Yeah, even the stuff that people think of as being "clean" can carry serious risks. Big IC fabs -- and their high hundreds or low thousands of jobs -- are located on the outskirts of metro areas for real reasons. Even Singapore, as crowded as that is, manages to put a pretty large buffer zone around their big fabs.
On a larger scale, it does take a heavier environmental tool on the earth than dense urban settlement and transit use.
I wonder regularly how much heavier it actually is. Once you get to the point where you're going to have 315M people widely distributed in the US, with heavy beef consumption, and practice industrial grain farming as a diplomatic tool, you're pretty much committed to a heavy impact on the environment. The 2007 NRI estimates for the 48 contiguous states were 21% forest land, 21% range land, 18% cropland, and 6% developed land (the rest in other categories where use is more restricted).
And not even that long ago. 20,000 years was the peak of the last glaciation. Glaciers a mile deep, boreal forest as far south as the Texas Panhandle, plenty of megafauna.
Chances are good that at some point, they'll have to do spreadsheets. In some cases, long and involved spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programming is so bad there's an entire academic body of literature that's grown out of it (including conferences). Billion-dollar errors have been uncovered. The Reinhart-Rogoff flap went on for years.
Granted, as a programming environment, spreadsheets break a lot of anyone's best-practices rules. Still, some sort of training would be nice.
A pencil can be worth the money. I have two pencils on my desk. One is an old Pentel 0.5mm that I only use for tiny printing on my calendar. The other is a beat-up, scruffy Autopoint 0.9mm I've had since my father gave it to me when I was a teenager (he said he no longer used it). Autopoint is best known for making millions of these drab, almost indestructible pencils for the US government and giant corporations like the old AT&T. You can buy one that's essentially identical from Autopoint today -- for $9.95. That's not a bad price for a pencil you intend to still be using in 40 years...
I admit to a certain amount of sympathy for your daughter. My thing was pens, rather than pencils, and beginning as a teenager a modest but steady portion of my allowance and part-time earnings went into those. Although the notion of spending Mom and Dad's money directly on a pen, without having asked permission first, wouldn't have crossed my mind.
Is there an assumption in here that a blood donation as community service counts for more than the hour or less the process takes (check in, filling out forms, pulse/BP/iron content tests, the donation, and the waiting afterwards to see if you're going to go into shock)?
Word Perfect: I’m old school. You can have my Reveal Codes when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.
When I worked for the state legislature, I had to learn Word Perfect because the whole bill drafting/tracking system assumed it (and no, the General Assembly was no more interested in spending money to keep their own mission-critical software system up to date than they were any other of the state's mission-critical software). Some of the documents I inherited had been reformated over and over, for several years, by multiple analysts. I spent part of one summer inter-session removing cruft. I admit to some curiosity about what an MS Word document might look like if it had Reveal Codes. I suppose I could find out in newer versions, where the whole thing is XML underneath.
Next week, whole blood (I'm about a year out from getting my 10-gallon pin). They tell me that my veins are unsuitable for the apheresis machine for platelets-only.
I have noticed over the years that there are more and more ways that contact with the criminal justice system disqualifies you for donations. The original article that @oscar-gordon pointed to says, near the bottom, that almost all of these particular donations were eventually discarded.
Did those who were turned down by the blood-collecting organization still get credit? I've been a regular donor for years, and the list of reasons that get you disqualified continues to get longer. I'm pretty much their ideal donor -- healthy, happily married, averse to tattoos and piercings, and don't travel outside the US and Canada. The only thing that would make them happier is if I were O-negative rather than O-positive.
It had a Krugmanian view of the Internet, as there and not-insignificant but also not revolutionary.
Predicting the future was part of my job, at least off-and-on, for 25 years. Wired data networks are something I got right (mobile, not so much). In 1984 I predicted that personal processor cycles were going to get ridiculously cheap, and that connecting those to a data network would be revolutionary. In 1993 I predicted that TCP/IP would win the ongoing technology battle over which data network (even then, the telcos of the world wanted X.25 and ATM -- since I worked for a telco, this made me unpopular). I missed some things, though. I thought people would serve up content from their house, not load things onto a dozen different companies' servers. And I thought IP multicast would be really important. Multicast might still make it, if the backbone providers can ever figure out a way to bill each other for transit.
Alternatively, Colorado's TABOR amendment. In its original form, all tax rate increases or new taxes had to be approved by the voters. Year-over-year revenue was allowed to increase at the rate of inflation (essentially, Front Range CPI change) plus population growth. Reserves up to 2% of the budget could be held as a contingent against some emergency need. Excess revenues to be returned to the taxpayers in the year after they were collected. Borrowing across a fiscal year boundary requires voter approval.
