Correct, gambling should be viewed as a frequently expensive, and not infrequently addictive form of entertainment.
Sure occasionally you might make some money, but the proportion of gambling trips that do in the end is small, and if enjoyed repeatedly the odds of being ahead at all decline to a very low order. In the end it is all outflow, the same as all other forms of entertainment. The occasional payout is really just like an occasional discount on a movie ticket or book, it reduces a bit the total you spend on this hobby. The fact that people find the discount thrilling because it is random doesn't make it any different from other non-random discounts.
It is true that bookies do not gamble more than other businessmen. If they are competent they set the odd so that there is close-to-even exposure on both sides, so that it does not matter who wins in the long run, their pay-out is the same and they make their safely money on the vigorish. Averaging over time allows adjustment of imperfections in the odds setting. Its all about making the most money possible in a predictable way.
But book making is not an instantaneous frictionless process. Bookies make mistakes, which will cost them. They will pay-out too much and thus not make what they expect on the vig. They will make it up in time, but a loss is a loss.
These researchers developed not a technique to predict who would win, but bookies with mispriced odds, which allows you to get in on the unexpected large payouts, thus costing the bookie more when this happens. They don't like this, and will stop it if they can detect it - as the paper shows.
Although the article offers the defense, which you quote, it is (if you read the article) not a very strong defense. As described in the article, the methodology of the EIA is a poor one, that gives poor predictions and can readily be fixed in a number of ways -- especially taking into account actual project and plans of entities deploying new energy sources.
Continuing to do a poor job at prediction year after year, always failing in the same way, suggests that a revision in methodology is in order.
I saw no reference to a "conspiracy", or any conspiracy-like speculation, in the article. That is just a straw man.
The key piece of this picture that no one (yet, in any of the comments posted thus far) as even mentioned that what we are talking about are books that are out of print. These are books that you cannot buy (unless you can find an old copy, and may be exorbitantly expensive if so), and make the author no money at all. Zero.
This is about 25 million books. Further it is estimated that half of these books are out of copyright under every iteration and perversion of copyright law and thus are already in the public domain - they belong to the public as is and was the intent of copyright law from the beginning.
And the Google-Author's Guild deal actually provided a way to provide some revenue to authors of out-of-print books. Nearly all books go out of print after several years, never, ever to even be printed again so nearly all authors face this issue.
So this is a lose-lose-lose situation (for Google, the public, and author's of out of print books).
That so many books can be in the public domain and yet be unavailable is largely the result of the constant expansion of copyright at the behest and for the benefit of corporations that own publishing rights that has plagued society throughout the Twentieth Century.
A terrible place for a telescope. It is not gravity free, the electrostatically suspended lunar dust is a serious hazard, and if working in the infrared the lunar surface emission is a big problem. The only scheme floating around for telescopes on the Moon are quite speculative ones of dubious value (like this one).
One thing that is invariably left out in discussions of the Social Security system, the absence of which is especially glaring when someone begins to talk up the "Ponzi Scheme" notion is the reality of productivity growth, which has been 1.7% a year since the First Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, and is at least 1% over recent years. Even with productivity growth this low the actual per capita wealth doubles over a 70 year period, so that SS payments are being made from a steadily wealthier society. It isn't all just demographics.
The OP is unfamiliar with the various periodizations of subsequent "industrial revolutions" offered by recent historians. Only the First Industrial Revolution (beginning circa 1770) is universal and unambiguous in the historical literature.
The term "Second Industrial Revolution" as you characterize it was only offered in a standardized form in 1972 by David Landes in Prometheus Unbound and is not universally accepted among historians even today.
There is clearly a third phase of industrialization in the Twentieth Century, not yet commonly called the "Third Industrial Revolution" (there is a terrible book by that name that is not a serious work of technological history and means something quite different).
Rather continuing with increasingly contentious and unstandardized enumerations I prefer to call what the OP is referring to as a "Second Industrial Revolution" as the "Cybernetic Revolution" that describes exactly what the revolution involves.
