If you really believe that the highest income earners actually paid 92% , you're naive. So which is better: An artificially inflated percentage that is easily avoided , or much lower percentages that are almost impossible to squeak out of?
So your argument is that the 92% income tax was inherently easier to avoid, while our current lower income tax regime on the wealthy is more difficult to avoid? I think that is questionable. For one thing, from 1944 to 1963, there were substantial and real barriers to moving large amounts of money across international borders. An example of this, though it is from Britain illustrates this: During the 1950's, wealthy Brits wanted to avoid paying the high British tax rates of the period. One way they had of getting their capital out was to build elaborate sailing yachts and sail them out of country. Their money was invested in the yacht itself, which they would then sell in different countries. The lengths they had to go to get their money out of their country is strong indirect evidence of the efficacy of barriers to international money flow. For evidence of this, read "Once is Enough" by Miles Smeeton.
Contrast this with today, where money flies across the world at the speed of light. Wealthy people use offshore tax havens to avoid most of their income taxes. They simply ask any money they are paid to be deposited in their Swiss or Cayman accounts, where it is effectively untraceable. I would argue that today, tax evasion is far easier than it was in the 1950's. In truth, this is likely one of the major causes of deficits in Western nations.
Your meagre argument is has little substance and is based largely on innuendo, and not on fact and logic.
I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?
If this is in the middle of the desert, I doubt that there would be a high concentration of birds, largely due to the lack of water. I'm not saying that there would be no birds, but surely this ecosystem couldn't support a large population. On the whole, I would think that the ecological consequences of putting solar plants in the desert would be relatively small, especially compared with say, cutting down the rainforests, eutrifying coral reefs, draining wet-lands, or suburbanizing large tracts of agricultural land.
Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?
A: Semantics
Yeah, perhaps, except that when a government collects income tax in a progressive way, some of the money collected by the government is likely to have come from someone more wealthy than you. That's kind of the point of the system, to prevent the rich from getting too rich, and use money that would have otherwise been spent on luxury for more useful projects (like the Interstate highway system). I don't think America's formerly large and prosperous middle class would have developed if the highest income tax bracket wasn't taxed at 92% from 1944 to 1964.
Here here! I have a 48g and it rocks. The processor is a tiny bit slow, but the battery lasts forever. The combination of the large stack with RPN has spoiled me for anything else. I love it how you can enter vectors as line items, and then multiply divide, add, and subtract them...makes your life easy when dealing with complex numbers.
FYI, you don't have to go to a university to read books and educate your self.
I completely agree. I suppose I am also concerned with the way we are training our leaders. I think the disappearance of classical education in much of elite education has had a great effect on the quality of our "intellectual elite". Our leaders seem to be extremely susceptible to ideology, both on the left and on the right.
For that amount of money, it better be about utility. I am not the idle rich, that can afford to send my child to university to make him a better man. I'm a serf, and I send my child to university so he can feed his family.
You may perhaps be a serf, but you are also a citizen in a democracy. You sound like you are resigned to being a drone, a meaningless cog in a vast purposeless machine, a football kicked around in someone else's game. Whatever happened to thinking for yourself?
That said, I do understand that we are living in a machine that makes it difficult to think in a truly independent way. It seems like a luxury to have a liberal arts education; and further, what we consider as a liberal arts education often seems sopped in questionable ideology. But even if you do pursue an education that has "utility", such as perhaps engineering or medicine, there is still room to continue and widen your education about the history and philosophy of our civilization.
My suspicion is that the growing trend in our educational system towards "utility" and ideology will over time rob our civilization of the vital spark that has allowed our profound technological and economic progress. I think we are becoming less and less able to recognize what is true, and are thus adopting fallacious ideologies as fact. A prime example of this is much of the field of economics, where theories that are only sometimes true are instead assumed to be always true. The economic crash of recent years is evidence of this. Watch this Nova documentary to see what I mean (the link will only work in the US...otherwise bittorrent should work).
I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality.
Your post, and the fact that you are rated as "insightful" speaks volumes to the shift that has occurred. Your statement, and the rest of your post, where you claim that "...an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use..." speak volumes of a profound poverty of mind, where education and the search for truth is predicated in material gain. This intellectual poverty forms us into individual intellectual islands floating through time, neither looking backwards nor forwards. We are separated from the origins of our society, our culture, our values. We forget that our society was modelled after ancient Greece. Ideas such as private property, money, justice, freedom of speech, constitutional government all come from ancient Greece, and were refined and developed by the Romans (at least during certain periods of Roman history).
Before you write off classical education, read Plato's "The Apology", where you start to see the beginnings of the ethical underpinnings of our modern world. Read Plato's Gorgias, where Socrates carries on a debate about many issues that still rings true today. See if you can see in this quote a great summation of the modern field of advertising and public relations in his statement about "oratory":
Socrates: The same is true about the orator and oratory relative to the other crafts, too, then. Oratory doesn't need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don't have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it. Plato - Gorgias - 459c
Reading the first volume of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has given me a great appreciation for how civilizations develop and change, and about how valuable our current stable democratic systems are. When you look at long succession of Roman emperors who were all removed by various methods of murder, you start to realize the value of electing leaders.
When you speak of the "disconnect between academia and reality", I think you minimize the work of centuries of great thinkers. When you look at the world logically, you begin to realize that it is very strange. You start to realize your own limitations. It gives you a sense of humility, both for yourself and for the poor sods who think they have figured it all out. You start to realize what pathetic creatures we are, how we weave illusion upon illusion. It is the way we are, and the best we can do is to try to understand the world. However, we should never believe that we have "figured it all out", because when we do that, we effectively stop thinking. Socrates said that "as for me, all I know is that I know nothing". He spent his life questioning and seeking knowledge, but he always remembered his limitations.
Education cannot simply be about utility. It has to also be about making us more complete as human beings. It should help us in our search for wisdom and truth in the world. Socrates said that "the unconsidered life is not worth living." When you do not consider the purpose and meaning of your own life, you become a football, being kicked around in someone else's game.
But there are many religions (or factions thereof) that reject the authority of a (politically; socially) powerful individual to mitigate arguments.
It is almost inevitable given the nature of most religions, that some individual will be seen as having the ability or the authority to comment on "the will of God". Indeed, even if some individual thinks that he has a "pipeline to God", he is assuming a form of authority. But the main issue is that in many religions, arguments on the nature of the physical world are often mitigated not by observation of the physical world itself, but on some perceived "will of God". That "will of God" is ALWAYS expressed through individual humans who claim to have received this "message". Thus we have people mitigating arguments about the physical world not by observing the physical world, but instead using authoritative irrational opinion. If I want to find out whether or not the acceleration of a falling object on Earth has an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 downwards in the absence of air friction, I will not look to the authority of a priest, preacher, pastor, or my neighbour who claims to have had visions. I will drop a penny in a glass tube that has had the air removed, measure the length and time of the fall, and calculate the acceleration.
Science is simply our agreement that when trying to learn about the physical world, we agree to let observations of the physical world be the ultimate mitigator of our arguments, rather than the authority of some powerful individual.
Yeah, aha. You do understand that as a result of the last election Republicans got as clear a mandate as any party got in recent history?
You do realize that, unfortunately, there is a sizeable block of voters who premise their voting decisions on their perceived direction of the economy. If the economy seems to be declining, they vote the current party out. If it seems to be improving, they vote for the party in power. Many voters don't have a clue of the detailed political philosophies of individual parties. I am not saying all voters are like this. But there is a large block of voters who seem to vote robotically like this. So when you speak of mandates, I have to remain skeptical.
Furthermore, many voters seem to have very short memories. They don't seem to remember that the decline in American manufacturing began around the mid to early 1980's, when Reagan was in power, and that over the last 30 years, we have seen increasing implementation of right wing economic policy (including during Democratic regimes). Now America has lost most of its manufacturing sector, and the middle class is in decline.
When I watch the seemingly flagrant way that Republicans seem to turn away from the Public Good these days, for example in network neutrality, financial regulation, or global warming, I am reminded of this quote
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
I don't mean to tickle fanboi/flamewar neurons here, but I think a comparison of Apple and Microsoft is germane here, especially since many posts are commenting on the use of small teams of programmers..
Apple develops new products like the iPhone/iPad using small teams of excellent designers and programers. Only once the basic product is designed, once the base OS patterns are set are the products released, and a broader range of programming staff allowed to mess with it. This allows them to design the basic elements of the OS elegantly. The elegant OS design in the long run requires less labor to maintain. The fact that new Apple products often lack basic features is evidence of this design process. Recall for example that the original iPhone lacked cut/paste functionality.
