> Austerity measures will include wage and price controls (like Nixon did in 1970s), sky high interest rates.
^This is my biggest concern.
Thus far real estate has been my favorite investment. I assume though if interest rates go up peoples buying power and hence prices will go down. If I liquidate my investments I will owe taxes and I fear inflation will eat up the cash value.
Given enough inflation you will eventually get full employment and wages will catch up with productivity increases. If you have 1% inflation for a decade the economic system is going to fix itself eventually but it's going to take forever, which is why anti inflation sentiments have built up as people get used to the new normal and are scared of change.
That's the opposite of what your link shows. While wages have not kept up with growth in the economy or overall productivity, they have absolutely "kept up with inflation," and a tiny bit more, i.e., the average wage has the same buying power now (or a little more) as the average wage had decades ago after adjusting for inflation.
I think the average pressure should stay about the same because the mass stays the same, but if it compresses maybe the pressure goes up in low-lying areas and goes down at higher altitudes.
According to Wikipedia, CO2 can liquify at around 5 atmospheres, though it has to be pretty cold at that pressure. The phase diagram shows it as a liquid around room temperature (300K or so) at about a hundred atmospheres. Which makes a liquid ocean of CO2 is at least sort of plausible if the temperature drops far enough.
No, and the other comments about gas laws and volume are overthinking it a bit. Pressure at the surface is caused by the weight of the atmosphere. On earth, a column of air extending from sea level to space, with cross sectional area one square inch, weighs 15 pounds.
Neither the temperature or volume of the atmosphere changes its weight. (Ok, I suppose a hotter atmosphere has more volume and extends higher into space and weighs slightly less, as it is farther from the planet on average, but I assume that’s a fairly negligible effect)
You forget things like condensation/solidification of things like CO2 in lower temperatures, so atmosphere composition would change dramatically, and so would overall 'weight' of the column to space you mention.
Anyway as other mention it doesn't change that much in survability, having 116 days long single Venus-day would mean temperature differences would be extreme, probably in hundreds of degrees.
You beat me to it. Just posted a comment saying the same thing. I think if we solidified the CO2 we would have an easier time dealing with it, but IDK. Then again, we might be able to get to work now by just suspending some blimps in the upper atmosphere. They could use solar energy to sequester the CO2 and start lowering the pressure & temperature.
I read an SF story a few years ago where the idea was to sequester the carbon of Venus into blocks of diamond. A minor bit of (ahem) atmosphere in a pretty good novel . . . just don't remember the title.
While the equation you give is valid, I think it is probably not that useful given the "volume" is open to space and so we can't solve this equation.
I think more useful is a static equilibrium, specifically that d(pressure)/d(altitude)=-density(pressure,temperature)*gravity(altitude).
Which gives you roughly an exponential falloff with altitude if you assume gravity is constant (which is fine if it's a small fraction of planet radius) and molecular weight and temperature are constant (that's definitely not true but oh well)
EDIT: for the question asker: reducing the temperature would have a first order effect of just making the density gradient steeper, but surface pressure would be the same. The second order effect might be that the surface absorbs some CO2, which would actually reduce surface pressure.
It's not, though, the Venus atmosphere does not behave like an ideal gas all around, it transitions into a supercritical dense liquid towards the ground.
I was at a school who was just starting to do some similar things. They had students register the mac of their devices (wired and wireless). So they identified students by mac. With this it was actually pretty easy for a bad actor to frame someone else by just changing their mac to another device on the network.
Same school would also lock your university account after 3 bad password attempts and you could only unlock in person at the library help desk. Again you can see the problem.
We required MAC registration but you also had to auth with 802.1x to get an IP so we knew who was doing what and when. MAC registration came in handy several times for locating stolen laptops and phones. I think there may have been an exception for devices that couldn't auth but it could have been a different vlan and probably port.
We also had adaptive password expiration and complexity policies based on length. If you used a passphrase (~15+ characters) you could use dictionary words but if it was under that you couldn’t and had to include a number and symbol too.