And then there is the fact that at some point in the past some imbecile (probably at Microsoft I am guessing, because it became industry wide) it stopped being a "caps lock" (locking to type nothing but upper case) but a case INVERSION key. Lower case is now uppercase, but if you hit the shift button by accident it is lower case again.
I have never once, in a long career of writing stuff (I do a lot of writing) or coding (I do a lot of coding) wanted to have a case inversion lock key. Not once.
It is clear that high intelligence is not necessary for successful survival, there is no general trend toward progressively evolving high intelligence in any lineage on land but the Hominidae (and it stalled among all the branches of the Great Apes but one). Curiously modern humans 80,000 years ago went through a near extinction event, with the world population dropping to a few thousand individuals, intelligence equivalent to our own did not give them a huge survival advantage at that time.
But success in a society creates an intelligence arms race. More powerful brains processing social information give an edge in dominating reproduction opportunity through most of evolutionary history. (Debates about whether perhaps the opposite is true at this moment in history I leave aside.)
I have been able to write essentially this same comment every year since cable hit is peak six years ago.
Cable companies are monopolies and behave exactly like all monopolies. They charge every customer extra as rent just because they can. And when customers start rebelling and refusing to sign up or cut service they have, even though they have no competitor cable companies to buy service from, the thought that maybe they should lower prices or provide better service will never cross their minds, ever.
Instead the focus of cable companies is to increase profits by sweetheart legislation that maintains their monopoly control of broadband access, and turn that into a cash cow by stripping away net neutrality so that it can become a perpetual toll booth collecting rents.
Probably less than you think. An airliner flying 20,000 km uses about 400 kg of fuel per passenger. The payload fraction of the launcher can run as high as 6.5% (Space Shuttle, taking the whole vehicle as payload). The unfueled weight of airliner is about 400 kg/passenger, let us assume that as the payload; and the fuel + oxidizer weight is usually 90% of the weight of booster, and the fraction of that F+O weight that is actually kerosene is 1/3.56. So the RP-1 (kerosene) weight per passenger would be something like (400/0.065)*0.9/3.56 = 1550 kg, or about 4 times what a regular airliner. Now, currently about 20% of airline costs are fuel, labor costs are larger. So if they can save big on labor costs (you are "spam in can", no flight crew at all) then maybe they can hold the extra cost to 40% or so of the whole service cost. I don't see it competing with economy fares though.
He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.
He doesn't have to. He is simply pointing out that we've been having this argument since mechanical loom was invented hundreds of years ago. And every time the Luddites have claimed that there will be no more jobs, and every time they have been wrong.
And for all of Kurzweil's prating about "history" he shows no evidence of actually spending the effort to study it, even though he certainly has had the time to do so.
Funny thing about those "mechanical looms" (and spinning machines, etc.) they did put huge numbers of people out of work! The effect of the First Industrial Revolution on the largest industry in Great Britain - cloth manufacturing - was to wipe out 20% of the employment in the span of a couple of decades (starting about 1770), and create huge numbers of paupers, a problem that persisted for about 70 years before eventually the economic gains of industrialization created enough jobs to replace those that they destroyed, around 1840.
The historical record about this disaster is very well known, even if you don't bother to actually read about the history of the First Industrial Revolution. The "Dickensian" slums are infamous. The Poor Laws. The work houses (prisons for being poor). The legacy of the petty crime explosion from the massive unemployment (e.g. the "transportation" of convicts to Australia when they couldn't build prisons fast enough).
The Napoleonic Wars came along at a convenient time (1795-1815) to alleviate this significantly for a 20 year period by providing alternative employment for a fair chunk of young men, but these are not what you would call productive jobs.
And the jobs created in factories for the first several generations were worse than the jobs destroyed. The health of the British population declined during that early period of growing average wealth. Wages fell, nutrition fell, adult heights fell, lifespans shortened, the proportion of the population fit for military service fell dramatically.
