There's something beautiful about simple low tech solutions that require cooperation or blunt force - even if it doesn't work.
I once dropped a car into a creek in a third world country and it was deep down a ravine off a cow path. In America, that thing would still be rusting away. But a couple trucks, some super winches and two big guys working for four hours moving it inch by inch by leveraging trees and rocks later and... Thing came out with hardly a scratch.
Again, don't know if it will work, but love these types of solutions as a first line of attack before some over architected solve. Im sure there are some good engineering analogs as well.
Exactly my thoughts. If any civil engineering out there could answer the question: Could this type of coordinated action lead to some 'cascading failure' in the water system? Or it would just drastically reduce the pressure, and that's it?
if everyone simultaneously cooperates to increase the demand on any network beyond its capacity then the the network is not able to supply any additional demand.
In the case of the electricity network, either demand is reduced or the whole thing grinds to a halt and nobody gets any power at all when the load exceeds the generation.
In the case of the water supply system water would cease to flow at points in the network when pressure reached zero. what is there to fail? an extended demand exceeding supply could empty reservoirs
folks who engineer communication networks really have the most control over what to do when demand exceeds capacity as they can prioritize some demand and curtail other demand.
Toilets have their own reservoirs, so the flush wouldn't have any effect on the supply side of the system. And I think that's the point: there's more water stored in distributed toilet reservoirs than the city could dump in through a centralized point.
Refilling them all at once may exceed the city's ability to supply pressure though. If pressure is provided by pumps, they'll increase their flow rate to maintain pressure until they reach their maximum rate, at which point the pressure will fall.
On the sewer side, I could see the flush creating water hammers that damage various parts of the system.
I could see them reasoning that they can do the flush and then go ahead and repair any water hammer damage, and that will be easier overall dealing with thousands of blockages.
This reads like satire — I mean it's a clever idea but I feel like it falls into the 'too cute' category, subject matter aside. Will be curious to see a follow-up as to whether it worked, was a disaster, or turned out to be a hoax or publicity stunt.
Synchronized flushing won't change the fact that Zimbabwe is a fucking shithole. This kind of "let's cross our fingers and hope for the best" measure was never necessary when the place was called Rhodesia, because when Whites were in control, they knew how to engineer around droughts. If Mugabe's government would simply stop killing Whites, there might be enough left to help out with such situations, even if they are in the minority.
This is a beautiful statement in regards to how ignorant and racist it is. Zimbabwe, despite It's history of turmoil and colonial exploitation, is on the verge to economic security and prosperity. I recently met some government ministers from Zimbabwe at a network security conference in Malaysia where they had been instructed by their government to not come back until they understood how to develope respectable and effective network infrastructure that would support the local people.
Sure Zimbabwe and many other African countries have issues, but so does every country around the world. The constant perpetual negative cloud that people associate Africa with really denegrates the vast growth and improvements the continent has recently gone through.
I'm a race realist, and the racial reality in sub-Saharan Africa is that blacks have very low IQs. No amount of foreign aid and wishful thinking will change this fact. You say that it is "on the verge of economic security and prosperity" with the government wanting to "develop respectable and effective network infrastructure that would support the local people", yet you conveniently leave out the fact that Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia, already had all of these things. Whites created economic security, prosperity, and an overall infrastructure which supported everyone, including blacks. It wasn't perfect, just like in South Africa, but it worked, and it did so due to Whites applying their knowledge and creativity to solve hard problems. The current majority, over the last few decades, has been slowly dismantling the civilization which Whites created, while simultaneously drastically increasing the amount of foreign aid the country now needs.
What's on my website doesn't change the facts on the ground in the former Rhodesia. Unlike most people with specific belief systems, I feel that I can be objective about anything.
I'm not a coward. If I was, I would have resisted making my original post, because a coward would care about losing HN points. I make the distinction between "racism" and "racial realism" merely because I care about using terms properly. The latter is more precise, whereas the former is tainted with negativity. Also: Why should I refer to myself using a term which I know others see as negative? I would gladly call myself a "racist" if its meaning were taken to be "someone who sees the differences between races and acts appropriately on that knowledge", or something to that effect.