Passphrases had like a 90 or 180 day expiration. Passwords were I think 30? You set them in the same text box and the rules were based on your entry.
I think the lockouts had a timer with an exponential increase. You'd get like five or ten tries before you'd have to start waiting minutes for the next attempt. Not sure if there was a hard lockout option. Phone support was daytime hours in the main office, all times when labs were open (some labs were 24 hour) and email support was 24/7. 24/7 lab monitors worked the ticket queues as well.
It was a great department actually. Lots of great work being done to make things easier for students. Relied heavily on students to operate the department and gave a lot of people careers.
Back in the 90s a student wrote a ticket management app in Perl. The university hired him and he was still in the department writing code 20 years later when I was there. One of the techs I worked with was hired by the law school to handle their IT. I got several jobs including my first out of school through people I met and worked with there.
Some Universities in the UK for a number of years have been making students download certificates that allow SSL decryption as part of counter radicalisation efforts.......
Oh god, Universities with CS divisions allow this sort of thing? Where are the sane people who go wtf?
These "IT" people who push to implement this probably end up working for the DoD or White Hall and push anti-encryption measures.
I find `mulmen`'s efforts very distasteful (trying to stop piracy on networks is like trying to stop kids from doing drugs) but not crossing the line as much as forcing certs on kids personal machines.
> I find `mulmen`'s efforts very distasteful (trying to stop piracy on networks is like trying to stop kids from doing drugs) but not crossing the line as much as forcing certs on kids personal machines.
You have badly misinterpreted my comments here. Everything we did was to protect the student's interests. We were the gateway between them and whoever was trying to sue them. The University took whatever action it needed to in order to maintain that position and keep students safe from abuse. We were often riding the line of legal action taken against us by those rights holders, frivolous or not.
I'm not aware of any student ever losing network access because of piracy. We just sent a lot of emails saying "please stop" and in general students did.
I'm not sure what you find distasteful about that but I stand by my words here and my actions at the time.
That seems like a very different requirement. The University I worked for just had hundreds of wired and wireless access points and limited staff to manage them so devices had to be registered to protect everyone. It was self-service IIRC. If you connected with an unrecognized device it just took you to a login page and then the device was registered to you. I don't think there was any tracking of what students were actually doing once they were connected. Certainly not at the kind of detail that could suggest anything about radicalization.
Wow, both of those describe the system at my alma mater Washington University. The 3 strikes logout was the biggest pain ever. I knew someone who got DOSed because his papercut printer driver kept trying to use old credentials, which somehow kept locking him out of his account until they diagnosed it.
I drink decaf coffee sometimes and still feel the same boost as drinking caffeinated even though I know is has much less caffeine. I guess its mostly in my head. Although decaf does have some caffeine.
This is all about previous association - your body reacts to the thing because it has worked before.
The same happens when you take a paracetamol, you always feel better as soon as you've taken it, but it's because previously it did really work.
A similar thing happens with cursing - you can put up with more pain while shouting swear words than normal words, it is believed that is because you associate all those swear words with previously painful/traumatic times in your life and you're kind of drawing on those for extra strength.
The thing is we (the US) did do this at one point in time. When I was a kid you could buy a coke in a glass bottle and return it when done to be re-used by the manufacturer. For some reason we stopped. We should bring that back.
When I was in Mexico around the early 2000 they still did this. When you buy a drink you could return it for a few cents back from the vender.
The corporations only make those choices because they are allowed to(or rather, because they are not forced by the regulations to actually pay for the environmental cost of what they make). Yes, I recently noticed that with Tesco eggs, I have complained to them about it. And it's not our fault but we can definitely try to avoid these products as consumers. Telling companies why you avoid them is also a good thing to do.
I hate this attitude that treats corporations as having zero responsibility beyond what they are legally mandated to do. Yes, it is an observable fact that corporatism and market economics incentivize corporations to behave that way. But it is an unjustified leap to turn that into a moral claim that it is ethically acceptable for that to be true.