"Pointing out" stuff that is not true is, well, lying.
Two additional advantages of strongly typed languages: ability to use refactoring tools, and easier code maintenance - particularly in code reading to recover business logic.
I am currently working with a Python (sub)program, part of a large web system that I do not have access to. The data comes in in messages of an undocumented JSON format, so from beginning to end the type of a variable is whatever the type it is, and the name of the 'variable' is whatever the label string associated with the data was. It is very difficult to deduce what any part of the processing means.
There is a funny tendency of people to put high intensity lights on top of entirely unmanned systems. Microwave relays, solar farms, remote storage facilities, high tension towers, water tanks, and so on. These lights do nothing useful, waste power, but seem to be assumed to be required.
It is really astonishing how far a single high intensity light that is not shielded can contaminate the night sly with pollution. It does not take many such ill-considered light fixtures to contaminate an otherwise pristine dark sky.
This is one area where dark sky ordinances, and recognition of dark sky preserves are important. It helps keep the 'stupid' light.
Additionally this encourages properly shielded light fixtures. We need light to shine down to see things at night, light shining horizontally into our eyes makes things harder to see, and light shining up into the sky does nothing useful. Reflective shielding (or properly design LED lights which are inherently directional) save energy and money. When light is used only for illuminating the ground, something like 90% of it is absorbed.
If you create content by a purely random process, or else get content through user input (which is like random, only malicious and sick), you must filter out the objectionable material that is guaranteed to be there! Remember Tay, Microsoft's Nazi Teen Chat Bot?.
Antisemitism has historically been linked to anti-banker and anti-capitalist sentiments
Except for the largest antisemitic group in history, the Nazis who were decidedly right wing.
Yes they were (right wing), but no not by any means the largest antisemitic group in history.
That group would be Orthodox Christianity which has been stridently antisemitic since at least the late second century.
It seems the break-up between Judaism, the religion of every original follower of Jesus, and Christianity being a separate religion was a messy one with a lot of bad blood.The earliest account of Jesus' life is the Gospel of Mark, written decades after the fact, and records a negative memory of Jews as being the reason that the Romans crucified Jesus. Though not antisemitic per se (though difficult to credit as accurate) Christian writing get worse from there until by the late 3rd Century the non-canonical Acts of Pilate has the harsh Roman Prefect as a Christian saint, and the Jews are the enemies of God himself, having rejected their own Messiah and murdered him.
Antisemitism rested on an explicitly religious basis throughout Europe until modern times. Pogroms did not kill Jews because some of them were bankers, they were because "The Jews killed Jesus".
Nonsense of course. They would write off processors that go down and drop them from their system. Periodically they may change out whole modules is most of them fail.
The U.S. has 20,000 MW of pumped storage on the grid right now (2% of U.S. grid capacity) and another 5% have been granted permits for construction.
Add 800 KV DC long distance transmission lines and electricity can be moved coast-to-coast with losses of only a few percent. Pumped storage can store electricity from anywhere in North America, and then supply it to anywhere in North America.
In fact, with 800 KV DC lines much of the need for storage disappears entirely. Grid supply can be balanced simply by moving electricity from where the sun is shining/wind is blowing to where demand is currently high.
Yeah, you can throw some batteries on to the grid, and may be attractive in certain specialized situations, but they aren't really needed with an revamped North American grid.
A 2011 study found 39 million tons of economically recoverable lithium (at current prices). Allowing for an 80 kWH battery (Tesla's have 70, IIRC) EVs would use about 20 kg of lithium (this costs about $180). So this will build 2 billion EV cars (there are only one billion cars on Earth right now), or twice that if we go with 40 kWH batteries. So there enough lithium for a lot of vehicles.
The "lithium reserve" estimate is very soft (on the upper end). Unlike oil it is not intensively exploited so many worldwide resources are likely undiscovered or underestimated. And as is true of many resources, modest increases in price will likely greatly expand the reserves. We can afford to spend more for that 20 kg of lithium.
