet shorts sit for 8 hours and get manky and then ride home with them, do a bit of stuff at home, then go on a training ride that evening. If I ran the shorts through a washer/dryer cycle I'd either have to own about 24 pairs of bike shorts (at about $80 each) or run two loads of laundry a week. Or, microwave.
Have you tried this? I read that two years ago and have a (spare, ugly) microwave and some silicon carbide paste, but have yet to actually give it a shot, for lack of time. If it works, it could be a lot of fun.
Same here. Everyone I know has been using microwaves as ersatz autoclaves since, well, microwaves became common. I use them to sterilize my bike shorts, frankly, which is probably a disgusting habit. At least that's my girlfriend's opinion, and I can't say I disagree, but it beats the alternative.
I ask girlfriend and Google: Is the line "those are pearls which were his eyes" Shakespeare? Google says 'nope.'
I ask girlfriend and Google: Is there more crime in the neighborhood where we're looking to buy a house than in the one where we're currently living? Google says 'nope.'
I ask girlfriend and Google: Hey, want to go in the other room and make a bunch of loud, immoral sounds? Google says 'nope.'
Google's so negative.
Girlfriend for the win!
I thought that it was precisely because capacitors have fairly small changes in value over temp that they were being aggressively developed for use in cold-start as battery replacements or supplements, or even as APU replacements in trucks. I'll even quote from that last source (since it takes a bit of scrolling to find the relevant section):
"Starting can be a problem if batteries are discharged too deeply, a situation all too common in extremely cold weather. Supercapacitors are devices with the ability to store large amounts of current and release it quickly at high energy levels. They replace starting batteries, allowing deep-cycle batteries to provide HVAC and hotel loads.
Developed in Siberia to start construction equipment in frigid climates, supercapacitors quickly recharge from batteries too weak to start a truck's engine. Although they cost close to $1,000 each, only one is needed and they are still substantially less costly than APUs.
With supercapacitors, batteries can exclusively power both 12-volt and 120-volt appliances using an inverter. Dollar-for-dollar, battery power may be less expensive than APUs, in terms of both initial and operating costs.
The ability of batteries to accept a recharge is inversely proportional to ambient temperature. As the climate gets colder, the batteries accept less recharging current. Over time, their state of charge may severely degrade. Cold doesn't affect a supercapacitor." [emphasis mine.]
Are these sources wrong?
I live right next to the Largest Wal-Mart In The Entire United States, which is in a suburb of Denver. There are bike paths less than a mile north and south of it, and there are a surprising number of people walking to and from Wal-Mart. Primarily, I grant you, it's an enormous parking lot -- much larger than the large industrial facility where I work -- completely filled with beat-up SUV's, and I mean *completely* filled, but there is always a group of pedestrians on the nearest major corner heading out south and west, waiting for buses.
I haven't, however, ever seen anyone riding a bike to/from that Wal-Mart.
I guess the point is: even the Wal-Mart crowd needs, and probably wants, mass transit and walking paths. The downside is that much like kids riding bicycles, the moment the people who currently need mass transit make enough money they'll be buying SUV's they can hardly afford so they can drive to Wal-Mart, because the appearance of affluence is much more alluring than actually having money. It takes a whole different mindset about social order and quality-of-life to aspire to walking, bike-riding, and mass transit rather than using them as a stopgap until you can afford a car.
This is one of the more short-sighted, egocentric proposals I've seen lately.
What makes them think that people in 1 or 10 kY from now are going to give a tinker's dam about us? There have been big chunks of human existence where nobody has had any perceptible curiosity about human history, or history at all.
What makes them think that people 1 or 10 kY from now will need their help? Let's pretend, for just a second, that we're a bunch of Cro-Magnons sitting around in a cave, grunting about how we should preserve our culture for people 10kY down the road, so we argue about the symbolism behind the alignment of the bat dung we've smeared on the wall as compared to the angle between the horns of the antelope we've scratched on the wall. Maybe in 10 kY they'll have a magnetooptic synaptosynergistic homologenizer that can scan corroded magnetic tape in a mass of dirt in a landfill in Queens, from their orbiting remote-control robot, or maybe they'll have bombed themselves back into the stone age and wouldn't recognize anything but bat dung and antelope etchings.
