I signed up for GrandCentral back when it was pretty new, but I never really used it for the sole reason that I had to be at my computer to get my voice mails. If I was wandering around and just barely miss a call, I don't know who it was and what's more (if I recall correctly) I don't know who was calling either, because it's the "GrandCentral" number that comes into your phone. I guess if I had an internet phone I could get around that, but I didn't and wasn't about to buy one (along with a plan for it) just for the ability to have two phones with one voicemail.
I also agree with the posts above, because I didn't hand out the number to anyone, I would freak out when once in a blue moon someone would call that number by accident and both my phones would ring at once.
I don't know if this stuff has been addressed since google took over, and I guess i won't know since I've moved back to Canada and it doesn't appear to be supported here. Ah well...
People always say "Chimp crime these days, it's out of control". But they do this with no historical perspective. When chimp crime peaked in the mid 1970s, chimps would hurl feces, not rocks, and we'd think ourselves lucky if it hadn't been eating apricots the meal earlier. I blame the internet and sensationalist media for making everyone think the problem is getting worse, when really it's getting better.
From what I've heard, there are tens of thousands of abandoned rigs in the world, and it would cost billions of dollars to dismantle them all properly (read: not going to happen). Until relatively recently, countries did not require oil companies to have "end of life" plans for drilling rigs or production platforms, and I suspect a lot of third world countries still don't. In the absence of these requirements, companies would do what made the most sense money-wise: run them empty and then just leave them. Of course big oil companies these days would never do that even if they were "allowed to", largely due to constant harassment from environmentalists (most American companies working offshore say they operate by "Gulf of Mexico standards" in all their operations, these being some of the most stringent standards in the world). But one could imagine a sketchy national oil company somewhere doing something similar even to this day.
I'm not sure if you could find abandoned rigs very easily in the gulf. Laws requiring disposal have been around the longest here, so any abandoned rigs would be decades old, but they would be close to shore since "deep water operations" weren't really possible at that point. I think the US government has been trying to clear out the gulf, you can see Rigs to reefs for more on this. If you were to find any abandoned rig still standing near the US coast, it would undoubtedly be very dangerous to explore. One of the sunk ones, however, would likely make for great scuba diving.
While I hate to be pedantic, there are oil production platforms off the west coast near santa barbara. You go past them when you take a ferry to the channel islands. They are Chevron facilities, put there before the offshore moratorium was enacted. In fact, I believe it was a famous oil seep from these facilities that pushed the moratorium through.
I guess it just goes to show, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Everyone was so pissed off about publishers suing Google, saying it was contrary to the publishers' own interests and so on. We should have realized then that they weren't looking to block this remarkably useful technology, they were looking to ding Google with a "gotcha" lawsuit, make a quick buck and take advantage of their work anyway.
Get as angry as you want. The fact is working in a sweatshop is better than dying, and that is the choice they have. I'm sorry that's the case, I'm afraid I don't follow your point about foreign investment creating unemployment. As with the industrial revolution in the West, people are coming to cities to work and live in near total squalor, but they do it to avoid starving quietly in the countryside.
I agree with you that foreign investment can be a negative force when done incorrectly. But in the case of China specifically, the days of the unequal treaties are over. In Latin America, the days of the cold war are over. And in the case overall, I believe foreign investment is the only chance many countries have.
And yes, I have seen grinding poverty in India, Yemen and Egypt and the lingering economic malaise in Syria. It's not that I don't care about the misery in those places. But I choose to throw my support behind the best way I believe things are going to get better for them. No the IMF and the World Bank are not perfect organizations and they have made mistakes, but I do not believe they are out to screw countries over but rather to help them, misguided and unsuccessful as some of their efforts may be.
Despite how it seems, the world is actually getting healthier and richer for almost all its inhabitants with the exception of Africa. This talk you may have seen demonstrates that: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
I believe open markets are in large part responsible for this massive improvement in the lives of so much of humanity, particularly in Asia. So on the balance, yes I do believe foreign investment is incredibly important for the future of humanity, and I disagree entirely that it is "rarely a good thing" for developing countries. I believe you are looking very closely at existing misery in the world and failing to realize that, miserable as it is, it is vastly improved from where it was even just a few decades ago or where it would be without open markets.
Coke is made and bottled all over the world. It's kind of a stupid line of conversation because Coke's real value lies in their marketing, distribution and general mind share, not some secret formula. But you are still incorrect.
The fact is Western governments and Western companies do not trust the Chinese government, and with good reason. THEY are a closed box, totally nontransparent on technology issues.
