Inevitable, eh?

  * Jobs are lost as the middle class continues to bump along the path of
      downward mobility, as it turns out re-training a wheel-wiggler to
      some high-education computing job isn't as easy a transition as the
      move from horse reigns to wiggling that wheel was back in the day.
      And how many computing jobs does one exactly need? And how much does
      automation contribute to the rather low labor participation rate?
      Can't raise revenue if folks aren't working.
  * An hour drive? Ouch, car sitting. Hope you got a gym membership or
      something to help undo that damage. Meanwhile, how much do all the
      roads, sewer, electricity, and other services cost for those
      sprawling suburbs? They'll have to build up, or fall down. The amount
      of tax revenue from those sprawling nowheres connected by expensive
      car sewers ain't that great.
  * Drunk driving can already be solved by not zoning the boozing with
      massive, expensive parking lots. Stumbling distance, no car sitting
      required. Simple, inexpensive, and no money wasted on parking, roads.
  * Speaking of parking, it really is already quite silly. See Donald
      Shoup on the high cost of that. Reforms there are badly needed,
      though I'm going to imagine that the car sitters will not much like
      the results (fewer spots, actual market pricing instead of blindly
      following some quasi-religious document from the 1950s, etc).
  * How exactly will the roads be maintained? Congress is busy raiding
      the General Fund to prop up the quite insolvent Highway Trust Fund,
      states are slumped out dead over the "build new!!" lever and how
      about maintenance of what is already built? Uh, yeah, hmm. Not at all
      a pretty picture. And how many trillions is the American Society for
      Civil Engineers asking for in road funding? Can all those Walmart
      workers and Detroit mechanics who already cannot afford a car really
      afford yet more spending on roads?

I am afraid I must recurse myself from this discussion.

Short distance travel? Walk. Avoids the health risks of all that car-sitting. How is your road funding going, by the way? $65 billion in bail-outs to the delightfully insolvent highway trust fund, the industry slumped out dead over the "build new road" lever and crickets on the topic of funding basic road maintenance are a few of the blinking red warning signs I've noticed. Ah, hmm, looks like they'll be needing another "bridging the gap" road funding tax increase in Seattle, as the previous one has already run dry. And my oh my look at the potholes! Heh heh.

Well, if you like throwing money at symptoms, I guess this might help (how much will it cost?). Won't do anything for the broken road design, where the Federal manual literally defines a street as "see: highway." Speed on, car-sitters. Meanwhile, those looking for a less, ah, passive role in their daily transportation options might instead consider what the Strong Towns folks are saying.

the barista fumbled with the card for a few swipes, unplugged and replugged the card swipy thingy and then after a few more swipes and apologies, much as one would whack a misbehaving laundry machine with broom a bit, the magic went through. I paid with cash. I guess a few of the vendors at the farmer's market also take those swipy thingies as well (slowly...connection? no?).

The tight couplings to the power system and lord knows what all else is doubtless a Normal Accident waiting to happen, but the power is always on, packets always flow, and the data centers always run, right? — resilient. That's the word I'm looking for.

There is alien life. I believe they are called "Hungarians."

"Have You Ever Heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates?" ... "Morons!" "Really."

One problem with renewable generation would be the order-of-magnitude higher costs Germany has shelled out for renewables (same cost as building the entire French nuclear fleet) mostly to just replace the German nukes while still retaining a hefty appetite for Carbon. Another problem is the oops-not-yet-invented-nor-even-a-path-to-market of whatever your "better energy storage" might be (pumped storage is, well, the Tenn. Valley Authority were rather shy about the efficiency numbers of such when a coworker asked, and I guess there's a lot of battery research going on but that invention thing and being viable in the marketplace are still two rather important hurdles). Otherwise, I've certainly heard much of Hydrogen since those Caltech folks wheeled a Hydrogen car around their parking lot back in the 1970s, then shelved it. In related news, TEPCO is proposing a new coal plant for Fukushima, China in 2011 had 79% coal burn for their energy, and Carbon consumption since the 1990s has grown at a faster rate than renewable usage has.

A businessman and governor can certainly come to some sort of mutually willing and beneficial agreement regarding the management of, say, coal fly ash on the property of said business, perhaps in the area of how well all those expensive regulations and inspections are carried out, and Governor Pat McCrory did work for Duke Energy all those years. Oh, your downstream water is now a little polluted? Whoops, tee-hee! No crime, just two willing folks who came to an understanding, uh-huh.

The high cost of oil and low interest rates (and being completely and totally addicted to oil) are more compelling reasons why America went bonkers for Bakkenpuffs; the recent price dip should be a good test to determine just how resilient those producers are, and to see who is out swimming sans skivvies. Also, the population density is rather higher in Europe, which may nix or upsize the costs of any fracking, depending on where those hypothetical fields might be located (there was a recent 96% slaughter of the reserves projected for the Monterey Shale, fluffy optimism and bad data being hallmarks of this field), and the land usage rights would also need delving into. So whatever "new" methods there might be may not fly at all in the EU, assuming that there is profitable oil to be had—for example, how are those fields in Poland panning out? Hmm, hmm, "Fracking Setback in Poland Dims Hope for Less Russian Gas." Righty, then. Consider also the brutal decline rates of fracked wells; Rune Likvern has written several times on the "Red Queen Running" state required to keep the tight oil party flowing.

