Canadian Politics Today

Beyond Politics => General Discussion => Topic started by: SirJohn on August 24, 2018, 11:32:10 am


Title: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on August 24, 2018, 11:32:10 am
An all purpose topic for whatever you come upon that seems interesting or noteworthy - or weird.

Like the fact that in a map of the world, showing the distribution of rats, there's a big blank spot the size of Alberta where there are no rats.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-stirring-story-of-how-alberta-became-the-first-place-in-the-world-to-banish-the-rat
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on August 24, 2018, 04:27:51 pm
An all purpose topic for whatever you come upon that seems interesting or noteworthy - or weird.

Like the fact that in a map of the world, showing the distribution of rats, there's a big blank spot the size of Alberta where there are no rats.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-stirring-story-of-how-alberta-became-the-first-place-in-the-world-to-banish-the-rat

I've lived in Alberta now for just over 10 years.  I always wondered about this claim Albertans make.......

Cool share, thanks!
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on August 26, 2018, 11:02:36 am
Are conservatives anti-science or are they anti-liberal scientist?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/its-not-science-i-dont-trust-its-the-scientists/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on August 26, 2018, 11:52:07 am
Complains about scientists, spends his whole column talking about sociologists.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on August 26, 2018, 02:20:07 pm
Complains about scientists, spends his whole column talking about sociologists.

 -k

Agreed! On the other hand, they do call themselves 'social scientists' and there arguments are often used as if they're 'settled science'. The numbers of liberals and lefties in many of the other fields, and he did mention ecology, are overwhelming, as well, and we've seen plenty of evidence of politicizing environmental science.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on August 28, 2018, 05:18:39 pm
Social science includes sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science and economics. It sometimes includes archaeology and history but it depends on the methods and scope of their projects.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on August 30, 2018, 07:06:36 am
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/08/29/after-decimation-of-the-crustaceans-lobster-tombstone-sought/

Lobster Memorial:

Quote
an animal rights group seeking state permission to erect a 5-foot-tall granite tombstone at the site of a lobster truck crash in Brunswick that resulted in about 7,000 pounds of live lobster being destroyed last week. Police didn’t know how many lobsters were in the truck, but assuming an average size of 1.5 pounds apiece would mean more than 4,500 lobsters died as a result of the crash.


An illustration submitted by PETA to state highway officials shows the proposed granite monument. Courtesy of Maine Department of Transportation

A memorial to the mass expiration of all those crustaceans would “remind everyone that the best way to prevent such tragedies is to go vegan,” says a letter from Danielle Katz, director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on August 30, 2018, 01:21:49 pm
The state said no but PITA got some free publicity which is probably what they were really after.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on August 30, 2018, 01:41:04 pm
Hey here's the good news, global warming has warmed ocean waters which has extended the breeding grounds for lobsters around our coasts. I am not vegan but I have moved away from eating a lot of meat, especially the red kind. But I say build that monument while I head off to the grocery store, seafood section, and I promise to be kind to those boys until I chuck them into the boiling pot. 
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 02, 2018, 11:31:02 am
From Sweden, the land of peace, calm, milk and honey. There is huge spending on public services and a budget surplus, almost no unemployment, and yet the Swedes are angry and getting ready to vote for a group that is variously described as fascist, racist and xenophobic. Why? Immigration and the violent crime it has spawned.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/swedens-political-panic-attack/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 02, 2018, 11:54:29 am
Funny how on another thread we were talking about tourists giving birth in Canada even though it's only a few hundred people.

How can immigration be seen as the source of strife and disunity when we admit that it's overemphasized?

What's the real reason?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 02, 2018, 12:36:39 pm
Funny how on another thread we were talking about tourists giving birth in Canada even though it's only a few hundred people.

Well, first it's not a few hundred people, it's likely thousands each year.

Quote
How can immigration be seen as the source of strife and disunity when we admit that it's overemphasized?

What's the real reason?

People are instinctively designed to be territorial and tribal. When you bring in large groups of people from other tribes it gets people's backs up. When that influx is seen as threatening local culture and when the elites in charge blithely ignore and dismiss, if not ridicule legitimate concerns it causes frustration which leads to anger.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on September 02, 2018, 12:39:07 pm
Well, first it's not a few hundred people, it's likely thousands each year.
The few hundred number was cited to STATCAN, your opinion about "likely thousands" is not.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 02, 2018, 03:02:44 pm
The few hundred number was cited to STATCAN, your opinion about "likely thousands" is not.

GIGO. Statcan can only base its numbers on what hospitals report, and hospitals, for the most part, are not reporting. Nor is there anywhere on the form to report citizenship. But if a Liberal MP says over 300 foreign births took place in one Richmond hospital in one year I don't think it's out of line to presume there are many more of them across Canada.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on September 02, 2018, 03:40:23 pm
GIGO. Statcan can only base its numbers on what hospitals report, and hospitals, for the most part, are not reporting. Nor is there anywhere on the form to report citizenship. But if a Liberal MP says over 300 foreign births took place in one Richmond hospital in one year I don't think it's out of line to presume there are many more of them across Canada.

And so if hospitals don't report, how then does this MP happen to just "know" the stats? Or is anecdotal evidence that suits your argument good enough for you yet again?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 02, 2018, 04:47:26 pm
People are instinctively designed to be territorial and tribal. 

Right - so why do you cede to populist emotionality in some circumstances and not others ?

When it's emotional defense of the Canadian way of life ... it could be healthcare, big business or immigration...

Trying to talk sense into people is always an option, or leading them from a knee-jerk reaction can happen too.

I think that I don't trust people's gut-level reactions ever.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 02, 2018, 06:31:31 pm
And so if hospitals don't report, how then does this MP happen to just "know" the stats? Or is anecdotal evidence that suits your argument good enough for you yet again?

This is off topic and there is already a discussion on this in another topic.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on September 03, 2018, 07:02:39 am
GIGO. Statcan can only base its numbers on what hospitals report, and hospitals, for the most part, are not reporting. Nor is there anywhere on the form to report citizenship. But if a Liberal MP says over 300 foreign births took place in one Richmond hospital in one year I don't think it's out of line to presume there are many more of them across Canada.
So then you don't know if it's happening or not because there is no verifiable evidence to back up the MP's claims. The appropriate stance isn't to run with this information and make wild speculations about immigration. The appropriate stance is to say that we need more information or better information.

For the record, the provinces are required by law to report all births in the country, even by non-resident women. So contrary to your claim, the data is out there and the problem just isn't what you seem to think it is.

Statistics Canada - Vital Statistics Birth Database
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=420279&dis=1

VSBD List of Variables (Notice: mother's residence as well as place of birth are listed)
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvVariableList&Id=420279&dis=1

This database can also be linked to the Census and T1 Tax Files, so mobility, citizenship, and everything else can be tabulated.

So the information is available. It also doesn't appear as though it's a very big problem and that the MP in question is wrong.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 06, 2018, 04:49:27 pm
Right - so why do you cede to populist emotionality in some circumstances and not others ?

Who says I do?

Quote
When it's emotional defense of the Canadian way of life ... it could be healthcare, big business or immigration...

Defense of the Canadian way of life is instinctive. And practical, in that I don't want the country turning into a shithole. My feelings about healthcare, big business and immigration can all be easily defended on logical and practical reasons.

Quote
Trying to talk sense into people is always an option, or leading them from a knee-jerk reaction can happen too.

Trudeau's idea of community buy-in for various resource projects depended on reasonable people discussing things with reasonable people and arriving at compromise. That was naďve, even childish, because the people on one side of the argument were and remain entirely uninterested in any kind of compromise. The same can be said about progressives on topics like health care, immigration, business, and the (sneer, sneer) Canadian (sneer sneer) way of life.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 06, 2018, 04:50:11 pm
So then you don't know if it's happening or not because there is no verifiable evidence to back up the MP's claims. The appropriate stance isn't to run with this information and make wild speculations about immigration. The appropriate stance is to say that we need more information or better information.

For the record, the provinces are required by law to report all births in the country, even by non-resident women. So contrary to your claim, the data is out there and the problem just isn't what you seem to think it is.

Statistics Canada - Vital Statistics Birth Database
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=420279&dis=1

VSBD List of Variables (Notice: mother's residence as well as place of birth are listed)
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvVariableList&Id=420279&dis=1

This database can also be linked to the Census and T1 Tax Files, so mobility, citizenship, and everything else can be tabulated.

So the information is available. It also doesn't appear as though it's a very big problem and that the MP in question is wrong.

You've already made these statements in another topic. There's no reason to make them again here.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 06, 2018, 06:30:37 pm
1. Who says I do?

2. Defense of the Canadian way of life is instinctive. And practical, in that I don't want the country turning into a shithole. My feelings about healthcare, big business and immigration can all be easily defended on logical and practical reasons.

3. Trudeau's idea of community buy-in for various resource projects depended on reasonable people discussing things with reasonable people and arriving at compromise. That was naďve, even childish, because the people on one side of the argument were and remain entirely uninterested in any kind of compromise.

4. The same can be said about progressives on topics like health care, immigration, business, and the (sneer, sneer) Canadian (sneer sneer) way of life.
1. I think I was thinking of your cite that most Canadians don't want to have foreigners giving birth in Canada, and having the baby declared Canadian.  And that being a reason to pass a law or take action somehow.

2. You just said that your "feelings" can be defended "logically".  Think about that a second.  Feelings and logic are two entirely different things.  I think you need to resolve that.  I get pissed off about things, but eventually talk myself out of it and realize it's my emotions acting.  Rich D-Bags in BMWs make my life hell but I don't demonize them, I recognize my irrational feelings and rise above.

3. Your side ?  Clearly your feelings are logical so you shouldn't HAVE to compromise - am I right ?

4. Yes, progressives are perhaps more guilty of being self-righteous.  I have been called 'too subjective' or bending over too far backwards, mainly because I engage with a wide range of opinions.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on September 07, 2018, 03:17:21 pm
https://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/man-fined-124-kicking-seagull-ate-cheeseburger-57650119

I think the headline pretty much covers it.

Quote
Man fined $124 for kicking seagull that ate cheeseburger
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 07, 2018, 10:14:37 pm
I'm not even going to click on it.  I will just be quietly sad.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 07, 2018, 10:25:26 pm
...

ok I'm over it now.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 08, 2018, 07:03:23 pm
1. I think I was thinking of your cite that most Canadians don't want to have foreigners giving birth in Canada, and having the baby declared Canadian.  And that being a reason to pass a law or take action somehow.

But who says its populist emotionality? Who says it's not just common sense? Why should we give citizenship to people who aren't Canadian?  The reason to pass the law to change the rule is because the current rule makes no sense and it puts obligations on us, including financial obligations, on behalf of people who are not and should not be Canadians. Is there some emotionality in not wanting to be taken advantage of? I suppose, but curtailing the law seems entirely  logical and involves no downside to Canada I can see.

Quote
2. You just said that your "feelings" can be defended "logically".  Think about that a second.

Would it make you feel better if I said my 'beliefs' about these things instead of my 'feelings' about these things? That is what I meant.

Quote
3. Your side ?  Clearly your feelings are logical so you shouldn't HAVE to compromise - am I right ?

The compromise made by those who support development has already been made. It involves massive expense, environmental safety regulations native consultation, environmental assessments, public hearings and years of fitting the proposed development into the regulatory framework and ensuring all the T's are dotted and all the is are dotted.

Where is the similar compromise on the part of those with environmental concerns? Rachel Notley thought that if she did her best to appease environmentalists, going all in on CO2 reduction, inserting new environmental regulations and such, the environmentalists would cut her some slack. They didn't give her an inch. Their stand is not one iota different than it was before she and Trudeau got elected. No pipelines. Ever. Under an circumstances. For any reason. No matter the assurances and safeguards.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 09, 2018, 10:29:10 am
But who says its populist emotionality? Who says it's not just common sense? Why should we give citizenship to people who aren't Canadian?  The reason to pass the law to change the rule is because the current rule makes no sense and it puts obligations on us, including financial obligations, on behalf of people who are not and should not be Canadians. Is there some emotionality in not wanting to be taken advantage of? I suppose, but curtailing the law seems entirely  logical and involves no downside to Canada I can see.

Ok, fair enough.  This is my subjectivity in action on my assessment.

Quote
Would it make you feel better if I said my 'beliefs' about these things instead of my 'feelings' about these things? That is what I meant.

Beliefs, emotions, feelings are all valid and in fact are the basis for how we act and communicate more than rational thinking.  But they need to be recognized as separate areas even if they intersect in the end.

Our beliefs and irrationality interact with our principles and rational thinking, and words and actions come out.

Quote
The compromise made by those who support development has already been made. It involves massive expense, environmental safety regulations native consultation, environmental assessments, public hearings and years of fitting the proposed development into the regulatory framework and ensuring all the T's are dotted and all the is are dotted.

