What I do wonder is why so many SWAT raids end in violence in the US when so many other countries just dont have that sort of problem. My guess is poor training.
Other countries don't have that problem because we don't send a swat team to investigate a routine 911 call, we send a patrol car and knock on the fucking door. Sure we have swat teams, we send them in to end confirmed sieges because that is what a swat team is trained for. Also the knowledge that everyone and his dog is armed to the teeth in the US encourages the cops shoot first and make up excuses later. If you ask me the cop who shot the kid in Ferguson was a coward, he panicked because he was alone and and could not control a black kid who was bigger than him. The last people you want waving a gun around like John Wayne, are fucking cowards.
The next thing you know, we get a law banning incandescents in refrigerators passed alongside more subsidies for corn-based ethanol fuel.
Off course, but that doesn't mean a regulation telling fridge manufacturers and importers to stop using incandescents is a bad idea. The US is the largest market in the world, California is the 5th largest all by itself. Efficiency regulations for manufactured goods in the US, and in particular California, can and do have a significant impact on the world market.
You mean the "environmental impact" of lowering the sea level in the Pacific
The environmental impact of any desal plant itself is that it dramatically raises the salinity of the water near it's outflow, the water is not lost from the normal hydrological cycle. You can minimise the salinity problem by not placing your outflow in a shallow bay. Wind, wave, and tidal power are ideal for desal plants since they are normally built near the coast, those built in deserts can obviously use solar. Unfortunately the one they built here in Melbourne was accompanied by a new brown coal plant which will only accelerate the unwelcome feedback loop between the climate and our species.
Desalination from seawater costs about 8.5 kWH / m^2. That is a lot of power.
I think you mean cubic meters, not square meters.
waste heat from existing power plants via secondary heat exchangers
Usable heat is already converted to electricity, that's the one thing a coal plant does best.
I see this sort of stuff all the time,
Been a C/C++ developer for 25yrs, in my experience this stuff is very rare in working code.
Normal workplaces are a lot better in my opinion.
I can only assume you have never worked in a male dominated blue collar job, such as a mechanics workshop, garbage depot, or a building site. I did that sort of work for 15yrs before moving to a white collar job. The first thing I noticed about working in an office was how polite most people are, the boss even says please and thank you. The second thing I noticed, the walls aren't covered with posters of semi naked women.
Thing is, TFA isn't about workplace behaviour, it's just some junk someone posted on the internet with the express purpose of becoming (in)famous for 15 minutes.
the mechanism by which the mind optimizes information directly, rather than through simulation
Your entire nervous system is a continuous feedback simulation of body/environment interaction that predicts ~0.25 seconds into the future and adjusts the chemistry of your body to react accordingly. Your mind is the self referential part of that simulation. Everywhere we look in the universe we see systems of enormous complexity emerging from matter and the simple rules of physics, many are also self referential in the sense they display a fractal nature or feedback loops, the human mind is no more or less "miraculous" than those systems.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne