Another issue: the fact that no one has been able to build a full-scale model of it and have it operate within acceptable safety limits.
Theoretically speaking, LFTR is a great technology. In practice, people haven't been able to make it work. I wouldn't advocate full-scale LFTRs until people are confident that they're small-scale models can actually be built-out to full scale.
Nothing. However, it demonstrates how little privacy there actually is once we leave the house. And even that's debatable, these days.
In other words, it's a perfect starting point for the discussion: what kind of privacy do we need to function properly, what kind of laws do we need to preserve that privacy, and what are the trade-offs? And now that the rich-and-famous can't hide either, they'll be part of the discussion. And since no one has the politician's hear like the rich and famous.... we'll get laws protecting the rich and famous. Yeah, but it's still better than the alternative.
But the world will forever remember the new mountains of Bureaucracy that were conquered during that time! I'm sure in the future, everyone will be in awe at how the DHS and TSA were able to actually function, and how no bureaucracy since then was able to achieve their stunning amount of rules and red tape.
Wow, where do I start? I'll ignore for a second that I nowhere advocated a ban of guns (which is what I'm assuming your pavlovian response seems to be about).
First off, you're committing the sin of extrapolating from an unrealistic and privileged position to create rules for everybody. And don't think for a second that the absence of rules doesn't create its own set of interaction rules.
Second, you're also operating under the delusion that there is such a thing as absolute Freedom, and that it is something that ought to be preserved at all cost. Even animals interact according to some fairly complex rules that limit what exactly happens when one member of a species meets another. The idea that there should never be a discussion about how much freedom it is that everyone should exactly enjoy is, quite frankly, more indicative of your total lack of understanding of the concept than anything else. Even the very basic freedom-curtailing rule of "your freedom ends where my nose begins" is so simplistic that it barely covers a sliver of all human interactions, and is expanded on in the US constitution.
Finally, if you're not advocating absolute freedom for all, you're down to advocating that gun ownership correlates with safety, which you can only do if you cherry-pick your data and ignore all other events that occurred in a community that banned/allowed guns.
You were asleep in social science class when they went over the discovery about 10k years ago that allowing anyone to do anything is not a good idea. Sometimes, an entity opposing additional legislation is indeed more evil than one endorsing restrictions on your personal freedoms. I mean, I understand that some people think that the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights movement are abominations restricting the freedoms of happy Americans, but that doesn't mean that they understand what the price of that freedom is (if you haven't caught on yet: the price is that someone can come and enslave you).
I'm starting to really think that Elop is prepping Nokia to become a fully-owned subsidiary of MS. I can't see any other reason for the smorgasboard of decisions whose only possible outcome are a dead Nokia.
I mean, really - what has Nokia done since Elop took over that did anything but generate facepalms, groans and a rapidly diminishing market share? Anything? I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...), or there's something nefarious at work.
The way I look at it, it's always been done: except in the past, they turned the actual guy, and he went from being a drug dealer to impersonating a drug dealer. Is it really that different that the person at the other end of the cell phone is now an actual cop impersonating a drug dealer? At the core, the drug buyer has been and is now dealing with a fraud - somebody who says they're a drug dealer, but isn't.
I agree that context is important when considering the impact. However, I have to say that if my manager or my CEO distributed their bonus out to all the people underneath them, my respect for them would go up tremendously - even if it would amount to only an extra beer at pub night for me. The important part is that they were willing to forego something that their contract said they were entitled to, and instead chose it to say thank you to their employees in a very direct manner.
I'm highly suspicious of them as well. I tend to follow MQs for my niches (if for no other than our execs like to show them to clients), and I have to say that it mostly is a fairly arbitrary ranking. The ability to execute is entirely predicated on staffing metrics, which is ridiculous on the face of it: 1000 badly equipped sales people do not allow a company to execute its R&D vision. Similarly, the vision axis is mainly driven by how closely a company (I think that I initially misspelled company as campaign was a Freudian slip that says something about what I think of vision in general...) aligns itself with the most recent buzzwords.
In other words, a Gartner MQ tells you how big a company is and how buzzword-compliant it is. It might also correlate with the performance of the actual products and services, but I found that to be more an accident than a result of Gartner's methodologies.
Personally, I would stay away from a company that is trying to sell me on their MQ position.