The symbology on your website is typically seen as negative as well. Perhaps you should consider an alternative there if you are concerned with what others see as negative.
That's a good point, but what you see there is my personal symbol, which is the banner of the Third Reich with the swastika's tips chiseled. The symbolism is therefore unique to me, because, as far as I know, no one else uses it. Also, I give a detailed explanation of whether I am a Nazi. It just takes a few clicks to get to it. I've let that website wither, and really should get it into shape some day.
Let me be very clear: I am saying you are a racist independent of whether or not you recognize differences between races, real or imagined.
Of course it has negative connotations. Most people don't like racists. You can't seem to deal with that, and your weasel words make you a coward. Whose respect are you trying to earn (or keep) anyway? I'll tell you something, owning up to it won't lose you any more respect. But at least you'd be less insufferable.
Okay then, I'm a racist, and I'm only saying that because I don't want to seem as insufferable as you make me out to be. See? I can be accommodating. However, your first sentence is not at all clear, because you contradict yourself. You are saying that I am a racist independent of whether I recognize differences between people based on the concept of "race". Well, no, calling me a "racist" is absolutely dependent on whether I see race as a real thing, not a concept, and on whether I use it to gauge people based on their differences, which are most obviously indicated by skin color.
"Racism is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that reflect the racial worldview: the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races". This ideology entails the belief that members of a race share a set of characteristic traits, abilities, or qualities, that traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral characteristics are inherited, and that this inheritance means that races can be ranked as innately superior or inferior to others."
"the racial reality in sub-Saharan Africa is that blacks have very low IQs."
I've had the pleasure of meeting enough sub-Saharan Africans that I can not only personally call bullshit on this, the statement is so nonsensical it reads to me like a claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese.
What's on my website doesn't change the facts on the ground in the former Rhodesia. Unlike most people with specific belief systems, I feel that I can be objective about anything.
The example you give was a harsh yet necessary action due to the fact that low-IQ humans require brutality to understand when they've done wrong, because nice words and the rule of law just don't cut it with them. Also, you fail to mention the many millions of blacks who were not hung from helicopters. It's not like the hangings were part of a systemic plan of eradication, whereas what the current government is doing to the remaining Whites certainly is. You imply that the current government is somehow enlightened. Have you seen photos of Whites brutally tortured and killed by said government?
The former Rhodesia was a veritable paradise in comparison to most of sub-Saharan Africa. Now it has (according to the following video) the lowest life expectancy of any country in the world. That change is a direct result of the combination of switching from White rule to black rule, and the killing of remaining Whites who continued to want to play a useful role in what they believed was a country in which they still belonged.
> The example you give was a harsh yet necessary action due to the fact that low-IQ humans require brutality to understand when they've done wrong, because nice words and the rule of law just don't cut it with them.
That's probably because you've never lived, side by side, day to day, with low-IQ humans. They are not the same as us, and therefore require different treatment. To believe otherwise would imply that the Whites of Rhodesia and South Africa were either heartless monsters, or people who couldn't learn from their environment. Neither of those is possible.
You thought that HN was somehow racist-free? It's not going to be, mostly it's just hard to spot them since it's relatively rare for non-white people to even be mentioned on here in the first place.
It's especially hard to spot them when they put swastikas at the top of the main page of their website, the same one which is linked in their HN profile. I propose a startup to prevent this sort of sneaky behavior. Of course, we'll have to put in logic which exempts from exclusion any website which uses the swastika for religious purposes, and other such situations.
I'm a hacker and a scientist, like most HNers. There is no cause to delete my account, especially as you can see that the vast majority of my comments have nothing to do with race, but rather with hacking and science. Also, deleting my account would be like admitting that your points system doesn't work as intended. If certain of my comments go below a certain amount of points, they won't be seen to most HNers, which is how it's supposed to work. Deleting my account would be superfluous and overkill. Lastly, I'm pretty sure that wishing a beating upon me is not a statement which PG would condone, especially given that you work for him.
I didn't take offense, but I haven't wished a beating on anyone here, not even on the people whose skin color is not the same as mine, and not even to prove a point, as you tried to do. A few downvotes does not a majority make. I agree that my IQ is very likely lower than the HN average, but that is not the same as being a low-IQ human, which is generally at the level of actual retardation. Race is not only about skin color.