BTW, there is also enough platinum for about 2 billion Mirai type hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The US is currently more or less self dependent for Oil, having larger reserves than most of the ME countries... combined.
Rydberg Energy's most recent estimate has (using the estimate type most favorable to the U.S., which is the most speculative) finds the U.S. to have slightly less oil than Saudi Arabia alone. Throw in other Middle Eastern countries and it is well more than 2-to-1 to the U.S. disadvantage.
Very little oil from the Arabian Peninsula makes it into the US.
More or less true. In 2016 6.8% of all U.S. oil consumption was supplied by the Arabian Peninsula. Not a lot, but hardly nothing - it is 1/8 of U.S.
imports.
The United States produces mostly all the oil it needs internally now.
In 2016 the U.S. produced 45% of the petroleum that it consumed, less than half. This is down slightly from 2015 (48%) when Saudi Arabia ramped up production, cut oil prices, and shut down U.S. exploitation of high priced tight oil.
A bit over half of our imports come from Canada and Mexico, and the rest mostly comes from OPEC.
And although only a little over a year old, it seems that this book is already uselessly out of date. Look at the only recent review on the Amazon site, it gives it two stars because the URLs referenced in the book at no longer valid. Given that the book is only about using those web-based analytic services being promoted by IBM, not about understanding any actual technology (check the index on Amazon "look inside") this is a major drawback.
It appears (to me) that "Watson" is simply a branding IBM is using for any sort of machine learning service they wish to promote, rather than actually designating some system or technology. I'm not at all sure there is any relationship between "Jeopardy Watson" and the "Watson" they are now promoting.
And looking at the contents of the book with Amazon preview it looks like it is entirely about using Watson's services, instead of being about Watson's architecture, implementation or technology - on other words, understanding anything about Watson itself.
In that context, where web access is the whole point of the book, bad URLs would make it next to useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, gambling should be viewed as a frequently expensive, and not infrequently addictive form of entertainment.
Sure occasionally you might make some money, but the proportion of gambling trips that do in the end is small, and if enjoyed repeatedly the odds of being ahead at all decline to a very low order. In the end it is all outflow, the same as all other forms of entertainment. The occasional payout is really just like an occasional discount on a movie ticket or book, it reduces a bit the total you spend on this hobby. The fact that people find the discount thrilling because it is random doesn't make it any different from other non-random discounts.
It is true that bookies do not gamble more than other businessmen. If they are competent they set the odd so that there is close-to-even exposure on both sides, so that it does not matter who wins in the long run, their pay-out is the same and they make their safely money on the vigorish. Averaging over time allows adjustment of imperfections in the odds setting. Its all about making the most money possible in a predictable way.
But book making is not an instantaneous frictionless process. Bookies make mistakes, which will cost them. They will pay-out too much and thus not make what they expect on the vig. They will make it up in time, but a loss is a loss.
These researchers developed not a technique to predict who would win, but bookies with mispriced odds, which allows you to get in on the unexpected large payouts, thus costing the bookie more when this happens. They don't like this, and will stop it if they can detect it - as the paper shows.
Although the article offers the defense, which you quote, it is (if you read the article) not a very strong defense. As described in the article, the methodology of the EIA is a poor one, that gives poor predictions and can readily be fixed in a number of ways -- especially taking into account actual project and plans of entities deploying new energy sources.
Continuing to do a poor job at prediction year after year, always failing in the same way, suggests that a revision in methodology is in order.
I saw no reference to a "conspiracy", or any conspiracy-like speculation, in the article. That is just a straw man.
The key piece of this picture that no one (yet, in any of the comments posted thus far) as even mentioned that what we are talking about are books that are out of print. These are books that you cannot buy (unless you can find an old copy, and may be exorbitantly expensive if so), and make the author no money at all. Zero.
