Working for myself was nice because I could select the projects that I wanted to work on and then 'become' that type of business. I didn't make a lot of money that way since it took longer to do things, with every project being a new adventure. But it was an excellent education and I got by. Obviously, I was lacking economy of scale that larger and more assembly line ventures enjoy.
To run your own business, you have to be someone with the capacity to make sure people pay, be able to negotiate, deal with folks who don't compensate you, etc. You have to be able to have the courage to ask for fair wages. You have to deal with clients who change their specifications constantly and don't want to pay you more for it. I've taken to getting signoffs on the specs with the understanding that changing the specs later will result in extra cost.
This does provide flexibility and more free time, though personally I've had trouble keeping a steady flow of work which has hurt my overall profitability.
I tend to do a lot of long term contracts, and then pick up short term work in between jobs. It's a nice thing to be able to fall back on.
Spellcheckers can't turn hopeless spelling into beautiful prose: they are no substitute for a human proofreader. (And even a perfect spellchecker would be incapable of detecting real problems with an essay such as inappropriately colloquial language use, or an argument that made no sense.
A robot could provide personalized attention that a teacher could not, or could not do easily. A computer might be a poor substitute for a tutor giving one-on-one time, but it could provide a fair substitute for an intro classroom environment, and to enforce basic language rules. It could easily take up 80% of a teaching workload.
I thought the difference was that high grade explosives could detonate (though some can also deflagrate) and low grade explosives deflagrate (i.e. burn?) explosives
And your last argument implies your government is not corrupt? Kyoto, Iraq.
Iraq was poorly handled. True, the US could probably have reached a better diplomatic solution. No, we couldn't have just left Saddam to his own devices and simply lifted or continued sanctions. Either would have been disasterous.
Kyoto - Better to take positive action and develop alternative energy sources while reducing methane and other greenhouse gasses than going straight to limiting CO2 production before there are any alternatives. The focus on CO2 as opposed to other stronger greenhouse gasses would seem to be linked to a desire to limit industrial capacity in the developed world.
You seem to think China would be less violent than the US. Take a nice trip to Xinjiang province sometime. There are even fewer checks on Chinese ambition than American.
Make no mistake, the Chinese are playing the Great Game and biding their time till they can become a world power.
What I'm sick of is this whole "sell a product with one hand and revoke rights with the other."
If they're going to sell a DVD, they should have to list any kinds of user limitations up front. Can't skip the FBI screen? List it. etc. If you don't agree, you don't buy. I'm sure that the MPAA could develop a standard, so announcing this info would be as simple as a short acronym on the label or in the ad.
If they're going to revoke my rights to the unlimited use of a product, it needs to be spelled out before they sell the thing to me, NOT afterwards. None of this 'well, what did you expect?' nonesense. The burden is on them to be upfront. Shrinkwrap denial of rights should be illegal.
I believe that saltpeter used to be extracted from urine. So diapers could set off an ultra-sensative machine.
Are you sure a mass spectrometer would distinguish between ammonia compounds (in Urine) + Potassium Nitrate and a high grade explosive like Ammonium Nitrate?
Very few guys are willing to share a girl like that. The few polyandrous societies involve brothers sharing a woman.
You might have meant just increasing the promiscuity in a society, but that has its own problems in terms of sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms don't stop everything (syphilis, HPV, and herpes Simplex for example)
Polygamy can cause some problems because some men will inevitably be without a mate. What do you think they're going to do?
This might make more sense in a society with a lot of warfare where many men were dead. But in peacetime there would be a shortage of women (since childbirth was often lethal.)
People making a mess outside the building are simply a nuisance. If you're so big to protest, hold your own damn convention, instead of borrowing someone else's.
There's far too much 'speaking to the converted' already. Oh, you're a conservative Republican? Here's your radio station. Oh, you're a social and economic liberal? Here's your radio station.
The candidates weren't even allowed to directly address each other in the debates, for the love of God. So if we don't have the debate during the formal debate, then when will we have it?
I say the more honest engagement of opposing views, the better.
Moreover, IMHO, more diversity is not inherently good nor is less of it inherently bad.
I agree. However, don't try to say that in a modern university or college setting, you racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, phallocentric pig.