People are incentivized to commit package theft in the US today. The odds of being caught and prosecuted are very slim, and the upside is you get free stuff. As an economic action, it is very market efficient: low barrier of entry, large number of "sellers", few cabals or controls over prices. There definitely isn't perfect information on products, but given that the cost is near-zero, that doesn't matter much. As a business, "package theft" is a great one to get into, and the market highly rewards you for doing so.
However, we correctly consider people who do so as despicable shitwads who rightfully earn our scorn and condemnation. We publicly shame them, and certainly don't want to hang out with them and count them as friends.
We should do the same with businesses that do morally harmful acts, regardless of whether the act is technically illegal or incentivized by market forces. It is certainly the business's fault when they do a shitty thing. They have fully agency in the choice of whether or not do so.
Corporations aren't natural persons and have no ethics. They are abstract creations of law and the only legitimate expectations of corporations as corporations are their responses to structural incentives including enforced legal obligations.
We can talk about the ethics of the actions of corporate decision-makers, but only while keeping in mind that structural incentives mean that decision-makers who sacrifice the narrow interests of corporate investors for ethical reasons beyond the constraints forcibly externally imposed on corporations are likely to, over time, be replaced by those who do not.
If you want corporations to act consistently with some view of ethics, you aren't going to do it sustainably by moral persuasion directed at decision-makers, but only by shifting the structural incentives.
You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.
Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right. It's just a legal accident, a mummers farce, and you defending it is morally reprehensible too.
Worse still, it didn't used to be this way till some prat of an economist (probably American) starting saying so, and a bunch of people smelling easy money piled on. Companies used to care about their image, now their "care" about their shareholders (but actually their contractual bonuses and severance packages).
> You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.
No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless, and that one ought to consider what they want corporations to do to acheive moral ends, and then work to establish structures to at least incentivize that, if not actually constrain them to it.
> Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right.
I think you start from a false premise here; that it is of no value to analyze corporations as if they were moral actors does not in any way absolve any natural persons for the immorality of any actions they undertake in or around a corporate structure.
It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)
Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.
There was a story on here today about the dilemma a roman consul faced because the laws were contradictory. It was fine to murder for revenge, in fact Roman law didn't get involved in revenge or murders really, but patricide was viewed as an absolute wrong, a no-no. The woman had murder her Mum in revenge as the Mum had killed her grand-children to spite her Daughter. It was a real dilemma, revenge is fine, and it was a good reason for revenge, but parricide is an absolute wrong.
Does that sound normal?
Of course not TO US.
I think that in the future, today's corporate law will be viewed just as asinine and bizarre. Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder? Thousands of people colluding to murder people with cigarettes when they knew how lethal they were? Fine. Because they were "employees" and the "person" doing it was a legal figment called a corporation?
A bunch of black people in America get incarcerated for simply being friends/near the murderer, but a bunch of white people who all spent years or even decades covering up systematic mass-murder get to walk away? Man, when you actually think about it it's mind-blowing. White collar crime is so easy to get away with.
It's a convenient fabrication that makes sense only when you're inside the system.
I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change, it's the way it is, but otoh you simply can't see the wood for the trees. You think, somehow, it's right.
> Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.
They really are not, and the entire corporate form is structured and governed by law differently than partnerships to make them not like that.
I mean, unless you count the chartering government, it's constituents, and all the investors as part of the group, as well as all the managers and other employees. But its completely useless to talk about the collectively morality of the aggregate of such a heterogenous group of individual actors with different knowledge and constraints with regard to the actions of the corporations. It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.
> Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder?
That's the consequence of viewing the corporation as an independent moral actor, since that allows viewing the corporation as the responsible party.
> I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change
I'm a pragmatist, and recognize that it needs to change, and that change starts with not viewing corporations as moral agents, but as tools.