This is about 25 million books. Further it is estimated that half of these books are out of copyright under every iteration and perversion of copyright law and thus are already in the public domain - they belong to the public as is and was the intent of copyright law from the beginning.
And the Google-Author's Guild deal actually provided a way to provide some revenue to authors of out-of-print books. Nearly all books go out of print after several years, never, ever to even be printed again so nearly all authors face this issue.
So this is a lose-lose-lose situation (for Google, the public, and author's of out of print books).
That so many books can be in the public domain and yet be unavailable is largely the result of the constant expansion of copyright at the behest and for the benefit of corporations that own publishing rights that has plagued society throughout the Twentieth Century.
A terrible place for a telescope. It is not gravity free, the electrostatically suspended lunar dust is a serious hazard, and if working in the infrared the lunar surface emission is a big problem. The only scheme floating around for telescopes on the Moon are quite speculative ones of dubious value (like this one).
One thing that is invariably left out in discussions of the Social Security system, the absence of which is especially glaring when someone begins to talk up the "Ponzi Scheme" notion is the reality of productivity growth, which has been 1.7% a year since the First Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, and is at least 1% over recent years. Even with productivity growth this low the actual per capita wealth doubles over a 70 year period, so that SS payments are being made from a steadily wealthier society. It isn't all just demographics.
The OP is unfamiliar with the various periodizations of subsequent "industrial revolutions" offered by recent historians. Only the First Industrial Revolution (beginning circa 1770) is universal and unambiguous in the historical literature.
The term "Second Industrial Revolution" as you characterize it was only offered in a standardized form in 1972 by David Landes in Prometheus Unbound and is not universally accepted among historians even today.
There is clearly a third phase of industrialization in the Twentieth Century, not yet commonly called the "Third Industrial Revolution" (there is a terrible book by that name that is not a serious work of technological history and means something quite different).
Rather continuing with increasingly contentious and unstandardized enumerations I prefer to call what the OP is referring to as a "Second Industrial Revolution" as the "Cybernetic Revolution" that describes exactly what the revolution involves.
And then there is the fact that at some point in the past some imbecile (probably at Microsoft I am guessing, because it became industry wide) it stopped being a "caps lock" (locking to type nothing but upper case) but a case INVERSION key. Lower case is now uppercase, but if you hit the shift button by accident it is lower case again.
I have never once, in a long career of writing stuff (I do a lot of writing) or coding (I do a lot of coding) wanted to have a case inversion lock key. Not once.
It is clear that high intelligence is not necessary for successful survival, there is no general trend toward progressively evolving high intelligence in any lineage on land but the Hominidae (and it stalled among all the branches of the Great Apes but one). Curiously modern humans 80,000 years ago went through a near extinction event, with the world population dropping to a few thousand individuals, intelligence equivalent to our own did not give them a huge survival advantage at that time.
But success in a society creates an intelligence arms race. More powerful brains processing social information give an edge in dominating reproduction opportunity through most of evolutionary history. (Debates about whether perhaps the opposite is true at this moment in history I leave aside.)
I have been able to write essentially this same comment every year since cable hit is peak six years ago.
Cable companies are monopolies and behave exactly like all monopolies. They charge every customer extra as rent just because they can. And when customers start rebelling and refusing to sign up or cut service they have, even though they have no competitor cable companies to buy service from, the thought that maybe they should lower prices or provide better service will never cross their minds, ever.
Instead the focus of cable companies is to increase profits by sweetheart legislation that maintains their monopoly control of broadband access, and turn that into a cash cow by stripping away net neutrality so that it can become a perpetual toll booth collecting rents.