That guy just earned himself some serious loyalty from the peons. Nothing says "I couldn't have done this without you" like sending a serious bonus down to everybody. The execs won't care, as that won't cover a day of their salary, but the people at the bottom of the ladder will appreciate it. Interesting that that came from a Chinese owner. I'd be curious to see what American CEOs think of that, and what their response would be to the question "Would you ever give you entire yearly bonus to your employees, and why?"
Eh, no. I filtered it according to homicides. We're 17th in homicides per capita. And i'm not sure what you mean by better "records". We have the biggest mass shootings? The biggest guns? The best-written accounts of the events? We might be better at cataloging the events, but we're still surrounded by countries that have little government and tons of guns.
As with pretty much all posts with girlintraining, the post gets some basic information right, and then goes off on a wild goose chase. The attack was motivated by his implant, but the motivation was absolutely not "he looked different". Instead, they objected to the fact that the camera was photographing them, which was counter the rules they had set up, and which were indicated on the sign outside the restaurant. Finally, her last comment is unsubstantiated hearsay, and probably flat out wrong as well. I don't remember any case like that, and I have a special interest in anything brain-implant related.
Your numbers are wrong. For the most recent actual numbers, we can take the 2011 year. See here for the budget: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?packageId=BUDGET-2011-BUD and here for the GDP numbers: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html 3.8 Trillion of 15 Trillion (roughly) is 25%. 40% of the current spending is deficit spending, but no idea where you get the idea that 60% is just financed by printing money. You need some citations for that. Finally, about 9.8% of the US GDP is deficit spending. That is a scary number - but the alternatives are scarier. And as someone pointed out, your information on the CPI is flat-out wrong.
For some who is making grand plans to influence the future, you are remarkably uninformed.
Not only that - it assumes that no one fucks up. Nuclear war was avoided for two reasons: both the USSR and the US were rational actors, and on both sides there were people who would rather die in a nuclear attack than press the button that started the nuclear war.
If every nation in the world has nukes - some more, some less - it is guaranteed that some nutjob will think that it is better to kill your enemy and be incinerated yourself than to tolerate the affronts for one more second.
There is a reason we don't build buildings by balancing them on a single pole, or that we don't.... wait, so that's one of the few examples left where we do not try to exploit some very small stable region in a chaotic system to extract some maximum profit out of it. Let's just not add one more major system that is just barely stable, and where instability results in humanity starting over.
Lets not forget all the soldiers dying in Afghanistan..... More soldiers in 3.5 years than GWB's in 8 full years.
That's because, you fucking moron, he actually put the necessary number of troops into Afghanistan. If GWB had actually gone after AQ and bin Laden, rather than play in the sand in Iraq, we'd A) have had far more US soldiers die in Afghanistan in his 8 years than in Obama's 3.5 years, and B) bin Laden would have been dead within a year of 9/11, and Afghanistan could have been wrapped up under Bush, instead of now.
Go leave it to conservatives to take a royal GWB fuckup, and then blame the situation on Obama.
Which he demonstrates by having significant gender-based inequities within his own White House staff.
Straw man and citation needed. Compare and contrast with previous administrations' staffing, national levels and historical averages. Furthermore, the argument is about the Ledbetter act. Stay on topic.
Which wasn't dis-abled before. Private parties could (and did) have at it with billions of dollars behind them. Taxpayer-based research continued with existing materials. Nobody was prevented from doing research, and indeed plenty was going on before, and after Obama's election.
It was just severely hamstrung by an arbitrary decision by the previous president. I mean, by that argument, the current recession didn't disable the economy, as there was still billions - even trillions of economic activity.
Which, with the administrative overhead, cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per car sold. An incredibly inefficient redistribution of other people's money.
It provided a quick shot in the arm for auto-makers, who were not doing so well. What was your more efficient redistribution process? Oh, right, ANY redistribution for you is inefficient. Which is fine and dandy, just don't bitch when you get run over by some rich dude and you are left in the dust. I know, I know, you deserved to be run over, it would never happen to you, you will be part of the elite one day, etc. Not to mention your number is way off.
Which was inevitable and already well on its way to happening.
If it was inevitable and well on its way to happening, why hadn't it happened before? Why were there so many anti-gay-marriage acts being passed? This is one of my favorite conservative lies: it not only lies about the actual state of nation with respect to it, it also lies about the position conservatives were taking.
Only when pressured by the press. He didn't care about it before he was elected, or after.