I'm by no means eager to dismiss an argument made seriously, but if you're going for apologetics for something as appalling as torture, you're going to have to work your way up to it gradually. That's been way beyond western civilization's Overton window for a couple of generations now. It may just be Something You Can't Say.
And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged.
If you actually believe that there is "Something You Can't Say" then you most certainly are a person who can "dismiss an argument made seriously".
"At any given moment, the [Overton] "window" includes a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office."
The US government has generally admitted to torture, in its "fight against terrorism". Given that the US government wasn't replaced, even partially, or its policies changed in any significant way, through the massive outrage of its citizenry, I am guessing that most people agree with "something as appalling as torture", today, in Western Civilization, as long as it's done for "all the right reasons".
EDIT: I didn't notice this the first time around.
"And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged."
Why don't you use that line on jews, who insist on "J" simply and entirely due to the mother's religion? They get very upset when you don't capitalize the "j", no matter where the word appears. Even the spellchecker in my Google Chrome browser underlines "jews" in red when I write it in all lowercase. If the power which jews possess is significant enough that it reaches deep down into the bowels of my web browser, then I think that I can get away with referring to the originators and guardians of Western Civilization as White.
You might find it even more unhinged that I usually refer to non-Whites as "unWhite", and I try not to use it at the beginning of a sentence, so as to avoid having to write it with a "U'. Likewise, I avoid using "jews" at the beginning of a sentence. Also, I refer to neo-nazis as "nazis", who are most of the ones you see today, mere pretenders, and I save "Nazis" for those, such as myself, who I think deserve the capitalization. Therefore, "White" doesn't mean every person with pale skin, so, really, it's not about honoring someone because of an accident of birth.
That was a reference to http://paulgraham.com/say.html which explored his fear of arbitrary fashion being mistaken for morality. As for torture, I regard that as something we're guilty of through having effectively lost democratic control of the country, and I've seen very little disagreement and none I find convincing.
Well, it looks like you got your wish. TQ2 has apparently been banned. For a while, I tried to reply to someone, and all I got was "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." How polite.
As a sub-saharan African(Zambia ).I think your views are terribly short sighted, whether or not the Zimbabwe economy was better during white rule gives you no right to refer to a whole race or group of people across multiple countries as less than.
My country just got a bond at the same interest rate as Spain, according to you, the Spaniards are just as "dumb" as the Africans for being in debt and having a bad economy at the moment .Should we throw in the Greeks?,speaking of economies,maybe most of the E.U
Let us continue with the illogical statements:Zimbabwe's economy is bad so all sub-saharans are "dull"....Hitler and the NAZI regime caused millions of deaths sooooo all Germans are murders? is that your line of thought?
Thinking of any human as being less than yourself and only fit to be treated as such has been the root of most evil.
It is people who think like you that have committed some of the worst atrocities.
As a sub-saharan African(Zambia ).I think your views are terribly short sighted, whether or not the Zimbabwe economy was better during white rule gives you no right to refer to a whole race or group of people across multiple countries as less than.
My country just got a bond at the same interest rate as Spain, according to you, the Spaniards are just as "dumb" as the Africans for being in debt and having a bad economy at the moment .Should we throw in the Greeks?,speaking of economies,maybe most of the E.U
Let us continue with the illogical statements:Zimbabwe's economy is bad so all sub-saharans are "dull"....Hitler and the NAZI regime caused millions of deaths sooooo all Germans are murders? is that your line of thought?
Thinking of any human as being less than yourself and only fit to be treated as such has been the root of most evil.
It is people who think like you that have committed some of the worst atrocities.
As a sub-saharan African(Zambia ).I think your views are terribly short sighted, whether or not the Zimbabwe economy was better during white rule gives you no right to refer to a whole race or group of people across multiple countries as less than.
My country just got a bond at the same interest rate as Spain, according to you, the Spaniards are just as "dumb" as the Africans for being in debt and having a bad economy at the moment .Should we throw in the Greeks?,speaking of economies,maybe most of the E.U
Let us continue with the illogical statements:Zimbabwe's economy is bad so all sub-saharans are "dull"....Hitler and the NAZI regime caused millions of deaths sooooo all Germans are murders? is that your line of thought?