Probably less than you think. An airliner flying 20,000 km uses about 400 kg of fuel per passenger. The payload fraction of the launcher can run as high as 6.5% (Space Shuttle, taking the whole vehicle as payload). The unfueled weight of airliner is about 400 kg/passenger, let us assume that as the payload; and the fuel + oxidizer weight is usually 90% of the weight of booster, and the fraction of that F+O weight that is actually kerosene is 1/3.56. So the RP-1 (kerosene) weight per passenger would be something like (400/0.065)*0.9/3.56 = 1550 kg, or about 4 times what a regular airliner. Now, currently about 20% of airline costs are fuel, labor costs are larger. So if they can save big on labor costs (you are "spam in can", no flight crew at all) then maybe they can hold the extra cost to 40% or so of the whole service cost. I don't see it competing with economy fares though.
Kind of like how you can tell a regularly schedule international flight from an attacking bomber?
But the baggage fees with be insane!
He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.
He doesn't have to. He is simply pointing out that we've been having this argument since mechanical loom was invented hundreds of years ago. And every time the Luddites have claimed that there will be no more jobs, and every time they have been wrong.
And for all of Kurzweil's prating about "history" he shows no evidence of actually spending the effort to study it, even though he certainly has had the time to do so.
Funny thing about those "mechanical looms" (and spinning machines, etc.) they did put huge numbers of people out of work! The effect of the First Industrial Revolution on the largest industry in Great Britain - cloth manufacturing - was to wipe out 20% of the employment in the span of a couple of decades (starting about 1770), and create huge numbers of paupers, a problem that persisted for about 70 years before eventually the economic gains of industrialization created enough jobs to replace those that they destroyed, around 1840.
The historical record about this disaster is very well known, even if you don't bother to actually read about the history of the First Industrial Revolution. The "Dickensian" slums are infamous. The Poor Laws. The work houses (prisons for being poor). The legacy of the petty crime explosion from the massive unemployment (e.g. the "transportation" of convicts to Australia when they couldn't build prisons fast enough).
The Napoleonic Wars came along at a convenient time (1795-1815) to alleviate this significantly for a 20 year period by providing alternative employment for a fair chunk of young men, but these are not what you would call productive jobs.
And the jobs created in factories for the first several generations were worse than the jobs destroyed. The health of the British population declined during that early period of growing average wealth. Wages fell, nutrition fell, adult heights fell, lifespans shortened, the proportion of the population fit for military service fell dramatically.
"Pointing out" stuff that is not true is, well, lying.
Two additional advantages of strongly typed languages: ability to use refactoring tools, and easier code maintenance - particularly in code reading to recover business logic.
I am currently working with a Python (sub)program, part of a large web system that I do not have access to. The data comes in in messages of an undocumented JSON format, so from beginning to end the type of a variable is whatever the type it is, and the name of the 'variable' is whatever the label string associated with the data was. It is very difficult to deduce what any part of the processing means.
There is a funny tendency of people to put high intensity lights on top of entirely unmanned systems. Microwave relays, solar farms, remote storage facilities, high tension towers, water tanks, and so on. These lights do nothing useful, waste power, but seem to be assumed to be required.
It is really astonishing how far a single high intensity light that is not shielded can contaminate the night sly with pollution. It does not take many such ill-considered light fixtures to contaminate an otherwise pristine dark sky.
This is one area where dark sky ordinances, and recognition of dark sky preserves are important. It helps keep the 'stupid' light.
Additionally this encourages properly shielded light fixtures. We need light to shine down to see things at night, light shining horizontally into our eyes makes things harder to see, and light shining up into the sky does nothing useful. Reflective shielding (or properly design LED lights which are inherently directional) save energy and money. When light is used only for illuminating the ground, something like 90% of it is absorbed.
If you create content by a purely random process, or else get content through user input (which is like random, only malicious and sick), you must filter out the objectionable material that is guaranteed to be there! Remember Tay, Microsoft's Nazi Teen Chat Bot?.
Antisemitism has historically been linked to anti-banker and anti-capitalist sentiments
Except for the largest antisemitic group in history, the Nazis who were decidedly right wing.
Yes they were (right wing), but no not by any means the largest antisemitic group in history.
That group would be Orthodox Christianity which has been stridently antisemitic since at least the late second century.