I think you're building a strawman here. Liberals don't encourage people to diversify, they encourage acceptance of diversity. i.e. Liberalism discourages the enforcement of conformity. Individual liberals may fail at this. But then, individual Christians sometimes get a divorce and then remarry without discrediting Christianity as a religion. A single person doesn't invalidate a worldview.
In terms of eurocentricity - American historical accounts often are from a European or Caucasian American viewpoint as opposed to an African or Mayan one. i.e. "The discovery of America" If the shoe fits...
The term 'homophobic' is overused, and often inaccurate. I've heard 'heterosexist' i.e. the assumption that everyone is heterosexual or should be, which seems to be more accurate. Dances which only give out tickets to male + female couples, and force same sex couples to buy at the higher 'stag' rates or even to not attend, are justifiably labeled heterosexist. They assume that a person is somthing that they may not be. Again, if some people act with the assumption that all people are heterosexual (and just for the record, I am) then why complain when someone says it out loud.
Unfortunatly, most people have a world view that they've never considered or questioned. That's not a unique product of liberalism.
Sometimes people accuse others unjustly. But again, mistakes by individuals does not discredit a worldview.
Isn't it likely that in the billions of years the earth has been around that it has seen its share of polar ice caps? I'd think so.
Before antarctica moved over the south pole 5 million years ago, there was, quite likely, never such a large mass of ice over the southern pole as there is now. A large mass of ice means a lower albedo allowing for even colder temperatures at the South Pole and an even more effective global heat engine to distribute equitorial heat.
In other words, the earth's climate in the last 5 million years is very very different from the climate at any other time in history, and probably more moderate climate. More ice at the poles has a powerful effect in 'smoothing out' temperature variations via the winds which move from the equator to the poles.
Similarly, the earth's oceanic belts would have been very different before there was such a large mass of ice at the South pole.
The last 5 million years or so of earth's history have, most likely, been absolutely unique in the history of this planet.
And while the earth might have seen a wide variety of climates, my concern is not for the earth. My concern is for the civilizations living on its surface, which have barely seen about 5 thousand years of climate. I don't care whether a particular ocean belt survives. I care about the people that might be impacted if it shut down.
At sometime in the distant distant past I'm sure the earth was a ball of molten magma. But if we tried to live on that, we'd be dead. Again, I don't care about what is or is not 'natural' I care about what is good for people.
You say we have altered the environment for the worst.
Quote me where I said that. Here's a clue. I didn't. I said that we had altered the environment, good bad or indifferent. And I said that this change will make climate LESS PREDICTABLE, which will have a cost in and of itself, on top of whatever harms or benefits the new climate offers.
That human activity has altered the environment is a fact. The question of how much and in what way is the issue.
Proof is what's lacking on either side.
Either side? Why phrase things like some kind of political debate (where everyone tries to boil things down to two opposing sides, even if there are many?) This makes it sound like you're more influenced by political thinkers than scientific ones. There are more than just two scientific theories out there.
Predictive value is what is lacking. I can prove that the earth's atmosphere has changed and that this change began during the industrial revolution most likely because of industry, population explosion, or a combination. What is hard to demonstrate is the effect that all this will have on the environment. And I'm not simply refering to CO2 but also to methane, CFCs, etc.
I say, find another 100,000 year period that has similar characteristicts at the start and for the majority of the span, and prove to me that this "theory" of harming the environment did not happen before.
You are not listening to what I'm saying.
1. I am talking about CHANGING the environment. Harm is somthing that YOU inserted, not me. People can be harmed. Living things can be harmed. Climate can be altered.
2. Go ahead and prove that there was an industrial revolution in the past, with widespread agriculture and massive burning of fossil fuels and release of CFCs. The modern situation is a unique event in that regard.
Try and predict the weather if you don't know the climate.
You're going to have a hard time doing this. The less we can predict the weather, the less we can benefit from it. Consider how much farming is based on knowing average temperatures and rainfalls. You can't grow tomatoes in the Philippines, for instance, because the night temperature never gets cold enough for the fruit to set.
If you knew what the temperatures in an area would be, you could adapt and even benefit from the change. But you've pretty frankly admitted that you don't have any rational way of predicting how human activity will affect the world's climate and you've presented no reliable past model with which to gauge events.
