All the problems we are having with food production are directly related to factory farming.
We're not actually having any problems and the price fluctuations that are occurring are not caused by so-called 'factory' farming. The problem is that high yield agriculture is concentrated in too few places.
Consider hogs; 80.9% of all hog production comes from two places; the US and China. One is coping with an outlier drought and the other is dealing with a rapidly growing domestic demand for meat. That leaves the rest of the planet out in the cold.
The solution is rising prices. Nations and people that have complacently relied on a few "bread basket" sources of supply have discovered fresh motivation for producing commodities. There is a boom in S. American agriculture as a result. This phenomenon is planet wide.
This is ultimately a good thing. Less reliance on those few traditional "break basket" nations will create supply stability, to say nothing of the self sufficiency of new third world bread baskets.
You, being the rich, comfortable malcontent you've been trained to be, will see this as a tragedy, while you simultaneously accelerate the process with your ill considered policies. As with the evacuation of our industry, the evacuation of our agriculture to the third world has begun.
So go to work and dream up lots of new regulation for domestic agriculture in your home nation. Don't stop until anything more productive than a hobby farm has been eradicated. The rest of the world will take up the slack because people are going to feed themselves whether you like it or not.
Has no one else been wondering why Germany is being seen as a utopia with all of the answers, recently?
No. Germany is a prosperous western nation. Germany has its budget deficit under control. Germany has its trade balance under control. Germany financial laws minimized exposure to toxic debt. As a result, the effects of collapse of the debt bubble in '07-08, the so-called financial crisis, were much more limited in Germany, amounting to a total bailout liability of only about 5.5% of GDP. The costs to other western nations was/is much higher.
Among the many effects of this is that Germany still has the luxury of indulging new social programs. It is also the go-to repository of wealth whenever one of the unproductive and misgoverned PIGS needs to be propped up which gives Germany a great deal of influence in the EU.
In my opinion Germany has all of these things for three basic reasons;
First, Germany has managed to keep its spending under control. There are many public benefits and a great deal of wealth redistribution in Germany, but the Germans don't tolerate large accumulations of debt; if the revenue of the German treasury can't fund it the dependents don't get it. That includes the medical system and the education system.
Second, Germany has an industrial policy that isn't subject to certain veto by pressure groups and their civil lawsuits. This means Germany can make choices, like replacing nuclear reactors with renewable, coal or anything else they decide to use and it doesn't get killed by some judge. This attracts capital.
Finally, Germany protects its domestic industry and workers from unrestrained competition with Asia. Trade unions, businesses and governments can all, independently, pursue importers in court to enforce Germany's sovereign trade laws, and they do so with high frequency. This all somehow happens without statist punditry crying 'oh noes trade war!' The result is Germany has a fully developed industrial base and workforce that is very attractive to capital.
Wealth is important. Germany has consistently sustained real wealth creation since the end of of the Second World War through hard nosed trade policy, credible industrial policy and sound fiscal governance. It doesn't surprise me that Germany has earned some respect.
I bought a Nexus S online from Best Buy four days after they became available. I know for a fact when they appeared. Wikipedia's date of December 16, 2010 is correct.
This isn't exclusive to China or other command economies. The US relies on a supply of transient, undocumented workers for its food supply. We use to have meat packing unions populated by citizens not falling off the low end of the income histogram. Now we have $0.99 Big Macs.
Do the affluent of today
You mean you and I right? The `affluent.' We are the customer. You're ranting on your Asian made system right now. Probably one of several. They aren't making a couple hundred and selling them for millions to the rich. They're making millions and selling for a couple hundred to you. And building a blue water navy with the proceeds.
Evacuating our industry to third world hell holes is a crucial part of contemporary culture. We, the affluent, are left to indulge our labor laws, environmental regulations, confiscatory tax policies and every other anti-industry, anti-energy, anti-business policy we can dream up, all while browsing our online retailers and big box stores filled with low cost goodies. But for Asia we would have to pay the cost of our high minded selves. We would have to weight the value of our environmental hysteria against our material desires.
