I use the Post Office quite often with my small business, and it actually works quite well. It's faster than Fedex, and much cheaper too for small (less than 2 pounds or so) packages. For $1.75, I can ship a 3-ounce package across the country to someone's home in 3 days, sometimes faster. Let's see Fedex do that.

FedEx can't do that because it is legally prohibited from charging less than the post office, and is prohibited from carrying non-urgent mail.

However, you should know that FedEx carries all the Post Office's urgent/priority mail. Which means by definition the post office is not faster than FedEx and (at least for urgent packages) the post office isn't cheaper than FedEx is capable of providing that service for.

I use the Post Office quite often with my small business, and it actually works quite well. It's faster than Fedex, and much cheaper too for small

Um, you do realize that the Post Office subcontracts their Express Mail and Priority Mail business to FedEx? So pretty much by definition it can't be faster to send something from the post office than via FedEx.

(It might be cheaper if they're passing along some sort of volume discount and/or accepting a lower service priority level than the FedEx default. But faster seems unlikely.)

quote:"In 2001, FedEx Express signed a 7-year contract to transport Express Mail and Priority Mail for the United States Postal Service. This contract allowed FedEx to place drop boxes at every USPS post office. In 2007, the contract was extended until September 2013. USPS continues to be the largest customer of FedEx Express."

Also, unless he builds it in international waters too (using money he has yet to allocate), how is he going to manage to get it through territorial waters into international waters to begin with?

Build it in a shipyard and float it out to where you want it to be, same as you'd do for an oil platform or a flotel or a floating runway or any other large floating structure. If it needs to be flagged for the journey, fly a flag of convenience during the trip. Liberia or Panama would do fine for the construction and initial move.

Probably work fine afterwards too, for most purposes - it depends on what you want to do with the thing.

The overhead of paying taxes to the existing government is small change compared to the running costs of an off-shore sea platform.

A big cost of doing business on land is that you have to pay the Government Tax. A big cost of doing business on the ocean is that you have to pay the Sea Tax.

The Government Tax is political. It's roughly proportional to your income and the tax rate tends to increase over time. So as time goes on and your business grows, the Government Tax keeps getting more expensive in absolute terms.

The Sea Tax is technological. A large fraction of it is a one-time investment and there are huge economies of scale, meaning the more space you need at sea, the cheaper it gets per square foot to provide it. Technological advances keep reducing the cost of the Sea Tax - every year it's a bit less expensive than it was the previous year to provide an equivalent level of comfort and services at sea. The Sea Tax is very expensive but keeps getting cheaper in absolute terms.

Currently the Sea Tax is hefty, but over time as the Sea Tax declines and the Government Tax continues to maintain or increase, eventually it'll make economic sense to literally "offshore" some businesses. Even if it doesn't make sense just yet, it will.

You don't need sovereignty to accomplish the "office park" idea, all you need for that is a flag of convenience. Any flag of convenience. The exact same thing that lets cruise ships offer gambling when in international waters also lets a boat or platform be an offshore office park, given sufficient demand for that service. There's very little practical difference between a floating outpost "being its own nation" or just flying under the flag of some random nation that doesn't mind letting it do what it wants.

How about NYC taxi medallions? That's a currency that expands even *less* than bitcoins - there are fewer medallions now than in 1937 so the value of one is roughly $600,000 USD. If only you could spend fractions of one...

The Valdez spill was right next to the shore, so the *concentration* of oil was extremely high. Even though there's more oil being spilled now, the fact that it's being spilled a hundred miles offshore means the oil has weeks to spread out and evaporate and degrade by natural processes before it hits any coastline. That is very different. The concentration of oil is lower (both in and on water) and the degree to which it comes to land somewhat "pre-digested" is higher, both of those are by orders of magnitude. In short, Valdez may not be the best comparison point.

[Michael Mann's] original hockey stick graph [...] has been substantially borne out by any number subsequent studies using different data sets.

No it hasn't. At least, not if by "different data sets" you mean data sets that don't intersect with his. The long-term hockey-stickness of the result comes from just a few of the same cherry-picked proxy sets reused over and over again in slightly different combinations.