> No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless
Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality? Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."? If so, what is meaningfully different between a political party, a corporation, or any other kind of organized collective activity?
> It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)
I think I get what you're saying. We should focus on the people, not the group, because the people can be punished. But I think that's an ineffective mindset.
The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.
If we don't allow our moral code to also operate at the group level, then it will always be at a disadvantage compared to the people whose organized behavior has moral outcomes with strong economies of scale.
We should treat individuals and groups as moral actors. We should be willing to say, "this corporation as an emergent behavior of its otherwise moral individuals did a bad thing, so should thus be dissolved."
> Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality?
Yes, though perhaps somewhat less so (I'll address the “perhaps somewhat less so” part later.) What I said further down a sibling thread about corporations applies exactly to political parties as well: “It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.”
> Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."?
No, if by “is bad” you mean “tends to produce bad outcomes”. In the general sense this is distinct from though correlated with the morality of the persons comprising the party.
> The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.
Yes, groups are tools of individuals, not moral actors. It is no more sensible to talk about their morality than it is to talk about the morality of other tools. You can talk about the morality of the people who are using the tool. In some types of groups, many actions of the group are a fairly direct reflection of a moral consensus of the members, and in the case of those actions of those groups one can refer to the morality of the group as a useful shorthand for the morality of the shared position of the membership that is behind the action. This is true of political parties generally in a simplified, idealized view, and frequently enough in a realistic view that it's not always completely pointless to talk about the morality of political parties.
It's almost never true of the complex set of stakeholders with different structural roles that are behind business corporations, especially large and/or broadly held corporations. For any given action of a particular corporation, there might be some group of it's constituents whose morality it fairly directly reflects, but even for actions for which this is the case it won't necessarily be the same group (or even a similarly situated group) from action to action.
Good doc here on how the plastic industry pushed for "recycling" laws so they could look like the good guys, but much of the stuff you see the recycling logo on can't in fact be recycled.
> Like in the UK, Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones. Is that my fault?
If you keep buying them, yes. Tesco's beancounters (who are legion) are certainly going to keep track of the overall cost and revenue structure. Assuming the plastic containers cost less and are sold in equal amounts, they will push forward to roll out plastic over cardboard where they can.
If they want price signals, give them price signals. Vote with your wallet.
We buy our eggs from a nearby farm. Tray of 30 is good for a week, and sometimes two. Better quality than what Tesco or Sainsbury's offers, too.
EDIT: we also return our cardboard trays to the farm shop when we buy a new batch. Reuse >> recycle.
Slightly OT: I may be a bit unfair picking on Tesco as it turns out the pulp used to make egg cartons has run out because of the demand for eggs from the covid home-baking upswing, they do plan to switch back.
But only because the last time they pulled this stunt back in 2011 or so claiming it was eco-friendly to use "recyclable" plastic it blew up in their face (most of which isn't recycled) .
Fair enough. Now that you mention it, I remember how during the height of the lockdown cardboard pretty much ran out. People bought more stuff online (lots of cardboard in packaging), while there was no waste paper collection to fill the demand from the supply side.
There still isn't enough waste paper collection happening, really. The communal large containers are emptied at most once a week - and they have capacity for less than two days. People have a lot more cardboard packaging to get rid of, but with collection points hitting their capacity in 1/3 of the pre-covid time, there's a constant backlog to get through.
> last time they pulled this stunt back in 2011 or so
A bunch of states have bottle deposit laws. Stuff goes to recycling rather than direct reuse, but still, the concept is to use the deposit as an incentive to reduce litter and increase recycling rates.
At the end of the day, if we want companies to do more sustainable things than using single use packages that cost nearly nothing to dump in a landfill (or litter), then we need to start charging them enough to incentive sustainable behavior. And sadly few politicians want to be the person that raises prices on bottles of milk or racks of beer.
Personal anecdote time, I guess. My state has a bottle deposit law. I don't return anything but it still goes into recycling. We buy very few individually packaged things, I honestly can't be bothered to collect large bulky containers and bring it back to a redemption center for a lousy $5 or less.
