I'm hopefully a future physicist and the first to defend its importance but this kind of argument seems quite bad faith to me.
"Physics-based industries are those that rely heavily on expertise in physics. These include oil and gas extraction, nuclear fuel processing, and various forms of manufacturing like fibre optics, lighting equipment, office machinery, cars, ships and armaments."
Oil extraction, gas, and ships. Really? Sure, I get it, these areas wouldn't be possible without prior physics research, and present physicists will create new economic opportunities in the future; but blindly inhereting these fields' economic signifiance to physics seems incorrect. In other news, mathematics worth more than 80% of EU economy - these industries include finance, business, engineering, computing, and entertainment.
You say that, but an awful lot of people doing maths in industry are physicists - mathematicians are far more likely to stay in academia. One of my first jobs was writing trading algorithms in the early 2000s - I was a physics student, most of the dev team were physicists or chemists. We got a mathematician in to consult on some gnarly cluster analysis - but after a month he presented us a white paper that was very, very pretty, and described our problem mathematically very succinctly - but totally unusable as it wasn’t so much a solution as a beautifully defined problem.
But the point is you are not doing physics, you are at best tweaking some pre existing model.
I did it in the past while consulting for a major bank, I studied CS, not physics, and I haven't seen any applied physics in banks.
They hire young people studying physics because they are not scared of working "with numbers", but when you past 40 you're not scared of anything anymore and you'll find there a majority of people with a degree in economy, once you grasped the basics, you can do the job.
While the physics student hopes to be a real physicist someday in the future and stop working on trading models as soon as somethings better comes up.
Conservapedia is trying to be a Wikipedia alternative - an Internet encyclopedia, from a fundamentalist point of view.
RationalWiki is not, and I'm not sure why you mentioned it. It's not a Wikipedia fork or alternative. It's not even trying to be one, it has completely different goals. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are both wikis, but there's thousands of those around.
Rationalwiki defers to Wikipedia on some things but writes articles on topics when they think the Wikipedia article doesn't go far enough in a direction they would like. Most rationalwiki articles would be redundant if their goal wasn't to overwrite Wikipedia
You seem to be spot on. According to ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) the carbon footprint of a flight from Malaga -> Amsterdam for 1 person is about 0.161t (metric ton) [1]. One carbon credit gives you the right to release 1t carbon dioxide and according to the NYT (2019) one 1 carbon credit is worth no more than $30 [2]. So, in taking the plane you release 0.16t, but you can prevent the release of up to $300/$30 = 10t with the money you save.
So sure, the train releases less CO2, but if you instead fly and buy carbon credits you prevent 62 times your carbon footprint from the plane ever being released into the atmosphere. But I'm starting to wonder, does my math really check out here? These numbers seem kinda absurd.
Great, so now we have more trees in a country that I will likely not visit. Meanwhile the people in my own country are suffering from the local pollution caused by planes and corresponding infrastructure. The noise a plane makes. The gigantic space that the airport needs. The local wildlife that suffers.
I was under the impression that carbon dioxide was largely a global problem. I don't have the knowledge to comment on that, or the other problems you brought up - in fact, I don't have much of an established opinion on the topic at all. I just wanted to present some math on how you could theoretically contribute to there being 62 times less CO2 in the atmosphere overall - if that's in your interests. I can't comment on the other intricacies (I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything, I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.)
Trains aren't that great either, unfortunately. Airports are a stain on a place, but railways cut huge stretches of habitats in two. Wildlife passes can help, but it's expensive to build a lot of them, and they're not a panacea. Plus, in some places you have to destroy valuable natural areas if you need to build more rail.
Still, until we have planes that pollute dramatically less (both in gases and in noise), they're the best we have.
Exactly. If the charterer has to pay less fuel for your ship because you put a kite on it, surely they will choose your ship over others? Is there no competition in this market or why does fundamental market principles seemingly not apply?
It's one extra level of indirection. In the housing market, landlords do sometimes pay for upgrades to their rental properties, but they are less likely to do so than owner-occupiers.
Additionally if the ship owner was also the operator, they could benefit from some vertical integration, training their crew on the new technology.
If the effect of the kites on prices becomes large enough or the technology becomes standard, expect widespread adoption, but it's a reasonable claim that the existing market structure slows rollout when it's only marginally profitable.
> In the housing market, landlords do sometimes pay for upgrades to their rental properties, but they are less likely to do so than owner-occupiers.
Is that a fair companrison? An owner occupier will often over capitalise because they desire something or have a lifestyle benifit beyond money. A rental owner wil look at dollars in/out. With the ships, its all coming down to a spreadsheet of cost vs benifit for both owner and hirer.
I guess the point is that these systems have to be retrofitted to existing ships. The ship owners don't see the benefit - it costs them to do the modification - and the ship renters don't see the benefit, because ultimately the owner passes on the modification costs to the renter, displacing the fuel cost savings.
Whats needed is for regulation to come in and say 'ships that have these systems pay less to dock in port' or whatever. But, the technology has to be proven to reduce costs and carbon footprint - so someone needs to make an investment to prove this works before governments will get behind it.
The fact a stranger gets to look at me naked is undignified - like if someone was hiding spy cameras in gym showers, or walking up to people in public and pulling down their trousers.
