... To really make this work elegantly, closures are needed, which were on and off the radar for the Java SE 7 release. Because of that, parallel array has somehow stalled. Now that closures are back, so might parallel array be, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while to be honest...
Elegance? Closures? Now you have me scared. Really scared.
The most serious problem with Java today is the whole complexity of the generics feature added in Java 5. Typing container classes was fine (and the only thing any working programmer I have talked to actually uses), but as soon as you venture beyond that it descends into a nearly incomprehensible API, all in pursuit of the elusive and trivial pursuit of absolute type safety (at which it fails anyway). Angelika Langer's FAQ about Java generics is 512 pages long. One of the world's leading Java experts, Ken Arnold, cannot explain the meaning of the Enum generic class's definition, I could go on and on.
As a whole the generics is a useless and dangerous disaster. If you mastered Langer's FAQ and could actually write code using generic wildcards no other programmer could understand and maintain your code. And I am doubtful that you could yourself, 6 months later. Java generics seems to require at least a graduate level course in type theory to use (possibly an actual degree in the field).
And the root cause of this disaster, as opposed to a useful tweak (typing containers and letting it go at that) is the search for "elegance" in a formal Comp Sci PhD dissertation type way.
What we need right now is for whoever is guiding Java development to find away to back out of the generics disaster to simplify the language and leaving only features people can actually use. This will clear the field for actual useful innovations.
I can say "drunken National Guard airman" - you know the DUI-guy who went crazy with the national credit card, wiping out a budget surplus and driving the national debt to incredible levels even before he drove the economy into a deep, deep ditch, and only THEN wrote the largest check the world has ever seen (TARP) to keep the national economic wreck he created from turning into a molten puddle.
BTW - this is only a loan guarantee for a productive purpose that will likely not cost the government anything. Not something the drunken airman would like.
Please explain to us exactly how electricity from the sun replaces any oil right now.
As opposed to over the next 20-30 years?
The "right now" (today? next week? by the end of the year?) is a ridiculous straw man. It takes many years to phase out substantial amounts of petroleum, just as it took a century or so to ratchet our usage up to current levels.
Reduction in the use of oil will come about primarily by more efficient vehicles, and the increasing use of electricity to power vehicles. Plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars are hitting the market right now, and will become a major part of the vehicle fleet over the next 25 years. And these cars can consume solar (and wind and nuclear) electricity instead of burning oil.
But you have to start before you can get anywhere.
No improvement today? Well then, best to just quit immediately and curse the (eventual) darkness.
Welfare spending is one of the most efficient uses of money to create jobs and economic activity generally because the money is immediately spent on local essential services which have a large multiplier effect (spending money on weapon systems or overseas deployment is one of the least efficient). And if you make it into work-fare (the actual case today) it is even stronger since there is direct economic benefit produced by the recipient as well.
But "welfare" (and apparently unemployment benefits today) is, by definition, to the right today socialist/communist/anti-American/un-Godly/criminal/evil... just TOTALLY BAD (it's all one thing y'know Limbaugh/Beck say so).
People assume that a download is worth less than a physical copy because they can't physically hold it, however if you consider the actual cost of a dvd the difference in cost will be a couple of cents at most...
About 5 years ago the cost breakdown for a CD sold in a store included 80 cents for packaging/manufacturing, 90 cents for distribution, 80 cents for retail proft, and $3.89 for retail overhead. So if we are talking about retail price in a store selling the game, the cost of making and distributing that disk added up (then) to $6.39.
See: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2004/10/14/does-a-cd-have.php
Even the taking retailing costs entirely out of the picture it is $1.70. Do the game makers only sell their disks from their website? Even if so we must adding shipping/handling costs to this $1.70 . Not exactly "a couple of cents at most."
I guess once police proclaim something a 'destructive device" all rights can be removed from anyone who happens to standing around. The law doesn't seem to be too specific as to how destructive something is, or what it could destroy. I have a devices which destroy wood. You know, saws, gouges, routers, drills, sanders. Think of the damage you could do with those. Much more than dry ice in a plastic bottle.
Now there would have been no problem (in principle) with the boy making loud bangs - with a.357 magnum, since these are constitutionally protected. Take away the dry ice and give him a box of hollow points lady!
One slightly longer "word" arXiv.org/help/endorsement.
You will likely need to be endorsed by a qualified endorser before they will accept your paper. So you will first have to find an endorser willing to endorse you.
So, if a company makes its stated purpose to improve society, they should be given special privileges over other companies?
Possibly - if there were real actions and consequences associated with the "stated purpose" assertion that give it material meaning, not just lip service (cf Google's "Do no evil").
BTW, we are really talking about incorporated entities here not just businesses which might be privately held.
Note that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations are required to operate for the benefit of the shareholder and not for any other purpose (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company 1919), so this hypothetical is probably moot under existing law.