I don't know what border confiscations you're talking about, but whatever it is you're wrong on this as well. The US government has let itself get into the position where it is not properly screening out unsafe products. The Chinese are notorious for exporting unsafe products. Until they demonstrate that they've fixed this I absolutely agree with placing more emphasis on their products than more "trustworthy" countries.
The Western economy was not created on the back of the third world. In large part it simply grew and the third world didn't. Was colonialism an issue in parts of the world? Sure. Were the opium wars an issue in China? Sure. But that is not the reason China's economy was at the point it was at the start of its new resurgence: an obsolete socio-economic system was, and that goes for almost all of the third world.
Afghanistan has no oil and only limited use as a pipeline transit route, which is probably why the US has apparently put it on the backburner. Working in a third world sweatshop isn't particularly pleasant, but it is clearly preferable to their lot without western investment, or they simply wouldn't do it. IMO, these countries are far more damaged by their own amateurish and corrupt governments than foreign companies, and those that do have effective systems are, with the help of the companies you deride, capable of making incredible progression in standard of living, Korea, Taiwan and recently mainland China being the obvious examples. Even de beers is capable of being a positive force, as Botswana demonstrates.
Economic growth is the only real way to significantly and permanently improve the lives of people in the third world, and foreign investment is the only way that's going to happen. It's terrible that countries have been abused in the past, but the idea that western interests are only in these countries to rape and pillage under the banner of capitalism is thankfully a largely defunct notion.
So what does China have to do with this? The government in the past has been canny enough to realize they are hugely benefited by being an attractive destination for foreign investment. If they make this kind of demand, it is very possible some companies will come to the conclusion it costs them more to operate in China than it's worth and move elsewhere. So no, in my view this is not an understandable move by the Chinese government that serves the greedy western capitalists right, it's a stupid move that's going to slow China's development and hurt its people.
That key being? If they do not control the medium, what power do they actually have? What is to stop Apple signing artists directly?
I'm not trying to be a dick, I just find it hard to understand the economic foundation the labels are looking to build their future on...
In a world where more and more people are buying their music directly from iTunes, what function do record companies serve, exactly? And how much money does Apple pay per song to these arguably vestigial middle men?
That is correct, this isn't like Alberta's oil sands where they do strip mining (for a large part of it anyway). It must be a naturally (vertically) fractured reservoir, where the vast majority of the recoverable oil is in the fractures rather than the shale. In order to produce economically out of this, you have to intersect a number of fractures, which serve as both conduits and storage space for the oil. If you're drilling a conventional, vertical, well you are probably lucky to intercept even one such fracture, but if you drill a horizontal well oriented correctly with relation to the prevailing stresses in the rock, you can intercept many. Extraction from shale is getting more common in gas fields (known as "tight gas"). I don't think it is nearly as common with oil though.
There are other costs beyond horizontal drilling that such a formation introduces though. You'll likely have to use various forms of stimulation like hydraulic fracturing and chemical flooding (known as EOR - Enhanced Oil Recovery). But the controlling economic factor is likely to be these wells' low production rate. They simply will not produce oil very fast, so the oil has to be worth a lot to justify the high expense of drilling and stimulation.
Jbengt is entirely correct, plus since these reservoirs have proven "gas tight" to natural gas for geologic time periods, why do you think CO2 would be that different? Earthquakes that you describe would seem to be extremely rare, seeing as we don't have huge methane plumes coming out of the earth every time there's an earthquake. The problem, as Jbengt said, is location of the fields and compressor costs, particularly compared to just venting it. There is also another way of sequestering CO2 that has been experimented with recently by the DOE: turning it into a gas hydrate that is denser than sea water and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, where it is largely stable in its solid form. See here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2003/37/i16/abs/es026301l.html
Their space and aeronautics program? The AK47? The T34? I didn't say they remained competitive in these areas (although the AK47 remains a stunningly successful design, and their space systems are apparently more reliable than America's). I said that for a time they led the world in some areas. Their brutally flawed economic system ultimately prevented them from capitalizing on their developments.
As the wikipedia article will tell you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_in_the_Soviet_Union), the most successful soviet research was pure science, with less emphasis than the US at turning out working products. Military equipment is the obvious exception, and many countries in the world continue to use Russian weapons or ripped off versions of them. The Chinese space program is also largely based on Soviet designs.
You never said that American researchers are more productive per capita. And if I'm missing a "positive correlation" between centralization and quality of student output, I'd say that correlation remains in your head until proven otherwise. IMO, the size of a school (particularly a high school) isn't a particularly critical factor compared to the economic and social background of the students attending, the quality of the teachers, the strength of the curriculum etc.