Thinking of any human as being less than yourself and only fit to be treated as such has been the root of most evil.
It is people who think like you that have committed some of the worst atrocities.
We did an experiment in my primary school physics class: hook a fluid pressure sensor up to the class faucet and start graphing the water pressure. We then sent a team to the restroom to flush a toilet. Then two at the same time. Then four. Around eight, the combined flush lowered the water pressure so much that many of them simply refused to work.
So many of my younger days were spent in Las Vegas and I remember reading about the very real problem of a 5000 room hotel having synchronized flushing. They could run low on water pressure and as a result tanks would not refill, which meant a toilet bowl with no water and sewer smells could come back into the room.
As it turned out one of the big bad guys was their porno video channel. It ran basically continuous movies from some flat fee, and whenever a movie ended a large number of flushes would happen, enough to cause a few dry toilets while waiting for pressure to come back up. Their "fix" was a hack to offset the feeds to various floors to move the breaks up.
This article is interesting to me because it highlights a symptom of a more commonly occurring problem, even here in the US. Drought or the dwindling supply of cheap drinking water is yet another problem we need to solve.
My understanding is that most water pumping and sewage systems are vacuum and pressure driven and reversible -- ie there aren't closing one-way valves between your toilet and the sewer pipe; it's more a system where the 'pressure in' provides the 'pressure out'. Isn't it possible that this could lead to reversal or other catastrophic events -- like in the sense of sewage backing up into freshwater supplies, or massively out some exits in the system (ie some people's toilets)?
If this is successful, it will cause a "water hammer" which will effectively destroy the sewage network. In hotels there is a high pressure pipe without locally storing water so if everybody flushes together there won't be too much water. In an apartment building or small hotel the local storage is enough to destroy the building's
sewer.
It's like if when you had a network congestion the cable broke!
The schools in my country go once a year a trip, usually staying in a hotel. It was sort of customary the
day they left the hotel to do the synchronized flush thing to see if the hotel survives. The one I witnessed had a sort of thundering noise and the network bursted in a couple of places.
62 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI once dropped a car into a creek in a third world country and it was deep down a ravine off a cow path. In America, that thing would still be rusting away. But a couple trucks, some super winches and two big guys working for four hours moving it inch by inch by leveraging trees and rocks later and... Thing came out with hardly a scratch.
Again, don't know if it will work, but love these types of solutions as a first line of attack before some over architected solve. Im sure there are some good engineering analogs as well.
story, please
In the case of the electricity network, either demand is reduced or the whole thing grinds to a halt and nobody gets any power at all when the load exceeds the generation.
In the case of the water supply system water would cease to flow at points in the network when pressure reached zero. what is there to fail? an extended demand exceeding supply could empty reservoirs
folks who engineer communication networks really have the most control over what to do when demand exceeds capacity as they can prioritize some demand and curtail other demand.
Refilling them all at once may exceed the city's ability to supply pressure though. If pressure is provided by pumps, they'll increase their flow rate to maintain pressure until they reach their maximum rate, at which point the pressure will fall.
On the sewer side, I could see the flush creating water hammers that damage various parts of the system.
I could see them reasoning that they can do the flush and then go ahead and repair any water hammer damage, and that will be easier overall dealing with thousands of blockages.
A single typical water tower holds approximately 400,000 to 500,000 gallons, and I'm quite sure a city of that size has more than 7 of them.
A small reservoir holds around 500,000,000 gallons.
Sure Zimbabwe and many other African countries have issues, but so does every country around the world. The constant perpetual negative cloud that people associate Africa with really denegrates the vast growth and improvements the continent has recently gone through.
edit: I don't really love your website.
Of course it has negative connotations. Most people don't like racists. You can't seem to deal with that, and your weasel words make you a coward. Whose respect are you trying to earn (or keep) anyway? I'll tell you something, owning up to it won't lose you any more respect. But at least you'd be less insufferable.