Creating a for-profit corporation that nonetheless operated in the public interest might require revising U.S. law.
So, groups dedicated to gaining power to dictate the behavior of others (political power) are more moral than groups dedicated to acquiring greater wealth (economic power)?
There is no such dichotomy.
There are groups dedicated to "gaining political power" (loaded phrasing for "influencing public policy", they aren't political parties and thus never have political power directly) and then there are corporations that already have power (through their wealth) and wish to increase that power, AND IN ADDITION are ALSO dedicated to "gaining political power" (that is, influencing public policy).
It is a very tilted playing field, with corporations already having tremendous advantages over everyone else, and always seeking to increase those advantages.
Pretending that there is any sort of equivalence between public non-profits, and international corporations in influence, or morality, or anything else is as crazy as asserting that negotiations between an individual employee and an international corporation over terms of employment is one between equals.*
*Many right wingers will fail to see the preposterousness of this latter example; for them there is no hope of enlightenment.
A company staffed by newly graduated graduate students explains a lot about their interview practices. A Google interview session is typically an oral exam - solve hard problems on your feet as if you had recently taken a course in the material - because it is the only form of evaluation they know.
They can use any style of interview they want (interviewing is sadly a very flawed evaluation process anyway), but only recent graduates, or people who specially refresh their oral exam skills in advance, will do well in these types of interviews. And often the expectation of the interviewer is pretty unreasonable: if he is a fresh expert in X, then you should be a fresh expert in X, otherwise you get the fatal interview veto and become a no-hire; given that there are are an awful lot of X's in the computer world, this is going to eliminate a lot of excellent engineers. This stuff has little to do with on-the-job problem solving and programming skills.
It's a funny thing that having wonderful natural resources dampens other parts of the economy. It's called Dutch Disease, and was diagnosed some time ago. Kind of makes you want to re-read Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
Even more cogently, read Diamond's more recent book Collapse. In this book he details the typical devastation that resource extraction inflicts, and the underlying reasons why this is a fundamentally bad deal under most conditions.
Oil production is unique in that it can be conducted with very low surface impact - but won't be unless strong pressure is present to influence corporate behavior. Hard rock mining (essentially all of the Afghan mineral wealth) is a bad scenario no matter what - fundamental factors in how it works technically and economically means that mining companies inevitably despoil the environment, resist all efforts at mitigating impacts, and then dissolve the legal entity running the mine to escape responsibility for the leaking contaminated mess left behind. If they did not operate in this callous, destructive manner they couldn't turn a profit so it is inherent in the business and not just "a few bad apples".
You can survey the entire world and you won't find any region that enjoyed long term benefits from being "resource rich" if that resulted in a hard rock extraction based economy.
...
"Yes, my signature is an 600 ppi out-stretched anus. Deal with it. The law says that any mark that I make is a legally valid signature and you have to recognize it as such. You either sign the mortgage or I'm going to the next bank."
And they may say - I'm sorry you "signature" must be your AUTOGRAPH to prove that you are who you say you are. That could be anyone's photo printer. We will have to photograph your anus ourselves to use it for identification. Please drop your pants.
John3:16 has been a somewhat popular name in the Bible Belt of the U.S. for many years. However attempting to check for its frequency of occurrence in the Social Security Administration's data base: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ revealed that only "alphabetic characters" are allowed!
Wind power will not be cost effective in the near future without massive subsidies.
Supporting cite?
Your views are about a decade out of date. In fact wind power is cost effective right now without any subsidies when measured by levelized cost comparisons, which evaluates the return on investment over the life of the plant. This method of comparison gives high capital cost, but low fuel cost power sources - like wind and nuclear - a fair comparison with the cheap-to-build but costly to run (and unpenalized for being carbon releasing, BTW) power plants like coal and gas. See:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html . Note that coal, gas, wind and nuclear are all in the same ballpark by this long-term metric, but that nuclear is significantly more expensive than the other three.
Observe that solar is not on the EIA list. Solar power is currently too expensive to be competitive without subsidies.
...Assuming you could drop it reliably in a part of the ocean where you could retrieve it, maybe the simple solution would be to embed whatever you're mining in chunks of moon rock and use them as your container...
The accuracy part of shipping materials to Earth is not that difficult. Artillery pieces can achieve 1 part in 1000 accuracy in the atmosphere. A raw material launcher would be some sort of magnetic accelerator which should be more precisely controllable, and also has the advantage of shooting in a vacuum. This level of accuracy would permit dropping the containers into a 400 km box on Earth. But we already have GPS equipped artillery projectiles with 10 m accuracy regardless of range. Equipping a container with a GPS and a thruster that imparts 4 m/sec delta-vee during the ~100 hour drop is not technically challenging.