I do not think MS uses such processes. When they actually do design from scratch, they push products to market quickly with less effort put into elegance. The products are often initially buggy. They then pay vast numbers of programmers to form the initially weak code into something usable. Think Vista and Windows 7. This process likely requires far more money and labor, while at the same time produces inferior software products.
Yes, but if you haven't realized the thrust is low, and you don't know your airspeed, then you may try to maintain an inappropriate angle of attack. I know that the stock way of flying without an airspeed indicator is to set the thrust at a specific level, and then to maintain a specific angle of attack. The issue here is that the pilot may not have known one or both of these facts. And in the thin air at cruising altitude, where there is a low tolerance for inappropriate angles of attack, this may have caused the crash.
This is an excellent Nova documentary on the disappearance of Flight 447. It is interesting how investigators were able to give a reasonable hypothesis as to what happened, even without the black boxes. The long and the short of it is that they think super-cooled liquid water from a serious thunderstorm overcame the pitot anti-icing heating systems, freezing over all of the pitots and thus depriving the computer of airspeed data. The computer probably panicked, suddenly switching off the autopilot (they did get data from the computer, as its satellite uplink gave some telemetry). Pilots are capable of flying without airspeed readings, but only if they react quickly. They think that prior to flying into a severe thunderstorm, the computer automatically reduced thrust, in order to slow down in anticipation of turbulence. The problem is that the only pilot feedback that the thrust was reduced would have been a tiny circle on a computer monitor...there is no physical feedback in the throttle levers in Airbus planes. The computer then probably switched off the autopilot, overwhelming the pilots with a sequence of warnings. The thrust likely remained at 70% and the pilots probably didn't realize it. After a minute so the airplane may have lost so much airspeed from the low thrust that it became unflyable, in effect causing the crash.
Give this Nova episode a try...it is very detailed, going into many technical aspects of airplane design.
Look at the Nile Delta. In every picture I've seen, including Google Earth, it is green. In the Russian photo, it is rust brown. I'm not sure how or why they did this.
Construction on the Fukishima reactor began in 1967 (wikipage). It is easy to forget that Plate Tectonics was only accepted as a reasonable explanation of geological phenomenon in the 1960's. According to this excellent New York Times article,
"After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches, presumably to protect it from high water, regulators said."
The tsunami that overwhelmed the plant recently was 46 feet high, far higher than anything they seemed to expect. If you read the NYTimes article, you get a sense that the nuclear safety bureaucracy hadn't adequately integrated modern plate tectonic theory into its safety programs. The 18 foot high maximum tsunami prediction is symptomatic of this.
From the article, it seems that Japan had based its tsunami predictions on historical records, instead of predictions from Plate Tectonic Theory. Computer simulations of plate movement would have given far larger predictions for maximum tsunami heights, predictions that would have agreed with the height of the recent tsunami. I think a strong argument can be made that Japan's nuclear bureaucracy had not taken into account modern Plate Tectonic Theory in its safety practices. They seem to have instead relied on past records of earthquakes and tsunamis. I am not suggesting that individual people were unaware of Plate Tectonic Theory, but instead that their bureaucratic rules didn't seem to acknowledge it. Since construction on the reactor began in 1967, planning of the reactor must have begun much earlier. It is easy to imagine that the initial reactor designers were unaware of the Theory of Plate Tectonics and its implications.
You have no grasp on reality or how the economy works
I think I have a far greater grasp of the economy than you think. I said the parent's thinking was flawed, and I meant it. The flaw in thinking comes from the nature of money itself. You think that by giving another person money when they provide you a service, you are not relying on them, that the payment erases any reliance you have on that person's services. The abstract nature of money causes us to forget that to live, we rely on the services of others. We in turn provide services, either directly or indirectly to others, causing them to rely on us. We signify these transactions with money. But we cannot erase the fact that if those other people were not there, or did not have the necessary skills, we would not receive the services that they provide. Money may be a great tool to raise our living standards by allowing things such as specialization, but it has many negative results as well, such as encouraging a sense of illusory self-reliance.
If you really want to understand the economy, strip away abstract notions such as money, and look at it for what it really is: humans exchanging goods and services with other humans. BTW, I will assume that your hostile response indicates that I hit a nerve. Good. People like you need to be shaken out of your hypnotic stupor sometimes...your assumptions are deeply flawed.
This country did not invest ANYTHING in producing resources like us.
Were the professors who trained you citizens of America? Were they part of the American economy? Were the buildings and equipment used in your education located in America? If so, then your country DID invest significant resources in your training. The fact that you may or may not have fully paid for your education is largely irrelevant to the question. There are limited numbers of engineering professors. There are limited numbers of engineering classrooms and labs. Some of those limited resources were used to train you, and not someone else. To think that you can separate yourself from your own economy demonstrates deeply flawed thinking.
you can't deny having a balance sheet in the red is just plain bad policy regardless of your economic theories.
I believe in my post I said that economics has "utility". It has made our lives better. My issue is when it is taken too far, when these inductively weak theories are treated as facts, and form the playbook by which we govern most of our civilization. Keynsians at least don't have pretensions to be hard quantitative scientists. They usually recognize that their field is more of an art than a science. As do behavioral economists. Chicago School economists often do have pretensions to being proper quantitative scientists. They build massively complicated mathematical models to describe economic behavior, models I might add that did not predict the crash of 2008. And these models are built on the assumption that markets are rational.
My main point is this: I believe that the free market should be treated as a tool to improve our living standards. And a powerful tool it is. But it is only a tool, and not the only one at that. Free markets should not be the end goal, but should instead be seen as a means to improve our lives. And if sometimes market behavior is having the opposite effect, then we as a society should be able to tweak the market so that it will better serve the interests of the Public.
if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot
Well, I'd say that if someone doesn't have any real understanding of the science, of the physics of climate science, then what they say should be assigned solely in the category of opinion, and uninformed opinion at that. We all have the right to our own opinion. But we don't have the right to our own facts.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really believe that the highest income earners actually paid 92% , you're naive. So which is better: An artificially inflated percentage that is easily avoided , or much lower percentages that are almost impossible to squeak out of?
So your argument is that the 92% income tax was inherently easier to avoid, while our current lower income tax regime on the wealthy is more difficult to avoid? I think that is questionable. For one thing, from 1944 to 1963, there were substantial and real barriers to moving large amounts of money across international borders. An example of this, though it is from Britain illustrates this: During the 1950's, wealthy Brits wanted to avoid paying the high British tax rates of the period. One way they had of getting their capital out was to build elaborate sailing yachts and sail them out of country. Their money was invested in the yacht itself, which they would then sell in different countries. The lengths they had to go to get their money out of their country is strong indirect evidence of the efficacy of barriers to international money flow. For evidence of this, read "Once is Enough" by Miles Smeeton.
Contrast this with today, where money flies across the world at the speed of light. Wealthy people use offshore tax havens to avoid most of their income taxes. They simply ask any money they are paid to be deposited in their Swiss or Cayman accounts, where it is effectively untraceable. I would argue that today, tax evasion is far easier than it was in the 1950's. In truth, this is likely one of the major causes of deficits in Western nations.
Your meagre argument is has little substance and is based largely on innuendo, and not on fact and logic.
I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?
If this is in the middle of the desert, I doubt that there would be a high concentration of birds, largely due to the lack of water. I'm not saying that there would be no birds, but surely this ecosystem couldn't support a large population. On the whole, I would think that the ecological consequences of putting solar plants in the desert would be relatively small, especially compared with say, cutting down the rainforests, eutrifying coral reefs, draining wet-lands, or suburbanizing large tracts of agricultural land.
Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?
A: Semantics
Yeah, perhaps, except that when a government collects income tax in a progressive way, some of the money collected by the government is likely to have come from someone more wealthy than you. That's kind of the point of the system, to prevent the rich from getting too rich, and use money that would have otherwise been spent on luxury for more useful projects (like the Interstate highway system). I don't think America's formerly large and prosperous middle class would have developed if the highest income tax bracket wasn't taxed at 92% from 1944 to 1964.
Sad.
Here here! I have a 48g and it rocks. The processor is a tiny bit slow, but the battery lasts forever. The combination of the large stack with RPN has spoiled me for anything else. I love it how you can enter vectors as line items, and then multiply divide, add, and subtract them...makes your life easy when dealing with complex numbers.