Actually the USSR did lead the world in a number of areas for some time, and given they developed a lot of the same technologies as the West with a smaller population (if not budget), I would say there's a good case to be made that they were more productive per capita than American and other western scientists. There was of course technology they stole from the West, but there was plenty of home grown advancement as well.
The comment said America was vastly more free than "the rest of the world", which presumably includes Europe. Exactly who is baselessly bashing who here?
In what way do you think any western European country is not as free as America? How about Canada? Japan? Australia? What do you think freedom is exactly?
I'm sorry... Is this a troll? American freedoms "vastly outclass the rest of the world"? Centralized education is a mighty fist of the state? Have you been reading a bunch of captain america comics or something? Exactly how ass backwards do you think the rest of the world is? "Freedom" doesn't generate research, money does and America is a large portion of the world economy. That's about all there is to it. China is a rapidly growing competitor in research, are new "freedoms" there responsible for this? The USSR had a massive research infrastructure, was that due to freedom of any kind beyond the government having the idea that technological advancement is a good thing?
As for your second statement, centralization isn't the issue with education, the fact that a huge number of highschool students are coming out of american schools largely uneducated is. I should think the last thing we would want is to continue churning out increasingly economically uncompetitive students, whether that's done through centralized means or other (what do you even mean by "centralized"?) seems secondary.
Wait, explain to me how spending billions or trillions of dollars of tax payer money on a project that practically zero tax payers are actually going to directly benefit from is going to end hunger or pollution or homelessness? And please spare me the "spin off technologies", as if investing that kind of money directly into research wouldn't produce similar results.
Why are you so hell bent on getting "off this rock"? We are designed by nature to live here, we fit here. Why do you think it's such an amazing idea to get off of it and live some crappy life on mars or some other similarly unpleasant place? There's a novelty factor I'll grant you. But there's a reason people don't live in the arctic or the antarctic or the middle of a desert. It sucks, and living on mars would suck too, only worse. And that is why I don't think there will ever be a significant human presence on any other celestial body over and above research stations. The money for your giant project really could be spent in a number of ways that much more effectively help man-kind.
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I signed up for GrandCentral back when it was pretty new, but I never really used it for the sole reason that I had to be at my computer to get my voice mails. If I was wandering around and just barely miss a call, I don't know who it was and what's more (if I recall correctly) I don't know who was calling either, because it's the "GrandCentral" number that comes into your phone. I guess if I had an internet phone I could get around that, but I didn't and wasn't about to buy one (along with a plan for it) just for the ability to have two phones with one voicemail. I also agree with the posts above, because I didn't hand out the number to anyone, I would freak out when once in a blue moon someone would call that number by accident and both my phones would ring at once. I don't know if this stuff has been addressed since google took over, and I guess i won't know since I've moved back to Canada and it doesn't appear to be supported here. Ah well...
People always say "Chimp crime these days, it's out of control". But they do this with no historical perspective. When chimp crime peaked in the mid 1970s, chimps would hurl feces, not rocks, and we'd think ourselves lucky if it hadn't been eating apricots the meal earlier. I blame the internet and sensationalist media for making everyone think the problem is getting worse, when really it's getting better.
From what I've heard, there are tens of thousands of abandoned rigs in the world, and it would cost billions of dollars to dismantle them all properly (read: not going to happen). Until relatively recently, countries did not require oil companies to have "end of life" plans for drilling rigs or production platforms, and I suspect a lot of third world countries still don't. In the absence of these requirements, companies would do what made the most sense money-wise: run them empty and then just leave them. Of course big oil companies these days would never do that even if they were "allowed to", largely due to constant harassment from environmentalists (most American companies working offshore say they operate by "Gulf of Mexico standards" in all their operations, these being some of the most stringent standards in the world). But one could imagine a sketchy national oil company somewhere doing something similar even to this day. I'm not sure if you could find abandoned rigs very easily in the gulf. Laws requiring disposal have been around the longest here, so any abandoned rigs would be decades old, but they would be close to shore since "deep water operations" weren't really possible at that point. I think the US government has been trying to clear out the gulf, you can see Rigs to reefs for more on this. If you were to find any abandoned rig still standing near the US coast, it would undoubtedly be very dangerous to explore. One of the sunk ones, however, would likely make for great scuba diving.
While I hate to be pedantic, there are oil production platforms off the west coast near santa barbara. You go past them when you take a ferry to the channel islands. They are Chevron facilities, put there before the offshore moratorium was enacted. In fact, I believe it was a famous oil seep from these facilities that pushed the moratorium through.
I guess it just goes to show, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Everyone was so pissed off about publishers suing Google, saying it was contrary to the publishers' own interests and so on. We should have realized then that they weren't looking to block this remarkably useful technology, they were looking to ding Google with a "gotcha" lawsuit, make a quick buck and take advantage of their work anyway.