The entry and collection on Earth is also not too hard. A choosing a typical meteorite-like entry would trace a short steep path through the atmosphere with deceleration forces of ~100 gees. The container as a whole needs to be strong enough to withstand these forces, but a solid mass of "lunar cement" like material for example would need no special entry shield/container. If made as a blunt body, it would lose all of its cosmic velocity and just become a multi-ton rock falling to Earth. Dropping into the middle of a desert would make collection easy.
The cost of transport from the Earth to the Moon is so high that only trivial amounts of shipping container mass can be brought from Earth. The real problem will be keeping this weight fraction down. The GPS unit weight is trivial, but the thruster and the magnetic/conducting material against which accelerator acts is a real challenge.
If someone could figure a good way to extract the uranium out of seawater, we'd have supplies to last essentially forever. The Japanese are the only ones I am aware of even working on the problem.
...
It is important to note that there is no real need for uranium from seawater for perhaps 50 years or so, so the pressure to develop a commercial process today is not strong.
The Japanese seawater process(es) are estimated to produce uranium at a cost of $250/lb or so. This less than double uranium spot market prices we have already seen: it hit $136/lb in 2007 before the current economic crisis. Any time prices rise above $250/lb the world uranium reserve sufficient to power all of the world's energy needs for 4000 years without breeder reactors or reprocessing.
But the first commercial scale uranium-from-seawater plant is likely to be built long before uranium prices consistently break $250/lb. Purpose: to evade uranium sale restrictions for a covert nuclear weapons program where access to uranium is paramount and cost is no object.
mining companies pump bulk cash into economies and employ 10,000's of people
Employing people is irrelevant. What those people really need is ownership the mines, i.e. equity. If they happen to work there too, fine (everyone has to spend their day somehow), but working for The Man isn't the road to prosperity.
Amen to that. And in addition it needs to be remembered that the environmental devastation left behind (leaking acid pits, waste heaps and shafts, denuded territory, etc.) is the long term legacy for which mining companies pay nothing. It is routine practice for mining operations to be conducted by a one-time shell company that disbands upon mine closing, leaving no one to take to court for the ruin left behind.
A useful example is the first world state of Montana ("The Treasure State"), in which the estimated clean-up cost for the tens thousands of old mines exceeds by far the value of the mineral extracted, nearly of which money left Montana for the mining company headquarters back East, leaving Montana dirt-poor.
i've heard this tired argument time and time again, painting mining companies as the devil who sneaks in and steals the wealth and gives nothing back.
it's FUD. mining companies pump bulk cash into economies and employ 10,000's of people. if you want to know who the real villains are, take a look at where all the royalties go - government coffers. corrupt government are the problem not mining companies. companies are neither good nor evil, they just want to do business.
You can argue you all you want that "companies are neither good nor evil" but that does not change the fact that what companies do can most definitely be good or evil. If it is more profitable, and there is no outside pressure to otherwise, then there are any number of companies ready to do evil for bucks.
And pushing all the blame off on to corrupt government does not wash. In every case of a mineral extraction horror story - there are two villains, the government that does not say "no" and the company happy to devastate a nation. And given the relatively weak governments found in poor nations generally, strong arm tactics and piles of readily dropped cash by international corporations are a large part of the cause of government corruption and malfeasance. In a poor nation, governments do not have the resources and skills to properly regulate the unscrupulous, and the unscrupulous love that fact.
Look at the recent history of Bougainville Island. Decades of mining devastation of the island, led to 15 years of civil war. The government and the mining company were equally to blame.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, etc. would disagree. Seems they made a good amount of money off their natural mineral resources. What makes a country rich is its resources - people and natural....
In each of your examples - Brazil, Nigeria, Angola - the wealthy ruling class is wealthy (fabulously so) because they have deemed that the benefits from the sales of natural resources should flow not to the country in general, but to the rulers in particular...
Ummm... could I point out a very obvious fact that distinguishes the "rich" countries (all Mideastern) from the contrasting "corrupt" nations: all of the "rich" ones have immense easily extracted oil reserves relative to their population that is the sole basis of their wealth; the "corrupt" list either do not have an oil-based economy (Brazil) or the oil revenue per person is drastically lower (Nigeria, Angola).
In fact monopolization of the oil wealth by oligarchic rulers in all of the Mideast countries listed has been extreme, the actual development of human capital has been weak. It is only the vast amounts of surplus money that allow them to appear more "successful".
Oil is a genuinely unique resource. It is very easy to extract (even in the more marginal wells) compared to "grind-the-rocks-up" mining, is uniquely easy to transport, and has an essentially unlimited market (no new producer could ever hope of being able to drive down oil prices no matter how aggressively their resource is exploited). If it is available in sufficient quantity relative to the population it can transform a nation in a way no other resource ever has.
And this brings us to Afghanistan. The vast store of mineral wealth has not been broken down by category, but many of these materials (e.g. lithium) have a limited market which cannot by itself make any nation rich. All of the non-oil/gas assets are hard to extract and process and even in combination cannot transform a poor nation by itself (I know of no counter-example).