Where is the similar compromise on the part of those with environmental concerns? Rachel Notley thought that if she did her best to appease environmentalists, going all in on CO2 reduction, inserting new environmental regulations and such, the environmentalists would cut her some slack. They didn't give her an inch. Their stand is not one iota different than it was before she and Trudeau got elected. No pipelines. Ever. Under an circumstances. For any reason. No matter the assurances and safeguards.

The compromise is that they drop objections to development, or at least enough of them do to allow the project to go forward.  As described some people will never compromise, for good or bad reasons.  Who knows why really ? Convincing them is more of a long term strategy.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on September 09, 2018, 12:22:12 pm
So, in the UK, a man was arrested for **** - not for the first time. After which he decided to self-identify as a woman. And, of course, with all-due sensitivity to his/her newfound rights, he was then assigned to a women's prison.

Yes, a man with a still very much intact and functioning ****, accused of multiple ****, was sent to a womens prison.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/why-was-a-transgender-rapist-put-in-a-womens-prison/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on September 09, 2018, 01:22:42 pm
on behalf of people who are not and should not be Canadians

Birthright of ancestry over geography; time for all the European invaders to go home.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on September 09, 2018, 01:34:12 pm
Birthright of ancestry over geography; time for all the European invaders to go home.

Yep, I guess I'll have to head back across the pond. I'm not so fond of neeps and tatties but I do like the whiskey. And I can fly the plane if need be. argus might be quite lonely in the future if he gets his way.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 09, 2018, 08:12:57 pm
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a34dme/this-guy-paints-the-sex-he-allegedly-has-with-aliens?utm_source=vicefbus

This man paints pictures of aliens having sex...

Having sex with him...

Based on his actual experiences...

Having sex with aliens...
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on September 09, 2018, 08:19:33 pm
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a34dme/this-guy-paints-the-sex-he-allegedly-has-with-aliens?utm_source=vicefbus

This man paints pictures of aliens having sex...

Having sex with him...

Based on his actual experiences...

Having sex with aliens...

Wow. That must have been some purple micro dot I'd guess.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on September 09, 2018, 08:34:41 pm
Wow. That must have been some purple micro dot I'd guess.

I don't think psychedelics can really give hallucinations to have degree, unfortunately.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on September 12, 2018, 04:44:27 pm
https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/friends-hung-poster-of-themselves-at-mcdonald-s-and-no-one-noticed-for-weeks-1.4079095

Funny. And harmless.
So much better than all those stupid challenges kids are killing themselves over these days.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on October 04, 2018, 11:44:15 am
So the Chinese have apparently been caught sticking chips onto motherboard manufactured in China for western companies. Apple and Amazon are denying it, but the US government isn't commenting. Bloomberg claims an extensive investigation shows China pressured Chinese manufacturers to install a tiny, barely visible chip on motherboards destined for the servers being assembled for a US company. They've apparently developed chips so tiny they can slip them between the layers of the fiberglass motherboard itself, rather than sitting on top. And since most computers are built in China, or at least assembled there that would sure as hell give them a lot of leeway to spy on anyone who purchases them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

Coincidental, or maybe not, to this, the Defense Department is trying to figure out how much of the new Arctic Patrol ships have gear sourced to China. Just because you're dealing with a US or Canadian company doesn't mean they don't build or assemble parts in China.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/arctic-patrol-ships-chinese-content-1.4849562
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on October 04, 2018, 03:36:02 pm
They've apparently developed chips so tiny they can slip them between the layers of the fiberglass motherboard itself

Yes, that is entirely possible. The problem is they still need to be wired into the circuits and that would be extremely difficult.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on October 04, 2018, 05:27:32 pm
I'm finding it hard to understand how this would work.  The operating system wouldn't see those processors though ?  I don't get it.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on October 05, 2018, 11:16:47 am
The irony... not to mention the blissful ignorance.

"I'm devoted to womens rights! And you **** better agree with me or I'll kick your ass!"

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/man-claiming-to-defend-women-s-rights-caught-on-cam-kicking-female-anti-abortionist-1.4121038
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on October 05, 2018, 11:29:34 am
I'm finding it hard to understand how this would work.  The operating system wouldn't see those processors though ?  I don't get it.
They hook in below the OS and potentially access devices directly but it is hard to see how they could do anything useful without exploits built into the firmware of the motherboard. This may be something like the heartbleed attack where 99.9999999% of the potentially collected data is useless just but once in a while they find something potentially useful.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Squidward von Squidderson on October 05, 2018, 01:53:08 pm
The irony... not to mention the blissful ignorance.

"I'm devoted to womens rights! And you **** better agree with me or I'll kick your ass!"

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/man-claiming-to-defend-women-s-rights-caught-on-cam-kicking-female-anti-abortionist-1.4121038

Sounds like assault.  Not that interesting really...
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on October 05, 2018, 04:18:39 pm
An a-hole.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on October 05, 2018, 08:47:44 pm
The irony... not to mention the blissful ignorance.

"I'm devoted to womens rights! And you **** better agree with me or I'll kick your ass!"

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/man-claiming-to-defend-women-s-rights-caught-on-cam-kicking-female-anti-abortionist-1.4121038

Shootings, bombings, arson at abortion clinics: "an isolated incident; a lunatic who is not representative of the pro-life movement."

Assault committed against pro-life demonstrator:  "typical of the intolerant left."

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on October 06, 2018, 11:34:38 am
Shootings, bombings, arson at abortion clinics: "an isolated incident; a lunatic who is not representative of the pro-life movement."

How many shootings, bombings or arsons have we seen against abortion clinics in Canada? Have there even been ANY?

Quote
Assault committed against pro-life demonstrator:  "typical of the intolerant left."

I didn't say it was typical of the intolerant left. I thought it was amusingly ironic to see a guy talking about how he supports womens rights attacking women for having an opinion contrary to his.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on October 06, 2018, 12:22:20 pm
How many shootings, bombings or arsons have we seen against abortion clinics in Canada? Have there even been ANY?

May 1992: Morgentaler's Toronto clinic is firebombed.

November 1994: Dr. Garson Romalis is the first Canadian doctor shot for performing abortions. He's hit by a sniper while eating breakfast in his Vancouver home. Two similar shootings follow in 1995 and 1997, first in Ontario, then Manitoba. None of the attacks is fatal.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/abortion-rights-significant-moments-in-canadian-history-1.787212


Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on October 06, 2018, 07:48:54 pm
https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/friends-hung-poster-of-themselves-at-mcdonald-s-and-no-one-noticed-for-weeks-1.4079095

Funny. And harmless.
So much better than all those stupid challenges kids are killing themselves over these days.

One of the best news stories of all-time.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on October 07, 2018, 01:18:47 am
May 1992: Morgentaler's Toronto clinic is firebombed.

November 1994: Dr. Garson Romalis is the first Canadian doctor shot for performing abortions. He's hit by a sniper while eating breakfast in his Vancouver home. Two similar shootings follow in 1995 and 1997, first in Ontario, then Manitoba. None of the attacks is fatal.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/abortion-rights-significant-moments-in-canadian-history-1.787212

Think of the irony happening here.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on October 07, 2018, 09:35:52 am
Think of the irony happening here.

What irony?

The three shootings are suspected by police to be the work of an American, presently in jail for life for similar shootings there around that time.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on October 07, 2018, 09:39:03 am
What irony?

I think it's about shooting people because you value life. 

But we sent people to kill Nazis.  And any one of us would defend ourselves. 

Louis CK:  “They’re so shrill and awful! They think babies are being murdered! What are they supposed to do? Well, that’s not cool. I don’t want to be a d*** about it though. I don’t want to ruin their day as they murder several babies all the time.”  (https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/louis-c.k.-says-abortion-is-murderbut-hes-cool-with-it)
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on October 07, 2018, 10:39:07 am
I think it's about shooting people because you value life. 

But we sent people to kill Nazis.  And any one of us would defend ourselves. 

And I'm willing to bet most of the pro-life crowd, at least down south, are fierce defenders of gun rights, own guns, and are ready to shoot anyone that comes to their door who looks 'threatening'.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on October 07, 2018, 10:46:37 am
Inconsistency abounds !  We all have to deal with our own and our societies'...
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on October 24, 2018, 12:58:19 pm
I don't know if this is interesting or just frustrating:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-human-trafficking-charter-challenge-cruel-and-unusual-punishment-1.4873288?cmp=FB_Post_News&fbclid=IwAR254mXL1Ba6fVY3INeZ4CKDfzu73nv4CnkQx-0JIMIGuLGa1g_OVNK-ArI

Quote
Two men who pleaded guilty to trafficking teenagers in southwestern Ontario but say their four-year prison sentences amount to "cruel and unusual punishment" will go before a judge today.
 
Minas Abara, 20, and Nicholas Kulafofski, 19, both from Kitchener, Ont., pleaded guilty to human trafficking and profiting from the sale of sexual services in June. They'd been involved in selling the sexual services of two girls, ages 14 and 17, in hotel rooms in Windsor, Ont. and London, Ont. in June 2017.

I don't think 4 years is enough, as they clearly don't understand why what they did is wrong and have zero empathy in life:

Quote
Abara's lawyer, Chris Uwagboe, said the penitentiary term of four years "would have an irreparable effect" on his client.

"The loss of freedom, and separation from family and society at such a young age would be a trauma that (Abara) may never recover from," Uwagboe wrote.

As usual - who gives a **** about the loss of freedom, separation from family and society and trauma to the young women.  The men are clearly the victims here.   >:(
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on October 24, 2018, 02:27:57 pm
I don't think 4 years is enough

Maybe they will share a cell with Bubba and his fifty friends for those 4 years
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on October 24, 2018, 02:35:40 pm
Maybe they will share a cell with Bubba and his fifty friends for those 4 years

That's what I was thinking, after all forced sex seems to be a part of their repertoire. Although it's a bit scary to think what kind of people might emerge at parole time.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on October 25, 2018, 03:11:37 pm
https://www.kcra.com/article/woman-who-created-green-bean-casserole-dies-at-92/24166570?fbclid=IwAR2m8PTPysz5HhyI_szk3yX7-eGgHaIvwDbN4OvGtnQTchPiZGCWi2cna_0

Quote
HADDONFIELD, N.J. —
The woman who created a Thanksgiving staple — the green bean casserole — has died at age 92.

Dorcas Reilly died Oct. 15 of Alzheimer’s disease, said Ken Tomlinson, of the Hinski-Tomlinson Funeral Home in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on October 25, 2018, 03:23:10 pm
I've never had green bean casserole. Perhaps I will have to celebrate US Thanksgiving this year, and try it out.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on October 25, 2018, 03:48:31 pm
I've never had green been casserole. Perhaps I will have to celebrate US Thanksgiving this year, and try it out.

I've done something similar but I use asparagus. Dang good, and healthy.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on November 02, 2018, 04:02:21 pm
This made me smile.  :)
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 03, 2018, 10:26:18 am
This ought to be a joke but isn't. A woman was hired by the federal government, then claimed harassment. When her claim was denied she then said she had anxiety disorder and went on sick leave. A looong sick leave, during which she got her PHD and taught at the University of Ottawa. When the government found out she was working during her sick leave they began to send her letters demanding to know what was up. She ignored them all, saying she was too anxious to communicate with them. Eventually, she was fired.

She expressed shock and dismay, grieved the decision, and the labour board has rules she was wrongly terminated.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/public-servant-fired-for-taking-phd-on-sick-leave-wrongly-terminated-board
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 03, 2018, 03:16:49 pm
I can't recall a lot of right wing types trying to shut down a left wing debate recently. Anyone else know of one? It seems the Left doesn't like discussion.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/11/02/melee-breaks-out-outside-munk-debate-between-ex-trump-adviser-steve-bannon-and-conservative-magazine-columnist-david-frum.html
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on November 03, 2018, 03:32:44 pm
I can't recall a lot of right wing types trying to shut down a left wing debate recently.

You are correct, the right wing types bring guns instead of signs.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 03, 2018, 03:37:57 pm
You are correct, the right wing types bring guns instead of signs.

That's true. "Unite the Right" comes to mind.
And as expected, Frum basically mopped the floor with Bannon and he is right of center.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on November 03, 2018, 04:01:45 pm
You are correct, the right wing types bring guns instead of signs.

That's not true, it's not like right-wing nutters ever tried to shoot Abraham Lincoln, JFK, RFK, or Martin Luther King.  Oh wait...

Oh and this is a classic:

Quote
Alma Powell, wife of Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, stopped her husband running for president by threatening to leave him if he ran for the White House, according to a new book.

"If you run, I'm gone. You will have to do it alone," she is said to have told Mr Powell in 1995, when opinion polls indicated that he would have won the Republican nomination and defeated Bill Clinton in the presidential election the following year.