Thankfully China and the environment are separated by a great big ocean so we don't have to deal with that.
The parent has the truth well in hand. Rural US is not what you think it is. This is not about shoe-less waifs huddled in plywood cabins. The sort of rural households that might benefit from 'universal internet' are typically well off.
Besides, this 'problem' is easily solved without a tax. Just open the right-of-way to competitors and then jump back and let the dirt fly as phone/cable companies suddenly discover new enthusiasm for complete coverage.
That solution does nothing to feed the statists, however. No opportunity to collect billions and then haggle over which politically favored constituency gets to play with it.
What are the alternatives to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security? Let the old, poor and jobless just die? Are you comfortable with this?
The parent offered one solution right off the bat: economic growth. Guess you missed that. There are damn few problems in the US that wouldn't be fixed by some actual wealth creation. Here are some others ideas:
2. Means test Social Security. Most recipients are fully enfranchised members of the wealthiest class of humans in the history of the species — the US elderly. Those SS checks are icing on their cake and they don't actually need as much as their getting, regardless of what they pay the AARP to tell your representatives.
3. Stop the crazy fast growth in medical costs. There are no solutions when the problem keeps growing 8% a year. AMA regulatory capture, trial lawyers and academic monopoly are the biggest parts of this.
4. Reform the tax code. You can't fund benefits when nobody is paying taxes. The lower half of the income histogram is paying nothing to the Treasury. The corps and the rich are skating by as well with byzantine tax law written by tax attorneys for tax evasion.. Lower rates and eliminate most of the deductions and exemptions with a net result of a few percent higher net revenue.
Do those four things and the problem is solved, assuming the saved/collected revenue isn't then used to buy votes with other new programs.
1. We do things that get the economy humming again. More economic activity means...
STOP TRYING TO WRECK MY ENVIRONMENT
We don't need any of your dirty bizzniss. Send it to China so it's not in the environment or near any children. I'm fine living with my parents and you should be too so the environment won't get ruined by people trying to prosper. Unemployment should be 80% and climbing or the environment will but RUINED.
As far as the deficit goes we just need to get the rich. The Republicans let them keep it all and pay nothing and we need to take it back!
Your history is a fiction. Trading markets have been turbulent battlegrounds forever. The hundredth anniversary of the biggest implosion of them all will arrive in a few years. There were no HFTs in 1929.
Your problem is that you've been trained to believe that fiction — that the market is supposed to be a fair, peaceful place where no one gets hurt and everyone plays by the rules.
The markets aren't safe. They're not supposed to be. That's why things that require safety don't belong in markets. Things like deposit banks and pensions and endowments. We no longer abide that wisdom because everyone is convinced that anything less than 8%+ return is just too little.
When reality inevitably asserts itself and trillions in jeopardized wealth vanishes they wail and gnash at their government to 'do something.' Thus we erect vast zombie regulators and quasi-government institutions filled with porn browsing lawyers.
You can't make trading safe. It's like the Internet; censorship is perceived as damage and is routed around. Traders are the same way; they'll just take whatever capital you permit them to whatever venue offers the least impediment — fairness and rules be damned.
First, you need more peak energy production with solar
Yep. Solutions exists for this but they are expensive and they look a lot like large industrial operations that we no longer tolerate in the US.
Second, that sounds like it's estimating some pretty low
The ratio (1E9 GW / 700k) isn't that far off. It has a bit of greeny BS built in (reality is more like 1E9 GW / 500k) but it's not too absurd.
The real problem with all of this is that it won't be permitted. This is why we won't be building out thousands of gigawatts of solar, or anything else. BANANA; Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
The US is a silo'ed backwater. We're going to offset some of our coal with gas and then stop. That is the power system you will have from now till you're long dead. A solar based energy economy will be built, it just won't be in the US.
Even if one accepts the claim that the US is a privacy liability, that claim is orthogonal to whether other nations impede US services with protectionism — those two possibilities may coexist just fine. Despite this obvious fallacy the parent characterizes the latter as a `blatant lie' while citing nothing credible.