Suppose Mann does a study using ten data sources including one that goes back a long time and has a hockey-stick signal - say, the Graybill bristlecone series - and nine others that just contribute noise to the mix. If some other researcher does a study that *also* includes Graybill's strip-bark bristlecone pines (a type of data that the National Academy of Sciences said "should be avoided") but swaps out one or more of the nine "random noise" series, it'll probably still have a similar shape. That doesn't mean Mann's conclusion was correct. It might just show GIGO. The output is related to the input.

One problem here is that we don't have a lot of really long data sets. The few we do have have been snooped and massaged a hundred ways - researchers *already know* what shape they have in the inputs before they do the analysis. Reusing data sets invalidates a lot of the standard verification statistics.

Another problem is that the people doing these studies don't seem to be specifying clear and objective input criteria. The researchers just pick a bunch of series they happen to have convenient access to. So there's no way to exclude the possibility that unconscious biases encouraged selection of input sets that specifically got the results they wanted. The fact that by coincidence they keep reusing the *same* sets over and over even when others are available does tend to argue in that direction.

Another problem is that different people are using different definitions of "hockey stick" and what it means for one result to be "like" another. RealClimate likes emphasizing the "blade" part, so for them it seems like even borehole studies that only go back to 1600 are said to"confirm" a HS, even though all that shows is it's warmer now than it was in the Little Ice Age - which no skeptic ever doubted. For the skeptics the main issue is with the "shaft" part - how large was the variance over the last two thousand years? Long-term proxy studies that get their main shape from tree rings tend to be flat in the past because tree rings aren't good long-term temperature proxies, tend to have a sudden upswing in the modern era because some sort of "calibration" step or arbitrary ad-hoc selection data-snooped the choice of a particular set of trees that happen to have a recent growth pulse, and don't drop again at the end because the last bit of data ("regression towards the mean" in a set that suddenly jumped due to a random growth pulse) is arbitrarily discarded and replaced with the instrumental record ("Mann's trick" to "hide the decline"). Long-term (thousand-year or longer) proxy studies that don't get their primary shape from tree rings tend to show a larger variance in the past, a warmer MWP (roughly as warm in 1000-1100 as in recent decades), and a colder Little Ice Age than Mann found.

One example of a study that doesn't rely on tree rings for its fundamental shape is Moberg: Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data Nature, Vol. 433, No. 7026, pp. 613 - 617, 10 February 2005. Quote: "According to our reconstruction, high temperatures - similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990- occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue. Here's the reconstructed shape found by Moberg (gif). This study was criticized by the RealClimate gang; Moberg's response to these criticisms is this followup study. Quote: "Hence, the M05 approach does not routinely inflate low-frequency variance."

Another example is the Loehle Study. RC also criticized that one and Loehle wrote a followup study which fixed all their concerns and had substantially similar findings, but the corrected version seems to be behind a paywall. eg, here. Here's the reconstructed shape found by Loehle (gif).

When I had a house built back in 1998, "Solatube" lighting was one of the build options. From this pictures, this looks like the same thing with a slightly different input lens for a system like this:

http://www.solatube.com/residential/product-catalog/brighten-up-series/index.php

I bought one to brighten a dark bathroom. It was nice. pretty much the same effect as a skylight, but it worked even where there was an attic in the way that would make a standard skylight unworkable.

Have you looked at their sample code? The apps people have put in the App store so far using this stuff aren't very good yet but the general approach looks promising.

As a former Newton developer, I found developing for iPhone so tedious and needlessly complex that it just wasn't fun. It's great that the iPhone SDK is free, but I'd rather pay hundreds of dollars for it in exchange for a decent development experience. The Newton Toolkit was something like $700 but worth every penny in terms of the amount of effort it saved developers; it Just Worked. It made the simple things easy and the hard things possible. Whereas the iPhone SDK environment is powerful almost entirely at the expense of ease-of-use; simple apps are far more complex than they need to be. In particular, both the Interface Builder and the DRM stuff seem very poorly integrated with XCode, providing many opportunities for things to break in confusing ways.

If paying these guys $99 means I can make a usable iPhone app without spending much time in XCode, Objective C or Interface Builder, that seems like a huge win to me.