It had long been known that Mrs Powell believed that Mr Powell, then a recently retired four-star general and Gulf war hero, was afraid that he might be murdered by a racist if he tried to become the first black man to be elected American president.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1413906/Wifes-ultimatum-to-Powell-if-you-run-Ill-leave.html
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on November 03, 2018, 05:46:34 pm
I can't recall a lot of right wing types trying to shut down a left wing debate recently. Anyone else know of one? It seems the Left doesn't like discussion.

Right wing types are just as happy to shut down 'free speech' as anyone else, often in a more direct manner through online threats and harassment (https://qz.com/560098/conservatives-have-a-version-of-political-correctness-too/), supported and encouraged by certain right-wing media.




Quote
"What harassment, especially harassment en masse, does is effectively chill speech". sociologist Cross tells Quartz. “You start calculating around the inevitability of it, thinking ‘I shouldn’t say this because it may give a clue about where I live’ or ‘I won’t say this because I know someone will take it out of context.’ Every time I publish an article, tweet, or even give answers in interviews like this I have to think about my family, the fallout that might affect them, and whether there is some unforeseen offense I’ll give to someone on the far right who will make me their pet project for the next god-knows-how-long.


According to at least a couple of studies on campuses (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown), there's minimal difference between left/right wing 'protests' about speakers, or professors, and in fact, more left-wing professors have been fired for their speech than right-wing.


Quote
The other key thing that emerges from the Georgetown data, according to Ungar, is that these protests and disruptions don’t just target the right. “Our data also include many incidents, generally less well-publicized, where lower-profile scholars, speakers, or students who could be considered to be on the left have been silenced or shut down,” he writes.


Quote
Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Canada’s Acadia University, put together a database of all incidents where a professor was dismissed for political speech in the United States between 2015 and 2017. Sachs’s results, published by the left-libertarian Niskanen Center, actually found that left-wing professors were more frequently dismissed for their speech than conservative ones:

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 03, 2018, 06:16:22 pm
Right wing types are just as happy to shut down 'free speech' as anyone else, often in a more direct manner through online threats and harassment (https://qz.com/560098/conservatives-have-a-version-of-political-correctness-too/), supported and encouraged by certain right-wing media.

That sort of thing happens all the time on-line, from all directions.

Quote
there's minimal difference between left/right wing 'protests' about speakers, or professors, and in fact, more left-wing professors have been fired for their speech than right-wing.

I'd have to see the examples. It takes a hell of a lot to fire a professor for left wing speech. And I would point out there ARE a hell of a lot more left wing professors than there are right wingers. As I have previously pointed out, you couldn't possibly survive on campus as a proud Fascist, but there are plenty of proud Marxists who do nothing to hide it. The campus culture is distinctly tilted to the Left, so you can have professors who are forced out for refusing to stay away from school during a 'day of abscence' thing the racialized students organized which wants no whites on campus, and you can have a couple at Yale forced out because they stated the letter Yale sent about students and Halloween costumes was idiotic - minor stuff, in other words. On the Left, well, you had that one professor who said all he wants for Christmas is White genocide. I can't think of another, but I'm willing to bet most of them are equally outrageous. Elsewise, remember that there are a number of Christian and Evangelical colleges in the US. You can be fired from those for any number of moral failings. But that's to be expected.



Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on November 03, 2018, 08:09:32 pm
That sort of thing happens all the time on-line, from all directions.
Ok.  So why is that right-wingers are generally considered to be much more active in terms of using media to send death threats and threats of physical harm, especially to women, gays and minorities?  Can you prove that this phenomenon is equally as pervasive among the left?  If not, can you at least explain why you dismiss it so cavalierly:  did you not read the comments of someone who stands to be targeted by right-wing types and how it inhibits what he may say?

Quote
I'd have to see the examples.
Did you read the link I provided?    Because it appears that in two years (2015-2017) 18 Liberal profs were fired for their speech, vs. 6 Conservative profs.

Quote
It takes a hell of a lot to fire a professor for left wing speech.
I assume you are implying that it's much easier to fire a professor for right-wing speech, eh?  In which case, it seems that there'd be a lot more firings for conservative speech than for liberal speech.  Right?  But the numbers show just the opposite.

Quote
And I would point out there ARE a hell of a lot more left wing professors than there are right wingers.
So?  Does there being "a lot more" somehow make it ok for right-wing types to have them canned for engaging in 'free speech'?  Do you support unrestricted free speech for professors you don't like, or just the ones you do like?

Quote
As I have previously pointed out, you couldn't possibly survive on campus as a proud Fascist, but there are plenty of proud Marxists who do nothing to hide it.
Well, I haven't been following those discussions too closely so don't really care what you've pointed out in the past.  So, do you have a cite for that claim?   

Quote
The campus culture is distinctly tilted to the Left, so you can have professors who are forced out for refusing to stay away from school during a 'day of abscence' thing the racialized students organized which wants no whites on campus, and you can have a couple at Yale forced out because they stated the letter Yale sent about students and Halloween costumes was idiotic - minor stuff, in other words. On the Left, well, you had that one professor who said all he wants for Christmas is White genocide. I can't think of another, but I'm willing to bet most of them are equally outrageous.
Yes, idiotic things happen all the time.  It's equally idiotic to decide that "everything is wrong" based on that idiocy.   

In any case, as one of the links I provided earlier points out:
Quote
The raw numbers here should already raise questions about the so-called political correctness epidemic. According to the Department of Education, there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (including two- and four-year institutions). The fact that there were roughly only 60 incidents in the past two years suggests that free speech crises are extremely rare events and don’t define university life in the way that critics suggest.

The article also points out that the same few people tend to be involved in these events.   
Quote
“Most of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter ,” Sanford Ungar, the project’s director, writes. “In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.”

Imagine that, eh?  Four people with a few well-publicized stories leading you to believe that free speech is being squelched on thousands of campuses by those "evil liberals".   

But I understand:  There's nothing that would ever convince you that campuses aren't simply incubation centers for those society-destroying liberals.   

Anyway, you'll be happy to know that the disinformation campaign of the the right-wingers is succeeding:  several States are drafting laws to "protect" free speech on campus.  In Wisconsin, for example,

Quote
rules drafted by the state university’s board of regents allow students to be expelled if they are found to have disrupted the speech of other students three times.

Protecting free speech on campus by expelling students for their political activism: just what the First Amendment’s drafters intended.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 04, 2018, 09:06:29 am
Ok.  So why is that right-wingers are generally considered to be much more active in terms of using media to send death threats and threats of physical harm, especially to women, gays and minorities?

By you.

Quote
Did you read the link I provided?    Because it appears that in two years (2015-2017) 18 Liberal profs were fired for their speech, vs. 6 Conservative profs.

Apparently basic arithmetic is beyond your understanding. If there are ten or twenty times more leftist professors than conservative professors (as has been suggested on some campuses) then in order for the removals to be equal there would have to be ten or twenty times more Leftists forced out than conservatives, and that's nowhere near the case.

Quote
I assume you are implying that it's much easier to fire a professor for right-wing speech, eh?

Yes. A conservative gets forced out for because progressive students went insane over her suggesting Yale's advisory letter to students about Halloween costumes was a bit overblown while a Marxist gets forced out for wishing genocide upon whites. Not exactly the same level of provocation needed.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 12, 2018, 08:36:29 am
Two innocent house painters were burned to death by a mob in Mexico because of a rumor on Whatsap.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46145986
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on November 12, 2018, 12:17:18 pm
Bet on the assissination of your most despised public figure(s) on assissination markets.

Quote
The markets – which allow users to bet on the fates of prominent politicians, entrepreneurs and celebrities – in some cases explicitly specify assassination, as the quote above shows. (CoinDesk is intentionally not providing links to these markets or naming the individuals concerned.)

In addition to targeting individuals, some markets offer bets on whether mass shootings and terrorist attacks with certain minimum numbers of casualties will occur.

https://www.coindesk.com/the-first-augur-assassination-markets-have-arrived/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 12, 2018, 01:09:31 pm
Two innocent house painters were burned to death by a mob in Mexico because of a rumor on Whatsap.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46145986

Friggin social media.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 13, 2018, 09:12:46 pm
After 129 years on the job, the International Prototype Kilogram is retiring this week. The kilogram receives a new definition this Friday. (https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/13/18087002/kilogram-new-definition-kg-metric-unit-ipk-measurement)

A kilogram will still weigh the same, but from here on it now has a mathematical definition rather than being defined by an actual physical object that lives in a vault in France.

That definition is pretty meaningless to most people. A kilogram will henceforth be defined as: Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s. 

That metal cylinder in Paris might lose weight or be stolen or destroyed in a fire... but Planck's constant is never going to change.



The kilogram is the last of the fundamental units to receive a new formal definition. The remaining units of SI measurement have already been redefined to immutable quantities.  The official definitions are now:

    Meter — length. Distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
    Second — time. Exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation of an atom of caesium-133.
    Kilogram — mass. Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s.
    Mole — amount of substance. Avogadro constant, or 6.022,140,76 ×10^23 elementary entities.
    Candela — luminous intensity. A light source with monochromatic radiation of frequency frequency 540 × 10^12 Hz and radiant intensity of 1/683 watt per steradian.
    Kelvin — temperature. Boltzmann constant, or a change in thermal energy of 1.380 649 × 10^−23 joules.
    Ampere — current. Equal to the flow of 1/1.602 176 634×10^−19 elementary charges per second.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 13, 2018, 09:44:57 pm
After 129 years on the job, the International Prototype Kilogram is retiring this week. The kilogram receives a new definition this Friday. (https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/13/18087002/kilogram-new-definition-kg-metric-unit-ipk-measurement)

A kilogram will still weigh the same, but from here on it now has a mathematical definition rather than being defined by an actual physical object that lives in a vault in France.

That definition is pretty meaningless to most people. A kilogram will henceforth be defined as: Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s. 

That metal cylinder in Paris might lose weight or be stolen or destroyed in a fire... but Planck's constant is never going to change.



The kilogram is the last of the fundamental units to receive a new formal definition. The remaining units of SI measurement have already been redefined to immutable quantities.  The official definitions are now:

    Meter — length. Distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
    Second — time. Exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation of an atom of caesium-133.
    Kilogram — mass. Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s.
    Mole — amount of substance. Avogadro constant, or 6.022,140,76 ×10^23 elementary entities.
    Candela — luminous intensity. A light source with monochromatic radiation of frequency frequency 540 × 10^12 Hz and radiant intensity of 1/683 watt per steradian.
    Kelvin — temperature. Boltzmann constant, or a change in thermal energy of 1.380 649 × 10^−23 joules.
    Ampere — current. Equal to the flow of 1/1.602 176 634×10^−

 -k
I had a few of those amperes flow though my body one time. I was testing the current flow of a basic radio I had built in high school electronics class. After I stopped shaking I confirmed to him that what I felt was exactly 19 elementary charges per second, and could I be excused for a few minutes.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 13, 2018, 09:52:06 pm
After 129 years on the job, the International Prototype Kilogram is retiring this week. The kilogram receives a new definition this Friday. (https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/13/18087002/kilogram-new-definition-kg-metric-unit-ipk-measurement)

A kilogram will still weigh the same, but from here on it now has a mathematical definition rather than being defined by an actual physical object that lives in a vault in France.

That definition is pretty meaningless to most people. A kilogram will henceforth be defined as: Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s. 

That metal cylinder in Paris might lose weight or be stolen or destroyed in a fire... but Planck's constant is never going to change.



The kilogram is the last of the fundamental units to receive a new formal definition. The remaining units of SI measurement have already been redefined to immutable quantities.  The official definitions are now:

    Meter — length. Distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
    Second — time. Exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation of an atom of caesium-133.
    Kilogram — mass. Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10^−34 m^−2s.
    Mole — amount of substance. Avogadro constant, or 6.022,140,76 ×10^23 elementary entities.
    Candela — luminous intensity. A light source with monochromatic radiation of frequency frequency 540 × 10^12 Hz and radiant intensity of 1/683 watt per steradian.
    Kelvin — temperature. Boltzmann constant, or a change in thermal energy of 1.380 649 × 10^−23 joules.
    Ampere — current. Equal to the flow of 1/1.602 176 634×10^−19 elementary charges per second.

