The primary goal of the NSC is to prevent the reactor complex from leaking radioactive material into the environment and the secondary goal is to allow a future partial demolition of the old structure.

Two things Hawkings has said come to mind: We need to get off this rock in the next 1,000 years and if there are aliens we probably wouldn't want to meet them because they'd tear us apart.

Lol, but I have so many thoughts on this - I wouldn't even know where to begin and end. Every single day I come up with a couple of different ideas of what the fuck is going on in this reality... So for today, Ugh (lol), we may actually be a part of an exceedingly strange alien "program" that exists beyond our senses. Wherever we look to find the nature of it, it turns into something else, does something else (good luck Large Hadron Collider lol) to create an illusion of infinity, yet along with an illusion of structure. So, in essence we could be the aliens and THE alien(s) is/are all around, inside & outside of us, yet we can't see it or know it. Sounds like a nightmare scenario, but I for one welcome our all encompassing magic-tech alien(s), lol.

I think it is extremely probable that there are lifeforms and probably advanced beings out there. Yet, I am open-minded enough to see that we may actually be *special* and there's nothing else out there besides this one strange paradise that we're destroying. And I mean, we may actually destroy ourselves before we're able to get far enough out there, so there's that and if that happens... guess we weren't so special afterall, or... but then we die and become part of the alien Nirvana so it doesn't matter anyway? lol

Flux core would remove any slight oxidation between deposits on a continuous weld, or a media blast nozzle in front of the weld zone.
I agree with you if they intend to use it for load bearing structures, but it wouldn't be difficult. Just a loose seal around the work area and positive gas flow keeping oxygen out, problem solved.
The downside I see is cost. It's expensive to 'make metal' with a mig....or any welder. Electrodes/wire aren't cheap, and then there's the electricity. Bending or milling sheets, castings, or blocks is almost always going to be cheaper. This will be useful for designs that require complex interior shapes impossible to do conventionally, but not much else, imo.

At 8:24 just as he's saying "rich Americans are therefore beginning to return to the city", the city shown is Canadian (Vancouver). The glass and metal structure in the lower left of the view is the Law Courts Building where my civil wedding took place under a waterfall.

I can't really disagree with that, but it has to be said that the issues that are not brought up are distinctly non-partisan--that is, the issues that are not brought up are the ones that are disadvantageous to both parties.

For instance, no one talks about gerrymandering anymore. It clearly benefits both parties, but it is destroying our political system by creating disincentives to working across the aisle with the other party.

In my view, there are three major structural reforms in the US government that need to be addressed: 1) Gerrymandering 2) Campaign finance and 3) regulatory capture. Of these three, only the second one is addressed by either candidate, but not in a satisfying way.

We need major reforms in healthcare and economic wealth distribution, and we need to prepare ourselves for certain worldwide economic changes due to technological innovation and globalization, but until we deal with those three major issues, we won't be able to make any headway.

"Bothans (pronounced /'bɑθɪn/) were furry mammalian anthropoids, about 1.5 meters tall. Hailing from Bothawui and several colonies, Bothans differed in facial appearance and body structure with canine, feline, and equine features. They were known for being master politicians and spies, craving intrigue and subterfuge.

So... where are all the Bothans who died to get this information?

Whitewashing in Star Wars? For shame.

eh, kinda, sorta, maybe, could be true depending on your circumstances...

It's a pretty short treatment of a very complex topic.

Buying a home has a lot of positives.
Financially, while you might not be building equity in the first few years, eventually, you ARE building equity. Don't buy a home unless you can afford to pay the damn thing off.

There's also a big difference between rents and mortgages. Rents go up over time and mortgages (depending on the structure) generally go down (either on a reducing mortgage or as a function of your income).

Also, mortgages stop when you've paid them off. Rent doesn't. If you're renting when you retire, well, have fun paying the same rent (or more!) until you die.

Also, if you get that dream job in Hawaii... you can actually SELL your house. Or even better, rent it out.

That doesn't even cover the intangibles like the fact that you can do whatever you want to the house. Don't like that wall? Knock it down. No asking a landlord! *

Also, no property inspections and while the bank can kick you out if you don't pay... that's the ONLY reason they can kick you out, unlike renting where you can be evicted for "damaging the property", "being a disturbance" or "because the landlord doesn't like you".

All that said, there are plenty of reasons not to buy, and they are highly dependent on your income, ambitions and the local property market.

Just don't ever buy anything where your mortgage is more than 30% of your take home pay.


* you should really ask an engineer and your local government in case your house falls over and/or you need building consent.

Very true, which is why I was glad she asked whether anyone in charge of compliance had been fired. However, her point about his paying back the money is pertinent, as he has stated repeatedly that he "takes full responsibility." I don't feel one can claim to both take full responsibility and personally suffer none of the consequences.