And, most of all, what makes them think people 10kY from now will give even the merest consideration to what we currently consider important? Why would they care about mpeg codecs or books on maritime law? Maybe they will: I certainly don't know, but neither do the people who are proposing this.
Maybe it's a good idea, but to me it sounds like it's going to end up as the equivalent of Citizen Kane gasping "Rosebud!": information without context.
I think the Morris Bishop version of the poem might be even more apropos:
"And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay."
>The amount of solid sulfur removed per day was quite a bit.
Which, presumably, has significant value, right? As I recall, the scrubbers in coal-fired power plants, which the operators fought like demons to avoid having to install, produce LOTS of sulfuric acid, which, when resold, pays for the cost of the scrubbers pretty quickly.
Likewise, people are spending good money extracting sulfur and arsenic from the ground to use in rubber and semiconductor industries (and plenty more I don't know off the top of my head) so a waste stream filled with them might be someone else's treasure.
One thing I loved was the ads:
Amiga: "The computer for the creative mind!"
Mac: "The computer for the rest of us."
That, for me, said it all.
Okay, so where's the line? If your friend stumbles in, drunk, yelling about how his girlfriend just dumped him and he doesn't want to go on living, and asks you for a gun, and asks you to load it, and asks you to hold onto the barrel and keep it aimed at his head while he pulls the trigger -- are you largely liable for his death?
I'd say yes.
There isn't a line between nanny-state and personal responsibility, but a gradiation, and what we're discussing is where the line we feel it necessary to draw, should fall on that gradiation.
*I* think it's stupid to try and hold MySpace responsible for what happens there, any more than holding a pool hall responsible for a guy's savings loss when the woman he met there and subsequently married sues him for divorce and takes everything he has.
But when a bartender gives someone a drink when the person is unable to walk correctly, I think the bartender is somewhat responsible for what happens next. Not entirely: the bartender didn't start the person drinking. But the bartender did choose to keep giving the person alcohol, when generally speaking, people are not obligated to sell something just because they can.
Dude. Even nerds make fun of the homely nerd, until a stupid asshole tries to beat him up.
I *love* the stuff that guy does. "Wrong Trousers" is one of my all-time favorite films, and some of his short stuff, particularly the one with the zoo, also ranks up there.
By the way, I liked your posts over on the solar house discussion.
English is growing and changing, and I think Coop is fine, and probably joins the list of words that changes pronunciation when capitalized. (Which would make it the only non-proper-name one I know of.)
'Coax' often gets me, too. Words like minute and console I parse without thinking about it, but lower-case coop and coax take me longer, particularly when it gives rise to such great images as these little neurotic chickens cowering in the center of a shed, with eerily glowing walls (for dramatic effect.)
>Michael Criton
It's "michael crichton", actually, but spelling it so that it sound like "cretin" is probably more appropriate.
>My Electric Coop keeps me informed...
MAN did I misread that. First I imagined that you were keeping chickens in an electrified cage, and then I thought maybe you meant that it was a normal chicken house that was wired so that it would email you if the chickens did something and THEN I finally managed to parse it correctly. Isonyms are weird.
One of the interesting things about technology is that it rarely gets worse, which is to say: *today* the reader can scan you from about four feet away. What about next month when a new design can do 8 feet? and next year when it can do 40? At what distance do you get nervous about any arbitrary stranger being able to unambiguously identify you without your knowledge? For me, *any* distance is too far. But, hey, maybe you've never had a stalker.
I'm not saying the word was wrong. The problem is that you can't use that word in that place, because it says that Mark James was incredulous -- with that sentence structure, 'incredulously' seems to modify 'mark james'. 'Incredibly' would do what the writer intended without ambiguity. If the writer really, truly wanted to use the word 'incredulously', which is a cool word, it would work to start the sentence, "In a move that leaves observers incredulous, Mark James..." although even that kind of sucks. 'Incredibly' or 'Unbelievably' fit in that space. 'Incredulously' doesn't.