Please try not mod this nonsense up. I know we're supposed to indulge privacy outrage around here but the parent is crap. Find some other, less stupid malcontent to amplify.
In summary: there are stupid questions, like "who really invented the Internet?"
What is worse; asking who invented it or taking exclusive credit for it to rationalize a statist agenda? The latter precipitated the former, just so we're clear about where this bit of stupid erupted.
"The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet — so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." - Barry
Phenomenal prosperity created the Internet. It supplied a military industrial complex with the conceit to believe such a thing was necessary and the spare wealth to attempt it. It also supplied a civilization full of consumers with the power, equipment, leisure time and disposable income to make the Internet a popular alternative and successor to all the other forms of media (phones, radio, television, cable, records, DVD, etc.) they previously indulged.
Google banned all firearm related products from Google Shopping not two weeks ago. Some of you are indulging an idealized `do no evil' Google from 2001. Google censors whatever it's told to and whatever it doesn't like whenever it wants. There may be some vestige of reluctance to censor within Google, but it's not bothering anyone.
See the National Cable Television Association, top 25 [Cable/Satellite companies] by subscribers.
The one at the top there, Comcast, has 22.2E6 paying cable TV subscribers. Netflix passed that number over a year ago. As of the end of Q2 2012 Netflix subscribers amount to more than 25% of the sum (97.5E6) of all US cable TV and satellite subscribers.
We're waaay past a couple percent. Never mind Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.
Cable TV is losing customers across the board. Comcast has been losing cable TV subscribers for over 40 consecutive months. Netflix predicts a total of 7 million new subscribers in 2012, and they're on track to hit that. Do the math. Inside about 48 months Netflix will have a subscriber base equal to half of the all cable TV subscriptions. That is assuming no acceleration in Netflix subscriber growth and no acceleration in cable decline, both of which may be bad assumptions.
Settling for 20% vs 30% is mere negotiation. I'm convinced DirecTV could have gotten more; they had public sentiment and an apparently loyal customer base that was willing to hold out longer. Taking Viacom down another 5% or 10% was possible, I believe, with no risk of angering anyone outside the Viacom boardroom.
The most important outcome by far is this; There was no DirecTV subscriber exodus for lack of Viacom content. People like Redstone will increasingly find themselves facing big carriers willing to forego content to get better deals.
Remember what happened to Netflix when they raised rates? They got schooled by their subscribers. Now they shed overpriced content (Starz, for instance) and leave the rates alone. They'll pick up seven million new subscribers in 2012. Most of those are refugees from carriers that haven't learned the lessons.
This is the Big Content bubble popping. Enjoy your paycut, Hollywood. It's been a long time coming.
Redstone et al. at Viacom got exposed to a big hot reality beam during the last two weeks.
The chronology of events is astonishing to me. Viacom pulls their content from DirecTV. DirecTV actually argues that their subscribers can get their Daily Show fix from the Internet thereby introducing millions of dearly paying subscribers to a delivery platform they had previously slouched away from. Viacom reacts to this by briefly pulling their content off the Internet, punishing millions of people that have never subscribed to DirecTV. Under pressure by their streaming advertisers and outraged Internet audience Viacom relents and puts the content back up!
DirecTV should have held out longer. Viacom blinked when they discovered they couldn't abuse their audience with impunity. That's when you're supposed go for the jugular.
Very little — in terms of cost. The energy is produced at low cost in places devoid of meaningful regulatory oversight and the finished product is sent to me duty free on a boat. This arrangement enables me to be an uncompromising and morally scrupulous advocate of each and every existing or proposed limit on domestic industry while still enjoying the benefits of industrial production.
I agree that high frequency ARMv7s aren't going to put a POSIX stack in every light bulb. Power consumption and the need for external components are just two obvious things precluding that.
... and the smaller microcontrollers will grow to replace ARM in the embedded segment.
For my purposes recent ARM designs are replacing the smaller MCUs. I love the fact that a bog standard 32 bit GNU tool chain is entirely sufficient because the MCU is a straightforward 32 bit thumb2 environment. That means no weird windows-version-x-only crazy-expensive proprietary tool chain that bit rots into obsolescence six months after your turn your back on it. This has a lot of value — enough to make up for the small and ever shrinking component price difference. Powerful on-chip debuggers are another huge win for more capable MCUs.