It made the budget process at the state level much more... interesting. And yes, every problem you can imagine happening under those terms has happened. Some of the constraints have been relaxed by the voters, particularly at the local level. State-wide changes, not so much.
I am reminded of the small Iowa town where my grandparents lived. Up through the 1930s, the town's fortunes were based on the shallow local coal seams that provided fuel for two different Chicago-to-Kansas City rail lines. I remember asking my father once, "Why are so many of Grandpa's friends missing some fingers or a whole hand?" Easy to get a finger (or more) caught in the various gears in those days.
Those aren't the things that come to my mind right off, but say more. You might convince me.
The things that come to my mind quickly include Ben Nelson of Nebraska blocking certain things from the ACA, a non-negotiable demand in states like Iowa for grain subsidies of various sorts, immigration attitudes in light of the fact that sweeps through certain kinds of facilities like meat packing plants -- when I was a kid the packing plant in town paid a living wage -- always find sizable number of illegals working cheap (fines are just a cost of business to the big corporations).
The question though is how much leeway do you give red-state Democrats to thwart what the large percentage of the Democratic Party wants. Rural state Democratic types have a way of annoying the rest of the party.
I admit that my first reaction to this statement was outrage on several levels. I've decided to see the silver lining, though. This is a good thing for my western secession conspiracy. Big-city Dems east of the Mississippi can afford to discard the red and purple states of the Mountain West. The West Coast, and California in particular, we can cut a deal with. We sit on top of their water and power supplies. There's enough other common ground -- water, fire, federal land holdings, etc -- for us to work something out as a separate country :^)
Democratic leaning types and liberals seem to not like the bread and butter of retail politics that happens at the local political level except in large cities where they dominate.
I'm always a bit surprised that jumps from big city mayor to state-wide offices, a la Cory Booker in New Jersey and John Hickenlooper in Colorado, are not more common. Maybe I shouldn't be -- dominant city at odds with the rest of the state is a pretty common meme.
This is a good point. In states that provide statutory guidelines for district drawing, the most common ones are compactness (usually expressed as minimizing the length of the perimeters) and doing as little city and/or county splitting as possible. Such guidelines tend to keep the Democrat-heavy cities intact. The three Colorado Congressional districts in and around Denver look like a gerrymander. In reality, they reflect the current odd shape of the City and County of Denver, and a pretty simple split of the donut of inner ring suburbs that tries to keep cities intact.
Anyone interested in why there was such a pronounced blue swing in Colorado in the naughts should read The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado by Rob Witwer and Adam Schrager. (Full disclosure: I knew Rob Witwer while I was on the legislative staff in Colorado and he struck me as a bright guy.) Among other things, the Gang of Four largely invented the big data methods that Obama would adopt in 2008. Not that there hasn't been a general drift to the left in the (critical) suburban population, but there was some carefully directed pushing going on as well.
Clearly, but is improper transportation worthy of a felony? Can someone articulate the harm to others that was committed?
I live in a state where possession of a few ounces of marijuana is no longer a violation of state law. In a couple of the adjacent states, possession of the same amount is a felony, and unless you can cut a deal, will get you jail time. There's a short list of things that anyone driving to another state ought to have on their mental checklist. Is my stash illegal? Is the gun I'm carrying illegal?
Spend a day and notice everything that you touch/do that depends on electricity "just being there." Imagine how different your life would be if your electricity was sporadic, or not there. My Mom is old enough, and from a rural area, to remember when electricity arrived -- fascinating stories. Since you're staying away from policy, I won't go any farther than that. It's a really interesting experiment.
Anyone (who's sane, at least) says, "Of course policies, including no action at all, can fail. That's why we instrument them, and re-examine them from time to time." That may be biased. Every permanent non-partisan staffer I've known says that; politicians and their partisan staff, not so much.
All the permanent non-partisan staffers I've known are also big believers in the KISS principle.
Salem's Lot is the sort of thing I'm looking for. I first read it in my early 20s, finishing up in bed around 1:00 AM. Faced with the choice of (a) getting up to turn out the lights and having to walk back in the dark, or (b) pulling the covers over my head and sleeping with the lights on, I opted for (b). Wimp.
On “Linky Friday #137: Nixon’s The One”
Yeah, even the stuff that people think of as being "clean" can carry serious risks. Big IC fabs -- and their high hundreds or low thousands of jobs -- are located on the outskirts of metro areas for real reasons. Even Singapore, as crowded as that is, manages to put a pretty large buffer zone around their big fabs.
"
On a larger scale, it does take a heavier environmental tool on the earth than dense urban settlement and transit use.