Flat out lie. I'm sure you have a citation to back that up? No? Then I'd like to point out that the number of MRAPs and armored Humvees went up after he came into office.
The combat troop draw-down happened on the schedule set before he was elected. But of course he didn't end it, because it's not ended. There are tens of thousands of US troops there, right now, armed to the teeth. Of course you know that, and you're just trolling away, right?
They are not armed to the teeth and the time table was changed (because there was no fucking time table to end the war in Iraq). Man, amazing what now qualifies as a drawdown and a time table, now that Obama was actually doing something about Iraq.
Yes, he has shown that, just like other presidents, he is able to take advice from military professsionals, and approve their plans, which they then go about acting on. Bin Laden was hit based on intel that originated before he was elected, and handled by career people who were working that case before he was elected. Of course, you know all of that, too.
Of course, the counter example is your dear conservative stalward, GWB, who ignored every military advice he ever got, made up his own shit, and then left it for others to clean up his shit. Not to mention that by all accounts of the events, no one was willing to actually say "that's Bin Laden there". Probability was still at 40%-50%. Rail on him for making a decision based on partial evidence, but it was a gutsy decision that paid off. The fact that he took existing intelligence for what it was and made a tough decision WAS new. Under GWB, intelligence was fabricated wholesale by politicians, and easy decisions were made - easy because they were based on completely ignoring facts on the ground.
He did, though, just get a massive new tax program in place, aimed squarely at middle class and lower middle class peo
To some extent, you're right. I think what you're missing though is that people had been taking your approach to flying for a very long time - probably since the first ape saw a bird fly away, and tried flapping his arms to catch up to it. Even just assuming that experiments had been tried since the start of civilization, that means that 5000 years went by before someone managed to actually fly, and that's while having a working model available for reverse-engineering purposes.
Extrapolating from this, while keeping in mind the complexities of leveraging the postulated properties of the Higgs boson, the energy levels involved and the complete lack of an example, I'd say we're looking at a few million years of trial and error and the wealth of several civilizations.
I'd say the applied physicist is right in his analysis of particle physics, and that both are wrong in their assessment of how important it is.
We're currently using energy on a global scale; i.e., energy that is available directly anywhere on earth. We're pretty much burning through those energy resources as fast as we can find them. The next step up is to use solar-scale energy systems, i.e., use up all the amount of energy that is put out by an entire star. And after that, energy-levels on a galactic scale. We can't even reach the solar level without particle physics. As such, particle physics is a vital step in our continued expansion.
I don't ever expect to see practical applications of the Higgs boson, but at the same time, I know that going down that route would pretty much stop all intellectual exploration.
The good news is that water vapor is an effect of, not a forcing of rising temperatures. Water vapor has a life span of a few days in the atmosphere. Methane significantly more, at about an average of 9 years. The lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is about a century or so. So removing CO2 is actually an option - if it would be anywhere near economical to do so on a scale large enough to affect the global temperatures. If anyone wants to know the cost of pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, it's right there.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here, Sparky. Note how I said that they are three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet? Where do you think drive and vision come from? I am fully aware that they are special. And for what it's worth, I consider neither of them evil, not even bad. But they sure have giant egos - also something that is required to succeed beyond anyone's dreams.
#1 While Zuckerberg has money now, I want to see if that is still true 3 years from now. The stock market is a cruel mistress. #2 Ellison, Gates and Jobs are probably three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet, who also lucked into a set of extraordinary circumstances (what would Jobs have been without Woz, and what would Gates have been without rich parents?) #3 Dropping out of school because your business is far more interesting and time consuming than school is entirely different from dropping out of school because "degrees don't correlate with success). #4 That's three people. Three people who made it without a degree. There are far more variables that impact success than can be properly identified and isolated through the anecdotal stories of three people. #5 That's not to say that degrees are necessary - they clearly aren't necessary, by the mathematical definition of the word. But they give you a hell of a leg up on the competition.
Anybody who says that degrees are useless is trying to sell you something else, or is trying to make sure that you won't become competition.
So in that sense, yes, it is a myth that successful entrepreneurs don't need degrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Another issue: the fact that no one has been able to build a full-scale model of it and have it operate within acceptable safety limits.
Theoretically speaking, LFTR is a great technology. In practice, people haven't been able to make it work. I wouldn't advocate full-scale LFTRs until people are confident that they're small-scale models can actually be built-out to full scale.