However, the authors of the article seem to have very bad eyes, if 1x1x1.5mm is already at the limit of what they can see unaided.
...limit of what the human eye can see at a distance of...
FYI, you don't have to go to a university to read books and educate your self.
I completely agree. I suppose I am also concerned with the way we are training our leaders. I think the disappearance of classical education in much of elite education has had a great effect on the quality of our "intellectual elite". Our leaders seem to be extremely susceptible to ideology, both on the left and on the right.
For that amount of money, it better be about utility. I am not the idle rich, that can afford to send my child to university to make him a better man. I'm a serf, and I send my child to university so he can feed his family.
You may perhaps be a serf, but you are also a citizen in a democracy. You sound like you are resigned to being a drone, a meaningless cog in a vast purposeless machine, a football kicked around in someone else's game. Whatever happened to thinking for yourself?
That said, I do understand that we are living in a machine that makes it difficult to think in a truly independent way. It seems like a luxury to have a liberal arts education; and further, what we consider as a liberal arts education often seems sopped in questionable ideology. But even if you do pursue an education that has "utility", such as perhaps engineering or medicine, there is still room to continue and widen your education about the history and philosophy of our civilization.
My suspicion is that the growing trend in our educational system towards "utility" and ideology will over time rob our civilization of the vital spark that has allowed our profound technological and economic progress. I think we are becoming less and less able to recognize what is true, and are thus adopting fallacious ideologies as fact. A prime example of this is much of the field of economics, where theories that are only sometimes true are instead assumed to be always true. The economic crash of recent years is evidence of this. Watch this Nova documentary to see what I mean (the link will only work in the US...otherwise bittorrent should work).
I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality.
Your post, and the fact that you are rated as "insightful" speaks volumes to the shift that has occurred. Your statement, and the rest of your post, where you claim that "...an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use..." speak volumes of a profound poverty of mind, where education and the search for truth is predicated in material gain. This intellectual poverty forms us into individual intellectual islands floating through time, neither looking backwards nor forwards. We are separated from the origins of our society, our culture, our values. We forget that our society was modelled after ancient Greece. Ideas such as private property, money, justice, freedom of speech, constitutional government all come from ancient Greece, and were refined and developed by the Romans (at least during certain periods of Roman history).
Before you write off classical education, read Plato's "The Apology", where you start to see the beginnings of the ethical underpinnings of our modern world. Read Plato's Gorgias, where Socrates carries on a debate about many issues that still rings true today. See if you can see in this quote a great summation of the modern field of advertising and public relations in his statement about "oratory":
Socrates: The same is true about the orator and oratory relative to the other crafts, too, then. Oratory doesn't need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don't have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it. Plato - Gorgias - 459c
Reading the first volume of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has given me a great appreciation for how civilizations develop and change, and about how valuable our current stable democratic systems are. When you look at long succession of Roman emperors who were all removed by various methods of murder, you start to realize the value of electing leaders.
When you speak of the "disconnect between academia and reality", I think you minimize the work of centuries of great thinkers. When you look at the world logically, you begin to realize that it is very strange. You start to realize your own limitations. It gives you a sense of humility, both for yourself and for the poor sods who think they have figured it all out. You start to realize what pathetic creatures we are, how we weave illusion upon illusion. It is the way we are, and the best we can do is to try to understand the world. However, we should never believe that we have "figured it all out", because when we do that, we effectively stop thinking. Socrates said that "as for me, all I know is that I know nothing". He spent his life questioning and seeking knowledge, but he always remembered his limitations.
Education cannot simply be about utility. It has to also be about making us more complete as human beings. It should help us in our search for wisdom and truth in the world. Socrates said that "the unconsidered life is not worth living." When you do not consider the purpose and meaning of your own life, you become a football, being kicked around in someone else's game.
But there are many religions (or factions thereof) that reject the authority of a (politically; socially) powerful individual to mitigate arguments.