While I agree with Bush's push for more nuclear energy, the article was just a little bit slanted, don't you think? I mean, on the one hand it acknowledged that methane was a potent green house gas and should be targeted for reduction (true). On the other, it snidely suggested that vegetarians should start eating meat... when livestock are a major producer of methane gas.
*shakes head*
I agree that Kyoto is bogus, but try telling me this article isn't just a little bit partisan.
How about phrasing it this way; If you want to find someone who will follow the rules, you want warning signs that they'll break the rules before somthing serious happens. People want to be able to judge others by their language. A person's language indicates their group affiliation.
I remember back when the principle called my elementary school class into the gym and gave us a speech about not using the 'n' word, which I had never heard before. My thoughts were; Who was the idiot who invented words that people shouldn't say, and why did they just now teach us the word and then tell us not to say it?
It all seemed horribly contradictory and I suspected somthing was being withheld.
If cyclone changes match 1:1 the changes in hurricanes, or have worsened by a greater margin, then human activity (which has varied between hemispheres) has not had significant impact, as there wouldn't be time for the impact to diffuse evenly. In all other cases, the attempt to disprove human impact has failed.
Noone is asking whether changes in greenhouse gasses or human activity are having a localized effect. The entire point of placing a research observatory in Hawaii was to eliminate any local effects related to industry.
Not to mention that the earth will go through warming and cooling periods all on its own.... We don't even know how the earth was born.
First, to address your comments;
The earth went through mass extinctions 'all on its own' too. Natural != good for people. A massive volcanic event, occuring naturally, would be just as catastrophic as if that same event were caused by people. There's this bogus notion going around that 'natural' is harmless. We should ask the people who of Pompeii what they think about that. It's worth considering that intensive agriculture is just a blip in history. Who can say if prior ages were stable enough for seasonal crops?
Perhaps prior ages were both hotter and also much less inhospitable to civilization (i.e. less predictable, cyclically?)
Most of the the things you bring up fail to address the point I was making, however. What happened to the earth more than 100,000 years ago is not going to be very informative for us today. Without the large southern polar ice cap we would have a different system for distributing equitorial heat.
Unpredictability equals cost in an economy where insurance tables are based on predictability and farmers work to anticipate the last frost of the year to help with planting. Human activity has altered the mix of gasses in the atmosphere. We need to figure out the results of that, good bad or indifferent. Data from +100,000 years ago are not going to be the most useful, since there are too many crucial variables changed. It doesn't matter much how the earth was formed or what happened 2 million years ago. The Sun, the continents, the world's oceanic belts and weather patterns were different then. The most important data for us in terms of climate can be found in the past 100,000 years.
I don't care about the earth's climate more than 100,000 years ago. How the 'earth evolved' is mostly irrelevant to the issue of how C02 and other greenhouse gasses will alter the earth's climate.
Antarctica has only recently(relativly speaking) moved over the south pole. The accumulation of ice there has helped to lower the earth's albedo. The accumulation of ice has probably helped to stabalize earth's climate (heat from the equatorial regions cycles to the poles and back.
The whole system several billion years ago would be totally different.
"Once you've copied your vhs tapes or similar onto a digital format on a computer, they can be media independent"
True. But they have to be copied to new media occasionally. No digital media lasts forever. And it's possible they may even have to be put into new formats. If we're dilligent and our recordings are distributed, we might be able to save a lot more... but for 200 years let alone 500?
In the past, only the rich could afford paintings while today anyone in the US can get a digital camera, but paintings lasted for generations.
What survives will be much more democratized, sure, but its unlikely to survive as long unless it's carefully mirrored by multiple locations in multiple countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Working for myself was nice because I could select the projects that I wanted to work on and then 'become' that type of business. I didn't make a lot of money that way since it took longer to do things, with every project being a new adventure. But it was an excellent education and I got by. Obviously, I was lacking economy of scale that larger and more assembly line ventures enjoy.
To run your own business, you have to be someone with the capacity to make sure people pay, be able to negotiate, deal with folks who don't compensate you, etc. You have to be able to have the courage to ask for fair wages. You have to deal with clients who change their specifications constantly and don't want to pay you more for it. I've taken to getting signoffs on the specs with the understanding that changing the specs later will result in extra cost.