 -k

That's a relief.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 13, 2018, 10:07:02 pm
Here's one way the US likes to use AC.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DmvqVXW3aw
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on November 13, 2018, 11:13:43 pm
Why bother executing someone when they can mow your lawn and shovel your driveway for free the rest of their life?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 13, 2018, 11:16:40 pm
Why bother executing someone when they can mow your lawn and shovel your driveway for free the rest of their life?
Why execute someone?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on November 13, 2018, 11:20:38 pm
Exactly.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 13, 2018, 11:26:42 pm
Exactly.
I guess it's the bible thumper's view about some shyte about an eye for an eye and all that crap
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Squidward von Squidderson on November 14, 2018, 12:19:10 am
I guess it's the bible thumper's view about some shyte about an eye for an eye and all that crap

Wait...  I thought it said turn the ther cheek and love your enemy....   are we looking at the same bible??
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 12:35:13 am
Wait...  I thought it said turn the ther cheek and love your enemy....   are we looking at the same bible??
I think it says turn the other cheek while you push the button, and then poke some Vaseline up your nostrils so you don't smell the human smoke.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 14, 2018, 11:57:46 am
Why execute someone?

Because the deserve it. And because it costs too much to imprison them forever.
Paul Bernardo being a case in point. The community has already spent millions on him. A bullet behind the ear would have been appropriate.

Note: I'm not a supporter of the death penalty, not because I consider it necessarily immoral but because of my lack of confidence in the judicial system.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 12:08:17 pm
Because the deserve it. And because it costs too much to imprison them forever.
Paul Bernardo being a case in point. The community has already spent millions on him. A bullet behind the ear would have been appropriate.

Note: I'm not a supporter of the death penalty, not because I consider it necessarily immoral but because of my lack of confidence in the judicial system.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                          If you look at the actual stats out of the US you find that by the time the appeals process has been gone through before you can actually execute a prisoner, the costs are much higher than if they are simply held.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on November 14, 2018, 01:11:57 pm
Because the deserve it.

Note: I'm not a supporter of the death penalty, not because I consider it necessarily immoral but because of my lack of confidence in the judicial system.
???
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 01:34:16 pm
???
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Well there we go, we don't need this expensive court system, we'll just let argus decide who gets a bullet ad who doesn't.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 01:45:37 pm
???

What he means is, there's nothing wrong with killing people who deserve it.  It's just that we aren't capable of deciding beyond a reasonable doubt who actually does deserve it. 

Too many people who didn't do it are waiting for DNA evidence to get them off.  Too late if they're dead.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on November 14, 2018, 01:47:03 pm
After 129 years on the job, the International Prototype Kilogram is retiring this week.

A kilogram will still weigh the same, but from here on it now has a mathematical definition rather than being defined by an actual physical object that lives in a vault in France.

I was taught, a long time ago, that a kilogram is the weight of a litre of water (at 4oC). Since we have a definition for a litre based on the meter (as defined above), then technically we could have used that as the mathematical definition. To ensure consistency, of course pure H2O would need to be used, rather than tap water or salt water. There might also be problems with atmospheric pressure. The bigger problem of course is that I doubt the value would match that physical object in the vault in Sčvres, although that platinum-iridium alloy itself has changed over the years. Apparently it was only referenced one every 50 years, but it lost a very small amount of mass the last time they checked. Nobody knows why, but I expect someone slipped and scraped it on a table or tool.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 02:06:59 pm
What he means is, there's nothing wrong with killing people who deserve it.  It's just that we aren't capable of deciding beyond a reasonable doubt who actually does deserve it. 

Too many people who didn't do it are waiting for DNA evidence to get them off.  Too late if they're dead.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Who knows what he means, but I would suggest that we are clearly capable of deciding who deserves to be put to death. That's why we assembled gallows, firing squads, electric chairs, lethal injections. Luckily here in Canada we came to our senses some time ago and stopped making those type of decisions ad focused simply on protecting the public fro dangerous people.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 02:17:45 pm
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Who knows what he means, but I would suggest that we are clearly capable of deciding who deserves to be put to death. That's why we assembled gallows, firing squads, electric chairs, lethal injections. Luckily here in Canada we came to our senses some time ago and stopped making those type of decisions ad focused simply on protecting the public fro dangerous people.

People differ on who deserves it.  Paul Bernado's mother probably agrees with you.

I guess what I should have said was, we aren't capable of deciding beyond a reasonable doubt who actually did it.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 02:27:50 pm
People differ on who deserves it.  Paul Bernado's mother probably agrees with you.

I guess what I should have said was, we aren't capable of deciding beyond a reasonable doubt who actually did it.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             30 states in the US, the federal government, and their military are still capable of making that decision. DNA has prove the wrong fro time to time, but they still carry on.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 02:29:38 pm
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             30 states in the US, the federal government, and their military are still capable of making that decision.

No they're not, or the jails would be full of only guilty people.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 02:33:51 pm
No they're not, or the jails would be full of only guilty people.
       The groups I mentioned still make the decision to execute people is the point.                                                                                               
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 02:49:25 pm
       The groups I mentioned still make the decision to execute people is the point.                                                                                               

Ah, yes.  I was talking about their ability to find the right person guilty.

All the groups you mentioned could change their minds on the execution thing, but would still be incapable of making sure the right person was blindfolded and offered one last cigarette.  That's why I'm happy if  they don't. 
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 02:56:44 pm
Ah, yes.  I was talking about their ability to find the right person guilty.

All the groups you mentioned could change their minds on the execution thing, but would still be incapable of making sure the right person was blindfolded and offered one last cigarette.  That's why I'm happy if  they don't.
     I think you are contradicting yourself, if those groups changed their minds on executions, they wouldn't need the blindfolds.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 03:03:32 pm
     I think you are contradicting yourself, if those groups changed their minds on executions, they wouldn't need the blindfolds.

My mistake.  I thought you were referencing areas without the death penalty.

In that case I hope they do change their minds.  Until they can fix the guilty/not guilty thing.

Then they can change them back again.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 03:05:08 pm
I find it interesting that even fox news is supporting c i their suit agaist the WH after Trup takes away Jim Acosta's credentials to work the WH. That must have mr. bonespurs really pissed. Fox is his mouthpiece after all.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 03:17:31 pm
My mistake.  I thought you were referencing areas without the death penalty.

In that case I hope they do change their minds.  Until they can fix the guilty/not guilty thing.

Then they can change them back again.
     I don't think it's the guilty/not guilty thing as much as it is that we don't like the idea of public murder so we wrote the whole idea off the books.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 03:26:12 pm
     I don't think it's the guilty/not guilty thing as much as it is that we don't like the idea of public murder so we wrote the whole idea off the books.

Meh, you can't please all of the people, etc.

So many people who don't deserve it die every day, it sure wouldn't bother me if a few who do deserve it do so as well.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 03:37:15 pm
Meh, you can't please all of the people, etc.

So many people who don't deserve it die every day, it sure wouldn't bother me if a few who do deserve it do so as well.
     " A few"? how many, which ones? The trouble is when we do that we reduce ourselves to a similar level as those we are killing. And as I pointed out previously, it's cheaper to keep the in jail once convicted.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 03:50:33 pm
     " A few"? how many, which ones? The trouble is when we do that we reduce ourselves to a similar level as those we are killing. And as I pointed out previously, it's cheaper to keep the in jail once convicted.

Not if you're sure of their guilt.  Then you can do away with all the appeals.  They can go straight from the courtroom.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 14, 2018, 04:03:17 pm
Even though they still have the death penalty it's interesting that the US military hasn't executed anyone since 1961 and the US Navy since 1849. Kind of surprised me. Progressive bunch what.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on November 14, 2018, 04:04:03 pm
Not if you're sure of their guilt.  Then you can do away with all the appeals.  They can go straight from the courtroom.

Bernardo.  Wouldn't have minded if he had gone straight from the courtroom.....
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 04:12:25 pm
Even though they still have the death penalty it's interesting that the US military hasn't executed anyone since 1961 and the US Navy since 1849. Kind of surprised me. Progressive bunch what.

That is a surprise.  No desertions, no mutinies, what have they been doing all this time?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 04:41:21 pm
Not if you're sure of their guilt.  Then you can do away with all the appeals.  They can go straight from the courtroom.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that to happen in Canada.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 14, 2018, 04:53:22 pm
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that to happen in Canada.

Important safety tip.  Thanks.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on November 14, 2018, 05:11:07 pm
Wait...  I thought it said turn the ther cheek and love your enemy....   are we looking at the same bible??

Ya, Jesus says specifically don't do eye for an eye, turn the other cheek instead.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on November 14, 2018, 08:04:15 pm
Man married a hologram, pretty sad story although the bridegroom says he's happy.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4661931/japanese-man-marries-hologram/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 08:10:02 pm
Man married a hologram, pretty sad story although the bridegroom says happy.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4661931/japanese-man-marries-hologram/

Wow. I guess I'm a bit old fashioned but I find that a tad spooky.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 10:33:20 pm
Yikes, just hearing Michael Avennati has just been released from jail after being charged with domestic violence. Interesting to see how this one plays out.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on November 14, 2018, 11:16:21 pm
Yikes, just hearing Michael Avennati has just been released from jail after being charged with domestic violence. Interesting to see how this one plays out.

Why interesting ?  He's never been more than a side-story, with Stormy's case being more salacious than substantial.  In the pantheon of supporting players of the Trump story, I would put him at the same level as 'The Mooch'.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 11:29:39 pm
Why interesting ?  He's never been more than a side-story, with Stormy's case being more salacious than substantial.  In the pantheon of supporting players of the Trump story, I would put him at the same level as 'The Mooch'.

"Just a side story"? OMG. She's suing the POTUS for what could well be illegal hush money payment from campaign funds. That's not a **** "side story"
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 14, 2018, 11:48:47 pm
Avennati's estranged wife, who he is accused of assaulting, has been quoted as saying she hasn't seen him in months. So if that's true then where did these accusations originate? The plot thickens.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on November 15, 2018, 06:14:13 am
"Just a side story"? OMG. She's suing the POTUS for what could well be illegal hush money payment from campaign funds. That's not a **** "side story"

Yes, it is.  The reason is, as I understand it, this would not amount to a huge penalty if guilty. 
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on November 15, 2018, 07:18:36 am
"Just a side story"? OMG. She's suing the POTUS for what could well be illegal hush money payment from campaign funds. That's not a **** "side story"
And Avenatti's personal life is irrelevant to what Trump has done. They can both be scumbags. Just because Avenatti is too, doesn't mean Trump suddenly isn't.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 15, 2018, 09:33:04 am
Avennati's estranged wife, who he is accused of assaulting, has been quoted as saying she hasn't seen him in months. So if that's true then where did these accusations originate? The plot thickens.

Well that's kind of interesting.  Remember that Stormy herself was improperly arrested a while back by a cop with a MAGA agenda. We will have to wait and find out more about the details on this Avennati situation.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: cybercoma on November 15, 2018, 10:59:44 am
Avennati's estranged wife, who he is accused of assaulting, has been quoted as saying she hasn't seen him in months. So if that's true then where did these accusations originate? The plot thickens.
It wasn't his wife, but another woman whom made the allegations.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 15, 2018, 11:12:07 am
It wasn't his wife, but another woman whom made the allegations.

That's what had me confused with the news reporting I heard, he is supposed to have assaulted the x who claims she hasn't had any connection with him in months. Is this a smear attempt, a cover up, fake news. I guess I'll have to wait for "details at 6"
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 15, 2018, 02:27:20 pm
And Avenatti's personal life is irrelevant to what Trump has done. They can both be scumbags. Just because Avenatti is too, doesn't mean Trump suddenly isn't.

Believe me I'm no fan of Avennati's, he could well be a scumbag. What I find interesting about this thing is that, from what I'm hearing with regard to this latest is that there seems to be such a lack of "who, what, why, when, where". This is perhaps my "conspiracy theorist" side emerging but of course we all know the other scumbag would like to see Avenatti's reputation besmirched and a night in jail over an assault charge would certainly advance that cause. I'm waiting more details.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 24, 2018, 03:09:27 am
An aircraft engine with no moving parts.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/21/first-ever-plane-with-no-moving-parts-takes-flight

The headline says it's the first ever plane with no moving parts.  I don't think that's actually true.  A pulse-jet engine has no moving parts, and if MIT's little contraption can be considered a "plane" then so can the German V-1 Flying Bomb.

Regardless, this is an interesting technology. Unlike a pulse-jet, this engine uses electricity.  It generates thrust by ionizing nitrogen in air and directing it through an intense electric field.  A leading wire is charged to +20,000 volts, while a trailing airfoil is charged to -20,000 volts. Nitrogen ions are blasted away from the leading wire and toward the trailing airfoil, generating thrust.

This is all very experimental at this point. The MIT experimental "plane" is only 2.5kg, and the first flight was only 60m.  But they have found that the thrust generated relative to power input is comparable to conventional technology, which is key.

Potential advantages of this technology:
 -it could be much quieter than jet or propeller aircraft
 -an engine with no moving parts would be very appealing from a maintenance and reliability point of view.

Maybe some day aircraft will fly above with a barely-audible whoosh instead of buzzing propellers or wailing turbines.


