Yeah, you just keep applying for work you know you're never going to get if you don't really want to work. But its been easier the last few decades as there really hasn't been any work to find. They don't force you out of your labor category - they don't make lab technicians apply for heavy equipment operator jobs - so if there are no lab tech jobs, there are no lab tech jobs in spite of the construction of the new interstate highway exchange going on within sight of the unemployment office.
And when the unemployment reaches its time limit, you get booted off. Get a job or starve. Well, the OTHER dodge is the welfare system, and particularly there is the "disability" social security benefit that allows people to basically go on public assistance forever, because they supposedly have a bad back or somesuch. Some of these people eventually get noticed in Facebook videos the like cutting a mean rug at a dance, and their medical disqualification from working gets disqualified.
Its not that they are all lazy, either, its just that they really can't find work, or the "work" is idiotically low-pay. I mean, if you can make $X in a disability benefits scam, but can find jobs that only pay 85% of X, why bother? Getting the wages boosted so that the job is paying $1.2X is what we need, and the lower taxes that bring back manufacturing to the USA is one of the best ways to do it.
Happened a long time ago when US manufacturers closed plant after plant, and those plant's outputs were replaced by foreign cars from Japan and Korea. Not exactly "sending" the factories to Japan or Korea, but essentially works the same. If a US company is driven out of business by lower-taxed foreign manufacturers, and the demand for product replaced by product made somewhere besides the USA, its the same thing as "sending" that manufacturing out of the country.
What needs to change is not the unemployment rate, it is the wage rate. There's no point in leaving a $10/hr job for another $10/hr job, and that's the sort that's being created now.
After the tax cut, the corporate taxes will be 20% instead of 35%, and corps will be able to make money in the USA, instead of sending the manufacturing to Mexico, Canada, Korea, Japan, and anywhere-but-here. Then the $10 / hr Walmart or McDonald's guy is going to hear some big-business guy say, "$10/hr? Piffle? Wanna make some real money? We're starting at $15/hr, and just complete this 2 year training, and you'll be making $30" and that will be how wages go up.
The McD's and the Walmarts are going to have to boost their $10/hr to $20/hr and attract those for which the smell of hot oil and metal shaving is a turn-off, and they'll accept $10 / hr less than the factories, but overall, the labor rate is going to go up. It may be a while - the manufacturing plants are going to have to be built (although the CONSTRUCTION companies for those are going to be paying good money too) and the economy is going to have start making a much greater portion of the world's goods, but eventually the factories and the Walmarts and the McD's will have sucked as many people off their couches and out from behind their soap operas so that... there's fewer and fewer people left to hire. But the demand for labor will continue to rise, there will be a labor shortage, and then watch wages sprout rocket engines.
All this would happen much faster with the Fairtax, but this 20% rate is a great start.
Well, the best way to do that is to provide the opportunity to get a good job to as many people as humanly possible. We have around 94 million people out of the work force, if we could drop that to only the people that are retired or otherwise independently wealthy, then the few left over that cannot work for physical reasons, the rest of those who are working and enjoying prosperity could contribute "a little" in taxes and have mountains of money to take care of those who can't care for themselves due to the vast number of those contributing "a little" and the diminuitive number of those who require assistance.
Well, yeah it is if it's INCOME tax. The tax collectors come and take something that doesn't belong to them, your money.
All income taxes should be abolished for being immoral. There are other things to tax - consumption is the best - and no, it doesn't have to be regressive if its designed right, like the Fair Tax is.
But we had all those mentioned features before 1913, when the 16th Amendment enabling the Federal income taxes was passed, and the 50 years or so preceding that were known as the "gilded age." Maybe it was because they didn't have an income tax then, since income taxes suppress prosperity.
Agree. 200 calories for the shakes is dangerously low calories for the day if you take 4 of them, I think it says. I did a diet when Medifast used to offer a 500 calorie a day suite of "shakes." Dangerous as hell. U get weak. Don't do it. This is nuts. Even Medifast won't provide this low calorie shake approach any more.
