An interesting thing about using solar power to charge electric cars is that electric cars inherently include storage. You can, in principle, choose to charge cars when the sun is shining.
This would require somewhat of a change in the timing of when you charge. Instead of going home and charging your car overnight, parking spaces would have solar panel roofs-- you'd charge your car in the daytime (which, for most of us, would mean: at work.)
Can you tell me what the trigger was for most of the significant downturns of the last few years? I'll remind you if you didn't know - the Chinese Government closing down Bitcoin exchanges.
Interesting. Can you give a source for that? I'd be curious to see it.
Yes, I really just link to goo.gl. Why? Because it's an Economist article, which sits behind a paywall.
The conventional way to post such a link is to post the link to the actual article, and then put in parentheses the alternate source.
So I instead funnelled the article through Pocket service -- a common way to break paywall -- so that most readers see an unpaywalled version of the story. Now, getpocket [dot] com wouldn't make much sense to others, but goo [dot] gl will make it clear to people that the link has been shortened.
I clicked the link and it sent me to a redirect to getpocket which sent me to a redirect to the Economist article https://www.economist.com/blog... . So the article is still behind a paywall, but the click got there via two redirects, instead of linking there directly. I'm not sure what the advantage was.
Oh really, the Russians? They are quite active these days, responsible for everything it seems. One could get the impression all 147 million Russians arent doing anything else than hack the West 24/7.
See subject: If "russians" (or anyone else instead of the current 'patsy' russians) found a door they left unlocked @ Yahoo (or YouTube etc.) whose fault is it REALLY folks?
Both, of course. The defense "the door wasn't locked so I came in and took your stuff" will not get you off from a charge of burglary. And the defense "but the lock was really easy to defeat" is even a worse excuse.
This is a form of false dichotomy: the fact that one party has blame does not mean that another party is not also in the wrong.
This is the reason I'm still (cautiously) optimistic about humanity: scientists discovered chlorofluorcarbons were destroying the ozone layer, and you know what? Humans PHASED THEM OUT. Sometimes humans DO do the right thing. http://www.theozonehole.com/im...
We've mostly "mastered" it because industries found inexpensive replacements for pollutants and they managed to use imposing pollution standards as a way to stem competition from poorer nations that cannot match environment standards and thus can't enter markets that require industries to heed standards.
Citation needed. And to a credible source, please. Or, to phrase this more bluntly: you're wrong.
The drop in production of ozone destroying CFCs started well before the Montreal protocol-- humans stopped using the ozone-destroying CFCs without being legally required to.
It turns out, actually, that humans are very good at solving problems. Once we clearly identify a problem, there are a lot of people who are willing to work hard at finding solutions.
Because the newspapers actually have reporters and editors, while the stuff that shows up on the internet is neither researched nor edited; it combines garbage and half-garbage and random factoids in a mish-mash of opinion.
I also read news on the internet, but pretty much all the news that actually has substance originated from a newspaper.
What? No. Being a PhD means you sit around, have grad assistants teach your class, grade your papers while you get to sit around in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoke a pipe and leer at co-eds. And have your grad assistants write your papers and since you're the PhD, your name is on it. Please, it's the cushiest there is. The fact they are even getting paid is an outrage.
I honestly can't tell if this post is deadpan sarcasm, or if it's serious.
I wonder if the Anonymous Coward who posted it even knows himself which it is.
It's almost as if I knew all that, and was pointing out that being a democracy doesn't seem to have stopped the US from being in a constant state of war. Plenty of other democracies were quite willing to tag along also.
It is usually hard to tell real ignorance from faked ignorance on slashdot, but, when in doubt, I just assume that people actually are ignorant; it's usually a good bet. It hardly matters: half of the readers will read your post assuming that you mean what you say, and not the opposite of what you say, so it's worth correcting for that fraction of readers.
It's worth pointing out that the second assumption is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Demographers have long proven that three things lead to lower population growth: 1. A wealthier population, 2. A more educated population, and 3. Access to birth control (not forced birth control! It turns out that merely giving people access to the means to limit number of children is enough to have an effect on reducing average family size.)
So, if you want humanity to not increase exponentially until it reaches a (inevitable) crash, work on three things: make all people wealthier, make them more educated, and give them control over their own reproduction.
Last time I checked the USA is pretty much "keeping its guard up". They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
Yep, as it turns out, America has a larger defense budget than the next eight nations combined. "Keeping its guard up" is, in fact, what we spend the largest part of our taxes on. (Along with paying for the debt we accrued from building and equipping that army in the past.)