Generally speaking, our recycling outweighs our trash and (commercial) compost put together. Mostly the bottle deposit doesn't change my recycling or purchasing behavior and it only annoys me that I'm "throwing money away". I think the biggest reason to keep it is because it's a perverted form of social welfare for homeless trash pickers who have a different tradeoff of time for money than myself.
Part of the problem is that nickel deposits were introduced in the '70s but have not been adjusted for inflation. The inflation-adjusted value of a nickel in the '70s is closer to a quarter, and if the deposit on the bottle was a quarter people would certainly feel more strongly about collecting said deposit back.
There's at least one company in the west (US) that still does this. Have you tried Strauss farms milk? The creamtop is absolutely delicious. There's a $2 bottle deposit which encourages the bottles to be returned. Only problem is you can only get this milk at higher end grocery stores or fancy co-ops.
Moving to plastic significantly reduced the cost of transportation and the resulting CO2 emissions (but increased CO2 through production of plastic - net?).
Better to haul a trailer full of coke that 98% product and 2% plastic than one that’s 90% product and 10% glass.
The reason is money. Labor is a lot higher in the US over Mexico. Cheaper to trash and remake vs reuse. You would need a stick or carrot in the economic cost to shift behavior. Corporations are smart, they will choose the cheaper path.
I was in Guatemala in the early 90's on a bus and it stopped near a stand with people selling soda.
The procedure was open the soda bottle, pour the soda into a plastic bag, put a straw in the bag and tie it. The vendor kept the bottle (presumably you could keep the bottle yourself if you paid the deposit with your soda). I kept waiting to see a bag leak or some other disaster but it seemed to mostly work. You couldn't put your soda down though. Maybe it was a scheme to encourage rapid consumption or accidental loss and sell more sodas, not sure.
Maybe the reason is because of stronger food safety laws and tort law.
If some guy used his bottle as a hammer for several months before turning it in for recycling, then someone cuts their hand on a jagged edge or drinks a glass sliver, that's a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Unlikely maybe but at Coca-Cola scale I imagine things like that will happen eventually.
These companies would have to have sophisticated QA processes, or melt down and re-cast the bottles to ensure the food safety of their supply chain against millions of chaos monkeys.
Edit: Here I just did a Google search for the butthurt downvoters that proves there is extra QA that needs to be done. From an Oregon glass bottling reuse program:[1]
> Among other attributes, the machinery features an electronic sensor that uses X-ray equipment to image each bottle, detecting flaws in the glass, as well as mold and other contaminants, Bailey said. That step will reject any bottles that are chipped or contaminated.
Why should laws to protect people be deleted and laws added to protect corporations?
You base laws that protect the well being of the citizenry into a tort reform call. Protecting corporations that abuse the public does not improve the lives of the public. It just improves the profit margin.
The basis of "tort reform" is a panic assessment that lawsuits run wild and the only solution is to indemnify the rich and powerful. This lets them abuse the public even more.
Your link implies this is for liability, but it could just as easily be a filtering step so that the bottles provided are up to a certain quality standard to be readily reused.
The root problem is the bottles are cheaper to make out of disposable material. The cost burden is shifted to The People over a longer term. This is the tragedy of the commons.
That's quite a hypothetical - if there were a rash of lawsuits the lead up to Coke being sold in 2 liter plastic bottles, that would be indicative, but I am not aware of anything like that - and you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case.
> you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case
That's completely different - you're confusing recycling with reuse. The bottles you're referring to are made anew from glass that has been smashed into cullet and re-cast into new glass.
What the commenters above are advocating are thicker glass bottles that are washed and reused as-is, i.e. reuse.
Different QA concerns when you're manufacturing fresh glass versus collecting it from randos
Bullshit. The Club Mate I'm drinking right now came in a reused glass bottle. Some of these bottles have more wear on the outside, some of them look pristine.