Just because people pay the $19.99 for the movie ticket doesn't mean they're paying $19.99 to watch the movie. Many are paying $19.99 for the moviegoing experience, and it doesn't matter so much what is moving on the screen as long as it isn't too boring or ridiculous or maybe even offensive.
I see most everything at the movies, and have a great entertainment experience. What I like is the huge screen that fills my peripheral vision, a sound system where I _feel_ the artillery shell that lands closeby rather than just detect it like a lot of watching-it-on-the-computer or watching it on a TV that doesn't have a high power surround-sound (that anyone else at home will yell at you to turn down) gives, its dark and not-home so no phone is going to ring, I don't need to be concerned about the noise outside the house that I need to investigate and it therefore distracts from watching, and I can eat popcorn without having to make it and drop the occasional kernel on the floor and someone else will clean up after me. That's the moviegoing experience, and you actually occasionally meet people at the theater to boot. If you're home, you're either going to see no one if you live alone as I do, or the same people you always see, who incidentally may work overtime to disrupt your movie watching if they're not interested in the same flick you are.
There's a whale of a lot of reasons to pay $19.99 to go to the movie that don't have the remotest thing to do with actually watching the movie.
"When I cut the cord in 2004 I did it because of ads"
Hmmm.... how's that work, anyway? Over-the-air TV doesn't have ads? When you get a DVD of original Star Trek episodes from the late 60's they run around 50.5 minutes. Get episodes of the latest NCIS and they run around 42.5 minutes. What do you suppose occurred during those 8 less minutes of programming? Yep, commercials.
Commercials are the reason I mostly stopped watching over-the-air TV. I can tolerate commercials on stuff like Fox News which just blathers in my background as I really entertain myself with my computer like right now, and when it goes away for commercials, I just ignore it. I don't have to hold plot-lines in my head for an extended period of time while they try to sell me 16 different thing, nor maintain my interest during the interruption. For regular drama / comedy etc. I often ended up channel surfing rather than waiting for the commercials to end, and never really got to watch the end of whatever it was I started watching.
And my "cord" brings me movies on HBO / Showtime / Cinemax / Starz with no commercials. No, it ain't cheap, but it is commercial-free.
And my non-cord is Netflix DVD. NCIS Season 13 Disk 3 is in the computer right now, and it doesn't have commercials either. They're sucky-short at around the 42 minute mark, but they don't have commercials either.
Soooo... dunno what you're talking about, "ads forcing you off the cord." Doesn't make sense.
Its because I road rally with the Sports Car Club of America, am just getting back to it after being off for 2 years for medical and financial reasons, and it is the 1st of a series of 5 - 10 rally weekends all over the USA I intend to attend, with the last of them probably consecutive weekends in California. I sold my last car, a 2012 Subaru WRX in 2015, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. In other words, I drive _a lot._ Always have, mainly because I like it, and partly because I don't want to give the TSA a chance to feel me up nor the airlines a chance to beat me up. If they want to do that, they're going to have to chase me down on I-10 at 85 mph.
Since I can't really afford an "around town" car AND a rally car AND a car suitible for deer hunting at a distance (about 600 miles, which is where my hunting buddies are), whatever car(s) I buy have to perform as well as the ones I have now, including range and refueling. I know people that drive more than me. Soooo... will wait for the "do-it-all electric.
Agreeing NOT to steal $7,500 of your money if you buy an electric car is NOT a subsidy. A subsidy is when someone coughs up $X if you do Y.
Anyway, when they get them to perform like gasoline cars, and be price-competitive with gasoline cars, I'll buy one. I just booked a trip to Arizona next March. The 1st day, I'll drive down I-95 from Virginia, rather than cutting cross-country, and hang a right at I-10 and stay there until I get to the Valencia exit for Tucson.
This will avoid the possibility of running into a lot of snow. I'll drive 600 - 800 miles the 1st day. Gimmie an electric car that will do that for me and I'll be happy. The 800 miles is about as much as I can endure, and would be less if I had to wait around for a battery charge. Swap out the batteries and we're golden, but the electric has to do what my gas car does or its no sale.