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish the objective. If you could accomplish the objective with a better tool-- well, then the people with the better tool would impose their will on the people without the better tool.
Despite the apparent misconception, "Republic" and "Democracy" are not mutually exclusive. You can, in fact, have a democratic republic.
(although most of the states with the phrase "democratic republic" in their official name put those words in to hide the fact that they were actually neither).
What's the saying? "Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is a sign of insanity". Well, people unhappy with how things have been going, when given an option of the same thing, and something different, wanting a different result, they went with something different.
Hoot’s Law: “No matter how bad things are, you can always make them worse.”
--Hoot Gibson (as recounted by Charles Boldin)
Or, perhaps this quote is more to the point:
"When you say, 'It can’t get any worse!' You're essentially challenging the universe to do exactly that.”
And you're committing the same error. You're appealing to authority and claiming a consensus while selectively choosing who is an authority or not and rejecting predictions as not being part of the consensus in order to construct the imagined authority and consensus.
In discussing a post about scientific consensus, I said that scientific consensus should be restricted to actual scientists, and you say that is "appealing to authority,"
Yeah, right.
It's like flipping a coin after collecting 10 guesses, then claiming the 5 incorrect guesses weren't part of the consensus and weren't from approved guessers.
Scientific consensus is consensus among scientists. I don't know why you think that's hard.
Show me one single model that has predicted temperature changes accurately for 5 or more years.
OK: Manabe and Wetherald 1967, the very first numerical model. Now show me one that is not accurate. Include the error bars, please.
Somebody needs to make a study about how many *different* conclusions have been made in the last 20 years and how those studies have faired when compared to reality.
That's been done. Read the IPCC report. And I mean, actually read it. They do a lot of comparing different models.
I'm just going to guess that two things are true. 1. The ones the press cover and are most often cited by activists are the most inaccurate over time.
Now, that has an element of truth in it: the press likes catastrophe, so they tend to emphasize the flamboyant studies, and write headlines that make them sound even more dire. It's only two or three paragraphs in that they mention the actual consensus.
And 2. Not one study, if old enough to verify, shows the dire consequences we are routinely told about.
I've been graphing the predicted temperatures from the oldest greenhouse effect models (Manabe & Wetherald, and the original NAS report), and they have been matching the actual temperatures to well within error bars. So, on this one, no, the studies "old enough to verify" actually do check out pretty well.
And none of those were mainstream positions that had scientific consensus. You've confused yourself by taking many different views and bundling them together as a single mind. It's entirely possible for there to be 10 different wrong views on climate change but still end up with climate change being real.
You want him to obey the consensus because it's a consensus but ignore the consensus because the people contributing to it are routinely proven to be hilariously incorrect?
I would call "scientific consensus" as incorporating "stuff that is said by actual scientists." So, yes, I'd indeed say "ignore the consensus" when by that you mean stuff not said by actual scientists in actual scientific publications. Not because it is "hilariously incorrect" but because it's not the scientific consensus, it's the result of people trolling the internet to find the most-wrong thing ever said by non-scientists so they can say "look at how wrong they were".
The IPCC reports are a good place to look for a summary of the actual consensus (with references to the actual scientific literature)-- try this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
Slashdot Mirror
India definitely needs to invest more in cleaner energy.
I agree, but I will point out that the pollution in question comes from burning fields, not from energy production or transportation.
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/stubble-burning-punjab-farmers-amarinder-singh-ngt-air-pollution-4897240/
http://www.dw.com/en/burning-fields-in-punjab/av-41233497
Then those cities should be paying "whatever the cost" instead of smugly telling others to pay for it.
If you read the article, instead of just the summary, you would see: they are.
An interesting thing about using solar power to charge electric cars is that electric cars inherently include storage. You can, in principle, choose to charge cars when the sun is shining.
This would require somewhat of a change in the timing of when you charge. Instead of going home and charging your car overnight, parking spaces would have solar panel roofs-- you'd charge your car in the daytime (which, for most of us, would mean: at work.)
But that's doable.
http://news.energysage.com/solar-canopy-installations-bring-shade-clean-energy-parking-lot/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/01/28/the-best-idea-in-a-long-time-covering-parking-lots-with-solar-panels/
http://solarbuildermag.com/news/costs-decline-solar-carports-will-spread-across-country/
https://www.borregosolar.com/news/the-design-basics-for-solar-parking-lots-you-need-to-know-2
Can you tell me what the trigger was for most of the significant downturns of the last few years? I'll remind you if you didn't know - the Chinese Government closing down Bitcoin exchanges.
