Wind power is a bad joke. In my home state, i see the things everywhere, and I know its a giant waste for one reason: steel. There are independent studies that quantify this and prove it, its been in the papers.
The environmental/carbon impact of having a windmill megawatt over existing natural gas production is slim. The carbon cost of refining several dozen tons of steel and metal for the thing, ruins the benefit. The things dont work very well for the cost, and they dont last. They require service all the time. They have a crane to take the generator/transmission out of the whole thing to work on it.
Whenever you consider the total "carbon cost" most of the zero emission green tech falls flat. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear are still the only commercially feasible zero carbon. Everything else is being subsidized. In place upgrades to existing fossil fuel plants is the best short-term solution. Profitable natural gas, with carbon offset trade (forestry/tree-planting) is the best long-term solution imo.
> The life cycle analysis focuses on the wind power plant as the basic functional object instead of a single wind turbine. Our results show that present-day wind power plants have a lifetime emission intensity of 5.0–8.2 g CO2/kWh electricity, a range significantly lower than estimates in previous studies.
> Our estimate suggests that wind is currently the most desirable renewable energy in terms of minimizing CO2 emissions per kWh of produced electricity [2].
2014 IPCC, Global warming potential of selected electricity sources [3]:
Just poison the data. Break their algorithms by going on a bit of a virtual shopping spree. You wont even have to buy anything, just place in cart and cancel later on. Get those targeted ads replaced with ads for machine parts, woodworking tools, craft supplies, coffeemakers, etc. Make sure you ARE logged in when you do this, so that these results have a higher priority for the algorithm to pull. Some products will also COMPLETELY poison your profile, just like a runaway slave throwing red herring. Anything related to pregnancy or impotence will do this. If they want data, give it to them. Drown them in it.
PS. I wind up shopping for parts for my job on my phone all the time, I know this works. Even when you dont have the accounts connected, they do.
This is not the only way they are cheating, they are using every tool they have to manipulate the market. Thier strategy for ~15 years now has been to short paper silver (ETFs) to hold the price down, while buying and stockpiling actual physical silver. They now have a 500 million ounce hoard. As the article mentions, they got this idea after they acquired Bear Stearns in liquidation, who had billions of long term shorts on paper silver ETFs.
JP Morgan is almost as crooked as Wells Fargo. A $1 Billion fine is nothing to them, especially because they are hoarding precious metals with the intent of being "last man standing" in a hyperinflation scenario. If I was RICOing them, I would stipulate that they lose the actual object of thier conspiracy - the silver. Unlike gold, which is used mainly for speculation, silver has many industrial uses and a certain constant demand. If JP Morgan nukes silver production, the whole world suffers.
1. Game cameras. They are purpose built for this kind of need. Your strategy should be to identify/establish clear routes in and out of your local area, and then set up an intel network in cooperation with neighbors. If you can network basic cameras, you can feed the input to a face/person recognition software. Say once every 30 seconds its sends the frame to an AWS instance or similar, and if it sees a person it rings the alarm/email alert.
Siesmographs and other such sensors can detect and track vehicles causing vibrations, some can be laid in roadway.
There are also some sensors that will detect only humans, via the ammonia our sweat contains, but I dont know if those ever made it to the public market, they were tippy top secret for the longest time.
2. Dogs. There is a landowner near me who is responsible for $5M+ of equipment and facilities. In addition to cameras and such, he has trained dogs that roam around at night. If you are already a livestock handler, adding "kennelmaster" to your job is a great way to solve your problem.
PS. There was a wave of this in my home state in the 80s. It was a combination of cults practicing, and uncommon diseases killing off livestock, which wild animals then tore apart to eat only what wasnt rotten.
Advice for the author, and anyone who cannot seem to learn from books:
1. Read better books. The three he mentions off the top are all pop science low-knowledge perspective pieces, imo. Especially G,G & S.
2. Learn how to learn. Gaining knowledge is like building a fortress. It requires a solid foundation and years of diligence. And it doesnt happen all at once, it is built brick by brick.
3. Know how to cope with your learning style. Visual, Auditory, Verbal, Structural, etc. Go get a full battery IQ test. If you discover you have no talent at visual processing, that could be why reading doesnt work for you.
Further elaboration:
1: A good book is like a dead man talking. The dialogues of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle only survived in written form, because they were good and useful. If you want a modern example, the last good information book i read was "Ignition: An Unofficial History of Rocket Fuel." A little more difficult than the best-sellers, but man thats cool stuff.