Grub, is that you? I hope this is a good replacement for Dr. Bob. I miss Bob!
Nothing. However, it demonstrates how little privacy there actually is once we leave the house. And even that's debatable, these days.
In other words, it's a perfect starting point for the discussion: what kind of privacy do we need to function properly, what kind of laws do we need to preserve that privacy, and what are the trade-offs? And now that the rich-and-famous can't hide either, they'll be part of the discussion. And since no one has the politician's hear like the rich and famous.... we'll get laws protecting the rich and famous. Yeah, but it's still better than the alternative.
But the world will forever remember the new mountains of Bureaucracy that were conquered during that time! I'm sure in the future, everyone will be in awe at how the DHS and TSA were able to actually function, and how no bureaucracy since then was able to achieve their stunning amount of rules and red tape.
Wow, where do I start? I'll ignore for a second that I nowhere advocated a ban of guns (which is what I'm assuming your pavlovian response seems to be about).
First off, you're committing the sin of extrapolating from an unrealistic and privileged position to create rules for everybody. And don't think for a second that the absence of rules doesn't create its own set of interaction rules.
Second, you're also operating under the delusion that there is such a thing as absolute Freedom, and that it is something that ought to be preserved at all cost. Even animals interact according to some fairly complex rules that limit what exactly happens when one member of a species meets another. The idea that there should never be a discussion about how much freedom it is that everyone should exactly enjoy is, quite frankly, more indicative of your total lack of understanding of the concept than anything else. Even the very basic freedom-curtailing rule of "your freedom ends where my nose begins" is so simplistic that it barely covers a sliver of all human interactions, and is expanded on in the US constitution.
Finally, if you're not advocating absolute freedom for all, you're down to advocating that gun ownership correlates with safety, which you can only do if you cherry-pick your data and ignore all other events that occurred in a community that banned/allowed guns.
You were asleep in social science class when they went over the discovery about 10k years ago that allowing anyone to do anything is not a good idea. Sometimes, an entity opposing additional legislation is indeed more evil than one endorsing restrictions on your personal freedoms. I mean, I understand that some people think that the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights movement are abominations restricting the freedoms of happy Americans, but that doesn't mean that they understand what the price of that freedom is (if you haven't caught on yet: the price is that someone can come and enslave you).
Beaten to the punch by an AC, apparently. Yep, I am indeed now wondering what the last discussion was that Elop had with MS head honchos.
I'm starting to really think that Elop is prepping Nokia to become a fully-owned subsidiary of MS. I can't see any other reason for the smorgasboard of decisions whose only possible outcome are a dead Nokia.
I mean, really - what has Nokia done since Elop took over that did anything but generate facepalms, groans and a rapidly diminishing market share? Anything? I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...), or there's something nefarious at work.
The way I look at it, it's always been done: except in the past, they turned the actual guy, and he went from being a drug dealer to impersonating a drug dealer. Is it really that different that the person at the other end of the cell phone is now an actual cop impersonating a drug dealer? At the core, the drug buyer has been and is now dealing with a fraud - somebody who says they're a drug dealer, but isn't.
I really don't see how that is some new concept.
I agree that context is important when considering the impact. However, I have to say that if my manager or my CEO distributed their bonus out to all the people underneath them, my respect for them would go up tremendously - even if it would amount to only an extra beer at pub night for me. The important part is that they were willing to forego something that their contract said they were entitled to, and instead chose it to say thank you to their employees in a very direct manner.
I'm highly suspicious of them as well. I tend to follow MQs for my niches (if for no other than our execs like to show them to clients), and I have to say that it mostly is a fairly arbitrary ranking. The ability to execute is entirely predicated on staffing metrics, which is ridiculous on the face of it: 1000 badly equipped sales people do not allow a company to execute its R&D vision. Similarly, the vision axis is mainly driven by how closely a company (I think that I initially misspelled company as campaign was a Freudian slip that says something about what I think of vision in general...) aligns itself with the most recent buzzwords.
In other words, a Gartner MQ tells you how big a company is and how buzzword-compliant it is. It might also correlate with the performance of the actual products and services, but I found that to be more an accident than a result of Gartner's methodologies.
Personally, I would stay away from a company that is trying to sell me on their MQ position.