IPCC corrected the error relying on one person's speculation in some paper.

How, exactly, did they "correct" it? If you download the report right now, will that mistake have been fixed? No? Okay, is there an officially-maintained errata somewhere you'll find the correction in? No? Then what do you mean by the claim "IPCC corrected the error"?

That sounds like a good system your daughter is in. My general sense is that the school system needs more experimentation generally. Best case, you happen on something that works better and other people copy it, worst case you end the experiment and try something else.

I remember once reading about a system that was supposed to have existed about a century ago - I can't remember the name associate with it - but it was a school system that was mostly aimed at teaching the poor. It was a lot like the montessori system except it was really cheap by virtue of having about a thousand-to-one student-teacher ratio. It scaled much the way karate schools still scale today - there's one master teacher who teaches a group of senior students, who teach less senior students, and so on down the line. In this system, you weren't judged to have really mastered a subject until you've taught it to somebody else, so it taught teaching as well as learning. That would be a great system to experiment with but I suspect the teacher's unions would never allow it in a public school. (Near as I can tell, public schools are mostly run for the benefit of the teachers, not the kids.)

Almost a polar opposite approach is the Sudbury Method, where you just let the kids learn what they want from who they want in an organic fashion. But age-mixing seems like a big part of the secret sauce for all of these. It just strikes me there's something fundamentally *wrong* about the idea that every kid needs to learn the same subjects in the same order at the same time as every other kid the same age. Kids aren't interchangeable parts. They'll have different aptitudes and interests; they'll want to race ahead in some areas and fall behind in others and *that's okay* as far as I'm concerned. A good school system should embrace the ability to do that. Even if it means teachers are a little less powerful.

What we have to ensure is that this program doesn't fall prey to overzealous parents - especially in the "everyone is a winner" mentality that we currently possess in America. I guarantee that if this gets passed there will be an outcry of "my child shouldn't be discriminated against. (S)he should be able to head to college too at this grade!"

Which...would be awesome! It might be the start of a trend towards everyone wasting fewer years being babysat before they go get real credentials and real jobs and a real life. Then maybe we can slice a couple years off grade school too while we're at it. I'm really failing to see a down side here. Ultimately we could have mixed-age classrooms with a fair bit of self-paced learning and students helping their peers keep up. From which kids leave "when they've learned enough" rather than because the earth has orbited the sun a specified number of times since they arrived.

Maybe you think that wouldn't work as well as what we've got now, but isn't it worth trying?

>>there's been a rising cost of disasters due to more CO2

>This is based on the story by Jonathan Leake, I'm guessing. The IPCC report said that one study indicated there was an increase in costs due to AGW while other studies did not detect a trend. So the IPCC report was balanced. Isn't that what people want?

The IPCC based their claim on a preprint, unpublished, non-peer-reviewed article which, when eventually published, did not show a trend. The IPCC ignored actual peer-reviewed articles that showed no trend to do this. And maintained this position despite complaints by the "expert reviewers", going so far as to misrepresent the view of one of the scientists (Pielke) whose work had found no trend. So the IPCC report was *not* balanced on this subject. "balanced" would have been to show the *actual* consensus view of the peer-reviewed literature at the time: that there was no trend.

I'm not basing any of this on stories by Jonathan Leake. Leake wrote some stories based on what had been uncovered in the blogosphere, of which there's a lot more where those came from; the IPCC has responded with weak apologetics that included such silly claims as "only one error has been found".

> And here's the thing: when the IPCC is found to be in error, they correct it.

Your evidence for this is what, exactly? Like I said, there is no provision for correcting errors other than waiting for the next report to come out year later and hoping it gets fixed then. Even if they admit an error has been made, they don't republish the report fixing the errors and don't publish an errata listing them. Do they?

>That's something I don't see from skeptics.

Maybe you're following the wrong skeptics. My impression has been the reverse of yours. When people like Steve McIntyre or Craig Loehle or Ross McKitrick make a mistake, they admit it and fix it and redo the work to see if it made a difference. And they make their data public so anybody can check it. When people like Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt or Phil Jones make a mistake, they deny it and hide their data from critics and pretend the error doesn't matter or doesn't exist.