"And return to the Gilded Age, where most families were literally owned by company towns and runaways were shot on site by private armed forces? No thanks."
Hadn't heard about that. Gilded age was 1865 - 1900, right? That was when many men carried firearms routinely, right? Must have been a real dangerous thing to try to chase one of those, when they can return fire.
I really doubt the ability to return to such a situation, esp. with >300,000,000 firearms in the country now.
If we were to geo-engineer, we should do it in a reversible manner. That is, say, do something in outer space that we could reverse by crashing whatever it is back into the ocean, rather than doing something to the ocean itself and maybe have that run away with itself and turn the planet into a snowball. Using biological entities to change things would seem particularly dangerous since they range from difficult to impossible to control if they start doing something counterproductive.
And I don't think "reducing" CO2 production is effective enough to contemplate. We need to zero CO2 production so that the atmosphere can start cleansing itself, rather than just increase the CO2 concentration more slowly.
With the big dollar signs at the end of the rainbow for anyone that can make our transport systems run on electricity, and for efficient wind and solar where the fuel cost for all is $0, we probably really don't have to do anything other than 1) make industry cheaper to do (what the President is trying to do with his tax cuts) and 2) Get the hell out of the way (stop impeding things with laws and regulations.) Someone will figure out the ultimate wind machine or solar electric generator, and someone else will either figure out the magic battery or a way to use grid electricity (I know one way... lots of infrastructure building associated with it) and we'll get our zeroized CO2 society. Probably 50 years from now before we can do it. But if we do it without making things more expensive because we're trying to do things before we're ready, we might not kill so many people by plunging them into poverty. Poverty kills more efficiently than even smoking. Smoking will take 7 years off your life on average, but living in poverty will take 10 years off your life - froze to death in a refrigerator carton under a bridge, failed to go to the doctor for lack of money and found to be terminal in the ER when the pain got too great, etc. Anyway, I think the best thing to do is to promote industry to the max, and let whatever genius tries the hardest succeed in saving us with electrical ways to do things. Electric cars are getting around 3 mi / KwH and a KwH around here is 12.5 cents. That's 33.3 KwH / 100 miles and therefore $4.16 / 100 miles. At 27 mi / gallon of premium at $2.70 / gallon, that's $10 / 100 miles, far more expensive, and electric would probably still be faster off the line than my very-quick Subaru WRX. Do I want an electric car like that? You bet. I sold my 2012 WRX in 2015, just 3 years old, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. Could I have saved a ton of money on fuel if it was electric and otherwise performed like my WRX? You bet. Some genius is just going to have to figure out how to refuel the car in the same time as gasoline - I drive 600 - 800 miles a day when I travel and that doesn't allow for sitting around for 1/2 hour each fueling, and the power companies are going to have to supply the electric. Hey, maybe charging electric car batteries AT the solar farm during the sunshine, and then trucking them to the refueling points out by the interstate will get around the devaluation of solar electricity that occurs now because of the oversupply of it when the sun shines, and the complete lack of it when it doesn't. Just some thoughts - hope it happens - I'm 70 and will be unlikely to see it. They'll probably figure all this out maybe 50 years from now, which will be plenty of time to start reversing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Oh, yeah,one other thing we could do to improve the CO2 situation is to wrest manufacturing from the likes of China, India, and the rest of the otherwise 3rd-world places where they use coal and get them into the USA by beating the hell out of those places in the marketplace. No, that isn't a function of those country's low wages, it is a function of our egregious income taxes. Zero the income taxes in the USA, and we could end up with the vast majority of the world's manufacturing, and would make things cleaner because of
Ha! First post with a clue. Yep, we don't have the tech to stop using fossil fuels. So, what we should probably be doing is working on that AND geo-engineering. One of them may eventually work. But the global warming people hyperventilate when you mention geo-engineering, its almost like they want to push their scarecrow to attempt to wreck the world economy by "conserving" fossil fuel usage when its not really possible. Couldn't be that, could it?