Polygraphic prospective hires doesn't have to catch anybody to serve a purpose. It's enough to drive the pissant commie sympathizers to bother someone else...
It also selects for sociopathic personalities. We really want a disproportionately high concentration of those individuals in all our internal spying programs...
Have we fully come to terms with the devastating effect that the written word has had on our minds?
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name:-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory. In the ages before writing prodigious feats of memorization were essential for cultural transmission, and evidence shows that Australian Aborigines have carried traditions down intact across tens of thousands of years. What literate person today could even dream of carrying out such immense tasks of memorization?
Information technology has always affected how we use our brains, and exploiting new capabilities is inevitably associated with allowing older modes of mental information processing and storage to languish. No doubt similar cries of alarm were issued at every earlier information innovation.
In other news, there has been a devastating loss in flint-knapping skill, which takes many years of practice and apprenticeship to perfect. This skill has been essential to the human race for almost all of its existence, having been replaced only in the last few percent of the species history by new-fangled metal-working technology. We won't know for another 4000 generations or so if metal will have the longevity as trusty old flint.
Lincoln's overriding concern was holding the Union together
That's kind of the point. The South's reason for secession may have been the preservation of slavery,
Let us stipulate it was the South's reason for secession... moving on now.
but the North's reason for fighting them was to prevent the secession, not to end slavery, at least in the beginning. Obviously "fighting to end slavery" made for much better PR later in the war, and both sides tried to put the best spin they could on the matter. I'm not trying to say that South was guiltless, by any means.
Oh, good. I'm glad you don't feel the states that abrogated the U.S. Constitution in order to keep million enslaved, and fired the first shots were guiltless. You had me worried there.
But the North should have let them secede, treating their escaped slaves as political refugees and working through diplomatic and economic channels to fix their internal policies.
Oh. My. G*d. If the South had seceeded there would have been no force at work at all to end slavery. Slave agriculture was the basis of the South's economic system, it was extremely profitable, it was still expanding in 1861 and it had near universal and unquestioning support among the white population (and tellingly, in the white churches). All of the rich and powerful men in the South owed their position to the slaves they owned.
You are arguing that the correct course of action would be one that would have left millions in slavery well into the 20th century. Mechanization did not replace manual labor in the cotton field until 1950.
BTW, I speak as a Southerner. My family hails from South Carolina - the center of slavery (more than any other state), and the leader of the secession.
And the South didn't fight over slavery; that issue didn't enter the war til later, and Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it. The war was about states' rights, and against crushing economic pressure brought by northern industrialists.
Well, that's the story that the South has been selling for 140 years or so anyway. Not slavery, so siree! Just Northern Oppression! Relentless repetition by Southerners (the North stopped caring particularly a century ago) has given this claim a wholly unwarranted veneer of plausibility. Examination of the words and deeds of the men who actually led secession reveals this to be Southern fantasy.
Read Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil Warhttp://www.upress.virginia.edu/apostles/index.html. Dew examines the actual speeches, arguments, and publications of the secessionists in the months after Lincoln's election, when the South seceeded, fired on Union forts, and thus began the Civil War. The remarkable thing is that the preservation of slavery was the only thing on these men's minds. At the outset of the Civil War, the leaders of the South were of one mind - they agreed unanimously that the purpose of secession was to keep African-Americans enslaved.
Destroying slavery was not first on Lincoln's agenda, but preserving it was first on the minds of the South.*
It is striking that as soon as the smoke cleared from the battlefields, the Southerners tried to make slavery disappear from the picture and recast it as a "noble cause". One might almost suppose they realized how profoundly in the wrong they were, and that history would revile them without a whitewash.
(* And there is a classic book: The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash that makes it clear how central subjugation of African Americans was to Southern identity, to poor whites just as much as rich landowners.)
The article does a breakdown on the cost of a 100 Euro running shoe. Of this 0.4% is worker's wages, 1.6% is other productions costs, 8% is materials, and 2% is factory profit. Of the remaining 88%, 11% is product development (probably done in the expensive country) and everything else is advertising, Euro taxes or profit for someone in Europe.
So only 12% of the shoe cost is production cost, and quadrupling it would only add 36 Euros to the shoes, if all other profits were kept the same. And this assumes that that 8% in raw materials would cost 32% in Europe/U.S.; an assumption that is almost certainly untrue, it could be imported as a raw material for about the same cost as it can be obtained in China (sure there is shipping, but that is already included in the price of the shoes). More realistically quadrupling production costs (labor, factory space, factory profit etc.) would add just 12 Euros to the cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Elegance? Closures? Now you have me scared. Really scared.