"Racism is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that reflect the racial worldview: the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races". This ideology entails the belief that members of a race share a set of characteristic traits, abilities, or qualities, that traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral characteristics are inherited, and that this inheritance means that races can be ranked as innately superior or inferior to others."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
Why are you arguing about this? Your homework is to go out and tell everyone you know that you're an unrepentant racist.
I've had the pleasure of meeting enough sub-Saharan Africans that I can not only personally call bullshit on this, the statement is so nonsensical it reads to me like a claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese.
http://amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-that... (Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa)
http://amren.com/news/2012/07/things-fall-apart-greg-cochran... (Things Fall Apart: Greg Cochran’s New Theory of the Cause of Racial Differences in IQ)
>>/dev/null
To be fair...
When it was called Rhodesia...
They also hung black guys from flying military helicopters with piano wire.
So they can live in a "...fucking shithole...", or they can live in a "...fucking shithole..." where they are hung from helicopters with piano wire.
They say "...the good old days, weren't always good..." That rule DEFINITELY applies here.
The former Rhodesia was a veritable paradise in comparison to most of sub-Saharan Africa. Now it has (according to the following video) the lowest life expectancy of any country in the world. That change is a direct result of the combination of switching from White rule to black rule, and the killing of remaining Whites who continued to want to play a useful role in what they believed was a country in which they still belonged.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MPKGZreusoQ (Inside a Failed State - Zimbabwe)(Journeyman Pictures)
I can't believe this just happened.
http://SwastikaSpotter.com
I'm afraid the most we can do for you at this point is to delete your account and to wish for a good beating in your near future.
I don't work for PG and I don't understand why you take offense.
You said: "low-IQ humans require brutality to understand when they've done wrong".
Your IQ is low in relation to the HN average and the majority of HN has agreed that you're doing wrong (see votes on your comments).
Do you practice what you preach or does your "logic" only apply to people of a different skin color?
And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged.
"At any given moment, the [Overton] "window" includes a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
The US government has generally admitted to torture, in its "fight against terrorism". Given that the US government wasn't replaced, even partially, or its policies changed in any significant way, through the massive outrage of its citizenry, I am guessing that most people agree with "something as appalling as torture", today, in Western Civilization, as long as it's done for "all the right reasons".
EDIT: I didn't notice this the first time around.
"And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged."
Why don't you use that line on jews, who insist on "J" simply and entirely due to the mother's religion? They get very upset when you don't capitalize the "j", no matter where the word appears. Even the spellchecker in my Google Chrome browser underlines "jews" in red when I write it in all lowercase. If the power which jews possess is significant enough that it reaches deep down into the bowels of my web browser, then I think that I can get away with referring to the originators and guardians of Western Civilization as White.
You might find it even more unhinged that I usually refer to non-Whites as "unWhite", and I try not to use it at the beginning of a sentence, so as to avoid having to write it with a "U'. Likewise, I avoid using "jews" at the beginning of a sentence. Also, I refer to neo-nazis as "nazis", who are most of the ones you see today, mere pretenders, and I save "Nazis" for those, such as myself, who I think deserve the capitalization. Therefore, "White" doesn't mean every person with pale skin, so, really, it's not about honoring someone because of an accident of birth.
We did an experiment in my primary school physics class: hook a fluid pressure sensor up to the class faucet and start graphing the water pressure. We then sent a team to the restroom to flush a toilet. Then two at the same time. Then four. Around eight, the combined flush lowered the water pressure so much that many of them simply refused to work.
But (most) home toilets have tanks that act as a buffer and can flush even with no water pressure at all.
As it turned out one of the big bad guys was their porno video channel. It ran basically continuous movies from some flat fee, and whenever a movie ended a large number of flushes would happen, enough to cause a few dry toilets while waiting for pressure to come back up. Their "fix" was a hack to offset the feeds to various floors to move the breaks up.
Similar effect : http://www.wwdmag.com/super-bowl-flush
It's like if when you had a network congestion the cable broke!
The schools in my country go once a year a trip, usually staying in a hotel. It was sort of customary the day they left the hotel to do the synchronized flush thing to see if the hotel survives. The one I witnessed had a sort of thundering noise and the network bursted in a couple of places.