While cross-selling is absolutely legal, managers at a high level should be savvy enough about how people behave to realize that if low-level employees are heavily incentivized to sell, while also being punished for not selling enough, then they're going to get creative about how they do it. That should absolutely lead to careful monitoring of any newly-opened accounts to ensure they're entirely legitimate. Without that compliance structure in place, it's inevitable that fraud is going to happen. Human nature makes it very easy to predict.

This is without even getting into the allegations that whistle-blowers who made serious efforts to inform upper-level management about the malfeasance were disregarded and subsequently fired.

I also thought it looked extremely unstable, and has way too much noncaptured motion to work long term. It looks like it would shake itself apart in under a week. I hope that is not how they intend the final version to operate, but the pole was already much larger than a similar size bladed turbine would need. Maybe good for direct to structure/ground mounted systems, but likely not for pole mounts without some serious redesign.

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

Your video, Wall-climbing mini robots build structures with carbon fiber, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The President does have enough power to totally sink us IF they're volatile enough. Simple incompetence in a president doesn't sink us. However, that can cost lives. 1,833 people died officially from Katrina, although obviously not that many were directly from the utter incompetence of the Bush administration. 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq during the invasion and subsequent occupation. These things don't "sink" the US completely, but they're VERY consequential.

But Trump is incompetent AND volatile. Bringing both of those qualities to the table as president, and you've got much much bigger issues.

Finally, I absolutely do not get the charges of personal corruption against Hillary Clinton, especially when compared to Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton, so far as I can tell, is an agent who is operating within a system that has been corrupted, and not personally by her. The system needs to be reformed. She's done things to win within the system that you'd ideally not do. But I don't get how she is personally corrupt.

But you speak as if Clinton is the competent but corrupt one, and Trump is the incompetent but non-corrupt one, which blows my mind. How is the only way you can be corrupt is through accepting campaign contributions? How is Trump University not an indictment of how corrupt Trump personally is? How is it not corrupt to appeal to white supremacists? How is it not corrupt to name call, incite your supporters to violence, and dismiss women because they must be on their periods? How is it not corrupt to have your daughter make a speech at the RNC and then tweet how to buy the dress she was wearing, so she could make some coin?

Because one of those forms of corruption is being potentially corrupted by a corrupt system, but they're at least trying to reform that system. Hillary Clinton is the one against Citizens United, officially calling for a constitutional amendment to get rid of it. Has Donald Trump?

I don't think HRC will be a great president. I don't particularly like her much. However, she is qualified to be President. She's done nothing illegal, which is the hallmark of whether someone is corrupt.

And don't kid yourself about our government's ability containing a fascist. The Weimar Republic's government had structures in place to prevent the rise of Hitler, too. They had separation of powers. The government was one of the most democratic governments in the world. Fat lot of good that did.

I'm not saying necessarily that Trump is the next Hitler. But I am saying that there are enough similarities that I can't vote for him, and the mere fact he got a major party's nomination is scary beyond all reason. And voting for someone like that proves out their blueprint for future candidates across the board for offices in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at all levels of government.

As much as I don't like HRC, Trump is easily the worse major party's nominee in a very very very long time.

I agree that 'writing off' a huge, near majority of the population is disastrous....but it's pretty damn close as it stands, with neither party doing much to improve things. It's already not a great time to be Mexican, black, or a woman in America today.

I, also, am at a loss on what to do. Southpark said, and I agreed, that 1/4 of Americans are mentally defective. I'm seeing now that that number is probably closer to 3/4, making meaningful, helpful change impossible. (Trump will be 'meaningful' change, but there's a >99% chance it won't be helpful to anyone not named Trump.)
A constitutional amendment declaring politics off limits for businesses and/or large groups, and making lobbying completely illegal, and funding elections rather than making them 'pay for play' would be a great start...but since the people who benefit from the current system are the same one's charged with making those changes, it's a non starter with no legal solution beyond voting every incumbent out of office...and that's not a good solution either.

Trump is likely not the answer if America is to continue as a united country.

It depends on the level of rot. If every load bearing beam in your home is infested with termites and rotten to the core....burning it down just might be the only way to save your neighbors homes, yours is already gone. We are at best on that knife edge where it's a toss up which is better, repair or replacement...but we aren't doing either, which is making the decision for us as the rot gets worse and less repairable. Perhaps a new structure is needed, one built to eliminate the rot from the get go. Of course....I see that leaves us all homeless in the interim, and many won't survive that, and in that circumstance it will be MUCH worse before it's better....most people advocating the dismantling of the government don't see that. I'm not advocating it, but I am considering it as a possibility.

@bobknight33

i wasn't making a claim that using labor and solidarity rhetoric has helped black or working poor communities.i was simply saying that was the tactic the democrats used to garner and solidify votes.

see:FDR

the current state of republican/democrat power structure is almost purely a machine to retain political power.it may go one way one election cycle and another the next,but BOTH parties attempt to crush any dissenting voice from the current narrative of power,and neither really offer any substantive change.

go ahead and ask your friends who gary johnson and jill stein are,chances are they never even heard of them.

because americans taken as a whole,are pretty fucking stupid.

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.