From a Defcon angle, it's also an information security risk; even large government bodies have fallen victim to cryptolockers, so it's not like the government-grade IT security keeping the photos secure is impenetrable.
The 'reassurance' that I'm too ugly and unimportant for anyone to take particular interest in does nothing to restore this dignity :)
> In the United States, the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 required that all full-body scanners operated in airports by the Transportation Security Administration use "Automated Target Recognition" software, which replaces the picture of a nude body with the cartoon-like representation.[3] As a result of this law, all backscatter X-ray machines formerly in use by the Transportation Security Administration were removed from airports by May 2013, since the agency said the vendor (Rapiscan) did not meet their contractual deadline to implement the software.[4]
Yep. I refused the backscatter scanner when they first came out because of radiation and nude scans, but now that they've changed that I think it's fine.
That's the reason why there are more recent devices that hide the nudity and only show abstract figures with suspicious body areas highlighted.
But the airport visitors has no way of knowing what generation the software is, i.e. whether they are visible in the nude or not. Also, the unmodified images by still be stored on the device - who knows?
Would Obama, Trump, and their wives be happy to have their scans available for public viewing? If it's obvious they wouldn't, it should be obvious it's an invasion of privacy.
For me, I'm already iffy about the whole thing when it's just me but the thought of putting my kids in one of these things makes me... very unhappy, in a bunch of different ways at once. But so does a stranger feeling them up. I'm not sure how/whether I'll ever be able to fly with them.
Some posters are claiming the screens don't show the raw images anymore, but what happens to those scans? Betting they don't discard them. Ever.
Revenge porn is terrible, but I don't think that's relevant here. Can you think of a plausible scenario where a backscatter machine's data could be used against someone? They didn't save your face; I don't know what someone would look at. And that's if the machines actually saved any data, which was not supposed to happen.
I created fake nudes in high school about 20 years ago... It's always been on the table for an artist to fake them, the only difference in that and deep nudes are that a computer does them. Why is it just now bothering people? Because of the buzz word of deepnude?
In addition to the fact that a computer can create a photograph that is exceedingly realistic with exceedingly little effort, releasing nude photographs of anyone without their consent—fake or not—is a terrible thing to do to another person.
Your youth makes your actions forgivable, but not acceptable.
non-ionizing means mostly harmless, but there is no guarantee. Proteins come in lots of shapes and sizes, and non-ionizing radiation can still resonate.
A little while ago I was trying to get into Airsoft (paintball with plastic bullets as opposed to color) to have a reason to spend more time with my brother. The little bullets have quite decent momentum and can penetrate normal low-grade safety glasses, and so I was browsing around for glasses with a certain rating. Found the exact pair I wanted for a good price on amazon, but I just couldn't run the risk of getting fakes from China. Needless to say, I haven't played any Airsoft yet..
They have secured a place in the minds of people as being the only place you can get anything - or, get anything conveniently, I guess. I hope there's still physical stores out there that do e.g. airsoft goods. The real "problem" is of course that consumers are then faced with real consumer prices, where they have to pay $15 for a good pair of safety glasses instead of $1.50.
They've gotten good enough at SEO that it's honestly hard to Google for alternative or niche vendors.
Unless you're plugged into the community for the activity enough to know the reputations of big online vendors, you've got the same problem of low quality, counterfeits, poor fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
I can't remember the specifics, but with the certain model I wanted, at a reasonable price, and with shipping to Sweden I'd like to remember that Amazon was the best option. Regardless, although my last sentence might've been a bit dramatic, the point of the anecdote was to share how Amazon lost me as a customer because of their counterfeit problem.
The first search result for "airsoft safety glasses" is [1], which shows me Danish prices and a delivery cost to Denmark.
Amazon might be easy, but knowing their products may be counterfeit, the company pays next to no tax, and has underpaid staff on awful contracts, I've not bought anything from them for years.
I must qualify what I said by saying that I've found this much harder the more specific I need to be. I could find 0 results for short M3 screws when I searched domestic sellers a few weeks ago. No hardware- or electronic stores carried them. One had them listed with a 3 month delivery and at about $3 each. After that hour+ you Amazon it, without putting hours into finding it in other countries who's languages you don't speak.
Airsoft glasses is something I can find in any mall here.
We're pretty well of the beaten path of Amazon here, but I had a similar need (#1 slotted flat-head brass wood screws) that McMaster-Carr didn't sell a little while ago and found them on microfasteners.com. It looks like they stock metric machine screws as well.
If nobody goes to retail stores to _ask_ for a specific type of security glasses, how will they ever know to stock it? We, the consumers making Amazon's monopoly.
While security glasses are something that you will hardly find in a typical mall retail shop, it is something, that shops with tactical gear do stock. They also haveh a clerk, who can give you an advice for your specific needs.
"Physics-based industries are those that rely heavily on expertise in physics. These include oil and gas extraction, nuclear fuel processing, and various forms of manufacturing like fibre optics, lighting equipment, office machinery, cars, ships and armaments."
Oil extraction, gas, and ships. Really? Sure, I get it, these areas wouldn't be possible without prior physics research, and present physicists will create new economic opportunities in the future; but blindly inhereting these fields' economic signifiance to physics seems incorrect. In other news, mathematics worth more than 80% of EU economy - these industries include finance, business, engineering, computing, and entertainment.