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on November 24, 2018, 06:20:54 am
This is all very experimental at this point. The MIT experimental "plane" is only 2.5kg, and the first flight was only 60m.  But they have found that the thrust generated relative to power input is comparable to conventional technology, which is key.
Extremely cool concept.

Maybe some day aircraft will fly above with a barely-audible whoosh instead of buzzing propellers or wailing turbines.
The prototype uses lithium batteries. Applications with commercially useful ranges would likely require battery technology that does not exist.
I tried to figure what is plausible given current tech by looking those drones:
https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/drones-with-longest-flight-time.html
30 min flight times would limit the applications.

Since the "power input is comparable to conventional technology" the limits that apply to drones likely apply to the ion drive.




Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 24, 2018, 09:42:51 am
Very interesting but still limited by battery and solar technology just like every other electric powered aircraft. Stealth drones, it could be hovering a foot over your head and you wouldn’t hear it. Creepy.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 24, 2018, 09:52:24 am
Extremely cool concept.
The prototype uses lithium batteries. Applications with commercially useful ranges would likely require battery technology that does not exist.
I tried to figure what is plausible given current tech by looking those drones:
https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/drones-with-longest-flight-time.html
30 min flight times would limit the applications.

Since the "power input is comparable to conventional technology" the limits that apply to drones likely apply to the ion drive.

Commercially-viable electric flight seems to be a long way off, and I imagine it will come via propellers before ion engines anyway. (Although, propeller planes can pretty unpleasant to fly on-- last time I was on a Dash 8, I decided I'm not doing that again unless there's no other choice. Maybe ion drive would be more appealing for short-distance commuter flight type air travel.)

Aside from the limitation of battery capacity, a second thing I was reading about recently is that the amount of power required during take-off is a real challenge for battery-based aircraft.  Level flight is no problem, but the amount of electricity required during take-off is much much higher than during level flight. The extreme current drain generates heat that's very damaging to the batteries.  I was reading an article a few weeks back about a group of scientists who have an improvement to electrode technology that they think is a step on the way to battery-powered flight.  But that still doesn't address the capacity issue.


I'm not sure what the economics of the commuter flight business are like, but I think even the limitation of a 30 minute flight time presents a lot of commercial possibilities.  The northeastern US has so many large cities within a couple hundred miles of each other that a 30-minute flight time at typical airplane speeds would have a lot of possible routes. (similar math probably applies in parts of Europe.)  I could be mistaken, but I think there are dozens of flights every day between New York-Boston, New York-Washington, and this sort of thing.  Depending on fuel prices, those flights might be ideal candidates for electric aircraft some day.


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on November 24, 2018, 10:37:42 am
Aside from the limitation of battery capacity, a second thing I was reading about recently is that the amount of power required during take-off is a real challenge for battery-based aircraft.
If it commercially viable in the air this problem can be solved with ground based assist (think slingshots).

I'm not sure what the economics of the commuter flight business are like, but I think even the limitation of a 30 minute flight time presents a lot of commercial possibilities.
That would depend on these aircraft having a cruising speed that is comparable to a commuter jet. That could be difficult. That said, I could see commercial viable cargo applications even if the cruising speeds can't match a jet.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 24, 2018, 10:47:31 am
Commercial flights must have enough fuel to reach an alternate plus holding fuel if weather or something else prevents it landing at its destination.  On short flights this can mean returning to where it came from.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 24, 2018, 11:35:48 am
If it commercially viable in the air this problem can be solved with ground based assist (think slingshots).
That would depend on these aircraft having a cruising speed that is comparable to a commuter jet. That could be difficult. That said, I could see commercial viable cargo applications even if the cruising speeds can't match a jet.

I hadn't considered ground assist.  Perhaps a rail or cable system, like they use on electric trains or trolleys, could provide a whole bunch of extra electrical power until the plane leaves the ground.  Or maybe an actual slingshot or tow-cable to get the plane up to speed.  Did they use cables on reels to launch gliders at some point?

I had figured that if the ion engine can generate comparable efficiency to a conventional engine, it ought to be able to eventually propel a plane at speeds comparable to conventional engines as well.  That might be a bad assumption. There could be issues of scale or aerodynamics or whatever that make it just not very good for going fast.  And maybe air composition or humidity or temperature make it not suitable for flying in cold weather or hot weather or wet weather or at altitude or so on.  There could be any number of real-world factors that make it a pipe dream.

All of this is a long way in the future if it happens at all, but I thought it was a neat article.


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 24, 2018, 12:18:14 pm
I hadn't considered ground assist.  Perhaps a rail or cable system, like they use on electric trains or trolleys, could provide a whole bunch of extra electrical power until the plane leaves the ground.  Or maybe an actual slingshot or tow-cable to get the plane up to speed.  Did they use cables on reels to launch gliders at some point?

I had figured that if the ion engine can generate comparable efficiency to a conventional engine, it ought to be able to eventually propel a plane at speeds comparable to conventional engines as well.  That might be a bad assumption. There could be issues of scale or aerodynamics or whatever that make it just not very good for going fast.  And maybe air composition or humidity or temperature make it not suitable for flying in cold weather or hot weather or wet weather or at altitude or so on.  There could be any number of real-world factors that make it a pipe dream.

All of this is a long way in the future if it happens at all, but I thought it was a neat article.


 -k

Yes they did used to use cables to launch gliders in certain areas where you could fling yourself off a ridge or hilltop and then glide down if you couldn't find an updraft to extend the ride. I could imagine a runway with a center slot with an attachment that would assist a plane get to flying speed, similar to what's done on aircraft carriers. But that's if they ever move this technology that far. I can see it being used for drones at some point. I'm not so sure I want to sit in an aluminum tube that has 60000 volts running around.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 24, 2018, 01:55:43 pm
A long time ago I had a ride in a winch launch glider at Hope airport. It got the 2 person glider up to about 1000 ft.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 24, 2018, 02:14:52 pm
My first crack at that was back in Ontario, Fergus area. There we had to follow a super cub up to about 2 thou I think. One thing that focused my attention was when it was time to setup for landing, you head for the strip intentionally staying high, (better to be too high than too low) and once you are assured you can make the strip you should have some height to get rid of and that's done by pulling up a lever to deploy spoilers and then when you get close to the ground you let the lever back down to decrease the ROD and then land. Just about the exact opposite of doing an autorotation in a chopper.     
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Squidward von Squidderson on November 24, 2018, 02:35:09 pm
Quote
A pulse-jet engine has no moving parts

True...  but you need something to spray fuel into it, don’t you?   So even though the engine has no moving parts, you’ll still need moving parts to make it operate. 

ETA:  I guess you can use pressurized fuel and then you wouldn’t need a pump...

I know nothing about these things, except a friend built one that ran on propane....   no moving parts that I can remember.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 24, 2018, 03:03:48 pm
True...  but you need something to spray fuel into it, don’t you?   So even though the engine has no moving parts, you’ll still need moving parts to make it operate. 

ETA:  I guess you can use pressurized fuel and then you wouldn’t need a pump...

I know nothing about these things, except a friend built one that ran on propane....   no moving parts that I can remember.

But you still have noise and pollution. The ion process is silent and the only atmospheric influence it so far seems to possibly have is to increase ozone levels.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 24, 2018, 03:35:23 pm
My first crack at that was back in Ontario, Fergus area. There we had to follow a super cub up to about 2 thou I think. One thing that focused my attention was when it was time to setup for landing, you head for the strip intentionally staying high, (better to be too high than too low) and once you are assured you can make the strip you should have some height to get rid of and that's done by pulling up a lever to deploy spoilers and then when you get close to the ground you let the lever back down to decrease the ROD and then land. Just about the exact opposite of doing an autorotation in a chopper.   

Fergus, beautiful town.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 24, 2018, 03:36:08 pm
True...  but you need something to spray fuel into it, don’t you?   So even though the engine has no moving parts, you’ll still need moving parts to make it operate. 

ETA:  I guess you can use pressurized fuel and then you wouldn’t need a pump...

I know nothing about these things, except a friend built one that ran on propane....   no moving parts that I can remember.

You're correct, fuel is admitted into the chamber through a reed valve, which I guess has to be considered a moving part.  I don't think a pump is required. I think the fuel is pulled into the chamber by a pressure differential during the same phase as air is drawn in.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on November 24, 2018, 03:51:05 pm
I don't think pressure differential would be enough. From looking at a cutaway drawing, I'm guessing they used air from the compressed air cylinders that powered the gyros to pressurize the fuel tank. Still, that would mean no moving parts in the fuel system.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on November 24, 2018, 04:02:12 pm
I happened to catch this today.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/a-new-plane-with-no-moving-parts-flies-by-electrifying-the-air-1.4916511
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on November 24, 2018, 07:03:02 pm
I had figured that if the ion engine can generate comparable efficiency to a conventional engine, it ought to be able to eventually propel a plane at speeds comparable to conventional engines as well.
In a radio interview the researcher said the ion engine works best at speeds comparable to conventional aircraft but they are a long way from that point.
The top speed of the prototype is 5m/s or 18 kph.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 25, 2018, 02:23:15 pm
Another take on the origin of the forces behind Trump - which is the view of big business that their only responsibility is to enhance shareholder value over the short term.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-founder-of-panera-bread-explains-the-economic-forces-that-led-to-trump
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 25, 2018, 02:29:52 pm
In a radio interview the researcher said the ion engine works best at speeds comparable to conventional aircraft but they are a long way from that point.
The top speed of the prototype is 5m/s or 18 kph.

I was a little puzzled by what seem like conflicting statements in the article. On the one hand it says they observed a thrust-to-power ratio comparable to conventional engines, but elsewhere it says that the efficiency is lower.  I had assumed that thrust-to-power meant thrust output per power input, but if the efficiency is lower than conventional engines, they must mean something else.

Hopefully this will evolve into a viable technology.  Extra points if the engines produce a blue glow like in Star Wars. :)

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on November 25, 2018, 02:35:21 pm
Another take on the origin of the forces behind Trump - which is the view of big business that their only responsibility is to enhance shareholder value over the short term.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-founder-of-panera-bread-explains-the-economic-forces-that-led-to-trump

Short term thinking is heavily incentivized. Long term thinking isn't.  Long tern concern for the health of the overall society to ensure a stable and fertile market to do business in, that isn't incentivized at all.  There's no incentive for shareholders to think about anything beyond their own stock portfolio.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on November 25, 2018, 03:21:53 pm
I was a little puzzled by what seem like conflicting statements in the article. On the one hand it says they observed a thrust-to-power ratio comparable to conventional engines, but elsewhere it says that the efficiency is lower.  I had assumed that thrust-to-power meant thrust output per power input, but if the efficiency is lower than conventional engines, they must mean something else.
Efficiency is always a function of velocity and is usually an inverted 'U'. They could have comparable efficiency on one part of the curve but be worse on others. That is why I initially said you can't assume that they would go as fast as a commercial airliner (i.e. their peak efficiency could be at a lower speed).
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 30, 2018, 10:49:33 am
Mom of the  year... This idiot names her daughter Abcde and then is indignant when people laugh at it. Way to set your daughter up for a lifetime of teasing, mocking and ridicule, moron.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46393501
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on November 30, 2018, 03:31:29 pm
Mom of the  year...

Actually she is not the only one. In fact the name has been in use since October 19, 1986, first recorded at the Kona Hospital in Hawaii. This is strange given that the Hawaiian alphabet doesn’t include the consonants b, c or d.  There are 328 girls in the US named Abcde, pronounced “AB-si-dee”.

https://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/people-named-abcde/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 30, 2018, 04:20:45 pm
Manitoba steps out on to the world stage.


https://i.redd.it/04we0j3wyh121.png
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 30, 2018, 04:22:04 pm
Actually she is not the only one. In fact the name has been in use since October 19, 1986, first recorded at the Kona Hospital in Hawaii. This is strange given that the Hawaiian alphabet doesn’t include the consonants b, c or d.  There are 328 girls in the US named Abcde, pronounced “AB-si-dee”.

https://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/people-named-abcde/

And their parents are all idiots who apparently never gave a thought to how others would react to this. These kids will be teased and ridiculed through life. Every time they try to order a freaking pizza people will laugh at them.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: waldo on November 30, 2018, 04:34:55 pm
And their parents are all idiots who apparently never gave a thought to how others would react to this. These kids will be teased and ridiculed through life. Every time they try to order a freaking pizza people will laugh at them.

insightful to your current condition! Thanks for sharing... your parents were such brutes to have named you _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (your prerogative to fill in the blanks; trust that no teasing, ridicule or laughing will occur)
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on November 30, 2018, 06:35:33 pm
And their parents are all idiots who apparently never gave a thought to how others would react to this. These kids will be teased and ridiculed through life. Every time they try to order a freaking pizza people will laugh at them.