It is almost inevitable given the nature of most religions, that some individual will be seen as having the ability or the authority to comment on "the will of God". Indeed, even if some individual thinks that he has a "pipeline to God", he is assuming a form of authority. But the main issue is that in many religions, arguments on the nature of the physical world are often mitigated not by observation of the physical world itself, but on some perceived "will of God". That "will of God" is ALWAYS expressed through individual humans who claim to have received this "message". Thus we have people mitigating arguments about the physical world not by observing the physical world, but instead using authoritative irrational opinion. If I want to find out whether or not the acceleration of a falling object on Earth has an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 downwards in the absence of air friction, I will not look to the authority of a priest, preacher, pastor, or my neighbour who claims to have had visions. I will drop a penny in a glass tube that has had the air removed, measure the length and time of the fall, and calculate the acceleration.
Science is simply our agreement that when trying to learn about the physical world, we agree to let observations of the physical world be the ultimate mitigator of our arguments, rather than the authority of some powerful individual.
Yeah, aha. You do understand that as a result of the last election Republicans got as clear a mandate as any party got in recent history?
You do realize that, unfortunately, there is a sizeable block of voters who premise their voting decisions on their perceived direction of the economy. If the economy seems to be declining, they vote the current party out. If it seems to be improving, they vote for the party in power. Many voters don't have a clue of the detailed political philosophies of individual parties. I am not saying all voters are like this. But there is a large block of voters who seem to vote robotically like this. So when you speak of mandates, I have to remain skeptical.
Furthermore, many voters seem to have very short memories. They don't seem to remember that the decline in American manufacturing began around the mid to early 1980's, when Reagan was in power, and that over the last 30 years, we have seen increasing implementation of right wing economic policy (including during Democratic regimes). Now America has lost most of its manufacturing sector, and the middle class is in decline.
Dems are just as bad.
Which is why they brought in the original net neutrality rules in the first place?
When I watch the seemingly flagrant way that Republicans seem to turn away from the Public Good these days, for example in network neutrality, financial regulation, or global warming, I am reminded of this quote
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
I don't mean to tickle fanboi/flamewar neurons here, but I think a comparison of Apple and Microsoft is germane here, especially since many posts are commenting on the use of small teams of programmers..
Apple develops new products like the iPhone/iPad using small teams of excellent designers and programers. Only once the basic product is designed, once the base OS patterns are set are the products released, and a broader range of programming staff allowed to mess with it. This allows them to design the basic elements of the OS elegantly. The elegant OS design in the long run requires less labor to maintain. The fact that new Apple products often lack basic features is evidence of this design process. Recall for example that the original iPhone lacked cut/paste functionality.
I do not think MS uses such processes. When they actually do design from scratch, they push products to market quickly with less effort put into elegance. The products are often initially buggy. They then pay vast numbers of programmers to form the initially weak code into something usable. Think Vista and Windows 7. This process likely requires far more money and labor, while at the same time produces inferior software products.
Yes, but if you haven't realized the thrust is low, and you don't know your airspeed, then you may try to maintain an inappropriate angle of attack. I know that the stock way of flying without an airspeed indicator is to set the thrust at a specific level, and then to maintain a specific angle of attack. The issue here is that the pilot may not have known one or both of these facts. And in the thin air at cruising altitude, where there is a low tolerance for inappropriate angles of attack, this may have caused the crash.
This is an excellent Nova documentary on the disappearance of Flight 447. It is interesting how investigators were able to give a reasonable hypothesis as to what happened, even without the black boxes. The long and the short of it is that they think super-cooled liquid water from a serious thunderstorm overcame the pitot anti-icing heating systems, freezing over all of the pitots and thus depriving the computer of airspeed data. The computer probably panicked, suddenly switching off the autopilot (they did get data from the computer, as its satellite uplink gave some telemetry). Pilots are capable of flying without airspeed readings, but only if they react quickly. They think that prior to flying into a severe thunderstorm, the computer automatically reduced thrust, in order to slow down in anticipation of turbulence. The problem is that the only pilot feedback that the thrust was reduced would have been a tiny circle on a computer monitor...there is no physical feedback in the throttle levers in Airbus planes. The computer then probably switched off the autopilot, overwhelming the pilots with a sequence of warnings. The thrust likely remained at 70% and the pilots probably didn't realize it. After a minute so the airplane may have lost so much airspeed from the low thrust that it became unflyable, in effect causing the crash.
Give this Nova episode a try...it is very detailed, going into many technical aspects of airplane design.