The most serious problem with Java today is the whole complexity of the generics feature added in Java 5. Typing container classes was fine (and the only thing any working programmer I have talked to actually uses), but as soon as you venture beyond that it descends into a nearly incomprehensible API, all in pursuit of the elusive and trivial pursuit of absolute type safety (at which it fails anyway). Angelika Langer's FAQ about Java generics is 512 pages long. One of the world's leading Java experts, Ken Arnold, cannot explain the meaning of the Enum generic class's definition, I could go on and on.
As a whole the generics is a useless and dangerous disaster. If you mastered Langer's FAQ and could actually write code using generic wildcards no other programmer could understand and maintain your code. And I am doubtful that you could yourself, 6 months later. Java generics seems to require at least a graduate level course in type theory to use (possibly an actual degree in the field).
And the root cause of this disaster, as opposed to a useful tweak (typing containers and letting it go at that) is the search for "elegance" in a formal Comp Sci PhD dissertation type way.
What we need right now is for whoever is guiding Java development to find away to back out of the generics disaster to simplify the language and leaving only features people can actually use. This will clear the field for actual useful innovations.
Drunken sailor?
I can say "drunken National Guard airman" - you know the DUI-guy who went crazy with the national credit card, wiping out a budget surplus and driving the national debt to incredible levels even before he drove the economy into a deep, deep ditch, and only THEN wrote the largest check the world has ever seen (TARP) to keep the national economic wreck he created from turning into a molten puddle.
BTW - this is only a loan guarantee for a productive purpose that will likely not cost the government anything. Not something the drunken airman would like.
Please explain to us exactly how electricity from the sun replaces any oil right now.
As opposed to over the next 20-30 years?
The "right now" (today? next week? by the end of the year?) is a ridiculous straw man. It takes many years to phase out substantial amounts of petroleum, just as it took a century or so to ratchet our usage up to current levels.
Reduction in the use of oil will come about primarily by more efficient vehicles, and the increasing use of electricity to power vehicles. Plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars are hitting the market right now, and will become a major part of the vehicle fleet over the next 25 years. And these cars can consume solar (and wind and nuclear) electricity instead of burning oil.
But you have to start before you can get anywhere.
No improvement today? Well then, best to just quit immediately and curse the (eventual) darkness.
Welfare doesn't create jobs...
Put away your Republican talking point card.
Welfare spending is one of the most efficient uses of money to create jobs and economic activity generally because the money is immediately spent on local essential services which have a large multiplier effect (spending money on weapon systems or overseas deployment is one of the least efficient). And if you make it into work-fare (the actual case today) it is even stronger since there is direct economic benefit produced by the recipient as well.
But "welfare" (and apparently unemployment benefits today) is, by definition, to the right today socialist/communist/anti-American/un-Godly/criminal/evil... just TOTALLY BAD (it's all one thing y'know Limbaugh/Beck say so).
People assume that a download is worth less than a physical copy because they can't physically hold it, however if you consider the actual cost of a dvd the difference in cost will be a couple of cents at most...
About 5 years ago the cost breakdown for a CD sold in a store included 80 cents for packaging/manufacturing, 90 cents for distribution, 80 cents for retail proft, and $3.89 for retail overhead. So if we are talking about retail price in a store selling the game, the cost of making and distributing that disk added up (then) to $6.39. See: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2004/10/14/does-a-cd-have.php
Even the taking retailing costs entirely out of the picture it is $1.70. Do the game makers only sell their disks from their website? Even if so we must adding shipping/handling costs to this $1.70 . Not exactly "a couple of cents at most."
I guess once police proclaim something a 'destructive device" all rights can be removed from anyone who happens to standing around. The law doesn't seem to be too specific as to how destructive something is, or what it could destroy. I have a devices which destroy wood. You know, saws, gouges, routers, drills, sanders. Think of the damage you could do with those. Much more than dry ice in a plastic bottle.
Worse still, since these are considered by the police to be "bombs" this means they are also - wait for it - Weapons of Mass Destruction. See: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/718/usc_sec_18_00002332---a000-.html (see C.2.A) and http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000921----000-.html .
Once declared a WMD, then they get to throw the really heavy Book of Rules at the Mom.
Now there would have been no problem (in principle) with the boy making loud bangs - with a .357 magnum, since these are constitutionally protected. Take away the dry ice and give him a box of hollow points lady!
arXiv
One slightly longer "word" arXiv.org/help/endorsement.
You will likely need to be endorsed by a qualified endorser before they will accept your paper. So you will first have to find an endorser willing to endorse you.
So, if a company makes its stated purpose to improve society, they should be given special privileges over other companies?
Possibly - if there were real actions and consequences associated with the "stated purpose" assertion that give it material meaning, not just lip service (cf Google's "Do no evil").
BTW, we are really talking about incorporated entities here not just businesses which might be privately held.
Note that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations are required to operate for the benefit of the shareholder and not for any other purpose (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company 1919), so this hypothetical is probably moot under existing law.