2. Knowledge is not something you are going to just "get" by going through the pages. I have read probably tens of thousands of pages of history and politics to get to where I am now: actual knowledge, I can almost predict the news, and frequently do, weeks or months in advance. Think of it like a D&D character. If you put points into "Knowledge: Whatever" every level, eventually you'll get to a +10 bonus where you are correct more often than not.
3. Because the schools are failing at their real jobs, most students never learn how to teach themselves. They require information to be presented, just so, for them to "get it." Different learning styles are coddled and enabled, while refusing to teach critical thinking, dialogue, i.e. how to actually learn and teach yourself. People really do have differing mental abilities. Its why some are lawyers, others are musicians.
Written material will always be the largest share of meaningful information and communication.
I try not to sit on HN logged into Upvotes Anonymous, but this article was so silly I had to. Im learning how to read Hebrew, guess what, from a .... a book! What a world!
I recognize some of the names here. This will be a case to watch, which ever way it goes the constructions allowed here will percolate through the law for years to come. This case hinges on the exact wording of the law that authorizes the National Emergency Library. IIRC, it basically gives copyright impunity during a declared national emergency. As far as I am aware, the coronavirus declared national emergency is still in effect. IA loses by attrition, is my guess. Many rounds of "Preliminary" injunctions and orders will stop thier income streams, then they die.
If I recall correctly, the Internet Archive decided unilaterally that they would do this due to many libraries being closed.
I (not in the US) do not remember any changes to the copyright act being passed to allow this.
Edit to add: They offered this globally and therefore disregarded any laws in countries which have already settled this issue. (Hint: to my knowledge not in a way that favors their interpretation)
There is no law permitting this - IA main legal argument it:
> Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books
> This case hinges on the exact wording of the law that authorizes the National Emergency Library. IIRC, it basically gives copyright impunity during a declared national emergency.
There is no such law. What on earth are you talking about?
4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less detail to start with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and poster is highly likely to contain people who can identify even the smallest detail. Within the past few years, a few remarkable ones stand out to me:
1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background.
2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.
3. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and facial hair.
The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail, which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.
Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results pretty quick.
Yes, but then again, Reddit also did the same thing right after the Boston marathon bombing and as I recall it went pretty badly, as they ended up identifying the wrong person as the culprit and his mom ended up receiving threats from random people (he was missing at the time). He was later found dead in a river and it turned out he had killed himself.
If anyone is interested in something from this time period worth reading in its original language, that is not on the reading lists, I can recommend the works of Sir Thomas Malory. He collected, compiled, and translated from French to English everything we call "Arthurian Legend." He did this while in prison near the end of his life. I picked up a used copy on a whim, knowing nothing about Middle English, and its been difficult but priceless. It took me an hour to get through the first page, but it puts Game of Thrones to shame. Found it on Amazon, they list it as ASIN B011T6UUCQ. Theres other editions, but I can vouch for the integrity and readability of this one.
Sir Thomas Malory's life is just nutters, likely because it's a bit hard to pin down. Nonetheless, born a lesser noble, he gets knighted and then does what any young man in those late medieval days does: goes civil warring. Riding about he gets married, and has a kid (maybe more?). Somehow he gets elected to parliament, while being wanted for some sort of crime. Parliament doesn't really seem to mind, maybe they thought him a bit roguish for it.
Unfortunately, he then decides to back the wrong (loosing) side durng some such part of the War of the Roses. They get at him and try to jail him for this. Also a bunch of murdering and raping and pillaging for good measure. He gets captured and, well, just walks out and swims the moat. Nothing really comes of that escape, legally speaking. Everyone was like, good for you.
As he is still backing the wrong side, they try and get him again. This time they do their jobs and capture him. The jury convicts him and he, well, maybe they convict him. No one really knows. So they let him go. This pattern repeats itself a few times, yes really. Malory finds that cattle rustling on the Scottish border is more his cup of tea anyway.
Eventually he gets on the right/winning side of the war. Unfortunately, they still don't really like him, all that pillaging you know, so the general pardons that come along when a new king comes into power, well, those skip him. Finally, he gets into a prison that really has some bars behind it. There he gets really bored reads a bunch of French and English stuff borrowed from a bleeding heart Noble next to the Tower of London. It's all about King Arthur so he writes 'Le Mort d'Arthur'. He dies in prison.
Another vote here for the Malory. An earlier draft of this article had a Malory example, but I decided it wasn't needed. But the Malory is not hard to read, and it's a lot a of fun.