This does provide flexibility and more free time, though personally I've had trouble keeping a steady flow of work which has hurt my overall profitability.
I tend to do a lot of long term contracts, and then pick up short term work in between jobs. It's a nice thing to be able to fall back on.
I'm curious, what do you make of this?
Which is why noone uses the spellcheckers, right?
Spellcheckers can't turn hopeless spelling into beautiful prose: they are no substitute for a human proofreader. (And even a perfect spellchecker would be incapable of detecting real problems with an essay such as inappropriately colloquial language use, or an argument that made no sense.
A robot could provide personalized attention that a teacher could not, or could not do easily. A computer might be a poor substitute for a tutor giving one-on-one time, but it could provide a fair substitute for an intro classroom environment, and to enforce basic language rules. It could easily take up 80% of a teaching workload.
I thought the difference was that high grade explosives could detonate (though some can also deflagrate) and low grade explosives deflagrate (i.e. burn?)
explosives
Bollywood has developed a failsafe method to keep people from pirating their creative works...
They make almost nothing but Hindi musicals.
And your last argument implies your government is not corrupt? Kyoto, Iraq.
Iraq was poorly handled. True, the US could probably have reached a better diplomatic solution. No, we couldn't have just left Saddam to his own devices and simply lifted or continued sanctions. Either would have been disasterous.
Kyoto - Better to take positive action and develop alternative energy sources while reducing methane and other greenhouse gasses than going straight to limiting CO2 production before there are any alternatives. The focus on CO2 as opposed to other stronger greenhouse gasses would seem to be linked to a desire to limit industrial capacity in the developed world.
You seem to think China would be less violent than the US. Take a nice trip to Xinjiang province sometime. There are even fewer checks on Chinese ambition than American.
Make no mistake, the Chinese are playing the Great Game and biding their time till they can become a world power.
What I'm sick of is this whole "sell a product with one hand and revoke rights with the other."
If they're going to sell a DVD, they should have to list any kinds of user limitations up front. Can't skip the FBI screen? List it. etc. If you don't agree, you don't buy.
I'm sure that the MPAA could develop a standard, so announcing this info would be as simple as a short acronym on the label or in the ad.
If they're going to revoke my rights to the unlimited use of a product, it needs to be spelled out before they sell the thing to me, NOT afterwards. None of this 'well, what did you expect?' nonesense. The burden is on them to be upfront. Shrinkwrap denial of rights should be illegal.
Does any one know a good setup like this for teaching English to Chinese speakers, or teaching any language to Enlgish speakers?
This is to language learning what spellcheck is to essay writing, and long overdue.
The purpose of formal language instruction is to teach rules. The advanced classes can have human teachers.
I believe that saltpeter used to be extracted from urine.
So diapers could set off an ultra-sensative machine.
Are you sure a mass spectrometer would distinguish between ammonia compounds (in Urine) + Potassium Nitrate and a high grade explosive like Ammonium Nitrate?
It's been a while since I used one.
Very few guys are willing to share a girl like that. The few polyandrous societies involve brothers sharing a woman.
You might have meant just increasing the promiscuity in a society, but that has its own problems in terms of sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms don't stop everything (syphilis, HPV, and herpes Simplex for example)
Polygamy can cause some problems because some men will inevitably be without a mate. What do you think they're going to do?
This might make more sense in a society with a lot of warfare where many men were dead. But in peacetime there would be a shortage of women (since childbirth was often lethal.)
People making a mess outside the building are simply a nuisance. If you're so big to protest, hold your own damn convention, instead of borrowing someone else's.
There's far too much 'speaking to the converted' already. Oh, you're a conservative Republican? Here's your radio station. Oh, you're a social and economic liberal? Here's your radio station.
The candidates weren't even allowed to directly address each other in the debates, for the love of God.
So if we don't have the debate during the formal debate, then when will we have it?
I say the more honest engagement of opposing views, the better.
Moreover, IMHO, more diversity is not inherently good nor is less of it inherently bad.
I agree. However, don't try to say that in a modern university or college setting, you racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, phallocentric pig.
