The point you're missing is that the tax cuts were unfunded and paid for by huge deficits. So that huge overhang will limit how much deficit spending politicians might undertake to offset any downturn. And they may need to raise corp taxes now and create even more drag.
Right - it helped out a year ago when those companies used their profits to buy back stocks, giving executives piles of money, while leaving the companies broke and in need of a bailout.
It also involves breaking enemy cyber security (signals intelligence).
It's actually a rather fascinating incongruity, since we live in a world where "the enemy" is more likely than not to be using the same software systems that the NSA themselves are, and that therefore any exploitable flaws they find in enemy systems are pretty likely to be just as exploitable in their own. (And that similarly, disclosing the flaw in order to fix the issue in their own systems is very likely to result in "the enemy" fixing the flaw as well.)
A couple years ago the White House released a document explaining the process they use for deciding what vulnerabilities they keep secret: https://www.cnet.com/news/white-house-trump-administration-h... noting that "In the vast majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest". Though from what we've seen in past leaks, it's pretty obvious they don't reach that conclusion for all vulnerabilities they find.
NSA has both attack and defense mandates and organizations. Currently, the attack org has priority, but it's not like the defense org does nothing. So if the attack org doesn't want a vuln, they can let the defense org reveal it for PR points.
Check out Loop https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/ it’s an iPhone app and works with Omnipod in addition to the old Medtronic pumps. My wife uses it and it’s a game changer.
Whenever I see an article about storing nuclear waste for such longer periods of time, I can't help but think we will find a use for nuclear waste and end up digging it all back up way before 100,000 years.
It's hard to reason intuitively about long time scales, because nothing is fixed any more. Usually we imagine technology, demographics, culture, etc to be fixed with respect to our decision-making, because most of our decisions are very short-term (and because people are quite lazy thinkers and prefer to face problems with fewer variables). But longer-term decisions, everything is in flux.
It reminds me of that concept where if you want to travel to another star, the best time to leave is not 'as soon as possible'. It may actually be better to wait several decades or centuries to develop new propulsion technologies (possibly based on entirely new branches of science), launch later, and arrive earlier.
This is why vitrification was abandoned as a disposal mechanism. There are a number of interesting papers on how it would work well (example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513...) however it makes it essentially impossible to reprocess fuel so disposed. Sad really.
And, while I try to hide my embarrassment---while Transatomic is BS, the concept of nuclear fuel cycles using waste is not, and many IV Generation designs are specifically working toward that. My main point was we likely won't need to wait millennia, or even centuries, for a lot of that waste to become useful.
Bah, my bad. I was just looking for a quick citation for nuclear fuel cycles, saw "MIT Tech Review" (usually a very good source), and grabbed it. Thanks for catching it.
The difficulty here is that radiation fries the brains of the robots, not that they aren't smart enough to work with the stuff. I was a bit shocked the robots people send to observe Fukushima die in minutes of exposure.
It's not something making smaller and faster transistors can solve.
The total volume of the oceans is about 1.35 billion cubic kilometers.
The total volume of the mantle is 909 billion cubic kilometers, roughly 1,000 times greater.
Moreover, the radioactive minerals which came out of the Earth's crust either originated within, or are otherwise found in, the Earth's mantle and core.
We're also talking about timecycles of hundreds of thousands of years, and, frankly, a mixing dynamic which is probably not well known.
I'm actually not much a fan of nuclear power (it's potentially useful, but highly problematic, and much more limited in capacity than is generally understood), but deep-mantle-injection would actually be, on the grand scheme of things, statistical noise so far as any radioactive risk is concerned.
We're also not aware of any biological activity occurring within the mantle. The problems with ocean pollution -- plastics, metals, fertilisers, etc. -- were that these are:
1. Generally unevenly distributed, with concentrations in specific areas.
2. Highly interactive with life forms -- biological concentration of heavy metals, forming algael blooms, etc.
3. For lighter detritus (especially plastics), confined to what's effectively a film at the surface of the oceans, rather than mixed throughout the full volume of the ocean.
Even for substances which do mix with seawater, such as CO2, the rate of mixing through the entire benthic column is a concern.
Where radioactive waste has entered seawater (numerous reactor cores, mostly from the nine nuclear-powered submarines which have sunk, waste disposal, and liquid discharge e.g., from Daichi-Fukushima), dilution with seawater tends to make this a very low-level threat at any distance from the immediate site.
(Despite this, I strongly discourage the practice.)
My point: in the list of risks to worry about, this isn't one I'd spend much time on. I've already spent more than it's worth.
We're making progress in scientific fields that are still in the growth stage of their evolution. There is little reason not to believe that these fields will not soon be any more moribund than say airplane technology has been for the last 40 years.
We still don't have the android maids that are past due, either. We've got a robot that does the vacuuming, and recently it was counted a major success to have a robot that could merely fold clothes (and only that). I don't know about you, but I think that free beamed energy is way more beneficial than a clothes-folding robot.
Or even if you count the awesome toys that Boston Dynamics puts out; they're still just that, toys. Incredible toys, but nowhere near taking over from humans.
We're nowhere near the AI that futurists of the past thought we'd have by now. Same goes for cancer cures (CRISPR).
This misses a few points. Key among them that projections of future technological development from 50 - 100 years ago have proved woefully inaccurate.
Drawing targets around what you shot at regardless of where you're aiming has a name: Texas Sharpshooting.
It's an exceptionally poor rebuttal or response to the observation that forecasts have failed. Moreso if in doing so the reasons for the deviation isn't specifically analysed.
After a period of a few hundred years it becomes a pretty ready to go repository of weapons grade plutonium. The problematic isotopes all have died away.
“Cerebro.app” can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. I'm really curious why developers release software without signing it. The Mac developer account and code signing certificate seem like a small cost if you're releasing software you actually expect people to use. Personally, I see that warning and assume the developers aren't serious and/or don't care about their users and delete the software.
My company pays for both and I had the same thought recently, but the consensus from the web seems to be that the Mac OneDrive client doesn't work very well.
Will skimmers be rendered obsolete by chip cards? It seems like this will all be over when the last magnetic strip reader is shut down. Although I've never seen a chip reader at a gas station, so it may be a while.
It is impossible (yet) to hack chip & pin. The problem is that even chip cards have a magstripe that can be skimmed. EMV[1] enabled fallback funtionality by default, which is the biggest issue imho. Basically, if your chip is broken, a terminal goes through fallback mechanism and uses magstripe instead. This way you can clone a card with "broken" chip and copied magstripe. Some banks allow to disable (opt-out) magstripe for chip cards, so unless you are in US, you should do that. I've seen some people intentionally scratched magstripe, but I'm not sure it's a very good idea.
Sure you could. But I'd like to have a backup options in case I end up in strange place that doesn't accept chip&pin or my chip is really broken while on travel. It could be opt-in, so in case I need magnet, I could call my bank and ask to enable it.