Interesting. Can you give a source for that? I'd be curious to see it.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
Now, that's a quotable quote.
Yes, I really just link to goo.gl. Why? Because it's an Economist article, which sits behind a paywall.
The conventional way to post such a link is to post the link to the actual article, and then put in parentheses the alternate source.
So I instead funnelled the article through Pocket service -- a common way to break paywall -- so that most readers see an unpaywalled version of the story. Now, getpocket [dot] com wouldn't make much sense to others, but goo [dot] gl will make it clear to people that the link has been shortened.
I clicked the link and it sent me to a redirect to getpocket which sent me to a redirect to the Economist article https://www.economist.com/blog... .
So the article is still behind a paywall, but the click got there via two redirects, instead of linking there directly. I'm not sure what the advantage was.
Oh really, the Russians? They are quite active these days, responsible for everything it seems. One could get the impression all 147 million Russians arent doing anything else than hack the West 24/7.
About 90 paid employees, in the most well-known Russian Troll farm, actually (reference: http://www.independent.co.uk/n... )
Possibly more in others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-russia-troll-farm-20171008-story.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/russian-troll-factory-activists-protests-us-election
Is the person who walked in and stole everything a criminal? Yes.
Am I liable for my negligence? Almost certainly.
Exactly. The correct answer to the question is "both."
See subject: If "russians" (or anyone else instead of the current 'patsy' russians) found a door they left unlocked @ Yahoo (or YouTube etc.) whose fault is it REALLY folks?
Both, of course. The defense "the door wasn't locked so I came in and took your stuff" will not get you off from a charge of burglary. And the defense "but the lock was really easy to defeat" is even a worse excuse.
This is a form of false dichotomy: the fact that one party has blame does not mean that another party is not also in the wrong.
Nobody else is commenting on the pun in the headline?
I can't tell if you're serious or joking. I reread your post about 5 times and I just can't tell.
Poe's law. You really can't tell sarcasm from cluelessness any more.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poes-law
Indeed.
This is the reason I'm still (cautiously) optimistic about humanity: scientists discovered chlorofluorcarbons were destroying the ozone layer, and you know what? Humans PHASED THEM OUT.
Sometimes humans DO do the right thing.
http://www.theozonehole.com/im...
We've mostly "mastered" it because industries found inexpensive replacements for pollutants and they managed to use imposing pollution standards as a way to stem competition from poorer nations that cannot match environment standards and thus can't enter markets that require industries to heed standards.
Citation needed. And to a credible source, please. Or, to phrase this more bluntly: you're wrong.
The drop in production of ozone destroying CFCs started well before the Montreal protocol-- humans stopped using the ozone-destroying CFCs without being legally required to.
It turns out, actually, that humans are very good at solving problems. Once we clearly identify a problem, there are a lot of people who are willing to work hard at finding solutions.
It's what we do.
Because the newspapers actually have reporters and editors, while the stuff that shows up on the internet is neither researched nor edited; it combines garbage and half-garbage and random factoids in a mish-mash of opinion.
I also read news on the internet, but pretty much all the news that actually has substance originated from a newspaper.
If you don't like NPR, here are some other sources:
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-climate-real.html
http://blog.ucsusa.org/rachel-licker/what-is-the-national-climate-assessment-the-most-comprehensive-report-on-climate-change-in-the-u-s
http://www.themorningsun.com/article/MS/20170822/LOCAL1/170829886
And links to the actual document:
PDF file draft as of June 2017: https://assets.documentcloud.o...
New York Times link to the draft report: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
National Academy of Sciences Review of the Draft report: https://nas-sites.org/americas...
What? No. Being a PhD means you sit around, have grad assistants teach your class, grade your papers while you get to sit around in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoke a pipe and leer at co-eds. And have your grad assistants write your papers and since you're the PhD, your name is on it. Please, it's the cushiest there is. The fact they are even getting paid is an outrage.
I honestly can't tell if this post is deadpan sarcasm, or if it's serious.
I wonder if the Anonymous Coward who posted it even knows himself which it is.
It's almost as if I knew all that, and was pointing out that being a democracy doesn't seem to have stopped the US from being in a constant state of war. Plenty of other democracies were quite willing to tag along also.
It is usually hard to tell real ignorance from faked ignorance on slashdot, but, when in doubt, I just assume that people actually are ignorant; it's usually a good bet. It hardly matters: half of the readers will read your post assuming that you mean what you say, and not the opposite of what you say, so it's worth correcting for that fraction of readers.
https://medium.com/@lessig/the-united-states-is-not-a-democracy-it-is-a-republic-54e8036c781c
Our resources aren't infinite.