I think you're building a strawman here. Liberals don't encourage people to diversify, they encourage acceptance of diversity. i.e. Liberalism discourages the enforcement of conformity. Individual liberals may fail at this. But then, individual Christians sometimes get a divorce and then remarry without discrediting Christianity as a religion. A single person doesn't invalidate a worldview.
In terms of eurocentricity - American historical accounts often are from a European or Caucasian American viewpoint as opposed to an African or Mayan one. i.e. "The discovery of America" If the shoe fits...
The term 'homophobic' is overused, and often inaccurate. I've heard 'heterosexist' i.e. the assumption that everyone is heterosexual or should be, which seems to be more accurate. Dances which only give out tickets to male + female couples, and force same sex couples to buy at the higher 'stag' rates or even to not attend, are justifiably labeled heterosexist. They assume that a person is somthing that they may not be. Again, if some people act with the assumption that all people are heterosexual (and just for the record, I am) then why complain when someone says it out loud.
Unfortunatly, most people have a world view that they've never considered or questioned. That's not a unique product of liberalism.
Sometimes people accuse others unjustly. But again, mistakes by individuals does not discredit a worldview.
Is anyone claiming that humans were a significant contributor to greenhouse gasses before the 1700s or so?
The human population was pretty small in ancient times.
Isn't it likely that in the billions of years the earth has been around that it has seen its share of polar ice caps? I'd think so.
Before antarctica moved over the south pole 5 million years ago, there was, quite likely, never such a large mass of ice over the southern pole as there is now. A large mass of ice means a lower albedo allowing for even colder temperatures at the South Pole and an even more effective global heat engine to distribute equitorial heat.
In other words, the earth's climate in the last 5 million years is very very different from the climate at any other time in history, and probably more moderate climate. More ice at the poles has a powerful effect in 'smoothing out' temperature variations via the winds which move from the equator to the poles.
Similarly, the earth's oceanic belts would have been very different before there was such a large mass of ice at the South pole.
The last 5 million years or so of earth's history have, most likely, been absolutely unique in the history of this planet.
And while the earth might have seen a wide variety of climates, my concern is not for the earth. My concern is for the civilizations living on its surface, which have barely seen about 5 thousand years of climate. I don't care whether a particular ocean belt survives. I care about the people that might be impacted if it shut down.
At sometime in the distant distant past I'm sure the earth was a ball of molten magma. But if we tried to live on that, we'd be dead. Again, I don't care about what is or is not 'natural' I care about what is good for people.
You say we have altered the environment for the worst.
Quote me where I said that. Here's a clue. I didn't. I said that we had altered the environment, good bad or indifferent. And I said that this change will make climate LESS PREDICTABLE, which will have a cost in and of itself, on top of whatever harms or benefits the new climate offers.
That human activity has altered the environment is a fact. The question of how much and in what way is the issue.
Proof is what's lacking on either side.
Either side?
Why phrase things like some kind of political debate (where everyone tries to boil things down to two opposing sides, even if there are many?) This makes it sound like you're more influenced by political thinkers than scientific ones. There are more than just two scientific theories out there.
Predictive value is what is lacking. I can prove that the earth's atmosphere has changed and that this change began during the industrial revolution most likely because of industry, population explosion, or a combination. What is hard to demonstrate is the effect that all this will have on the environment. And I'm not simply refering to CO2 but also to methane, CFCs, etc.
I say, find another 100,000 year period that has similar characteristicts at the start and for the majority of the span, and prove to me that this "theory" of harming the environment did not happen before.
You are not listening to what I'm saying.
1. I am talking about CHANGING the environment. Harm is somthing that YOU inserted, not me. People can be harmed. Living things can be harmed. Climate can be altered.
2. Go ahead and prove that there was an industrial revolution in the past, with widespread agriculture and massive burning of fossil fuels and release of CFCs. The modern situation is a unique event in that regard.
Try and predict the weather if you don't know the climate.
You're going to have a hard time doing this. The less we can predict the weather, the less we can benefit from it. Consider how much farming is based on knowing average temperatures and rainfalls. You can't grow tomatoes in the Philippines, for instance, because the night temperature never gets cold enough for the fruit to set.