And if it is, there's not one F'n thing that we can do about it. We don't have the tech to NOT burn fossil fuels. Try it, and food doesn't get to market, commerce goes to near-zero, people starve, etc. We _need_ the energy from fossil fuels, and whining about it just won't change that.
Wind and solar is cool, we should keep building it, and battery tech is getting better too. Will battery tech get to the point that it can replace the internal combustion engine? Maybe. If not, we then have to figure out how to deliver grid electricity to a car / truck / airplane / ship / etc. in motion.
And if this warming is due instead to natural forces as some believe, then we should be pouring a lot of effort into geo-engineering, which may be the only way to mitigate the temperature rise.
" that will be able to do just about anything we're able to do, job-wise."
I'm skeptical. I think that is a looooooong way off. Think about "truck driver." Gonna have a robot that jumps down out of the cab, tightens an insecure load, changes a flat on the inside dual, and continues a run? We're going to need robots with full-up human intelligence to do these things, and that is still pretty much an unknown "how to." Robots will be able to do a lot, but they're still going to lack for what a thinking human being will be able to do, I believe.
When we do get human-intelligence robots, then we're just going to have to tell them what we want done, and they're going to do it for us. UBI will not be necessary. Money will not be necessary. Humans will be doing absolutely nothing for a paycheck. The robots will be doing it all - mining the raw materials, manufacturing every widget, delivering every finished product to whomever wants one, etc. The challenge will then be how to distribute the 100 million Ferraris to the 200 million people that want one - even robots won't be able to mine enough minerals to build whatever everyone wants, nor will there be enough vegetable and animal-derived products to go to everyone. Sooo... who gets what? Money as a determination will be obsolete because no one will be working at all. How to do that? Some other figure of merit for a person besides what they can contribute economically? How many people love them? Invent an "asshole quotient" where people are pushed down the queue when they diminish others enjoyment of life? What?
I own several and belong to a lot of yahoogroups and didn't notice. I download posts via email, and just checked a particularly active group, the N3FJP software support forum, and it has posts for every day in recent history except for November 15. Of course, November 15th is the deer season opener most places, so I can understand why no one might have been on a computer, they were all sitting out in the woods with their rifles...
But, no, really, there were messages for every day except 15 Nov, for-real.
Yeah, there's all kinds of corporate sins of short term profit reigning supreme, as well as most businesses not leaving the USA. But, a whale of a lot of MANUFACTURING left the USA, and that's important because those are one of the big 3 - agriculture, mining, and manufacturing that produce real wealth. That makes them also capable of providing the best jobs. Many miners in W. Va. that Obama nuked with his extreme global warming agenda were making $95K a year. That's good money, probably equivalent to working 4 Walmart jobs at $11 / hr.
But of those that DID leave, taxes were the biggest culprit. You can't have the gov't coming thru the door like Jesse James and demanding 35% of the profit when all the company has to do to avoid that is move out of the country.
Our best move would be to stop taxing income in all its forms - individual, corporate, capital gains, self employment, alternative minimum, estate, gift, yada yada and replace them with the Fair Tax, which has a monthly "prebate" to keep from taxing the poor, who would just show up at a welfare office to recover the money you'd be stealing from them anyway, in order not to starve. The Republican's tax plan will help somewhat, in the manner of the Fair Tax, just less effectively.
"Chairman Mao" disarmed his people, then killed 20 million of his countrymen who opposed him. The bottom line is that we vote against ANYONE that we feel is likely to pass even the slightest of "gun control" legislation. Between the despots exterminating opposition, and the fact that "gun control" legislation absolutely does not work, the opposition cannot find anyone that we would not vote for as long as Democrats demonstrate their willingness to go down the same road as past communists.
Oh, the "people in charge" don't know about the bad bearings? You must mean the managers.... yeah, the managers don't know s***, but the journeyman factory worker does. Why they weren't fixing it I can't guess.