'The technology revolution that is "fracking"' is a curious claim (some would call it a lie), given that the technology is something like four to six decades old, and has been used to drill oil well before the recent high cost of oil (how about that global conventional crude oil peak back in 2005?) caused fracking to actually more than break even. Granted, "The high cost of oil revolution" would probably not sell copy, and the recent slide of prices will mostly put the hurt on one of the few bright spots (flaring pun included) in an otherwise stagnant or declining oil industry (the oil majors as recently as March were muttering something about the new "age of austerity" and "loosing their shirts" in natural gas).

Let's see, let's see...

02:15 AM cron job that did not run one Sunday, some important scheduled payments thingy, with other things then running expecting it had run, oh lord the manhours cleaning up and correcting after that disaster. Yep, servers were in US/Pacific, nice little time bombs left laying around for months until the pointless time wobble sets them off...good luck testing for that, hence the modern "just put it in UTC" to eliminate that class of problems. Alas, many servers still get placed in stupid timezones, or being so cannot be fixed (risk too high, bitrot, etc).

Then, at another company, the on-call got woken up each and every DST wiggle, because, you know, credit card latency was now 3600.00049996 seconds, or something, and hey! send pages! at who knows what hour; can't fix that software, legacy stack you see. On a positive note, the next version did run everything in UTC, thank goodness, but not after a few years of pointless, stupid, dumb pages.

Finally, there was the 2005 or so "energy savings" act, when they changed when the time wobble happened, and then everyone was spelunking around all the codebases, finding out how many custom date-time libraries had crawled into the systems (hint: lots) that all then needed updating. Maybe they found 'em all? Who knows, some reports might still be off by an hour, sometimes. Worst was the Exchange system, good fun post-change as they eventually threw up their hands and said "here's your new, empty calendar, good luck" and then 10,000+ folks were scavenging through old email invites to try to figure out who had been going to what meeting that was no longer there.

Probably seemed a good idea at the time. Isn't.

Incorrect, sir, I've RHEL6 systems with the traditional init that do sometimes randomly hang on NFS or tmp or lord knows what and need to be power-button-poked to get them to reboot, as requested. So, feature parity with systemd in that regard, if your claim is true. I have not yet moved anything to RHEL7, as there's been zero demand or need for it (Windows 8 on surface seems popular with the users; but hey there's always next year for Linux on the desktop, right?), and I think only earlier this week they fixed a local RHN satellite issue preventing access to necessary additional packages, plus there's that happy bundle of commercial CAD apps that would need to be got working on RHEL7, the typical sort of Augean shoveling the graduate student they probably aren't paying enough somehow isn't in a hurry to get neck deep into.

Startup time matters? Hmm. Let's see.

    15:11 up 39 days, 13:13, 5 users, load averages: 1.09 1.11 1.41

well that's my laptop, can't remember what I was doing 39 days ago or why I'd care how long it takes to boot, I could go make tea, or read a book, or whatever. Really not at all important.

Servers? Well, they may spend anywhere from ~2-5 minutes doodling around in the BIOS, so shaving a few seconds or whatever from the system boot time means they take about ~2-5 minutes still doodling around in the BIOS. If you've done servers right, there will be redundancy, so who cares how long server A takes to reboot when servers X, P, Q, M, and R are chirping merrily away. Sorry, but I'm just not seeing the need for speed.

    valen% uptime
3:22PM up 168 days, 14:53, 47 users, load averages: 0.58, 0.36, 0.34

Oh no! My slow OpenBSD server will reboot slowly when I upgrade to 5.6. Oh, the humanity!

The tired buggy whip trope is hilariously out-of-touch with the present situation. Switching from moseying horses about to wiggling a wheel, well, most anyone could and did make that change. Now, updating from mere wheel wiggling to data analytics or database administration or such, why that there probably requires a wee bit more spare time and training and learning and brainpower, and fewer will make that cut to those fewer jobs. I think some folks have been making noises about structural unemployment or the like, and the bell curve suggests that not everyone will via some magic whisk of a well-funded education wand meet those high skill jobs. What to do about such predicaments, well, the rich folks of Rhodes used to given direct cash payments to the poor, and there was the Roman "bread and circus" model ("The Economy of the Greek Cities", Léopold Migeotte), or there's always the social darwinism approach (mmm, cake!) and nothing particularly resolved yet from the "Discourses on Salt and Iron" days, but so these things go.

As for inefficient practices, I need only point to the lobster industry, whose hilariously inefficient capture process as compared to, say, the net-'em-all factory farming of fish (whose previously thought infinite stocks are somehow now collapsing) indicates that mere increased efficiency is not always the best of choices. Nor is forced inefficiency a good thing—I think Milton Friedman made some particularly boneheaded remarks in this area—but there are 7+ billion people who are usually happy to find and do meaningful work, even if it involves a shovel.