Look at the Nile Delta. In every picture I've seen, including Google Earth, it is green. In the Russian photo, it is rust brown. I'm not sure how or why they did this.
Grrrr...the links didn't show up. Here are the links I tried to include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/world/asia/27nuke.html
Construction on the Fukishima reactor began in 1967 (wikipage). It is easy to forget that Plate Tectonics was only accepted as a reasonable explanation of geological phenomenon in the 1960's. According to this excellent New York Times article,
"After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches, presumably to protect it from high water, regulators said."
The tsunami that overwhelmed the plant recently was 46 feet high, far higher than anything they seemed to expect. If you read the NYTimes article, you get a sense that the nuclear safety bureaucracy hadn't adequately integrated modern plate tectonic theory into its safety programs. The 18 foot high maximum tsunami prediction is symptomatic of this.
From the article, it seems that Japan had based its tsunami predictions on historical records, instead of predictions from Plate Tectonic Theory. Computer simulations of plate movement would have given far larger predictions for maximum tsunami heights, predictions that would have agreed with the height of the recent tsunami. I think a strong argument can be made that Japan's nuclear bureaucracy had not taken into account modern Plate Tectonic Theory in its safety practices. They seem to have instead relied on past records of earthquakes and tsunamis. I am not suggesting that individual people were unaware of Plate Tectonic Theory, but instead that their bureaucratic rules didn't seem to acknowledge it. Since construction on the reactor began in 1967, planning of the reactor must have begun much earlier. It is easy to imagine that the initial reactor designers were unaware of the Theory of Plate Tectonics and its implications.
You have no grasp on reality or how the economy works
I think I have a far greater grasp of the economy than you think. I said the parent's thinking was flawed, and I meant it. The flaw in thinking comes from the nature of money itself. You think that by giving another person money when they provide you a service, you are not relying on them, that the payment erases any reliance you have on that person's services. The abstract nature of money causes us to forget that to live, we rely on the services of others. We in turn provide services, either directly or indirectly to others, causing them to rely on us. We signify these transactions with money. But we cannot erase the fact that if those other people were not there, or did not have the necessary skills, we would not receive the services that they provide. Money may be a great tool to raise our living standards by allowing things such as specialization, but it has many negative results as well, such as encouraging a sense of illusory self-reliance.
If you really want to understand the economy, strip away abstract notions such as money, and look at it for what it really is: humans exchanging goods and services with other humans. BTW, I will assume that your hostile response indicates that I hit a nerve. Good. People like you need to be shaken out of your hypnotic stupor sometimes...your assumptions are deeply flawed.
The parent's post is very detailed and informative.
This country did not invest ANYTHING in producing resources like us.
Were the professors who trained you citizens of America? Were they part of the American economy? Were the buildings and equipment used in your education located in America? If so, then your country DID invest significant resources in your training. The fact that you may or may not have fully paid for your education is largely irrelevant to the question. There are limited numbers of engineering professors. There are limited numbers of engineering classrooms and labs. Some of those limited resources were used to train you, and not someone else. To think that you can separate yourself from your own economy demonstrates deeply flawed thinking.
you can't deny having a balance sheet in the red is just plain bad policy regardless of your economic theories.
I believe in my post I said that economics has "utility". It has made our lives better. My issue is when it is taken too far, when these inductively weak theories are treated as facts, and form the playbook by which we govern most of our civilization. Keynsians at least don't have pretensions to be hard quantitative scientists. They usually recognize that their field is more of an art than a science. As do behavioral economists. Chicago School economists often do have pretensions to being proper quantitative scientists. They build massively complicated mathematical models to describe economic behavior, models I might add that did not predict the crash of 2008. And these models are built on the assumption that markets are rational.
My main point is this: I believe that the free market should be treated as a tool to improve our living standards. And a powerful tool it is. But it is only a tool, and not the only one at that. Free markets should not be the end goal, but should instead be seen as a means to improve our lives. And if sometimes market behavior is having the opposite effect, then we as a society should be able to tweak the market so that it will better serve the interests of the Public.
if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot
Well, I'd say that if someone doesn't have any real understanding of the science, of the physics of climate science, then what they say should be assigned solely in the category of opinion, and uninformed opinion at that. We all have the right to our own opinion. But we don't have the right to our own facts.