I wonder regularly how much heavier it actually is. Once you get to the point where you're going to have 315M people widely distributed in the US, with heavy beef consumption, and practice industrial grain farming as a diplomatic tool, you're pretty much committed to a heavy impact on the environment. The 2007 NRI estimates for the 48 contiguous states were 21% forest land, 21% range land, 18% cropland, and 6% developed land (the rest in other categories where use is more restricted).
"
And not even that long ago. 20,000 years was the peak of the last glaciation. Glaciers a mile deep, boreal forest as far south as the Texas Panhandle, plenty of megafauna.
On “The Debate Over Millennial Employees”
More practically, you have to be able to at least read code in order to find the errors.
"
Chances are good that at some point, they'll have to do spreadsheets. In some cases, long and involved spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programming is so bad there's an entire academic body of literature that's grown out of it (including conferences). Billion-dollar errors have been uncovered. The Reinhart-Rogoff flap went on for years.
Granted, as a programming environment, spreadsheets break a lot of anyone's best-practices rules. Still, some sort of training would be nice.
On “In Which My Teenaged Daughter Burns Me”
A pencil can be worth the money. I have two pencils on my desk. One is an old Pentel 0.5mm that I only use for tiny printing on my calendar. The other is a beat-up, scruffy Autopoint 0.9mm I've had since my father gave it to me when I was a teenager (he said he no longer used it). Autopoint is best known for making millions of these drab, almost indestructible pencils for the US government and giant corporations like the old AT&T. You can buy one that's essentially identical from Autopoint today -- for $9.95. That's not a bad price for a pencil you intend to still be using in 40 years...
"
I admit to a certain amount of sympathy for your daughter. My thing was pens, rather than pencils, and beginning as a teenager a modest but steady portion of my allowance and part-time earnings went into those. Although the notion of spending Mom and Dad's money directly on a pen, without having asked permission first, wouldn't have crossed my mind.
On “Petty Cash & Creative Revenue”
Is there an assumption in here that a blood donation as community service counts for more than the hour or less the process takes (check in, filling out forms, pulse/BP/iron content tests, the donation, and the waiting afterwards to see if you're going to go into shock)?
On “Child Protective Services, 1877 edition”
Word Perfect: I’m old school. You can have my Reveal Codes when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.
When I worked for the state legislature, I had to learn Word Perfect because the whole bill drafting/tracking system assumed it (and no, the General Assembly was no more interested in spending money to keep their own mission-critical software system up to date than they were any other of the state's mission-critical software). Some of the documents I inherited had been reformated over and over, for several years, by multiple analysts. I spent part of one summer inter-session removing cruft. I admit to some curiosity about what an MS Word document might look like if it had Reveal Codes. I suppose I could find out in newer versions, where the whole thing is XML underneath.
On “Petty Cash & Creative Revenue”
Next week, whole blood (I'm about a year out from getting my 10-gallon pin). They tell me that my veins are unsuitable for the apheresis machine for platelets-only.
I have noticed over the years that there are more and more ways that contact with the criminal justice system disqualifies you for donations. The original article that @oscar-gordon pointed to says, near the bottom, that almost all of these particular donations were eventually discarded.
"
Did those who were turned down by the blood-collecting organization still get credit? I've been a regular donor for years, and the list of reasons that get you disqualified continues to get longer. I'm pretty much their ideal donor -- healthy, happily married, averse to tattoos and piercings, and don't travel outside the US and Canada. The only thing that would make them happier is if I were O-negative rather than O-positive.
On “When I Predicted 2010”
It had a Krugmanian view of the Internet, as there and not-insignificant but also not revolutionary.
Predicting the future was part of my job, at least off-and-on, for 25 years. Wired data networks are something I got right (mobile, not so much). In 1984 I predicted that personal processor cycles were going to get ridiculously cheap, and that connecting those to a data network would be revolutionary. In 1993 I predicted that TCP/IP would win the ongoing technology battle over which data network (even then, the telcos of the world wanted X.25 and ATM -- since I worked for a telco, this made me unpopular). I missed some things, though. I thought people would serve up content from their house, not load things onto a dozen different companies' servers. And I thought IP multicast would be really important. Multicast might still make it, if the backbone providers can ever figure out a way to bill each other for transit.
On “Petty Cash & Creative Revenue”
Alternatively, Colorado's TABOR amendment. In its original form, all tax rate increases or new taxes had to be approved by the voters. Year-over-year revenue was allowed to increase at the rate of inflation (essentially, Front Range CPI change) plus population growth. Reserves up to 2% of the budget could be held as a contingent against some emergency need. Excess revenues to be returned to the taxpayers in the year after they were collected. Borrowing across a fiscal year boundary requires voter approval.