Everybody look at me!  Forget the kid, just look at MEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on November 30, 2018, 08:14:21 pm
insightful to your current condition! Thanks for sharing... your parents were such brutes to have named you _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (your prerogative to fill in the blanks; trust that no teasing, ridicule or laughing will occur)

In fact, when my parents named me and my siblings they deliberately chose names which could not be easily ridiculed.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on December 01, 2018, 09:18:38 am
How ridiculous is tipping? Very ridiculous. Turns out the servers are making twice what the cook is. I actually know a young cook. Or former cook. She really liked her job, but quit to work as a waitress because it pays better. Did you know that some servers make a hundred thousand a year with their tips?


https://ottawacitizen.com/news/the-100000-a-year-waitress-isnt-a-myth-some-hard-truths-about-tipping-in-canada/wcm/d5422794-9d2b-46f7-83a2-5a36c7b961b5
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on December 01, 2018, 10:27:32 am
I have to admit I'm a big tipper.  >20%.  I always take a lot of cash with me so I don't have to use the card.  That way they aren't hovering.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest4 on December 01, 2018, 11:13:08 am
I have to admit I'm a big tipper.  >20%.  I always take a lot of cash with me so I don't have to use the card.  That way they aren't hovering.
Funny; I still tip based on how I perceive the sevice, and its either 0, 10% or 15%.   I don't tip at the till where I do all or much of the work (liquor stores, food courts etc.), except for the lunch place near work, sometimes.  They really do work hard and are always very cheerful and friendly.  Virtually every group outting I've been on (and we have many here) makes a point of telling us that the gratuity is added automatically at 18%. 

As to the original article, women getting awesome tips from tipsy male custmers in bars has been a fact of life for at least 45 years.  Using that to discredit tipping servers in family or even upscale restaurants is not particularly honest, imo. 

As to sharing with kitchen and other staff, I was doing that 40 years ago and its pretty common still, if what servers tell me today is true.  Front line service is a different job than kitchen; managing customers and keeping one's cool in what can be very trying circumstances should be compensated accordingly, imo.  Without a servers ability to do that, kitchen staff's take of the tipping pot would be reduced comsiderably. 

I also think tipping should be a customers choice; if choices on an electronic screen can stampede someone into choosing the most expensive option, that is not the fault of the servers; one can default to least expensive option just as well as most expensive though I get how it can be hard to do with the server standing right there.

What I don't like is when the choice for 0 is difficult to find on the screen.  So I ask because as long as the tip isn't advertised and presented up front as part of the food bill, then its still my choice and I want that choice.  I realize not everyone feels comfortable doing this and think its an unfair tactic.  I am equally dismayed by finding that a tipping option isn't automatically available when I want to tip, though that happens less and less often.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 01, 2018, 11:25:01 am
I have to admit I'm a big tipper.  >20%.  I always take a lot of cash with me so I don't have to use the card.  That way they aren't hovering.

Me too 20% on bill+tax.  15% if it's not great service.  10% if terrible.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on December 01, 2018, 11:31:11 am
Me too 20% on bill+tax.  15% if it's not great service.  10% if terrible.

But the article makes a point. What did your server do to deserve this tip? If the girl at the A&W counter takes the food and slips it onto your tray and gets no tip why should the one who takes it and carries it to your table get 20% of the value? Who  wouldn't get their own damn food to save 20%?

Also, in the US, where this really originates, servers make almost no money, as little as $2hr., and live on their tips That's just not the case here.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on December 01, 2018, 12:00:22 pm
But the article makes a point. What did your server do to deserve this tip? If the girl at the A&W counter takes the food and slips it onto your tray and gets no tip why should the one who takes it and carries it to your table get 20% of the value? Who  wouldn't get their own damn food to save 20%?

Also, in the US, where this really originates, servers make almost no money, as little as $2hr., and live on their tips That's just not the case here.

Good points, but when all is said and done I tip for me, not them. 

I leave a tip for the hotel maid and I never let them into my room.  I tip the taxi driver.  (More if they don't talk to me)  I drop cash in the tip jar at Starbucks when all they did is take my order.

I do it so I don't feel bad. 
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 01, 2018, 12:03:44 pm
But the article makes a point. What did your server do to deserve this tip? If the girl at the A&W counter takes the food and slips it onto your tray and gets no tip why should the one who takes it and carries it to your table get 20% of the value? Who  wouldn't get their own damn food to save 20%?

 

Sorry - I didn't read the article, I was just replying to tipping customs.  I just follow the general rules for this, and don't put much thought into it.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on December 01, 2018, 02:03:16 pm
I think we get the picture.



https://images.boredomfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/07/funny-signs-20.jpg
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 01, 2018, 03:43:51 pm
Huuuuuge cave discovered in BC!

https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/canadian-team-confirms-presence-huge-unexplored-cave-british-columbia


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 01, 2018, 03:51:19 pm
Ancient ruins discovered in BC!

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/b-c-university-student-helps-unearth-14-000-year-old-village-1.3358711

Quote
A university student has helped unearthed North America's oldest settlement, while excavating on a remote B.C. island. Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student with the University of Victoria's anthropology department, helped uncover a village that dates back roughly 14,000 years – which would make the settlement older than Egypt's pyramids.

...

Gauvreau and her team uncovered ancient fish hooks and spears, as well as tools for lighting fires and charcoal flakes, which can be used for dating the site, during an excavation on Triquet Island, which is roughly 500 kilometres north of Victoria and located within the Heiltsuk Nation’s traditional territory.

Researchers say the material is providing a glimpse in what they believe was a large human migration that may have occurred along B.C.'s coastline.


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on December 12, 2018, 04:49:35 pm
OK, I'm not sure if this qualifies as "news" but it was definitely news to me.  Family poop knives.  I think this kind of thing should be divulged BEFORE any weddings take place.

https://mommyneedsvodka.com/2018/12/poop-knives-family-wtf/?fbclid=IwAR0B339reW7Y-32cA3Sh5_pphFV1hy3523aDwaBXW4x_PEjh7dR9mrkwEDY
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 13, 2018, 06:11:37 am
No.  No.  No.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on December 14, 2018, 03:38:47 pm
http://theliberal.ie/pc-madness-people-are-saying-santy-should-be-now-female-or-even-gender-neutral/?fbclid=IwAR2W4ozE1i3FOGIvJBbcXfr-oWDiyJCRM2NXQWpMPXvML5DoqFnalA5ohLE

It's about damn time the Tooth Fairy also gets equality!!  >:(
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 14, 2018, 05:13:05 pm
Quote

You know the type, the social justice warrior, usually found on twitter hammering away on their keypad while lounging around in their pyjamas waiting for something else to be offended by.

Oh ... yay.  27% thought this was a good idea.  Is that 27% of their country (Ireland) being SJWs?  Seems like a whole lot.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on December 16, 2018, 09:34:43 am
Satire as political commentary.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/13/i-now-understand-how-nelson-mandela-felt/
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 16, 2018, 09:39:50 am
Satire as political commentary.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/13/i-now-understand-how-nelson-mandela-felt/

It feels a little too provocative to be satire.  This is also my problem with The Beaverton sometimes.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on December 16, 2018, 10:16:19 am
I always figured good satire would naturally be provocative to some. 

It's a little unsubtle, but hey, I know just how she and Nelson Mandela felt, having had my picture deleted last night.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 16, 2018, 10:40:55 am
I always figured good satire would naturally be provocative to some. 

It's a little unsubtle, but hey, I know just how she and Nelson Mandela felt, having had my picture deleted last night.

Right, but at a certain point it becomes a harangue and not fun.  The Onion gets close to it sometimes, but The Beaverton goes over the line.  I think political satire should be for everybody but I don't see how a conservative could enjoy TB.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on December 16, 2018, 10:46:10 am
I always figured good satire would naturally be provocative to some. 

It's a little unsubtle, but hey, I know just how she and Nelson Mandela felt, having had my picture deleted last night.

I guess you just have to learn the difference between "good satire" and just plain dumb.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: SirJohn on December 16, 2018, 10:47:39 am
I guess you just have to learn the difference between "good satire" and just plain dumb.

Thankfully, you here to constantly demonstrate the latter.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on December 16, 2018, 11:30:26 am
I guess you just have to learn the difference between "good satire" and just plain dumb.

It depends on who you are.  To many, dumb just means they disagree with it.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on December 16, 2018, 11:36:07 am
It depends on who you are.  To many, dumb just means they disagree with it.

Ah, I'm sure you'll get over it.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: guest7 on December 16, 2018, 11:43:46 am
Ah, I'm sure you'll get over it.

Good one.  Dorothy Parker, eat your heart out.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on December 19, 2018, 02:30:25 pm
Haha, this is funny.

Quote
Popeyes is launching "Emotional Support Chicken" for stressed-out travelers this holiday season.
On Tuesday, the chicken chain announced that it is selling three-piece chicken-tenders meals packaged in "Emotional Support Chicken" carriers at Philadelphia International Airport.

https://www.businessinsider.com/popeyes-emotional-support-chicken-airport-2018-12?utm_content=buffer61a4c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-insider-main&fbclid=IwAR1RqcxKs4qWbETGSLcvoAbGsnsJQGpA7O2rZ5c7XaJiyEcob_nTdagzXas
[attachimg=1]
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on December 19, 2018, 06:01:18 pm
Satire as political commentary.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/13/i-now-understand-how-nelson-mandela-felt/

Good article. Wish I could contemplate my oppression in Val d’Isere.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 23, 2018, 01:52:33 pm
Russian bears are addicted to huffing helicopter fuel until they pass out.  They're even following helicopters in search of delicious gas fumes and abandoned fuel barrels.

https://www.thefix.com/content/russian-bears-hooked-jet-fuel91494

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on December 23, 2018, 02:03:35 pm
Russian bears are addicted to huffing helicopter fuel until they pass out.  They're even following helicopters in search of delicious gas fumes and abandoned fuel barrels.

https://www.thefix.com/content/russian-bears-hooked-jet-fuel91494

 -k

Funny in a kind of sad way.

When I was a kid we lived in Steveston for a year when it was still pretty much a Japanese fishing village. One of the kid's parents used to make sake and they would put some of the used rice on top of fence posts and watch the seagulls get pissed.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 23, 2018, 02:15:05 pm
Good article. Wish I could contemplate my oppression in Val d’Isere.

I took a glance at her Twitter and had a few giggles.  I think ridiculing political correctness run amok has become low-hanging fruit for comedy, though.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 30, 2018, 04:25:02 pm
A new advance in solar cell technology may be on the way.  It uses "perovskite cells", which are based on tin salts or lead salts, rather than silicon. They were first discovered in Japan in 2009, but were not stable enough or efficient enough to be commercially valuable at the time.  But they have been improved steadily since, and are now apparently more efficient than the mainstream solar cell technologies.  In addition to better efficiency, perovskite cells are also appealing because they could potentially be much cheaper to manufacture than existing silicon-based panels. The co-founder of Swift Solar says:
Quote
“Another aspect that really excites me: how cheaply these can be made. These thin crystalline films are made by mixing two inexpensive readily abundant salts to make an ink that can be deposited in many different ways… This means that perovskite solar panels could cost less than half of their silicon counterparts.”

Swift Solar is a US based company that is trying to bring perovskite panels to market.  In the UK, a company partnered with Oxford University, called Oxford PV, is also trying to bring perovskite panels to market.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/a-new-solar-technology-could-be-the-next-big-boost-for-renewable-energy/

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on December 30, 2018, 04:34:14 pm
Interesting Kimmy, but i don't buy into hyped technologies anymore, but until sales match the hype.  Heard many promises before even in this field only to be disappointed. 

And when is Oculus Rift & VR going to take off!?  Was hyped for that too...then I actually played it and the pixels were so glaring it looked like i was always looking through a screened porch window.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on December 31, 2018, 08:43:02 am
Cold Fusion, 1989, was supposed to be the end of scarce energy...
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on December 31, 2018, 10:52:23 am
Unlike cold fusion, this is a known, understood technology that has evolved to the point of being ready for commercial use.

Unlike hyped "breaththrough" technologies like Graphene, this is to the point of being manufacturable. 

And it's not really a miracle technology at all, it's just an incremental improvement in the field of solar cells.  We can expect to see similar improvements in batteries and super-capacitors and magnetics and low-resistance conductors and other technologies that on their own won't change the world but as bits and pieces of a bigger puzzle can help enable new technologies or make existing technologies more efficient or cost-effective.

From the article, it seems as though the big obstacle here might be Chinese manufacturing capacity of existing solar-cell technologies. China has made it hard for US manufacturers to compete, by building huge quantities and selling them cheaply.  It could be that lower manufacturing costs will let Swift and Oxford be competitive, but if Chinese manufacturers undercut them on price, they might not survive regardless of how good their panels are.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 03, 2019, 03:56:16 pm
Unlike cold fusion, this is a known, understood technology that has evolved to the point of being ready for commercial use.