What does yro mean? It has been driving me nuts...
Forget Gmail, I need this for my E-Trade account
Get as angry as you want. The fact is working in a sweatshop is better than dying, and that is the choice they have. I'm sorry that's the case, I'm afraid I don't follow your point about foreign investment creating unemployment. As with the industrial revolution in the West, people are coming to cities to work and live in near total squalor, but they do it to avoid starving quietly in the countryside.
I agree with you that foreign investment can be a negative force when done incorrectly. But in the case of China specifically, the days of the unequal treaties are over. In Latin America, the days of the cold war are over. And in the case overall, I believe foreign investment is the only chance many countries have.
And yes, I have seen grinding poverty in India, Yemen and Egypt and the lingering economic malaise in Syria. It's not that I don't care about the misery in those places. But I choose to throw my support behind the best way I believe things are going to get better for them. No the IMF and the World Bank are not perfect organizations and they have made mistakes, but I do not believe they are out to screw countries over but rather to help them, misguided and unsuccessful as some of their efforts may be.
Despite how it seems, the world is actually getting healthier and richer for almost all its inhabitants with the exception of Africa. This talk you may have seen demonstrates that:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
I believe open markets are in large part responsible for this massive improvement in the lives of so much of humanity, particularly in Asia. So on the balance, yes I do believe foreign investment is incredibly important for the future of humanity, and I disagree entirely that it is "rarely a good thing" for developing countries. I believe you are looking very closely at existing misery in the world and failing to realize that, miserable as it is, it is vastly improved from where it was even just a few decades ago or where it would be without open markets.
Coke is made and bottled all over the world. It's kind of a stupid line of conversation because Coke's real value lies in their marketing, distribution and general mind share, not some secret formula. But you are still incorrect.
The fact is Western governments and Western companies do not trust the Chinese government, and with good reason. THEY are a closed box, totally nontransparent on technology issues.
I don't know what border confiscations you're talking about, but whatever it is you're wrong on this as well. The US government has let itself get into the position where it is not properly screening out unsafe products. The Chinese are notorious for exporting unsafe products. Until they demonstrate that they've fixed this I absolutely agree with placing more emphasis on their products than more "trustworthy" countries.
The Western economy was not created on the back of the third world. In large part it simply grew and the third world didn't. Was colonialism an issue in parts of the world? Sure. Were the opium wars an issue in China? Sure. But that is not the reason China's economy was at the point it was at the start of its new resurgence: an obsolete socio-economic system was, and that goes for almost all of the third world.
Afghanistan has no oil and only limited use as a pipeline transit route, which is probably why the US has apparently put it on the backburner. Working in a third world sweatshop isn't particularly pleasant, but it is clearly preferable to their lot without western investment, or they simply wouldn't do it. IMO, these countries are far more damaged by their own amateurish and corrupt governments than foreign companies, and those that do have effective systems are, with the help of the companies you deride, capable of making incredible progression in standard of living, Korea, Taiwan and recently mainland China being the obvious examples. Even de beers is capable of being a positive force, as Botswana demonstrates.
Economic growth is the only real way to significantly and permanently improve the lives of people in the third world, and foreign investment is the only way that's going to happen. It's terrible that countries have been abused in the past, but the idea that western interests are only in these countries to rape and pillage under the banner of capitalism is thankfully a largely defunct notion.
So what does China have to do with this? The government in the past has been canny enough to realize they are hugely benefited by being an attractive destination for foreign investment. If they make this kind of demand, it is very possible some companies will come to the conclusion it costs them more to operate in China than it's worth and move elsewhere. So no, in my view this is not an understandable move by the Chinese government that serves the greedy western capitalists right, it's a stupid move that's going to slow China's development and hurt its people.
Right so you'd be happy to offer up your job first, I assume?
That key being? If they do not control the medium, what power do they actually have? What is to stop Apple signing artists directly? I'm not trying to be a dick, I just find it hard to understand the economic foundation the labels are looking to build their future on...
In a world where more and more people are buying their music directly from iTunes, what function do record companies serve, exactly? And how much money does Apple pay per song to these arguably vestigial middle men?
Because it's probably the most outlandish, uneconomical and simply impractical method of electricity generation ever devised.
No wait I should say "5kyllz you fucking n00b!" Sorry it's been a while
These kids are so right. I learned at least 90% of my personal skills through Quake Team Fortress back in the late 90s. Or should I say 5kyllz?
It was a simpler time...