Creating a for-profit corporation that nonetheless operated in the public interest might require revising U.S. law.
So, groups dedicated to gaining power to dictate the behavior of others (political power) are more moral than groups dedicated to acquiring greater wealth (economic power)?
There is no such dichotomy.
There are groups dedicated to "gaining political power" (loaded phrasing for "influencing public policy", they aren't political parties and thus never have political power directly) and then there are corporations that already have power (through their wealth) and wish to increase that power, AND IN ADDITION are ALSO dedicated to "gaining political power" (that is, influencing public policy).
It is a very tilted playing field, with corporations already having tremendous advantages over everyone else, and always seeking to increase those advantages.
Pretending that there is any sort of equivalence between public non-profits, and international corporations in influence, or morality, or anything else is as crazy as asserting that negotiations between an individual employee and an international corporation over terms of employment is one between equals.*
*Many right wingers will fail to see the preposterousness of this latter example; for them there is no hope of enlightenment.
A company staffed by newly graduated graduate students explains a lot about their interview practices. A Google interview session is typically an oral exam - solve hard problems on your feet as if you had recently taken a course in the material - because it is the only form of evaluation they know.
They can use any style of interview they want (interviewing is sadly a very flawed evaluation process anyway), but only recent graduates, or people who specially refresh their oral exam skills in advance, will do well in these types of interviews. And often the expectation of the interviewer is pretty unreasonable: if he is a fresh expert in X, then you should be a fresh expert in X, otherwise you get the fatal interview veto and become a no-hire; given that there are are an awful lot of X's in the computer world, this is going to eliminate a lot of excellent engineers. This stuff has little to do with on-the-job problem solving and programming skills.
It's a funny thing that having wonderful natural resources dampens other parts of the economy. It's called Dutch Disease, and was diagnosed some time ago. Kind of makes you want to re-read Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
Even more cogently, read Diamond's more recent book Collapse. In this book he details the typical devastation that resource extraction inflicts, and the underlying reasons why this is a fundamentally bad deal under most conditions.
Oil production is unique in that it can be conducted with very low surface impact - but won't be unless strong pressure is present to influence corporate behavior. Hard rock mining (essentially all of the Afghan mineral wealth) is a bad scenario no matter what - fundamental factors in how it works technically and economically means that mining companies inevitably despoil the environment, resist all efforts at mitigating impacts, and then dissolve the legal entity running the mine to escape responsibility for the leaking contaminated mess left behind. If they did not operate in this callous, destructive manner they couldn't turn a profit so it is inherent in the business and not just "a few bad apples".
You can survey the entire world and you won't find any region that enjoyed long term benefits from being "resource rich" if that resulted in a hard rock extraction based economy.
... "Yes, my signature is an 600 ppi out-stretched anus. Deal with it. The law says that any mark that I make is a legally valid signature and you have to recognize it as such. You either sign the mortgage or I'm going to the next bank."
And they may say - I'm sorry you "signature" must be your AUTOGRAPH to prove that you are who you say you are. That could be anyone's photo printer. We will have to photograph your anus ourselves to use it for identification. Please drop your pants.
John3:16 has been a somewhat popular name in the Bible Belt of the U.S. for many years. However attempting to check for its frequency of occurrence in the Social Security Administration's data base: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ revealed that only "alphabetic characters" are allowed!
Wind power will not be cost effective in the near future without massive subsidies.
Supporting cite?
Your views are about a decade out of date. In fact wind power is cost effective right now without any subsidies when measured by levelized cost comparisons, which evaluates the return on investment over the life of the plant. This method of comparison gives high capital cost, but low fuel cost power sources - like wind and nuclear - a fair comparison with the cheap-to-build but costly to run (and unpenalized for being carbon releasing, BTW) power plants like coal and gas. See: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html . Note that coal, gas, wind and nuclear are all in the same ballpark by this long-term metric, but that nuclear is significantly more expensive than the other three.
Observe that solar is not on the EIA list. Solar power is currently too expensive to be competitive without subsidies.
...Assuming you could drop it reliably in a part of the ocean where you could retrieve it, maybe the simple solution would be to embed whatever you're mining in chunks of moon rock and use them as your container...
The accuracy part of shipping materials to Earth is not that difficult. Artillery pieces can achieve 1 part in 1000 accuracy in the atmosphere. A raw material launcher would be some sort of magnetic accelerator which should be more precisely controllable, and also has the advantage of shooting in a vacuum. This level of accuracy would permit dropping the containers into a 400 km box on Earth. But we already have GPS equipped artillery projectiles with 10 m accuracy regardless of range. Equipping a container with a GPS and a thruster that imparts 4 m/sec delta-vee during the ~100 hour drop is not technically challenging.