I wouldn't say it is quite read for commercial use. $7 million investment is interesting, but remember that the solar cell market is already multi-billion size.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Queefer Sutherland on January 03, 2019, 11:23:34 pm
What we do know is solar panels are going to keep getting better.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 03, 2019, 11:33:57 pm
What we do know is solar panels are going to keep getting better.
What we do know is the available solar energy per square meter is fixed and only available for a few hours per day. More efficient solar panels do nothing to address the need for dispatchable power sources such as natural gas.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 03, 2019, 11:51:10 pm
What we do know is the available solar energy per square meter is fixed and only available for a few hours per day. More efficient solar panels do nothing to address the need for dispatchable power sources such as natural gas.

"Only a few hours a day", where do you live? Germany isn't the sunniest country in the world but it generates over a third of it's power from solar. I suggest you sell your stocks in Exxon Mobil and get with the new picture.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 04, 2019, 12:35:50 am
"Only a few hours a day", where do you live? Germany isn't the sunniest country in the world but it generates over a third of it's power from solar.
It generates 7.1% of its power from solar even if 30% of the installed capacity is solar. The difference in the two numbers illustrates how inefficient solar is and how much Germany depends on the non-renewable dispatchable power sources.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 04, 2019, 12:49:37 am
It generates 7.1% of its power from solar even if 30% of the installed capacity is solar. The difference in the two numbers illustrates how inefficient solar is and how much Germany depends on the non-renewable dispatchable power sources.

I meant to say over a third (36%) by renewables, of which solar is a major component.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 04, 2019, 03:04:26 pm
What we do know is the available solar energy per square meter is fixed and only available for a few hours per day. More efficient solar panels do nothing to address the need for dispatchable power sources such as natural gas.

About 1kw of solar energy reaches the Earth surface per square meter. That is a lot of energy. If the average home consumes about 10kwh per day, then you need 10 hours for a square meter or 10 square meters (size of a garden shed) for 1 hour of sunlight. Today's solar panels are only about 25% efficient so you need about 4 times that amount.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 04, 2019, 07:37:44 pm
About 1kw of solar energy reaches the Earth surface per square meter. That is a lot of energy. If the average home consumes about 10kwh per day, then you need 10 hours for a square meter or 10 square meters (size of a garden shed) for 1 hour of sunlight. Today's solar panels are only about 25% efficient so you need about 4 times that amount.
Except 1KW of incident radiation is only available for panels mounted on racks that follow the sun. Fixed solar panels don't get anywhere new that amount of energy for 10 hours a day. Maybe 2-3 hours tops. Moreover, any cloud cover reduces the available energy so unless you live in a desert a lot of days there will be less than 1KW even at peak times. Lastly, people don't stop using power when the sun goes down and they need electricity so it makes no difference if solar panels were 100% efficient and as cheap as paper, they would still be an expensive source of energy. The only thing that will change the poor economics of solar will be cheap batteries but we are a long way from that.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 09:58:23 am
About 1kw of solar energy reaches the Earth surface per square meter. That is a lot of energy. If the average home consumes about 10kwh per day, then you need 10 hours for a square meter or 10 square meters (size of a garden shed) for 1 hour of sunlight. Today's solar panels are only about 25% efficient so you need about 4 times that amount.

Even if you never had any cloud cover, that is only a constant at the equator, everywhere else it varies with latitude and time of year.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 10:01:36 am
In So Cal there are some huge wind farms in the Mojave area and between Riverside and Palm Springs. The other day we drove through Mojave in a calm and not one of them was turning.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 10:07:56 am
"Only a few hours a day", where do you live? Germany isn't the sunniest country in the world but it generates over a third of it's power from solar. I suggest you sell your stocks in Exxon Mobil and get with the new picture.

How does it do that during the winter when there is less than 8 hrs of daylight at 50N and for much of it the sun is fairly close to the horizon?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 05, 2019, 12:19:57 pm
How does it do that during the winter when there is less than 8 hrs of daylight at 50N and for much of it the sun is fairly close to the horizon?

Well of course  solar power has it's limits especially based on where you live. When the sun goes low in Germany, they have wind farms which can pick up the slack. Then they have hydro and nuclear. Point being is they now produce a little over a third of their power from renewables. They fell behind somewhat due to political events more so than scientific events and China is now kicking their butts, especially in the manufacturing sector-you want a solar panel to stick on your roof in Germany you have to order it from China. I have walked the streets in various Scottish towns when there were thermal inversions in winter and it certainly convinced me we need to leave that coal **** in the ground, cough, cough.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: waldo on January 05, 2019, 12:34:03 pm
In So Cal there are some huge wind farms in the Mojave area and between Riverside and Palm Springs. The other day we drove through Mojave in a calm and not one of them was turning.

waldo factoid: many of those turbines, particularly the initial/early 80s vintage, have been shuttered. In some cases waiting on replacements due to efficiencies of newer vintage turbines and/or a lack of contracts to support those less efficient early vintage turbines and/or lack of contracts outright. Coincidentally, California's big utility companies have already bought most of the energy they need to meet the state's next target; one that requires 33% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on January 05, 2019, 12:56:43 pm
waldo factoid: many of those turbines, particularly the initial/early 80s vintage, have been shuttered. In some cases waiting on replacements due to efficiencies of newer vintage turbines and/or a lack of contracts to support those less efficient early vintage turbines and/or lack of contracts outright. Coincidentally, California's big utility companies have already bought most of the energy they need to meet the state's next target; one that requires 33% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.

That's an odd bit of phrasing. Does that mean that they've bought the equipment with which to make that much renewable energy?  Or does that mean that they've bought the energy itself (ie, secured contracts to buy renewable power from BC or similar?)

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 01:25:31 pm
waldo factoid: many of those turbines, particularly the initial/early 80s vintage, have been shuttered. In some cases waiting on replacements due to efficiencies of newer vintage turbines and/or a lack of contracts to support those less efficient early vintage turbines and/or lack of contracts outright. Coincidentally, California's big utility companies have already bought most of the energy they need to meet the state's next target; one that requires 33% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.

The other day, none of them were working because there was no wind. The solar arrays would have been working fine but this was a desert in So Cal, not the great Great North Wet of BC.

Just south west of Vegas they have mirror arrays that focus light on a tower where water is heated to produce steam to run generators. They need to use natural gas to get them going in the morning and also incinerate any birds that fly close to the towers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 05, 2019, 01:59:12 pm
The other day, none of them were working because there was no wind. The solar arrays would have been working fine but this was a desert in So Cal, not the great Great North Wet of BC.

Just south west of Vegas they have mirror arrays that focus light on a tower where water is heated to produce steam to run generators. They need to use natural gas to get them going in the morning and also incinerate any birds that fly close to the towers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Yep I think we all understand that a solar panel array doesn't work when the sun goes down. But why ignore how much coal isn't burned during the day when the sun comes back up? And, how many birds do you reckon have died due to breathing in coal smoke and temp. change?
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 02:49:30 pm
Yep I think we all understand that a solar panel array doesn't work when the sun goes down. But why ignore how much coal isn't burned during the day when the sun comes back up? And, how many birds do you reckon have died due to breathing in coal smoke and temp. change?

I'm no against renewable sources but they all have their limitations. Wind and solar alone will not entirely replace fossil fuels.

I posted the link to Ivanpah as a matter of interest, not at statement. You drive by them on I15 between LA and Vegas and they are quite a sight.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 05, 2019, 03:43:34 pm
Except 1KW of incident radiation is only available for panels mounted on racks that follow the sun. Fixed solar panels don't get anywhere new that amount of energy for 10 hours a day. Maybe 2-3 hours tops. Moreover, any cloud cover reduces the available energy so unless you live in a desert a lot of days there will be less than 1KW even at peak times. Lastly, people don't stop using power when the sun goes down and they need electricity so it makes no difference if solar panels were 100% efficient and as cheap as paper, they would still be an expensive source of energy. The only thing that will change the poor economics of solar will be cheap batteries but we are a long way from that.

True that today's panels reduce efficiency by angle of direct sunlight, but that angle is improving (widening) constantly. The amount of solar radiation is based on what reaches the surface.

Yes we all know that cloud cover and nighttime hours are challenges that need to be addressed with storage. The South Australia battery project is going well, not only addressing those challenges but stabilizing the grid far better than traditional means.

Even if you never had any cloud cover, that is only a constant at the equator, everywhere else it varies with latitude and time of year.
Yes, but 1kw per square meter is a lot of energy. Total energy we receive from the Sun in an hour is about equal to the total energy we expend (in all forms) in a year.  Also remember that over 85% of our global electricity generation was originally sunlight. We just need to harness it efficiently. The 1kw value is the global average, yes polar regions receive less and equatorial regions receive more.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 05, 2019, 04:52:31 pm
True that today's panels reduce efficiency by angle of direct sunlight, but that angle is improving (widening) constantly. The amount of solar radiation is based on what reaches the surface.
The amount of radiation reaching a surface is a function of the incident angle. That is why higher latitudes have less radiation. Fiddling with solar cells to perform better at high incident angles will only reduce the energy that can be used at low incident angles (i.e. they produces more consistent output for a longer time).

Yes we all know that cloud cover and nighttime hours are challenges that need to be addressed with storage. The South Australia battery project is going well, not only addressing those challenges but stabilizing the grid far better than traditional means.
The SA arrays store a few minutes of power at great cost and exist to smooth out sudden swings in output. They compete with natural gas peaking generators but are a lot less flexible. What SA installations can't do is store power for use overnight or for a few days of cloudy weather. We are no where close to having the battery tech needed for the latter application which is why solar will remain a bit player in energy production for the foreseeable future.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 05, 2019, 05:23:17 pm
The amount of radiation reaching a surface is a function of the incident angle. That is why higher latitudes have less radiation. Fiddling with solar cells to perform better at high incident angles will only reduce the energy that can be used at low incident angles (i.e. they produces more consistent output for a longer time).
The SA arrays store a few minutes of power at great cost and exist to smooth out sudden swings in output. They compete with natural gas peaking generators but are a lot less flexible. What SA installations can't do is store power for use overnight or for a few days of cloudy weather. We are no where close to having the battery tech needed for the latter application which is why solar will remain a bit player in energy production for the foreseeable future.

Maybe you didn't know that Inuvik in the NWT receives only about 10% less hours of sunlight than does Toronto.And, in Inuvik you have 56 days in a row when the sun doesn't go down. Solar is becoming very popular in the NWT, especially as AGW increases.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 05, 2019, 05:55:05 pm
Maybe you didn't know that Inuvik in the NWT receives only about 10% less hours of sunlight than does Toronto.And, in Inuvik you have 56 days in a row when the sun doesn't go down. Solar is becoming very popular in the NWT, especially as AGW increases.

You also have 56 days when it doesn't come up.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 06, 2019, 02:55:31 pm
Fiddling with solar cells to perform better at high incident angles will only reduce the energy that can be used at low incident angles (i.e. they produces more consistent output for a longer time).
Are you suggesting that all improvements at high incident angles are equally offset with loses at lower incident angles? Yes, tracking panels will give you the maximum efficiency overall, and are in widespread usage. I am just pointing out that non-tracking panels should not be dismissed either. At higher latitudes setting them on south facing slope (e.g. roof mount) is a simple way to optimize them for lower incident angles over the average day.

They compete with natural gas peaking generators but are a lot less flexible.

I guess responding in milliseconds instead of minutes is considered a lot less flexible in your book. They offer very different benefits, you are saying a car is bad only a bus will do. You are also totally ignoring the technology offers far more flexibility because it can be configured to offer different benefits and are only focusing on part of the system and how it was configured.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 06, 2019, 03:07:26 pm
You also have 56 days when it doesn't come up.

True, and that's when you switch to wind, and of course as storage improves, as it is rapidly, you can save up a lot of both.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 06, 2019, 08:19:54 pm
True, and that's when you switch to wind, and of course as storage improves, as it is rapidly, you can save up a lot of both.

The problem with solar in the Arctic is it only works when you least need it, in the summer. On the other hand, anything that reduces the need to truck in LNG and diesel to run generators is positive.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 06, 2019, 09:02:37 pm
Are you suggesting that all improvements at high incident angles are equally offset with loses at lower incident angles?
Yes, because for a given manufacturing process the density of cells will be the same which means orientating some of the cells to work better at high incident angles necessarily reduces the number of cells oriented for low incident angles. Improvements in technology can increase the overall density but the trade off will always exist.

