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It is false for all panels on the market today. There may in the past have been solar panels that cost a lot more energy to manufacture and produced a lot less energy, but no one would be a panel like that anymore.
Would you be willing to show a reference or back-of-the-envelope calculation for this?
The last time I checked, the manufacture of large photovoltaic panels was energy-intensive and low-yield (their current price suggests that these problem persist.) They were also rated for a useful life of around two decades.
I do not believe that these problems have been corrected in any panel currently on the market. There is no shortage of vaporware.
Ah, no. I grew up listening to arguments like, "Racism, sexism, and ableism. You know what I think of all that? Marxist bullshit, invented to turn people against each other. Divide and conquer."
That was my father, a few weeks ago, expressing his belief that the world (and especially the US, but even more so Europe) is ruled by Marxist who invented racism and sexism. This is someone who went to first grade in southern Georgia, the US, the first year of racial desegregation in schools.
I have heard it argued, and not just by him, that all the things listed are retarded liberal fantasies: That evolution is a way of denying God and thereby justifying hedonism, a lot about how solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they'll produce in their lifetime, and about how a society that tolerates homosexuality cannot survive (and that it can't truly be a marriage if it's between two people of the same sex).
Yes, it's possible to tell parodies from people honestly stating their views if you study the context, but it's not often possible to do so just from the context of what they're saying. I thought the above person was just stating their views succinctly in a way they thought was clever.
solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they'll produce in their lifetime
Do you mean to say that this is false?
wrinkles forehead in mock-puzzled look
We're literate. Is there any other way to become literate?
What are your thoughts on the recent "Etsy considered harmful" article?
Could you give more examples about things you like about Mathematica? Years ago, I resolved to become an expert at it after reading A New Kind of Science (will you guys forgive me?) and like it for a while, but then noticed some things were needlessly complicated or refused to spit out the right results (long time ago so I can't give examples).
Btw, I learned about Lisp after Mathematica, and was like, "wow, that must have been where Wolfram got the idea."
Could you give more examples about things you like about Mathematica?
1) Mathematica's programming language does not confine you to a particular style of thinking. If you are a Lisp fancier, you can write entirely Lispy code. Likewise Haskell. There is even a capability for relatively painless dataflow programming.
2) Wolfram Inc. took great pains to make interfacing with the outside world from within the app as seamless as possible. For example, you can suck in a spreadsheet file directly into a multidimensional array. There is import and export capability for hundreds of formats, including obscure scientific and engineering ones. In case the built-in formats do not suffice, defining custom ones is surprisingly easy.
3) A non-headache-inducing replacement for regular expressions. Enough said.
4) Graphical objects (likewise audio and other streams) are first-class data types. They are able to appear as both the inputs and outputs of functions.
5) Lastly, and most importantly: fully interactive program development. The rest of the programming universe lives a life of endlessly repeated "compile and pray" cycles. Mathematica permits you to meaningfully evaluate and edit in place every line of code you write. I am otherwise an Emacs junkie, yet I have never felt the slightest desire to touch Emacs when working on Mathematica code. The programmer's traditional need to wade through and shovel giant piles of text from one place to another while writing code is almost entirely absent when working in this language.
The downsides of Mathematica (slow, proprietary, expensive, etc.) are widely known. Thus far, the advantages have vastly outweighed the problems for my particular kind of work. However, I have found that I now feel extremely confined when forced to work in any other programming language. Perhaps this risk should be added to the list of disadvantages.
I learned about Lisp after Mathematica, and was like, "wow, that must have been where Wolfram got the idea."
Wolfram had (at least in the early days of Mathematica) a very interesting relationship with Lisp. He seems to have initially rejected many of its ideas, but it is clear that they somehow crept back into his work as time went by.
"Lying" and "being wrong" are not the same. Lying is intentionally communicating a non-truth with the intent to deceive.
And intelligence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our capacity to detect lies. You're simply assuming your conclusion in a different form. Again.
intelligence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our capacity to detect lies
Do you actually believe this?
In response to
Rationalists lose when others choose
while the rational person may suddenly reach an opposite conclusion on learning one new fact.
I would have serious doubts about the rationality of anyone who made significant changes in their beliefs based on one new fact.
Regardless of exactly what the new fact was?
How should society implement this? I repeat my claim that other personal characteristics are as important as IQ.
I do not know of a working society-wide solution. Establishing research institutes in the tradition of Bell Labs would be a good start, though.
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Not that I know of offhand. I'm vastly curious as to whether I could beat it, of course - but wouldn't dare try to find out, even if there were a simulating drug that was supposedly strictly temporary, any more than I dare ride a motorcycle or go skydiving.
We can temporarily disrupt language processing through magnetically-induced electric currents in the brain. As far as anyone can tell, the study subjects suffer no permanent impairment of any kind. Would you be willing to try an anosognosia version of the experiment?