Where I have the choice I won't go back to the exotic ICE hardware and flaky proprietary tools endemic to really small MCUs.
NIF is, in part, a nuclear weapon stockpile research program. Substantial periods of the NIF operational calendar are devoted to defense research. This fact is frequently used to smear the program.
One common attack is that the fusion energy aspect of NIF is a cover for nuclear weapons research. How one is supposed to believe the US needs cover to do things it often does in public view I'm not sure, but that's the claim.
NIF offers the possibility, however remote, of abundant `clean' energy. As such it has a lot of enemies. Energy scarcity – self inflicted or otherwise – is an important enabler of hair-shirt statism.
Spain is also a fucked up mess. They've spent decades feathering their public services nest and now they're busted. They will spend generations wallowing in servitude to their creditors while public services get cut and cut again.
Short term thinking, people. It'll fuck you every time
Deficit spending is the epitome of short term thinking. Florida now has a relatively small budget deficit that should disappear entirely with a bit of economic growth. In the mean time some of these chronic dependents and their lists of ailments will enjoy less state funded coddling — we can't afford to indulge every fool that can't function without having his hand held by an army of social workers.
This whole story is just the CDC and the state funded medical industry resisting the necessary cuts. They've managed to trump up a 'health crisis' story using a single lunger and some FUD about the closing of one of a plethora of state funded facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
All the problems we are having with food production are directly related to factory farming.
We're not actually having any problems and the price fluctuations that are occurring are not caused by so-called 'factory' farming. The problem is that high yield agriculture is concentrated in too few places.
Consider hogs; 80.9% of all hog production comes from two places; the US and China. One is coping with an outlier drought and the other is dealing with a rapidly growing domestic demand for meat. That leaves the rest of the planet out in the cold.
The solution is rising prices. Nations and people that have complacently relied on a few "bread basket" sources of supply have discovered fresh motivation for producing commodities. There is a boom in S. American agriculture as a result. This phenomenon is planet wide.
This is ultimately a good thing. Less reliance on those few traditional "break basket" nations will create supply stability, to say nothing of the self sufficiency of new third world bread baskets.
You, being the rich, comfortable malcontent you've been trained to be, will see this as a tragedy, while you simultaneously accelerate the process with your ill considered policies. As with the evacuation of our industry, the evacuation of our agriculture to the third world has begun.
So go to work and dream up lots of new regulation for domestic agriculture in your home nation. Don't stop until anything more productive than a hobby farm has been eradicated. The rest of the world will take up the slack because people are going to feed themselves whether you like it or not.
I wonder if Larry and Sergei, both jews, would take issue with a video revealing just how insidious jewish activity is in global politics
Since there aren't any of those movies or books in the world I guess we'll never know.
Has no one else been wondering why Germany is being seen as a utopia with all of the answers, recently?
No. Germany is a prosperous western nation. Germany has its budget deficit under control. Germany has its trade balance under control. Germany financial laws minimized exposure to toxic debt. As a result, the effects of collapse of the debt bubble in '07-08, the so-called financial crisis, were much more limited in Germany, amounting to a total bailout liability of only about 5.5% of GDP. The costs to other western nations was/is much higher.
Among the many effects of this is that Germany still has the luxury of indulging new social programs. It is also the go-to repository of wealth whenever one of the unproductive and misgoverned PIGS needs to be propped up which gives Germany a great deal of influence in the EU.
In my opinion Germany has all of these things for three basic reasons;
First, Germany has managed to keep its spending under control. There are many public benefits and a great deal of wealth redistribution in Germany, but the Germans don't tolerate large accumulations of debt; if the revenue of the German treasury can't fund it the dependents don't get it. That includes the medical system and the education system.
Second, Germany has an industrial policy that isn't subject to certain veto by pressure groups and their civil lawsuits. This means Germany can make choices, like replacing nuclear reactors with renewable, coal or anything else they decide to use and it doesn't get killed by some judge. This attracts capital.