If you knew what the temperatures in an area would be, you could adapt and even benefit from the change. But you've pretty frankly admitted that you don't have any rational way of predicting how human activity will affect the world's climate and you've presented no reliable past model with which to gauge events.
While I agree with Bush's push for more nuclear energy, the article was just a little bit slanted, don't you think? I mean, on the one hand it acknowledged that methane was a potent green house gas and should be targeted for reduction (true). On the other, it snidely suggested that vegetarians should start eating meat... when livestock are a major producer of methane gas.
*shakes head*
I agree that Kyoto is bogus, but try telling me this article isn't just a little bit partisan.
How about phrasing it this way; If you want to find someone who will follow the rules, you want warning signs that they'll break the rules before somthing serious happens. People want to be able to judge others by their language. A person's language indicates their group affiliation.
I remember back when the principle called my elementary school class into the gym and gave us a speech about not using the 'n' word, which I had never heard before. My thoughts were; Who was the idiot who invented words that people shouldn't say, and why did they just now teach us the word and then tell us not to say it?
It all seemed horribly contradictory and I suspected somthing was being withheld.
If cyclone changes match 1:1 the changes in hurricanes, or have worsened by a greater margin, then human activity (which has varied between hemispheres) has not had significant impact, as there wouldn't be time for the impact to diffuse evenly. In all other cases, the attempt to disprove human impact has failed.
Noone is asking whether changes in greenhouse gasses or human activity are having a localized effect. The entire point of placing a research observatory in Hawaii was to eliminate any local effects related to industry.
Unless I misunderstand what you're testing for.
Not to mention that the earth will go through warming and cooling periods all on its own.... We don't even know how the earth was born.
First, to address your comments;
The earth went through mass extinctions 'all on its own' too. Natural != good for people. A massive volcanic event, occuring naturally, would be just as catastrophic as if that same event were caused by people. There's this bogus notion going around that 'natural' is harmless. We should ask the people who of Pompeii what they think about that. It's worth considering that intensive agriculture is just a blip in history. Who can say if prior ages were stable enough for seasonal crops?
Perhaps prior ages were both hotter and also much less inhospitable to civilization (i.e. less predictable, cyclically?)
Most of the the things you bring up fail to address the point I was making, however. What happened to the earth more than 100,000 years ago is not going to be very informative for us today. Without the large southern polar ice cap we would have a different system for distributing equitorial heat.
Unpredictability equals cost in an economy where insurance tables are based on predictability and farmers work to anticipate the last frost of the year to help with planting. Human activity has altered the mix of gasses in the atmosphere. We need to figure out the results of that, good bad or indifferent. Data from +100,000 years ago are not going to be the most useful, since there are too many crucial variables changed. It doesn't matter much how the earth was formed or what happened 2 million years ago. The Sun, the continents, the world's oceanic belts and weather patterns were different then. The most important data for us in terms of climate can be found in the past 100,000 years.
I don't care about the earth's climate more than 100,000 years ago. How the 'earth evolved' is mostly irrelevant to the issue of how C02 and other greenhouse gasses will alter the earth's climate.
Antarctica has only recently(relativly speaking) moved over the south pole. The accumulation of ice there has helped to lower the earth's albedo. The accumulation of ice has probably helped to stabalize earth's climate (heat from the equatorial regions cycles to the poles and back.
The whole system several billion years ago would be totally different.
True, however weather != climate.
Predicting average rainfall is not the same as predicting if it will rain on a particular day in a particular place.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again.
"Miami was a college before Florida was a state."
The college's name wasn't confusing when the name was given.
Miami, Florida is named after the Miami river valley in Ohio, which is also Miami University of Ohio's namesake.
"Once you've copied your vhs tapes or similar onto a digital format on a computer, they can be media independent"
True. But they have to be copied to new media occasionally. No digital media lasts forever. And it's possible they may even have to be put into new formats. If we're dilligent and our recordings are distributed, we might be able to save a lot more... but for 200 years let alone 500?
In the past, only the rich could afford paintings while today anyone in the US can get a digital camera, but paintings lasted for generations.
What survives will be much more democratized, sure, but its unlikely to survive as long unless it's carefully mirrored by multiple locations in multiple countries.