I guess responding in milliseconds instead of minutes is considered a lot less flexible in your book.
Gas plants can operate for long periods of time. Batteries offer a few minutes of power. That is what makes gas more flexible and always a necessary part of a grid. Short duration battery installations are duct tape that mitigates some of the harm caused by introducing solar but cannot completely compensate for them. Gas installations are still necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 06, 2019, 09:21:38 pm
The problem with solar in the Arctic is it only works when you least need it, in the summer. On the other hand, anything that reduces the need to truck in LNG and diesel to run generators is positive.

That is quite true of course, but as storage capability improves we might be able to put some of those trucks to better use and also not have to pay 4 bucks a piece for a grapefruit after the sun goes down.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 06, 2019, 09:29:44 pm
Yes, because for a given manufacturing process the density of cells will be the same which means orientating some of the cells to work better at high incident angles necessarily reduces the number of cells oriented for low incident angles. Improvements in technology can increase the overall density but the trade off will always exist.
Gas plants can operate for long periods of time. Batteries offer a few minutes of power. That is what makes gas more flexible and always a necessary part of a grid. Short duration battery installations are duct tape that mitigates some of the harm caused by introducing solar but cannot completely compensate for them. Gas installations are still necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

Gas plants, coal mines, oil wells etc. can operate for a period of time long enough until we suck the last of it dry. We are going to look pretty stupid when that day comes if we don't prepare for it, and not only the "eastern bastards freeze in the dark". Do you have any idea how much solar power we get every day that we need to capture to meet our energy needs?" About 1 %. 
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: wilber on January 06, 2019, 10:12:50 pm
That is quite true of course, but as storage capability improves we might be able to put some of those trucks to better use and also not have to pay 4 bucks a piece for a grapefruit after the sun goes down.

I wouldn't hold my breath on the storage capability. I don't believe there is a silver bullet anywhere in sight that will replace all fossil fuels. I think that future energy requirements will come from a variety of sources including renewables and fossil fuels.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 06, 2019, 10:32:45 pm
I wouldn't hold my breath on the storage capability. I don't believe there is a silver bullet anywhere in sight that will replace all fossil fuels. I think that future energy requirements will come from a variety of sources including renewables and fossil fuels.

Well, on the one hand I know quite well that in all likelihood the last shower I take, the water will still be heated by gas. And I don't have kids so once I'm gone I don't really give a fiddely arse **** what happens to this planet. On the other, it's interesting to see that people are getting the point that dinosaur **** won't last forever. Some folks seem to think it will.   
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 07, 2019, 07:36:26 pm
Well, on the one hand I know quite well that in all likelihood the last shower I take, the water will still be heated by gas.

About 30% of my showers are solar heated.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Omni on January 07, 2019, 08:54:41 pm
About 30% of my showers are solar heated.

Hey, didn't you hear, Trump says global warming isn't happening. Tomorrow, after your shower, grab a pick axe and go dig some coal. It's the way of the future.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: ?Impact on January 08, 2019, 04:23:56 pm
Yes, because for a given manufacturing process the density...

Agreed, if you keep doing the same thing you get no improvement. Instead of a simple metal grid, you can use Fresnel lenses, or even ring-shaped metallic nanocavity arrays. Lets not get away from the fact however that the amount of energy needed is still only a very small percentage of what reaches the surface anyway.

Batteries offer a few minutes of power. ... Gas installations are still necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

Battery capacity is a function of how big and how they are configured. Musk math (so some hyperbole may be present) is that the scope of battery manufacturing needed to meet global demand for the electricity grid is on the order of present automobile manufacturing. The point being that is it big, but not something outside of our capability.

Let us not forget that there are a lot of battery storage alternatives to lithium-ion. The interesting ones I see are salt water based, and potassium air. They both rely on abundant natural resources, and recycling would be easier (in the case of the salt water ones, you could literally mix the components and get sea water which is easy to dispose of; potassium is the 7th most abundant element in the earths crust). Both those technologies offer very deep discharging: 80% in the salt water ones, and 90% in potassium air (by comparison lead acid is 50% and lithium ion is 70%). The disadvantage to salt water is relatively slow charge/discharge times (10 hour/20 hour in current production batteries), but that could be combined with other technologies to smooth out the overall rate. Salt water also cannot operate in very cold temperatures (about -5C), so would need to be housed in buildings or warming blankets in northern climates. Salt water appears to have similar weight storage densities to lithium ion, and potassium air seems to be far better by a factor of about 3.

Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: TimG on January 08, 2019, 06:05:57 pm
Let us not forget that there are a lot of battery storage alternatives to lithium-ion...
The issue has never been about technology (i.e. can we build it?) but about economics (i.e. can we afford to build it?). There has been an economic incentive to develop grid scale batteries for 60+ years because these kinds of batteries would make the management of the grid so much easier even without renewables. They have not been deployed because they would cost too much money and there is little evidence that the cost structures are going to change significantly given current trends. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not our society depends on access to cheap energy and unfortunately, solar/wind and other non-dispatchable sources are expensive once you build all the infrastructure needed to turn the sun or wind into *useful* energy.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Goddess on January 10, 2019, 11:33:52 am
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/quebecs-labour-watchdog-seeks-dollar900k-from-church-of-scientology-for-underpaying-staff/ar-BBS2usz?li=AAggXBV&ocid=spartanntp

You gotta hand it to Quebec - they don't put up with religious nonsense as much as the rest of us do.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on January 14, 2019, 01:24:05 am
Canadian scientists have observed interesting and mysterious repeating "fast burst" radio signals coming from a galaxy 1.5 billion light years away:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/radio-signals-fast-radio-bursts-frbs-galaxy-signal-repeated-space-scientists-a8719886.html

CHIME-- "Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment" is some kind of project in BC that detected the signals.  They don't really know what causes these repeating fast burst radio signals.  I gather that repeating signals are not an anomaly, and that fast burst signals are not an anomaly, but repeating fast burst signals is rare and hard to explain.

Whatever produced these signals obviously happened a very long time ago, and was also very powerful.  These millisecond-long bursts originated with as much energy as our sun produces in a year.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on January 14, 2019, 05:28:05 am
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/quebecs-labour-watchdog-seeks-dollar900k-from-church-of-scientology-for-underpaying-staff/ar-BBS2usz?li=AAggXBV&ocid=spartanntp

You gotta hand it to Quebec - they don't put up with religious nonsense as much as the rest of us do.

 :D  Also - Catholicism in public schools.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on February 05, 2019, 06:09:49 am
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/04/asia/russians-arrested-baby-swing-malaysia-intl/index.html

Russian idiots swing baby around for busking show.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on February 12, 2019, 01:55:48 am
Interesting article about consciousness. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/)  It looks at how we can identify consciousness in creatures that can't tell us whether they are self-aware.   Primates and whales are widely believed to be self-aware... it appears some birds may have some degree of consciousness as well.

But birds have significantly different brain geography than we higher mammals do.  So if (and it's still an if) some birds have consciousness, then...

Quote
If these behaviors add up to consciousness, it means one of two things: Either consciousness evolved twice, at least, across the long course of evolutionary history, or it evolved sometime before birds and mammals went on their separate evolutionary journeys. Both scenarios would give us reason to believe that nature can knit molecules into waking minds more easily than previously guessed. This would mean that all across the planet, animals large and small are constantly generating vivid experiences that bear some relationship to our own.

And it goes on to speculate how fish and insects might experience the world around themselves.

Quote
The neuroscientist Björn Merker has suggested that early animal brains solved these problems by generating an internal model of the world, with an avatar of the body at its center. Merker says that consciousness is just the multisensory view from inside this model. The syncing processes and the jangle and noise from our mobile bodies are all missing from this conscious view—some invisible, algorithmic Stanley Kubrick seems to edit them out. Nor do we experience the mechanisms that convert our desires into movements. When I wished to begin hiking up the mountain again, I would simply set off, without thinking about the individual muscle contractions that each step required. When a wasp flies, it is probably not aware of its every wing beat. It may simply will itself through space.

If one of the wasp’s aquatic ancestors experienced Earth’s first embryonic consciousness, it would have been nothing like our own consciousness. It may have been colorless and barren of sharply defined objects. It may have been episodic, flickering on in some situations and off in others. It may have been a murkily sensed perimeter of binary feelings, a bubble of good and bad experienced by something central and unitary. To those of us who have seen stars shining on the far side of the cosmos, this existence would be claustrophobic to a degree that is scarcely imaginable. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t conscious.


 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on February 22, 2019, 05:42:38 am
And more creatures in the news:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/21/worlds-largest-bee-missing-for-38-years-found-in-indonesia

(a giant bee to make me not sleep some night soon)
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: kimmy on March 13, 2019, 01:06:42 am
Not a news item, really, but somewhat related to my last post regarding consciousness.

http://nautil.us/blog/heres-how-well-know-an-ai-is-conscious

This is one of those things that I am interested in but don't really have the education to fully grasp.  These are slippery topics that are difficult to get a grip on.

The alt-right crowd recently came up with a meme they call "the NPC" ..."non-player character", referring to video game characters who are controlled by computer scripts rather than other human players. The premise is that liberals aren't really sentient beings, they're just simplistic scripts that can't engage in rational conversation, and are only capable of giving a few predictable responses.  "that's racist", "Trump supporters are Nazis", and so on.  It's dumb, but that's how the meme goes.  But the meme is actually a new formulation of a really old question.  How can you tell if somebody else is actually sentient?  What if they're not? What if I'm the only sentient self-aware being alive, and everybody else is a robot or a figment of my imagination, or so-on?

That puzzle leads to something called a Turing Test... proposed by famous cryptographer and early computing theorist Alan Turing, a Turing Test is the notion that a real intelligence could be discerned from an emulation by asking suitable questions... some questions may be grammatically correct but make no contextual sense, for example, and one would expect a thinking observer to respond that the question doesn't make any sense, while a non-thinking observer might attempt to answer, which should result in inane responses that reveal it didn't really understand the question.

But if an artificial intelligence is able to scan the entire internet for similar questions, parse the results of its search, and pick out popular answers, or determine that the question is nonsense by observing a lack of search results, then a Turing Test becomes more challenging. The author suggests that a Turing Test would have to be conducted with the subject disconnected from the internet.

The author discusses "qualia" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/)-- aspects of something that can only really be understood through actual experience--  you can't describe color to a blind person, you can't describe pain to something with no physical sensations, and so on.  This is something I thought was an interesting question-- is a chess computer actually playing chess, or is it just solving a series of mathematical problems? (Are humans even playing chess, or are we also actually just solving a series of mathematical problems?) Does any understanding of what "chess" even is factor into whether chess is being played? Is it possible to be a champion chess player who has no concept of what chess is other than a series of math problems to work out?   I dunno. Anyway, the author of this article talks about qualia as a possible means of identifying sentience.

Quote
What might we ask a potential mind born of silicon? How the AI responds to questions like “What if my red is your blue?” or “Could there be a color greener than green?” should tell us a lot about its mental experiences, or lack thereof. An AI with visual experience might entertain the possibilities suggested by these questions, perhaps replying, “Yes, and I sometimes wonder if there might also exist a color that mixes the redness of red with the coolness of blue.” On the other hand, an AI lacking any visual qualia might respond with, “That is impossible, red, green, and blue each exist as different wavelengths.” Even if the AI attempts to play along or deceive us, answers like, “Interesting, and what if my red is your hamburger?” would show that it missed the point.

But that's also problematic, because an artificial intelligence could potentially have qualia that are much different from our own, while having no concept of qualia that are meaningful to humans.  An artificial intelligence might fail to grasp color as anything other than different wavelengths, while experiencing mathematics (for example) in a way that humans are simply incapable of grasping, or perceive qualia in some other respect that we can't even conceive of.  So trying to discern sentience using qualia that are meaningful to humans would result in a very anthropocentric concept of sentience, and one that might be very incomplete.

So the author moves on to more abstract concepts, which is where I kind of lost the plot.  Anyway, I still thought it was interesting.

 -k
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on March 13, 2019, 06:04:19 am

But that's also problematic, because an artificial intelligence could potentially have qualia that are much different from our own, while having no concept of qualia that are meaningful to humans.  An artificial intelligence might fail to grasp color as anything other than different wavelengths, while experiencing mathematics (for example) in a way that humans are simply incapable of grasping, or perceive qualia in some other respect that we can't even conceive of.  So trying to discern sentience using qualia that are meaningful to humans would result in a very anthropocentric concept of sentience, and one that might be very incomplete.

So the author moves on to more abstract concepts, which is where I kind of lost the plot.  Anyway, I still thought it was interesting.

 -k

I think qualia by definition have to be human.  However, machines can understand things we can't and bugs cause them to behave erratically, lie humans.  What they have over us is the ability to look at huge volumes of data.
Title: Re: Interesting news items
Post by: Michael Hardner on October 07, 2021, 12:13:31 pm
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/q38bpf/i_saw_some_ants_carrying_a_glove_up_a_lamp/

Ants advancing on human culture...