That guy just earned himself some serious loyalty from the peons. Nothing says "I couldn't have done this without you" like sending a serious bonus down to everybody. The execs won't care, as that won't cover a day of their salary, but the people at the bottom of the ladder will appreciate it. Interesting that that came from a Chinese owner. I'd be curious to see what American CEOs think of that, and what their response would be to the question "Would you ever give you entire yearly bonus to your employees, and why?"
Eh, no. I filtered it according to homicides. We're 17th in homicides per capita. And i'm not sure what you mean by better "records". We have the biggest mass shootings? The biggest guns? The best-written accounts of the events? We might be better at cataloging the events, but we're still surrounded by countries that have little government and tons of guns.
Actually, compared to the rest of the world, we are.... 17th in homicide death-rate. Right between Zimbabwe and Costa Rica. Fuck Yeah! America! ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_raterel=url2html-3513http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate>
As with pretty much all posts with girlintraining, the post gets some basic information right, and then goes off on a wild goose chase. The attack was motivated by his implant, but the motivation was absolutely not "he looked different". Instead, they objected to the fact that the camera was photographing them, which was counter the rules they had set up, and which were indicated on the sign outside the restaurant. Finally, her last comment is unsubstantiated hearsay, and probably flat out wrong as well. I don't remember any case like that, and I have a special interest in anything brain-implant related.
Your numbers are wrong. For the most recent actual numbers, we can take the 2011 year.
See here for the budget: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?packageId=BUDGET-2011-BUD and here for the GDP numbers: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
3.8 Trillion of 15 Trillion (roughly) is 25%.
40% of the current spending is deficit spending, but no idea where you get the idea that 60% is just financed by printing money. You need some citations for that. Finally, about 9.8% of the US GDP is deficit spending. That is a scary number - but the alternatives are scarier. And as someone pointed out, your information on the CPI is flat-out wrong.
For some who is making grand plans to influence the future, you are remarkably uninformed.
Not only that - it assumes that no one fucks up. Nuclear war was avoided for two reasons: both the USSR and the US were rational actors, and on both sides there were people who would rather die in a nuclear attack than press the button that started the nuclear war.
If every nation in the world has nukes - some more, some less - it is guaranteed that some nutjob will think that it is better to kill your enemy and be incinerated yourself than to tolerate the affronts for one more second.
There is a reason we don't build buildings by balancing them on a single pole, or that we don't.... wait, so that's one of the few examples left where we do not try to exploit some very small stable region in a chaotic system to extract some maximum profit out of it. Let's just not add one more major system that is just barely stable, and where instability results in humanity starting over.
Lets not forget all the soldiers dying in Afghanistan ..... More soldiers in 3.5 years than GWB's in 8 full years.
That's because, you fucking moron, he actually put the necessary number of troops into Afghanistan. If GWB had actually gone after AQ and bin Laden, rather than play in the sand in Iraq, we'd A) have had far more US soldiers die in Afghanistan in his 8 years than in Obama's 3.5 years, and B) bin Laden would have been dead within a year of 9/11, and Afghanistan could have been wrapped up under Bush, instead of now.
Go leave it to conservatives to take a royal GWB fuckup, and then blame the situation on Obama.
Which he demonstrates by having significant gender-based inequities within his own White House staff.
Straw man and citation needed. Compare and contrast with previous administrations' staffing, national levels and historical averages. Furthermore, the argument is about the Ledbetter act. Stay on topic.
Which wasn't dis-abled before. Private parties could (and did) have at it with billions of dollars behind them. Taxpayer-based research continued with existing materials. Nobody was prevented from doing research, and indeed plenty was going on before, and after Obama's election.
It was just severely hamstrung by an arbitrary decision by the previous president. I mean, by that argument, the current recession didn't disable the economy, as there was still billions - even trillions of economic activity.
Which, with the administrative overhead, cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per car sold. An incredibly inefficient redistribution of other people's money.
It provided a quick shot in the arm for auto-makers, who were not doing so well. What was your more efficient redistribution process? Oh, right, ANY redistribution for you is inefficient. Which is fine and dandy, just don't bitch when you get run over by some rich dude and you are left in the dust. I know, I know, you deserved to be run over, it would never happen to you, you will be part of the elite one day, etc. Not to mention your number is way off.
Which was inevitable and already well on its way to happening.
If it was inevitable and well on its way to happening, why hadn't it happened before? Why were there so many anti-gay-marriage acts being passed? This is one of my favorite conservative lies: it not only lies about the actual state of nation with respect to it, it also lies about the position conservatives were taking.