Finally, Germany protects its domestic industry and workers from unrestrained competition with Asia. Trade unions, businesses and governments can all, independently, pursue importers in court to enforce Germany's sovereign trade laws, and they do so with high frequency. This all somehow happens without statist punditry crying 'oh noes trade war!' The result is Germany has a fully developed industrial base and workforce that is very attractive to capital.
Wealth is important. Germany has consistently sustained real wealth creation since the end of of the Second World War through hard nosed trade policy, credible industrial policy and sound fiscal governance. It doesn't surprise me that Germany has earned some respect.
Apparently one of the guys you could rely on to show up to a tower fight.
Vile rat
Indeed, where did you get that date from?
I bought a Nexus S online from Best Buy four days after they became available. I know for a fact when they appeared. Wikipedia's date of December 16, 2010 is correct.
I've had my Nexus S for almost three years
Wow! How did you get one 16 months before they existed?
Nexus S isn't that old. Introduced Dec. 2010.
A worker's paradise indeed.
This isn't exclusive to China or other command economies. The US relies on a supply of transient, undocumented workers for its food supply. We use to have meat packing unions populated by citizens not falling off the low end of the income histogram. Now we have $0.99 Big Macs.
Do the affluent of today
You mean you and I right? The `affluent.' We are the customer. You're ranting on your Asian made system right now. Probably one of several. They aren't making a couple hundred and selling them for millions to the rich. They're making millions and selling for a couple hundred to you. And building a blue water navy with the proceeds.
Evacuating our industry to third world hell holes is a crucial part of contemporary culture. We, the affluent, are left to indulge our labor laws, environmental regulations, confiscatory tax policies and every other anti-industry, anti-energy, anti-business policy we can dream up, all while browsing our online retailers and big box stores filled with low cost goodies. But for Asia we would have to pay the cost of our high minded selves. We would have to weight the value of our environmental hysteria against our material desires.
Thankfully China and the environment are separated by a great big ocean so we don't have to deal with that.
The parent has the truth well in hand. Rural US is not what you think it is. This is not about shoe-less waifs huddled in plywood cabins. The sort of rural households that might benefit from 'universal internet' are typically well off.
Besides, this 'problem' is easily solved without a tax. Just open the right-of-way to competitors and then jump back and let the dirt fly as phone/cable companies suddenly discover new enthusiasm for complete coverage.
That solution does nothing to feed the statists, however. No opportunity to collect billions and then haggle over which politically favored constituency gets to play with it.
how exactly does economic growth solve
The 'poor' rely on benefits. Benefits are funded by taxes. Tax revenue increases with economic growth.
They're really not covering the basics in public school any longer, are they?
What are the alternatives to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security? Let the old, poor and jobless just die? Are you comfortable with this?
The parent offered one solution right off the bat: economic growth. Guess you missed that. There are damn few problems in the US that wouldn't be fixed by some actual wealth creation. Here are some others ideas:
2. Means test Social Security. Most recipients are fully enfranchised members of the wealthiest class of humans in the history of the species — the US elderly. Those SS checks are icing on their cake and they don't actually need as much as their getting, regardless of what they pay the AARP to tell your representatives.
3. Stop the crazy fast growth in medical costs. There are no solutions when the problem keeps growing 8% a year. AMA regulatory capture, trial lawyers and academic monopoly are the biggest parts of this.
4. Reform the tax code. You can't fund benefits when nobody is paying taxes. The lower half of the income histogram is paying nothing to the Treasury. The corps and the rich are skating by as well with byzantine tax law written by tax attorneys for tax evasion.. Lower rates and eliminate most of the deductions and exemptions with a net result of a few percent higher net revenue.
Do those four things and the problem is solved, assuming the saved/collected revenue isn't then used to buy votes with other new programs.
1. We do things that get the economy humming again. More economic activity means...
STOP TRYING TO WRECK MY ENVIRONMENT
We don't need any of your dirty bizzniss. Send it to China so it's not in the environment or near any children. I'm fine living with my parents and you should be too so the environment won't get ruined by people trying to prosper. Unemployment should be 80% and climbing or the environment will but RUINED.