Point of Information: the phrase "conspiracy theorist" was developed and fielded by the CIA as a counterintelligence effort.
Among other tactics, they wished to be able to use the term as a dismissal of anyone who got information about their real operations. This is very well documented, and is common among intel agencies of many countries.
It is also well documented, that the CIA and others (KGB etc.), have intentionally spread disinformation, from AIDS to Apollo hoaxes, in the same channel as (limited) legitimate information. This tactic is called "poisoning the well," the limited real info is a "limited hangout." If you put those terms into any search, youll find reams of documents detailing examples. Usually, these are the actions of some foreign service, analysed and released for the public service.
When the author began to align obviously false information with more credible things, what he is seeing are these intentional networks of lies that our own services have created. These things are not organic. He identifies common psychological features in these posters, because the intel agencies strongly select based on personality.
Also, how many of the accounts he investigated are bots? Was he able to prove that real individual people were doing this?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Its been debunked already!
I’ve heard it before, but it does sound like a typical conspiracy theory: it could have theoretically happened, but seems too convenient for conspiracy theorists to use to say they are being persecuted by a large body of power.
You didn't mention a source for your point that the CIA coined the phase 'conspiracy theory'. I found the original source, in the New York Times. [1] (Context: combating suspicion of the CIA's involvement in the Kennedy assassination.) Relevant quotes:
> But a C.I.A. document, recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, provides a detailed account of at least one instance in which the agency mustered its propaganda machinery to support an issue of far more concern to Americans, and to the C.I.A. itself, than to citizens of other countries.
> “Conspiracy theories,” the cable went on, “have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.”
> Among the arguments that the agency suggested were that the Warren Commission had conducted “as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.”
> “Point out also,” the cable directed, “that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.”
> These critics and others, the C.I.A. said, should be depicted as “wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in,” politically or financially “interested” in disproving the commission's conclusion, “hasty or inaccurate in their research, or infatuated with their own theories.”
> When the author began to align obviously false information with more credible things
I think there is a terminology problem in this discussion and it will cause lots of us in the comments to chase our tails.
I think the credibility word is too subjective to be useful in this discussion. I think most conspiracy accusations are unprovable by most of us (unless we are federal prosecutors) so I assume that both logic conspiracies and fantasy conspiracies must be evaluated with equally few facts.
I think the myth that the CIA created/empowered the term “conspiracy theory” has lots of the same symptoms of fantasy conspiracy theories themselves. It apparently empowers the powerful and gives additional persecution claims to those who are labeled “crazy”.
The most interesting part of your comment was to get me thinking about the role of bots (and AI in the future) in crafting both hypotheses and researching them. I’m curious if social media bots may give us the tools to effectively test the psychological traits of people who are more likely to adopt theories about less coherent conspiracies.
1. No. Simply impossible. Experimental aircraft maybe, but no aliens.
2. Somewhat. The cabal is there, thankfully they dont control everything yet. See: Rothschild and sons; communism.
3. No. A technical miracle, but they happened for sure. With a very high power telescope you can see some tracks the rovers left.
4. Definetely. Theres enough circumstantial evidence to take to court and win. Biggest obvious one is Al Franken admitting on Congressional record that he got "the Jew call" (his own words) to not go to work in the towers on that day.
5. Only through negligence and bad science. Fluoride at the end tap cannot be measured en masse effectively, so it is often overused. It is a potent neurotoxin, even at low levels. There is a chicken-egg problem with measuring many contaminants present in recycled water.
6. Again, only through negligence. Insufficient standards in medical supply and waste disposal, needles being reused is how HIV got out.
Keep asking, I can do this all day. Ive been to the bottom of the rabbit hole and back. We have such sights to show you!
I can find no Congressional record of Al Franken saying this.
What I did find were quotes from his book and a lot of people saying that he was being sarcastic and if you read the next few sentences you can see that.
(I still think it was obviously an inside job though without even knowing about Al Franken.)
The environmental/carbon impact of having a windmill megawatt over existing natural gas production is slim. The carbon cost of refining several dozen tons of steel and metal for the thing, ruins the benefit. The things dont work very well for the cost, and they dont last. They require service all the time. They have a crane to take the generator/transmission out of the whole thing to work on it.
Whenever you consider the total "carbon cost" most of the zero emission green tech falls flat. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear are still the only commercially feasible zero carbon. Everything else is being subsidized. In place upgrades to existing fossil fuel plants is the best short-term solution. Profitable natural gas, with carbon offset trade (forestry/tree-planting) is the best long-term solution imo.