Only when pressured by the press. He didn't care about it before he was elected, or after.
Flat out lie. I'm sure you have a citation to back that up? No? Then I'd like to point out that the number of MRAPs and armored Humvees went up after he came into office.
The combat troop draw-down happened on the schedule set before he was elected. But of course he didn't end it, because it's not ended. There are tens of thousands of US troops there, right now, armed to the teeth. Of course you know that, and you're just trolling away, right?
They are not armed to the teeth and the time table was changed (because there was no fucking time table to end the war in Iraq). Man, amazing what now qualifies as a drawdown and a time table, now that Obama was actually doing something about Iraq.
Yes, he has shown that, just like other presidents, he is able to take advice from military professsionals, and approve their plans, which they then go about acting on. Bin Laden was hit based on intel that originated before he was elected, and handled by career people who were working that case before he was elected. Of course, you know all of that, too.
Of course, the counter example is your dear conservative stalward, GWB, who ignored every military advice he ever got, made up his own shit, and then left it for others to clean up his shit. Not to mention that by all accounts of the events, no one was willing to actually say "that's Bin Laden there". Probability was still at 40%-50%. Rail on him for making a decision based on partial evidence, but it was a gutsy decision that paid off.
The fact that he took existing intelligence for what it was and made a tough decision WAS new. Under GWB, intelligence was fabricated wholesale by politicians, and easy decisions were made - easy because they were based on completely ignoring facts on the ground.
He did, though, just get a massive new tax program in place, aimed squarely at middle class and lower middle class peo
To some extent, you're right. I think what you're missing though is that people had been taking your approach to flying for a very long time - probably since the first ape saw a bird fly away, and tried flapping his arms to catch up to it. Even just assuming that experiments had been tried since the start of civilization, that means that 5000 years went by before someone managed to actually fly, and that's while having a working model available for reverse-engineering purposes.
Extrapolating from this, while keeping in mind the complexities of leveraging the postulated properties of the Higgs boson, the energy levels involved and the complete lack of an example, I'd say we're looking at a few million years of trial and error and the wealth of several civilizations.
I'd say the applied physicist is right in his analysis of particle physics, and that both are wrong in their assessment of how important it is.
We're currently using energy on a global scale; i.e., energy that is available directly anywhere on earth. We're pretty much burning through those energy resources as fast as we can find them. The next step up is to use solar-scale energy systems, i.e., use up all the amount of energy that is put out by an entire star. And after that, energy-levels on a galactic scale. We can't even reach the solar level without particle physics. As such, particle physics is a vital step in our continued expansion.
I don't ever expect to see practical applications of the Higgs boson, but at the same time, I know that going down that route would pretty much stop all intellectual exploration.
The good news is that water vapor is an effect of, not a forcing of rising temperatures. Water vapor has a life span of a few days in the atmosphere. Methane significantly more, at about an average of 9 years. The lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is about a century or so. So removing CO2 is actually an option - if it would be anywhere near economical to do so on a scale large enough to affect the global temperatures. If anyone wants to know the cost of pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, it's right there.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here, Sparky. Note how I said that they are three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet? Where do you think drive and vision come from? I am fully aware that they are special. And for what it's worth, I consider neither of them evil, not even bad. But they sure have giant egos - also something that is required to succeed beyond anyone's dreams.
#1 While Zuckerberg has money now, I want to see if that is still true 3 years from now. The stock market is a cruel mistress.
#2 Ellison, Gates and Jobs are probably three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet, who also lucked into a set of extraordinary circumstances (what would Jobs have been without Woz, and what would Gates have been without rich parents?)
#3 Dropping out of school because your business is far more interesting and time consuming than school is entirely different from dropping out of school because "degrees don't correlate with success).
#4 That's three people. Three people who made it without a degree. There are far more variables that impact success than can be properly identified and isolated through the anecdotal stories of three people.
#5 That's not to say that degrees are necessary - they clearly aren't necessary, by the mathematical definition of the word. But they give you a hell of a leg up on the competition.
Anybody who says that degrees are useless is trying to sell you something else, or is trying to make sure that you won't become competition.
So in that sense, yes, it is a myth that successful entrepreneurs don't need degrees.
This trend has been getting worse as time goes on
You're viewing history through rose-colored glasses. It's been pretty much always like this.