As far as the deficit goes we just need to get the rich. The Republicans let them keep it all and pay nothing and we need to take it back!
Remember when...
Your history is a fiction. Trading markets have been turbulent battlegrounds forever. The hundredth anniversary of the biggest implosion of them all will arrive in a few years. There were no HFTs in 1929.
Your problem is that you've been trained to believe that fiction — that the market is supposed to be a fair, peaceful place where no one gets hurt and everyone plays by the rules.
The markets aren't safe. They're not supposed to be. That's why things that require safety don't belong in markets. Things like deposit banks and pensions and endowments. We no longer abide that wisdom because everyone is convinced that anything less than 8%+ return is just too little.
When reality inevitably asserts itself and trillions in jeopardized wealth vanishes they wail and gnash at their government to 'do something.' Thus we erect vast zombie regulators and quasi-government institutions filled with porn browsing lawyers.
You can't make trading safe. It's like the Internet; censorship is perceived as damage and is routed around. Traders are the same way; they'll just take whatever capital you permit them to whatever venue offers the least impediment — fairness and rules be damned.
First, you need more peak energy production with solar
Yep. Solutions exists for this but they are expensive and they look a lot like large industrial operations that we no longer tolerate in the US.
Second, that sounds like it's estimating some pretty low
The ratio (1E9 GW / 700k) isn't that far off. It has a bit of greeny BS built in (reality is more like 1E9 GW / 500k) but it's not too absurd.
The real problem with all of this is that it won't be permitted. This is why we won't be building out thousands of gigawatts of solar, or anything else. BANANA; Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
The US is a silo'ed backwater. We're going to offset some of our coal with gas and then stop. That is the power system you will have from now till you're long dead. A solar based energy economy will be built, it just won't be in the US.
Even if one accepts the claim that the US is a privacy liability, that claim is orthogonal to whether other nations impede US services with protectionism — those two possibilities may coexist just fine. Despite this obvious fallacy the parent characterizes the latter as a `blatant lie' while citing nothing credible.
Please try not mod this nonsense up. I know we're supposed to indulge privacy outrage around here but the parent is crap. Find some other, less stupid malcontent to amplify.
In summary: there are stupid questions, like "who really invented the Internet?"
What is worse; asking who invented it or taking exclusive credit for it to rationalize a statist agenda? The latter precipitated the former, just so we're clear about where this bit of stupid erupted.
"The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet — so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." - Barry
Phenomenal prosperity created the Internet. It supplied a military industrial complex with the conceit to believe such a thing was necessary and the spare wealth to attempt it. It also supplied a civilization full of consumers with the power, equipment, leisure time and disposable income to make the Internet a popular alternative and successor to all the other forms of media (phones, radio, television, cable, records, DVD, etc.) they previously indulged.
The atavist exploiting soft targets because the world fails to conform to his faith.
Google banned all firearm related products from Google Shopping not two weeks ago. Some of you are indulging an idealized `do no evil' Google from 2001. Google censors whatever it's told to and whatever it doesn't like whenever it wants. There may be some vestige of reluctance to censor within Google, but it's not bothering anyone.
Sure for a couple percent of people.
See the National Cable Television Association, top 25 [Cable/Satellite companies] by subscribers.
The one at the top there, Comcast, has 22.2E6 paying cable TV subscribers. Netflix passed that number over a year ago. As of the end of Q2 2012 Netflix subscribers amount to more than 25% of the sum (97.5E6) of all US cable TV and satellite subscribers.
We're waaay past a couple percent. Never mind Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.
Cable TV is losing customers across the board. Comcast has been losing cable TV subscribers for over 40 consecutive months. Netflix predicts a total of 7 million new subscribers in 2012, and they're on track to hit that. Do the math. Inside about 48 months Netflix will have a subscriber base equal to half of the all cable TV subscriptions. That is assuming no acceleration in Netflix subscriber growth and no acceleration in cable decline, both of which may be bad assumptions.
