California has been in drought for 9000 of the last 12000 years. It's the normal state there. Switch from avacado to chia, and you'll be fine.

The Midwest is another story. We've been planting our favorite foods there so long that we've destroyed the ecology of the place. Thus the "Dust Bowl" phenomenon.

But there is one way to deal with this- bunch grass grazing. It's working well in the Eastern Oregon Desert; but it's hard to manage.

Adapt, work with the ecology, not against it, with climate change, not against it. The earth will survive, human beings are not guaranteed to; but we do have one advantage- invention.

They were paid back a half a decade later by the parish they went to in San Francisco being vandalized during the Prop 8 debate. That's one of the reasons why I'm not very sympathetic to homosexuals, I've seen how they treat their friends.

And I'm saying it's very easy to be a bad manager. It's even easier to be a "bad manager" in the sense that those who work for you think you're a bad manager.

I know of only one desert on earth that is entirely life free, and it's prevented from having rainfall by elevation (it's higher than most clouds, and in the rain shadow of the Andes which are even higher and prevent weather patterns from reaching there- hasn't had rainfall in 10,000 years).

Global climatic climate change droughts are different, they're more of the flash flood once in a blue moon variety, more like Death Valley in California- where the Native Americans have been agricultural for centuries, just on foods you won't eat.

And that is the real key. We have to get *real local* to survive this.

Cost? Responses to global climate change have nothing to do with cost.

You also misunderstand the main use of urban farming: increasing vegetable biomass is the point, not eliminating agricultural chemicals. Increase the vegetable biomass and you *will* remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and replace it with oxygen, that's how plants breathe.

http://www.towergarden.com/ is usable on household scale in high density urban areas.

Poor Japanese fishermen have been seasteading for centuries, using bamboo as their primary construction material. And yes, barnacles do get on everything, but once again, plant mass is the answer- when your mooring post grows faster than the barnacles attack.....

I said libertarian, not conservative. Left wing libertarians do exist, you know. And common carrier laws have been a part of their mantra ever since the Pony Express, it wasn't exactly internet related.

I'm glad you haven't met such a sorry man, I have a couple of times. They strive to be, but priests and monks fail like the rest of us, sometimes spectacularly.

Having said that, the group I'm thinking of is now long gone; they volunteered in 1991 to be a control group for an AIDS infection study. They're all dead now, but their generous donation of their lives is why we have HIV drugs today.

I've worked for one company that I thought did a rather smart thing: They separated out the "manager" and "boss" roles.

So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group. The "boss" was a rather technical guy who was not good at managing, and did not want to manage, and who mostly worked as part of the team. The "manager" was treated more as a resource to keep the group working effectively, and really wasn't "in charge". For any substantial decisions, the manager would discuss it with the boss, and the boss would make a decision.

Admittedly, it was a small company doing a rather niche set of work, but it worked really well. There seemed to be something to the idea.

But according to that logic, you'd need techs all the way up.

Yeah. I've been a manager before, and if I'm being honest, I think I did a pretty good job at it. Relatively. Mostly.

But the guy who said, "It's too easy NOT to be." doesn't know what he's talking about. It's really easy to make a dumb managerial decision. It's really hard to be a good manager. For example, he says;

So great, now instead of being the absentee manager who doesn't know what's going on, you're the micromanaging asshole who calls constant meetings. As a result, you remember all the reasons why your project is delayed, but what are you going to do about it? Do you let the project be late? Do you cut back on the project goals? Can you throw more resources into the project to meet deadlines? Sometimes more resources don't work.

Sometimes you can push your people harder and get more work out of them. You don't want to do that all the time, because it has diminishing returns, and your people might hate you for it. They probably will hate you for it, but in doing so, you might be saving their jobs.

Now upper management calls you in. They're upset that the project is going wrong. You know it's because little bubble-headed Billy screwed up again. Billy is bad at his job. How much do you protect Billy, knowing that he really ought to be fired. Maybe you could throw him under the bus and get everyone else out of a jam, but that seems like a shitty thing to do. You prefer to be the type of manager that says, "This is my responsibility. The buck stops here."

But does Billy need to be fired? If you want to fire him, you're going to need reasons, and this could be one. He's a nice guy, and people like him. You're afraid of ruining the guy's life. You'd like to see him do well. Maybe you could sit down and have a talk with him, give him some help, and get him on the right track. That sounds great to you. You'd be a little bit of a hero, if you took this guy who's a bit of a fuck-up and helped him become a big success. You have a little fantasy about the whole thing: Someday, Billy is a big-shot millionaire, but he owes it all to you. That's a nice thought. Of course, you've tried the same thing with Peter last year, before eventually firing him. You really should have just cut your losses earlier, because everything you did to try to help Peter just fell flat. Ultimately, he wasn't motivated. Maybe Billy will be like that too, and you'll look back and say, "I wish I'd fired Billy earlier."

.... and Sorry about that. I went down a rabbit hole there, but I wanted to try to illustrate that these decisions aren't particularly easy. There are a bunch of competing interests, and there's not a clear "correct" answer. You can read books about management, with all their trite aphorisms. They might give some good examples of where other managers succeeded or failed, but the reality is that those examples worked because of context and chance. Often, the real lesson is that you have to be aware of all of the details and subtleties of your situation, sometimes ignoring conventional wisdom, try to find a solution that works in that exact, particular context, and hope for the best.

Your question is limited to existing technologies and platforms that are built around the assumption of 12/3Mbps connections at best.

Imagine a respectable percentage (or large enough market) where the network was reliably 2Gbps or more.

If the latency were low enough, there'd be less reason not to share multiple GB files on remote drives for editing locally, like agencies using Photoshop files between 700MB and 1GB large.

Hi quality VR conferencing might materialize if the machines connected to each other could exchange data at rates that today are considered too fast to do anything with.

Or what about existing or yet-to-exist distributed networks that might benefit from truly massive throughput? What would be possible with faster interconnectivity across great physical distances? Say 10Gbps. 100Gbps? 1Tbps? 2Exa bps?

Sure, none of those speeds even mean anything today let alone would be feasible in the current market, but hopefully you get my point, which is that the as-yet uncreated future technologies that would evolve and flourish under much faster and reliable Internet throughput can't be known in advance.

And like any resource rich ecosystem, you can bet that once those resources are there, someone and something will use them.

Yeah it'll be used for higher fidelity porn, more unwanted spam, and larger cat videos. But such a network will also be used for cool things like better medicine, more accurate physics, and more efficient manufacturing, in addition to stuff we can't know about yet.

Stop holding back the future by asking for comparisons from today.

Come on. Tell us how you REALLY feel.

; )