As for automation, the bottom line is that they're still going to be employing some people. If it's 500 instead of 20,000, that's still 500 people. We'll make it up due to the overwhelming return of jobs from other countries if we just lower the damned taxes. The US taxes are why companies have fled the USA, not wages. If you study the Fair Tax, you find that their research pegged the US income tax burden at 22% of the selling price of anything built in this country. Meanwhile, building a car in this country takes 30 - 33 man-hours. Since the car companies were telling us that their cost per worker was $78 / hr in 2007 when they were going bankrupt, and wages have been stagnant, multiplying that out gives around $2500 of worker cost per vehicle, while for a $40K SUV, the tax burden is around $8,800. That's why the FairTaxers want to get rid of the income taxes, but even if we just lower the corporate income tax, that'll help. The ultimate key to putting rocket engines on the economy is abolition of the income taxes, but for now we need to take what we can get.
Bruce Bartlett is a leftist shill whose opinions are manufactured to support whatever globalist / communist theory that the left thinks they need supported. The left especially doesn't like the freedom from governmental interference that comes with something like a Fair Tax, so he attacks and attacks it. He is simply wrong.
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Yeah, you just keep applying for work you know you're never going to get if you don't really want to work. But its been easier the last few decades as there really hasn't been any work to find. They don't force you out of your labor category - they don't make lab technicians apply for heavy equipment operator jobs - so if there are no lab tech jobs, there are no lab tech jobs in spite of the construction of the new interstate highway exchange going on within sight of the unemployment office.
And when the unemployment reaches its time limit, you get booted off. Get a job or starve. Well, the OTHER dodge is the welfare system, and particularly there is the "disability" social security benefit that allows people to basically go on public assistance forever, because they supposedly have a bad back or somesuch. Some of these people eventually get noticed in Facebook videos the like cutting a mean rug at a dance, and their medical disqualification from working gets disqualified.
Its not that they are all lazy, either, its just that they really can't find work, or the "work" is idiotically low-pay. I mean, if you can make $X in a disability benefits scam, but can find jobs that only pay 85% of X, why bother? Getting the wages boosted so that the job is paying $1.2X is what we need, and the lower taxes that bring back manufacturing to the USA is one of the best ways to do it.
Happened a long time ago when US manufacturers closed plant after plant, and those plant's outputs were replaced by foreign cars from Japan and Korea. Not exactly "sending" the factories to Japan or Korea, but essentially works the same. If a US company is driven out of business by lower-taxed foreign manufacturers, and the demand for product replaced by product made somewhere besides the USA, its the same thing as "sending" that manufacturing out of the country.
What needs to change is not the unemployment rate, it is the wage rate. There's no point in leaving a $10/hr job for another $10/hr job, and that's the sort that's being created now.
After the tax cut, the corporate taxes will be 20% instead of 35%, and corps will be able to make money in the USA, instead of sending the manufacturing to Mexico, Canada, Korea, Japan, and anywhere-but-here. Then the $10 / hr Walmart or McDonald's guy is going to hear some big-business guy say, "$10/hr? Piffle? Wanna make some real money? We're starting at $15/hr, and just complete this 2 year training, and you'll be making $30" and that will be how wages go up.
The McD's and the Walmarts are going to have to boost their $10/hr to $20/hr and attract those for which the smell of hot oil and metal shaving is a turn-off, and they'll accept $10 / hr less than the factories, but overall, the labor rate is going to go up. It may be a while - the manufacturing plants are going to have to be built (although the CONSTRUCTION companies for those are going to be paying good money too) and the economy is going to have start making a much greater portion of the world's goods, but eventually the factories and the Walmarts and the McD's will have sucked as many people off their couches and out from behind their soap operas so that... there's fewer and fewer people left to hire. But the demand for labor will continue to rise, there will be a labor shortage, and then watch wages sprout rocket engines.
All this would happen much faster with the Fairtax, but this 20% rate is a great start.