Settling for 20% vs 30% is mere negotiation. I'm convinced DirecTV could have gotten more; they had public sentiment and an apparently loyal customer base that was willing to hold out longer. Taking Viacom down another 5% or 10% was possible, I believe, with no risk of angering anyone outside the Viacom boardroom.
The most important outcome by far is this; There was no DirecTV subscriber exodus for lack of Viacom content. People like Redstone will increasingly find themselves facing big carriers willing to forego content to get better deals.
Remember what happened to Netflix when they raised rates? They got schooled by their subscribers. Now they shed overpriced content (Starz, for instance) and leave the rates alone. They'll pick up seven million new subscribers in 2012. Most of those are refugees from carriers that haven't learned the lessons.
This is the Big Content bubble popping. Enjoy your paycut, Hollywood. It's been a long time coming.
Redstone et al. at Viacom got exposed to a big hot reality beam during the last two weeks.
The chronology of events is astonishing to me. Viacom pulls their content from DirecTV. DirecTV actually argues that their subscribers can get their Daily Show fix from the Internet thereby introducing millions of dearly paying subscribers to a delivery platform they had previously slouched away from. Viacom reacts to this by briefly pulling their content off the Internet, punishing millions of people that have never subscribed to DirecTV. Under pressure by their streaming advertisers and outraged Internet audience Viacom relents and puts the content back up!
DirecTV should have held out longer. Viacom blinked when they discovered they couldn't abuse their audience with impunity. That's when you're supposed go for the jugular.
Do you realise how much energy it takes
Very little — in terms of cost. The energy is produced at low cost in places devoid of meaningful regulatory oversight and the finished product is sent to me duty free on a boat. This arrangement enables me to be an uncompromising and morally scrupulous advocate of each and every existing or proposed limit on domestic industry while still enjoying the benefits of industrial production.
I agree that high frequency ARMv7s aren't going to put a POSIX stack in every light bulb. Power consumption and the need for external components are just two obvious things precluding that.
... and the smaller microcontrollers will grow to replace ARM in the embedded segment.
For my purposes recent ARM designs are replacing the smaller MCUs. I love the fact that a bog standard 32 bit GNU tool chain is entirely sufficient because the MCU is a straightforward 32 bit thumb2 environment. That means no weird windows-version-x-only crazy-expensive proprietary tool chain that bit rots into obsolescence six months after your turn your back on it. This has a lot of value — enough to make up for the small and ever shrinking component price difference. Powerful on-chip debuggers are another huge win for more capable MCUs.
Where I have the choice I won't go back to the exotic ICE hardware and flaky proprietary tools endemic to really small MCUs.
Nothing to do with weapons.
NIF is, in part, a nuclear weapon stockpile research program. Substantial periods of the NIF operational calendar are devoted to defense research. This fact is frequently used to smear the program.
One common attack is that the fusion energy aspect of NIF is a cover for nuclear weapons research. How one is supposed to believe the US needs cover to do things it often does in public view I'm not sure, but that's the claim.
NIF offers the possibility, however remote, of abundant `clean' energy. As such it has a lot of enemies. Energy scarcity – self inflicted or otherwise – is an important enabler of hair-shirt statism.
Show me SOMETHING that is made inthe USA.
Here is something. 100% US manufacture.
Your point is well taken, however. We don't make much here anymore, unless you count government. We make a lot of that.
Spain has a robust social security program
Spain is also a fucked up mess. They've spent decades feathering their public services nest and now they're busted. They will spend generations wallowing in servitude to their creditors while public services get cut and cut again.
Short term thinking, people. It'll fuck you every time
Deficit spending is the epitome of short term thinking. Florida now has a relatively small budget deficit that should disappear entirely with a bit of economic growth. In the mean time some of these chronic dependents and their lists of ailments will enjoy less state funded coddling — we can't afford to indulge every fool that can't function without having his hand held by an army of social workers.
This whole story is just the CDC and the state funded medical industry resisting the necessary cuts. They've managed to trump up a 'health crisis' story using a single lunger and some FUD about the closing of one of a plethora of state funded facilities.