nickjarboe

Well, most reservoirs have gone from almost empty to near capacity[1] in just this year and the snow pack is well above average. It would be great to recharge some of the ground water used during the drought, but by any reasonable measure the drought is over.

[1] http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...

Standardized gold and silver coinage (money) was also developed at this time. Another huge change for humanity. Maybe the two ideas are related. See "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber.

Just because it is not legal to force servers to share some with the bar backs and the cooks does not mean it is not expected in most places. Not all social customs should be codified in law. Some flexibility in life is good.

Many cultures and sub-cultures don't believe in tipping for many different reasons. These cultures exist all over the globe and in the US. When tipping is needed to provide a decent wage for a service, people from these 'no tipping' cultures will tend to get bad to no service. Taxi services are heavily criticized for this behavior. I think it is great at least one of the two major smartphone hailed car services has a default culture of not tipping. Drivers can choose which they like better.

Uber rides are very cheap at the moment, especially when you get an Uber Pool and no one joins. I hope they up the fares some and pass them on to drivers and keep tipping for special extra-ordinary service. Uber is so much more convenient than conventional taxi service and I sure hope it or some similar service continues into the future.

I would think that volatility would be a shot term play. Give me a stock the just goes up 0.1% every day and I'll borrow to the hilt to buy it.

It is because oil in a barrel contains many different parts. Refining is mostly just distillation. Chemically changing the product is sometimes done but is much more complicated and expensive. With just distillation, one will get everything from butane to kerosene to fuel oil [1]. The light parts (lower boiling point) are generally more valuable, with fuel oil as the gunk left over (also used for asphalt). This is also why "light" crudes are more valuable than "heavy" crudes.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=6970

It would be great to move as a home owner and be able to avoid the 5-6% realtor cost on both ends (10-12% total). This could enable millions of people choose better living arrangements. Unfortunately for people in California, Prop 13 will still create huge costs to moving.

And then there was Webvan that IPO'ed in Nov, 1999 with a market cap north of $4.8 billion. RIP: 2001.

Please note this 60% tax is 60% of what one could rent the property for, not 60% of the value. Yearly rents are maybe 5-10% of the value, so a 3% to 6% tax as the word is normally used. Still something, but not nearly extreme as the headline.

From the abstract of the paper cited, "vehicle-kilometers traveled increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads." Congestion may not decrease but building more roadway lets more people get to travel where and when they want.

Cities are powerful because of ease and variety of people and businesses you can interact with. A fast point-to-point transportation system where one can travel with up to 40 tons stuff seems to me to be a great system. Cars and trucks have large external costs that we should vigorously try to reduce (physical pollution, noise pollution, land use for roads and parking, energy use, time wasted driving, etc.) but forcing people to use less desirable modes of transport by having the desired mode suck more due to traffic seems quite regressive. If we had instant teleportation from point to point, but the machine took up a city block and belched sulfur dioxide, I would hope the impulse for society would be to research decreasing the size and pollution of the machine and not to just restrict by law that there is to be only one machine per city.

One might consider that if Enclosure did not increase total food production productivity per person, then the peasants would have had to just keep working the land like they did before. I'm not saying the peasants had better lives as industrial workers than as feudal farmer workers (they probably did not), but maybe in the long run more people will have better lives. Same problem today with automation.

And decision was unanimous.

And we also gave up on incremental and evolutionary improvements on the last great new thing, nuclear technology. The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was on December 2, 1942. Nuclear bomb - July 16, 1945. Hydrogen bomb - November 1, 1952. Grid connected nuclear power plant - June 26, 1954. Nuclear aircraft program - canceled 1958. US nuclear rocket program NERVA - 1959 to 1973. Project Orion, a nuclear pulse spaceship design (with an interstellar variant) - ended with the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. Low radiation versions of nuclear explosives for seismology, mining, excavation, and construction (Project Plowshare) - canceled 1977.

I think you are right that 1970's was when society changed with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 as the final nail in the coffin for nuclear technology advancement and use.

I had not considered that conflict. It was in Kashmir and the border was never agreed upon by both sides (as you state). I wouldn't call it an invasion or even really a "war" with the small number of killed at only ~1,000. Others might disagree.

Countries with atomic weapons have never invaded another country with atomic weapons. This is a great improvement over WWI and WWII, although it is hard to know what the long tail risk is of killing almost everybody with a full scale nuclear exchange and nuclear winter. I think maybe the best situation would be that each responsible (to be determined) country would be allowed 10-30 nukes on ICBMs only (verified somehow; live cameras plus inspections?). With nukes on ICBMs only there would be no sneak attack where the attacker is unknown. With a small number of nukes, deterrence is still likely and the possibility of a nuclear winter is eliminated. I'd trust Norway with a small nuclear arsenal.

Another rare example is the US where mineral rights are spread over millions of individuals instead of the govenment.

More like an ore deposit. Could turn it into a mine with some work.

Rock bands may have been in their prime back then but their fan base has probably yet to reach peak wealth.

To the first order it is the fact that a liquid only propagates pressure waves while a solid can propagate shear and pressure waves (which propagate a different speeds).

The key is debt. If your debt is in US dollars and you are forced to pay in US dollars, then you need to have US dollars. If you don't have them, you have to trade what you have (labor, land, beanie babies) with someone who has US dollars and want what you have. Hyperconcentrate the dollars, get most people in debt, and maintain the power to collect debts. This will make the economy not work well for most people.

Student loans, house loans, car loans, credit cards. Here we are.

I was thinking that producing the hydrogen feed stock would be most of the energy used in the process. This site [1] states that, using the current global feed stock mix of light carbon and heavy carbon sources, about half the energy used in production is feed stock energy and half is added energy. Maybe an industrial chemist could estimate how much energy this new tech could save if it could be used at the scale needed?

[1] http://ietd.iipnetwork.org/content/ammonia

Maybe electricity rates in California should be dropped to increase demand. The state has one of the highest electricity rates in the country [1].

[1] http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm

Not sure where you get a pure hydrogen source on this planet without using some energy. I'd like to own such a source. Sort of like owning an oil well.

Individual DNA analysis is on the way, so hopefully health science can start to study what might best work for you, individually. Maybe for now just weigh the health advise of your genetic ancestors more than some study on millions of people that show only small differences of outcome.

Well, half of it will. The half life of potassium-40 is ~1.25 billion years. It decays to calcium-40 about 89% of the time and argon-40 11%. When using potassium-40 decay for dating, the usual method is determining the ratio of K-40 to radiogenic Ar-40 [1]. This is not easy and involves irradiating samples in a nuclear reactor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon%E2%80%93argon_dating

Since Musk is not making electric cars just for the profits, maybe Tesla will produce replacement batteries with better specs at lower cost. Tesla cars are designed to have battery packs that can be easily replaced contra Apples recent devices. Tesla car batteries will be the first ones, at volume, that people with electric cars will want to replace. If Tesla sets the trend other car manufactures will be at a disadvantage if they don't follow.

This short article is basically a bunch of quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... (2007).

Some might find the New Yorker article, "Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich"[1], that the Outside Online article extensively quotes, a more interesting read.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-f...

I wonder, with Alphabet's investment in SpaceX, if they see satilite as the future instead of fiber.

Here is a link to the full html article [1] and the pdf [2] The links are a bit hard to find from the abstract page. The html version has some messed up formatting but the pdf is fine. The DOI is: 10.1073/pnas.1601040113

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9232.full [2] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9232.full.pdf