Humanity grows exponentially.
It's worth pointing out that the second assumption is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Demographers have long proven that three things lead to lower population growth: 1. A wealthier population, 2. A more educated population, and 3. Access to birth control (not forced birth control! It turns out that merely giving people access to the means to limit number of children is enough to have an effect on reducing average family size.)
So, if you want humanity to not increase exponentially until it reaches a (inevitable) crash, work on three things: make all people wealthier, make them more educated, and give them control over their own reproduction.
You have your task. Now, get to work!
Last time I checked the USA is pretty much "keeping its guard up". They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
Yep, as it turns out, America has a larger defense budget than the next eight nations combined. "Keeping its guard up" is, in fact, what we spend the largest part of our taxes on. (Along with paying for the debt we accrued from building and equipping that army in the past.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/how-us-defense-spending-stacks-up-against-the-rest-of-the-world.html
They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
No, not even close. Heart disease and stroke are still number one and two. http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish the objective. If you could accomplish the objective with a better tool-- well, then the people with the better tool would impose their will on the people without the better tool.
Despite the apparent misconception, "Republic" and "Democracy" are not mutually exclusive. You can, in fact, have a democratic republic.
(although most of the states with the phrase "democratic republic" in their official name put those words in to hide the fact that they were actually neither).
Some links: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic
What's the saying? "Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is a sign of insanity". Well, people unhappy with how things have been going, when given an option of the same thing, and something different, wanting a different result, they went with something different.
Hoot’s Law: “No matter how bad things are, you can always make them worse.”
--Hoot Gibson (as recounted by Charles Boldin)
Or, perhaps this quote is more to the point:
"When you say, 'It can’t get any worse!' You're essentially challenging the universe to do exactly that.”
--Kamand Kojouri
Who sweeps the dead stars away and out of the observable universe?
The word you want is "trawling".
OK, you don't appreciate wordplay. Got it.
And you're committing the same error. You're appealing to authority and claiming a consensus while selectively choosing who is an authority or not and rejecting predictions as not being part of the consensus in order to construct the imagined authority and consensus.
In discussing a post about scientific consensus, I said that scientific consensus should be restricted to actual scientists, and you say that is "appealing to authority,"
Yeah, right.
It's like flipping a coin after collecting 10 guesses, then claiming the 5 incorrect guesses weren't part of the consensus and weren't from approved guessers.
Scientific consensus is consensus among scientists. I don't know why you think that's hard.
Show me one single model that has predicted temperature changes accurately for 5 or more years.
OK: Manabe and Wetherald 1967, the very first numerical model. Now show me one that is not accurate. Include the error bars, please.
Somebody needs to make a study about how many *different* conclusions have been made in the last 20 years and how those studies have faired when compared to reality.
That's been done. Read the IPCC report. And I mean, actually read it. They do a lot of comparing different models.
I'm just going to guess that two things are true. 1. The ones the press cover and are most often cited by activists are the most inaccurate over time.
Now, that has an element of truth in it: the press likes catastrophe, so they tend to emphasize the flamboyant studies, and write headlines that make them sound even more dire. It's only two or three paragraphs in that they mention the actual consensus.
And 2. Not one study, if old enough to verify, shows the dire consequences we are routinely told about.
I've been graphing the predicted temperatures from the oldest greenhouse effect models (Manabe & Wetherald, and the original NAS report), and they have been matching the actual temperatures to well within error bars. So, on this one, no, the studies "old enough to verify" actually do check out pretty well.
And none of those were mainstream positions that had scientific consensus. You've confused yourself by taking many different views and bundling them together as a single mind. It's entirely possible for there to be 10 different wrong views on climate change but still end up with climate change being real.
You want him to obey the consensus because it's a consensus but ignore the consensus because the people contributing to it are routinely proven to be hilariously incorrect?
I would call "scientific consensus" as incorporating "stuff that is said by actual scientists." So, yes, I'd indeed say "ignore the consensus" when by that you mean stuff not said by actual scientists in actual scientific publications. Not because it is "hilariously incorrect" but because it's not the scientific consensus, it's the result of people trolling the internet to find the most-wrong thing ever said by non-scientists so they can say "look at how wrong they were".
The IPCC reports are a good place to look for a summary of the actual consensus (with references to the actual scientific literature)-- try this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/