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Comment The chain of technology (Score 4, Interesting) 195

Most of the world's oil technology was developed using coal power
Most of the world's coal technology was developed using wood power
Most of the world's wood technology was developed using driftwood and animal technology

and so on and so on. These gotcha-memes never really stand up to examination of any kind, much less close examination.

Comment Lifespan of cars in the future (Score 3, Insightful) 24

This type of supply chain breakage is why I think we have already passed peak automobile lifetime (cars built 1990-2010): in the future when critical parts fail there won't be any spares, and unless one is willing to take on 10s of thousands of dollars of firmware modding no workarounds either. I would not expect cars sold after 2010 to have lifetimes of more than 10 years or so.

Comment The Firefly (Score 1) 47

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Comment "Propping up"? (Score 1) 113

Unclear why one of the traditional routes of population increase in US states - for the last 425+ years in most states, closer to 525 years in what is now California - is deemed to be "propping up" the population. Almost as if there is an agenda and a narrative to declare more recent immigrants as not real citizens or not real people. As opposed to, say, a German family that immigrated to the United States in 1904.

Comment Sure glad the Bell System was destroyed (Score 5, Interesting) 157

In the Old Days(tm), say 1990, electric power companies depended on Bell System wires for the most critical protective relaying applications, and the Bell Operating Companies provided nine 9s reliability with latency approaching the speed of light. Television networks likewise: national distribution in as close to atomic time synchronization as was humanly possible.

Today one is lucky to be able to make a voice call from one medium sized city to another without dropouts, jitter, disconnections, and other digital voice garbage. Latency? Ha ha ha ha. Reliability? Not even funny.

Progress!

Comment Re:The glass was completely empty (Score 2) 34

As first described the Google glasses would have been very useful in industrial environment and for jobs such as railroad locomotive and airliner maintenance - having maintenance instructions automatically overlaying your sight picure based on what you were working on would be a great thing for productivity and safety. Problem is that would have been billions of dollars in development of the hardware and the pattern recognition software alone. Then maintenance documents (drawings, procedures, etc) would have had to be incorporated and the owners of that IP would not have been willing to participate except on an equal contractual footing. So huge upfront costs and no equally huge revenue stream for Google in sight (heh).

That said, the idea that a secretive recluse billionaire who made his money by stealing other people's PII might not realize that ordinary human beings do not care to be under a combination of Superman's x-ray vision and Thiel's tracking database 24/7 is... not surprising.

Comment Plenty of workers (Score 0) 115

I'm looking forward the legions of Slashdotters who will quit their work-from-home coding and data jobs to move to remote rural areas for 40 years and devote themselves to hot, uncomfortable, 60 hour/week physical jobs with the added bonus of up to 5 REM/year of radiation exposure operating nuclear power plants.

Comment Re:George Bush vetoed Little Timmy's future! (Score 1) 226

This is literally what "Two Santas" refers to. There is a name for it, and it is deliberate and intentional. Republicans don't overspend and undertax when they have power because they are bad at governing, they do it because they are evil, because it puts money in the pockets of their base AND it gives them leverage to harm their opponents when they lose power. It's a NOW and LATER, it is two Santas.

For anyone interested, this is the original article by Wanniski detailing "the Two-Santa Claus Theory of the political economy":

  • Wanniski, Jude. (1976). Taxes and a Two-Santa Theory. National Observer. March 6, 1976.

Original article reposted below on this page and discussed on this page.

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