It made the budget process at the state level much more... interesting. And yes, every problem you can imagine happening under those terms has happened. Some of the constraints have been relaxed by the voters, particularly at the local level. State-wide changes, not so much.
On “The Tommy Barlow Story”
I am reminded of the small Iowa town where my grandparents lived. Up through the 1930s, the town's fortunes were based on the shallow local coal seams that provided fuel for two different Chicago-to-Kansas City rail lines. I remember asking my father once, "Why are so many of Grandpa's friends missing some fingers or a whole hand?" Easy to get a finger (or more) caught in the various gears in those days.
On “Is the Democratic Party doomed, too?”
Those aren't the things that come to my mind right off, but say more. You might convince me.
The things that come to my mind quickly include Ben Nelson of Nebraska blocking certain things from the ACA, a non-negotiable demand in states like Iowa for grain subsidies of various sorts, immigration attitudes in light of the fact that sweeps through certain kinds of facilities like meat packing plants -- when I was a kid the packing plant in town paid a living wage -- always find sizable number of illegals working cheap (fines are just a cost of business to the big corporations).
On “Sunday!”
This faux conference presentation based on Blindsight was worth spending half an hour of my evening on.
On “Is the Democratic Party doomed, too?”
The question though is how much leeway do you give red-state Democrats to thwart what the large percentage of the Democratic Party wants. Rural state Democratic types have a way of annoying the rest of the party.
I admit that my first reaction to this statement was outrage on several levels. I've decided to see the silver lining, though. This is a good thing for my western secession conspiracy. Big-city Dems east of the Mississippi can afford to discard the red and purple states of the Mountain West. The West Coast, and California in particular, we can cut a deal with. We sit on top of their water and power supplies. There's enough other common ground -- water, fire, federal land holdings, etc -- for us to work something out as a separate country :^)
"
Democratic leaning types and liberals seem to not like the bread and butter of retail politics that happens at the local political level except in large cities where they dominate.
I'm always a bit surprised that jumps from big city mayor to state-wide offices, a la Cory Booker in New Jersey and John Hickenlooper in Colorado, are not more common. Maybe I shouldn't be -- dominant city at odds with the rest of the state is a pretty common meme.
"
This is a good point. In states that provide statutory guidelines for district drawing, the most common ones are compactness (usually expressed as minimizing the length of the perimeters) and doing as little city and/or county splitting as possible. Such guidelines tend to keep the Democrat-heavy cities intact. The three Colorado Congressional districts in and around Denver look like a gerrymander. In reality, they reflect the current odd shape of the City and County of Denver, and a pretty simple split of the donut of inner ring suburbs that tries to keep cities intact.
"
Anyone interested in why there was such a pronounced blue swing in Colorado in the naughts should read The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado by Rob Witwer and Adam Schrager. (Full disclosure: I knew Rob Witwer while I was on the legislative staff in Colorado and he struck me as a bright guy.) Among other things, the Gang of Four largely invented the big data methods that Obama would adopt in 2008. Not that there hasn't been a general drift to the left in the (critical) suburban population, but there was some carefully directed pushing going on as well.
On “Ryan Lizza Shows Why Republicans Can’t Nominate Jeb Bush”
Clearly, but is improper transportation worthy of a felony? Can someone articulate the harm to others that was committed?
I live in a state where possession of a few ounces of marijuana is no longer a violation of state law. In a couple of the adjacent states, possession of the same amount is a felony, and unless you can cut a deal, will get you jail time. There's a short list of things that anyone driving to another state ought to have on their mental checklist. Is my stash illegal? Is the gun I'm carrying illegal?
On “Two-Thirds of Idiocy Sabbatical Completed”
Spend a day and notice everything that you touch/do that depends on electricity "just being there." Imagine how different your life would be if your electricity was sporadic, or not there. My Mom is old enough, and from a rural area, to remember when electricity arrived -- fascinating stories. Since you're staying away from policy, I won't go any farther than that. It's a really interesting experiment.
On “The Toderonemy, Vol. I”
Anyone (who's sane, at least) says, "Of course policies, including no action at all, can fail. That's why we instrument them, and re-examine them from time to time." That may be biased. Every permanent non-partisan staffer I've known says that; politicians and their partisan staff, not so much.
All the permanent non-partisan staffers I've known are also big believers in the KISS principle.
On “Sunday!”
Salem's Lot is the sort of thing I'm looking for. I first read it in my early 20s, finishing up in bed around 1:00 AM. Faced with the choice of (a) getting up to turn out the lights and having to walk back in the dark, or (b) pulling the covers over my head and sleeping with the lights on, I opted for (b). Wimp.
"
Finished reading Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. I seem to be starting some sort of vampire kick. Do people have suggestions?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.