The entry and collection on Earth is also not too hard. A choosing a typical meteorite-like entry would trace a short steep path through the atmosphere with deceleration forces of ~100 gees. The container as a whole needs to be strong enough to withstand these forces, but a solid mass of "lunar cement" like material for example would need no special entry shield/container. If made as a blunt body, it would lose all of its cosmic velocity and just become a multi-ton rock falling to Earth. Dropping into the middle of a desert would make collection easy.
The cost of transport from the Earth to the Moon is so high that only trivial amounts of shipping container mass can be brought from Earth. The real problem will be keeping this weight fraction down. The GPS unit weight is trivial, but the thruster and the magnetic/conducting material against which accelerator acts is a real challenge.
If someone could figure a good way to extract the uranium out of seawater, we'd have supplies to last essentially forever. The Japanese are the only ones I am aware of even working on the problem.
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It is important to note that there is no real need for uranium from seawater for perhaps 50 years or so, so the pressure to develop a commercial process today is not strong.
The Japanese seawater process(es) are estimated to produce uranium at a cost of $250/lb or so. This less than double uranium spot market prices we have already seen: it hit $136/lb in 2007 before the current economic crisis. Any time prices rise above $250/lb the world uranium reserve sufficient to power all of the world's energy needs for 4000 years without breeder reactors or reprocessing.
But the first commercial scale uranium-from-seawater plant is likely to be built long before uranium prices consistently break $250/lb. Purpose: to evade uranium sale restrictions for a covert nuclear weapons program where access to uranium is paramount and cost is no object.
Employing people is irrelevant. What those people really need is ownership the mines, i.e. equity. If they happen to work there too, fine (everyone has to spend their day somehow), but working for The Man isn't the road to prosperity.
Amen to that. And in addition it needs to be remembered that the environmental devastation left behind (leaking acid pits, waste heaps and shafts, denuded territory, etc.) is the long term legacy for which mining companies pay nothing. It is routine practice for mining operations to be conducted by a one-time shell company that disbands upon mine closing, leaving no one to take to court for the ruin left behind.
A useful example is the first world state of Montana ("The Treasure State"), in which the estimated clean-up cost for the tens thousands of old mines exceeds by far the value of the mineral extracted, nearly of which money left Montana for the mining company headquarters back East, leaving Montana dirt-poor.
i've heard this tired argument time and time again, painting mining companies as the devil who sneaks in and steals the wealth and gives nothing back.
it's FUD. mining companies pump bulk cash into economies and employ 10,000's of people. if you want to know who the real villains are, take a look at where all the royalties go - government coffers. corrupt government are the problem not mining companies. companies are neither good nor evil, they just want to do business.
You can argue you all you want that "companies are neither good nor evil" but that does not change the fact that what companies do can most definitely be good or evil. If it is more profitable, and there is no outside pressure to otherwise, then there are any number of companies ready to do evil for bucks.
And pushing all the blame off on to corrupt government does not wash. In every case of a mineral extraction horror story - there are two villains, the government that does not say "no" and the company happy to devastate a nation. And given the relatively weak governments found in poor nations generally, strong arm tactics and piles of readily dropped cash by international corporations are a large part of the cause of government corruption and malfeasance. In a poor nation, governments do not have the resources and skills to properly regulate the unscrupulous, and the unscrupulous love that fact.
Look at the recent history of Bougainville Island. Decades of mining devastation of the island, led to 15 years of civil war. The government and the mining company were equally to blame.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, etc. would disagree. Seems they made a good amount of money off their natural mineral resources. What makes a country rich is its resources - people and natural. ...
In each of your examples - Brazil, Nigeria, Angola - the wealthy ruling class is wealthy (fabulously so) because they have deemed that the benefits from the sales of natural resources should flow not to the country in general, but to the rulers in particular...
Ummm... could I point out a very obvious fact that distinguishes the "rich" countries (all Mideastern) from the contrasting "corrupt" nations: all of the "rich" ones have immense easily extracted oil reserves relative to their population that is the sole basis of their wealth; the "corrupt" list either do not have an oil-based economy (Brazil) or the oil revenue per person is drastically lower (Nigeria, Angola).
In fact monopolization of the oil wealth by oligarchic rulers in all of the Mideast countries listed has been extreme, the actual development of human capital has been weak. It is only the vast amounts of surplus money that allow them to appear more "successful".
Oil is a genuinely unique resource. It is very easy to extract (even in the more marginal wells) compared to "grind-the-rocks-up" mining, is uniquely easy to transport, and has an essentially unlimited market (no new producer could ever hope of being able to drive down oil prices no matter how aggressively their resource is exploited). If it is available in sufficient quantity relative to the population it can transform a nation in a way no other resource ever has.
And this brings us to Afghanistan. The vast store of mineral wealth has not been broken down by category, but many of these materials (e.g. lithium) have a limited market which cannot by itself make any nation rich. All of the non-oil/gas assets are hard to extract and process and even in combination cannot transform a poor nation by itself (I know of no counter-example).