It seems the break-up between Judaism, the religion of every original follower of Jesus, and Christianity being a separate religion was a messy one with a lot of bad blood.The earliest account of Jesus' life is the Gospel of Mark, written decades after the fact, and records a negative memory of Jews as being the reason that the Romans crucified Jesus. Though not antisemitic per se (though difficult to credit as accurate) Christian writing get worse from there until by the late 3rd Century the non-canonical Acts of Pilate has the harsh Roman Prefect as a Christian saint, and the Jews are the enemies of God himself, having rejected their own Messiah and murdered him.
Antisemitism rested on an explicitly religious basis throughout Europe until modern times. Pogroms did not kill Jews because some of them were bankers, they were because "The Jews killed Jesus".
Nonsense of course. They would write off processors that go down and drop them from their system. Periodically they may change out whole modules is most of them fail.
The U.S. has 20,000 MW of pumped storage on the grid right now (2% of U.S. grid capacity) and another 5% have been granted permits for construction.
Add 800 KV DC long distance transmission lines and electricity can be moved coast-to-coast with losses of only a few percent. Pumped storage can store electricity from anywhere in North America, and then supply it to anywhere in North America.
In fact, with 800 KV DC lines much of the need for storage disappears entirely. Grid supply can be balanced simply by moving electricity from where the sun is shining/wind is blowing to where demand is currently high.
Yeah, you can throw some batteries on to the grid, and may be attractive in certain specialized situations, but they aren't really needed with an revamped North American grid.
A 2011 study found 39 million tons of economically recoverable lithium (at current prices). Allowing for an 80 kWH battery (Tesla's have 70, IIRC) EVs would use about 20 kg of lithium (this costs about $180). So this will build 2 billion EV cars (there are only one billion cars on Earth right now), or twice that if we go with 40 kWH batteries. So there enough lithium for a lot of vehicles.
The "lithium reserve" estimate is very soft (on the upper end). Unlike oil it is not intensively exploited so many worldwide resources are likely undiscovered or underestimated. And as is true of many resources, modest increases in price will likely greatly expand the reserves. We can afford to spend more for that 20 kg of lithium.
BTW, there is also enough platinum for about 2 billion Mirai type hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The US is currently more or less self dependent for Oil, having larger reserves than most of the ME countries ... combined.
Rydberg Energy's most recent estimate has (using the estimate type most favorable to the U.S., which is the most speculative) finds the U.S. to have slightly less oil than Saudi Arabia alone. Throw in other Middle Eastern countries and it is well more than 2-to-1 to the U.S. disadvantage.
Very little oil from the Arabian Peninsula makes it into the US.
More or less true. In 2016 6.8% of all U.S. oil consumption was supplied by the Arabian Peninsula. Not a lot, but hardly nothing - it is 1/8 of U.S. imports.
The United States produces mostly all the oil it needs internally now.
In 2016 the U.S. produced 45% of the petroleum that it consumed, less than half. This is down slightly from 2015 (48%) when Saudi Arabia ramped up production, cut oil prices, and shut down U.S. exploitation of high priced tight oil.
A bit over half of our imports come from Canada and Mexico, and the rest mostly comes from OPEC.
And although only a little over a year old, it seems that this book is already uselessly out of date. Look at the only recent review on the Amazon site, it gives it two stars because the URLs referenced in the book at no longer valid. Given that the book is only about using those web-based analytic services being promoted by IBM, not about understanding any actual technology (check the index on Amazon "look inside") this is a major drawback.
It appears (to me) that "Watson" is simply a branding IBM is using for any sort of machine learning service they wish to promote, rather than actually designating some system or technology. I'm not at all sure there is any relationship between "Jeopardy Watson" and the "Watson" they are now promoting.
And looking at the contents of the book with Amazon preview it looks like it is entirely about using Watson's services, instead of being about Watson's architecture, implementation or technology - on other words, understanding anything about Watson itself.
In that context, where web access is the whole point of the book, bad URLs would make it next to useless.