This is incorrect. Transportation accounts for approximately 2/3rds of oil consumption in the US. See here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/oil_market_basics/demand_text.htm
That is correct, this isn't like Alberta's oil sands where they do strip mining (for a large part of it anyway). It must be a naturally (vertically) fractured reservoir, where the vast majority of the recoverable oil is in the fractures rather than the shale. In order to produce economically out of this, you have to intersect a number of fractures, which serve as both conduits and storage space for the oil. If you're drilling a conventional, vertical, well you are probably lucky to intercept even one such fracture, but if you drill a horizontal well oriented correctly with relation to the prevailing stresses in the rock, you can intercept many. Extraction from shale is getting more common in gas fields (known as "tight gas"). I don't think it is nearly as common with oil though.
There are other costs beyond horizontal drilling that such a formation introduces though. You'll likely have to use various forms of stimulation like hydraulic fracturing and chemical flooding (known as EOR - Enhanced Oil Recovery). But the controlling economic factor is likely to be these wells' low production rate. They simply will not produce oil very fast, so the oil has to be worth a lot to justify the high expense of drilling and stimulation.
But wait, I don't look through the eye piece when I take pictures any more...
Jbengt is entirely correct, plus since these reservoirs have proven "gas tight" to natural gas for geologic time periods, why do you think CO2 would be that different? Earthquakes that you describe would seem to be extremely rare, seeing as we don't have huge methane plumes coming out of the earth every time there's an earthquake.
The problem, as Jbengt said, is location of the fields and compressor costs, particularly compared to just venting it. There is also another way of sequestering CO2 that has been experimented with recently by the DOE: turning it into a gas hydrate that is denser than sea water and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, where it is largely stable in its solid form. See here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2003/37/i16/abs/es026301l.html
Their space and aeronautics program? The AK47? The T34? I didn't say they remained competitive in these areas (although the AK47 remains a stunningly successful design, and their space systems are apparently more reliable than America's). I said that for a time they led the world in some areas. Their brutally flawed economic system ultimately prevented them from capitalizing on their developments. As the wikipedia article will tell you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_in_the_Soviet_Union), the most successful soviet research was pure science, with less emphasis than the US at turning out working products. Military equipment is the obvious exception, and many countries in the world continue to use Russian weapons or ripped off versions of them. The Chinese space program is also largely based on Soviet designs.
You never said that American researchers are more productive per capita. And if I'm missing a "positive correlation" between centralization and quality of student output, I'd say that correlation remains in your head until proven otherwise. IMO, the size of a school (particularly a high school) isn't a particularly critical factor compared to the economic and social background of the students attending, the quality of the teachers, the strength of the curriculum etc. Actually the USSR did lead the world in a number of areas for some time, and given they developed a lot of the same technologies as the West with a smaller population (if not budget), I would say there's a good case to be made that they were more productive per capita than American and other western scientists. There was of course technology they stole from the West, but there was plenty of home grown advancement as well.
The comment said America was vastly more free than "the rest of the world", which presumably includes Europe. Exactly who is baselessly bashing who here? In what way do you think any western European country is not as free as America? How about Canada? Japan? Australia? What do you think freedom is exactly?
I'm sorry... Is this a troll? American freedoms "vastly outclass the rest of the world"? Centralized education is a mighty fist of the state? Have you been reading a bunch of captain america comics or something? Exactly how ass backwards do you think the rest of the world is? "Freedom" doesn't generate research, money does and America is a large portion of the world economy. That's about all there is to it. China is a rapidly growing competitor in research, are new "freedoms" there responsible for this? The USSR had a massive research infrastructure, was that due to freedom of any kind beyond the government having the idea that technological advancement is a good thing?
As for your second statement, centralization isn't the issue with education, the fact that a huge number of highschool students are coming out of american schools largely uneducated is. I should think the last thing we would want is to continue churning out increasingly economically uncompetitive students, whether that's done through centralized means or other (what do you even mean by "centralized"?) seems secondary.
Wait, explain to me how spending billions or trillions of dollars of tax payer money on a project that practically zero tax payers are actually going to directly benefit from is going to end hunger or pollution or homelessness? And please spare me the "spin off technologies", as if investing that kind of money directly into research wouldn't produce similar results.
Why are you so hell bent on getting "off this rock"? We are designed by nature to live here, we fit here. Why do you think it's such an amazing idea to get off of it and live some crappy life on mars or some other similarly unpleasant place? There's a novelty factor I'll grant you. But there's a reason people don't live in the arctic or the antarctic or the middle of a desert. It sucks, and living on mars would suck too, only worse. And that is why I don't think there will ever be a significant human presence on any other celestial body over and above research stations. The money for your giant project really could be spent in a number of ways that much more effectively help man-kind.