Polygraphic prospective hires doesn't have to catch anybody to serve a purpose. It's enough to drive the pissant commie sympathizers to bother someone else...
It also selects for sociopathic personalities. We really want a disproportionately high concentration of those individuals in all our internal spying programs...
Have we fully come to terms with the devastating effect that the written word has had on our minds?
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name :-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory. In the ages before writing prodigious feats of memorization were essential for cultural transmission, and evidence shows that Australian Aborigines have carried traditions down intact across tens of thousands of years. What literate person today could even dream of carrying out such immense tasks of memorization?
Information technology has always affected how we use our brains, and exploiting new capabilities is inevitably associated with allowing older modes of mental information processing and storage to languish. No doubt similar cries of alarm were issued at every earlier information innovation.
In other news, there has been a devastating loss in flint-knapping skill, which takes many years of practice and apprenticeship to perfect. This skill has been essential to the human race for almost all of its existence, having been replaced only in the last few percent of the species history by new-fangled metal-working technology. We won't know for another 4000 generations or so if metal will have the longevity as trusty old flint.
Lincoln's overriding concern was holding the Union together
That's kind of the point. The South's reason for secession may have been the preservation of slavery,
Let us stipulate it was the South's reason for secession... moving on now.
but the North's reason for fighting them was to prevent the secession, not to end slavery, at least in the beginning. Obviously "fighting to end slavery" made for much better PR later in the war, and both sides tried to put the best spin they could on the matter. I'm not trying to say that South was guiltless, by any means.
Oh, good. I'm glad you don't feel the states that abrogated the U.S. Constitution in order to keep million enslaved, and fired the first shots were guiltless. You had me worried there.
But the North should have let them secede, treating their escaped slaves as political refugees and working through diplomatic and economic channels to fix their internal policies.
Oh. My. G*d. If the South had seceeded there would have been no force at work at all to end slavery. Slave agriculture was the basis of the South's economic system, it was extremely profitable, it was still expanding in 1861 and it had near universal and unquestioning support among the white population (and tellingly, in the white churches). All of the rich and powerful men in the South owed their position to the slaves they owned.
You are arguing that the correct course of action would be one that would have left millions in slavery well into the 20th century. Mechanization did not replace manual labor in the cotton field until 1950.
BTW, I speak as a Southerner. My family hails from South Carolina - the center of slavery (more than any other state), and the leader of the secession.
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And the South didn't fight over slavery; that issue didn't enter the war til later, and Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it. The war was about states' rights, and against crushing economic pressure brought by northern industrialists.
Well, that's the story that the South has been selling for 140 years or so anyway. Not slavery, so siree! Just Northern Oppression! Relentless repetition by Southerners (the North stopped caring particularly a century ago) has given this claim a wholly unwarranted veneer of plausibility. Examination of the words and deeds of the men who actually led secession reveals this to be Southern fantasy.
Read Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War http://www.upress.virginia.edu/apostles/index.html. Dew examines the actual speeches, arguments, and publications of the secessionists in the months after Lincoln's election, when the South seceeded, fired on Union forts, and thus began the Civil War. The remarkable thing is that the preservation of slavery was the only thing on these men's minds. At the outset of the Civil War, the leaders of the South were of one mind - they agreed unanimously that the purpose of secession was to keep African-Americans enslaved.
Destroying slavery was not first on Lincoln's agenda, but preserving it was first on the minds of the South.*
It is striking that as soon as the smoke cleared from the battlefields, the Southerners tried to make slavery disappear from the picture and recast it as a "noble cause". One might almost suppose they realized how profoundly in the wrong they were, and that history would revile them without a whitewash.
(* And there is a classic book: The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash that makes it clear how central subjugation of African Americans was to Southern identity, to poor whites just as much as rich landowners.)
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It's been said, a pair of $75 nike's would cost $300 if made by americans.
But it hasn't been said correctly then. See: http://www.consumersinternational.org/files/99672/FileName/RealDealRunningShoes-FINALFINAL300609.pdf .
The article does a breakdown on the cost of a 100 Euro running shoe. Of this 0.4% is worker's wages, 1.6% is other productions costs, 8% is materials, and 2% is factory profit. Of the remaining 88%, 11% is product development (probably done in the expensive country) and everything else is advertising, Euro taxes or profit for someone in Europe.
So only 12% of the shoe cost is production cost, and quadrupling it would only add 36 Euros to the shoes, if all other profits were kept the same. And this assumes that that 8% in raw materials would cost 32% in Europe/U.S.; an assumption that is almost certainly untrue, it could be imported as a raw material for about the same cost as it can be obtained in China (sure there is shipping, but that is already included in the price of the shoes). More realistically quadrupling production costs (labor, factory space, factory profit etc.) would add just 12 Euros to the cost.