Well, the best way to do that is to provide the opportunity to get a good job to as many people as humanly possible. We have around 94 million people out of the work force, if we could drop that to only the people that are retired or otherwise independently wealthy, then the few left over that cannot work for physical reasons, the rest of those who are working and enjoying prosperity could contribute "a little" in taxes and have mountains of money to take care of those who can't care for themselves due to the vast number of those contributing "a little" and the diminuitive number of those who require assistance.
"Taxation isn't theft."
Well, yeah it is if it's INCOME tax. The tax collectors come and take something that doesn't belong to them, your money.
All income taxes should be abolished for being immoral. There are other things to tax - consumption is the best - and no, it doesn't have to be regressive if its designed right, like the Fair Tax is.
But we had all those mentioned features before 1913, when the 16th Amendment enabling the Federal income taxes was passed, and the 50 years or so preceding that were known as the "gilded age." Maybe it was because they didn't have an income tax then, since income taxes suppress prosperity.
Agree. 200 calories for the shakes is dangerously low calories for the day if you take 4 of them, I think it says. I did a diet when Medifast used to offer a 500 calorie a day suite of "shakes." Dangerous as hell. U get weak. Don't do it. This is nuts. Even Medifast won't provide this low calorie shake approach any more.
It was $34 yesterday, $59 now. Yeah, I'd stay away from it...
Banned? Amazon, about $34. Ya' just gotta want it $34-worth.
Just because people pay the $19.99 for the movie ticket doesn't mean they're paying $19.99 to watch the movie. Many are paying $19.99 for the moviegoing experience, and it doesn't matter so much what is moving on the screen as long as it isn't too boring or ridiculous or maybe even offensive.
I see most everything at the movies, and have a great entertainment experience. What I like is the huge screen that fills my peripheral vision, a sound system where I _feel_ the artillery shell that lands closeby rather than just detect it like a lot of watching-it-on-the-computer or watching it on a TV that doesn't have a high power surround-sound (that anyone else at home will yell at you to turn down) gives, its dark and not-home so no phone is going to ring, I don't need to be concerned about the noise outside the house that I need to investigate and it therefore distracts from watching, and I can eat popcorn without having to make it and drop the occasional kernel on the floor and someone else will clean up after me. That's the moviegoing experience, and you actually occasionally meet people at the theater to boot. If you're home, you're either going to see no one if you live alone as I do, or the same people you always see, who incidentally may work overtime to disrupt your movie watching if they're not interested in the same flick you are.
There's a whale of a lot of reasons to pay $19.99 to go to the movie that don't have the remotest thing to do with actually watching the movie.
"When I cut the cord in 2004 I did it because of ads"
Hmmm.... how's that work, anyway? Over-the-air TV doesn't have ads? When you get a DVD of original Star Trek episodes from the late 60's they run around 50.5 minutes. Get episodes of the latest NCIS and they run around 42.5 minutes. What do you suppose occurred during those 8 less minutes of programming? Yep, commercials.
Commercials are the reason I mostly stopped watching over-the-air TV. I can tolerate commercials on stuff like Fox News which just blathers in my background as I really entertain myself with my computer like right now, and when it goes away for commercials, I just ignore it. I don't have to hold plot-lines in my head for an extended period of time while they try to sell me 16 different thing, nor maintain my interest during the interruption. For regular drama / comedy etc. I often ended up channel surfing rather than waiting for the commercials to end, and never really got to watch the end of whatever it was I started watching.
And my "cord" brings me movies on HBO / Showtime / Cinemax / Starz with no commercials. No, it ain't cheap, but it is commercial-free.
And my non-cord is Netflix DVD. NCIS Season 13 Disk 3 is in the computer right now, and it doesn't have commercials either. They're sucky-short at around the 42 minute mark, but they don't have commercials either.
Soooo... dunno what you're talking about, "ads forcing you off the cord." Doesn't make sense.
So you want to build cars ONLY for the average person?
Its because I road rally with the Sports Car Club of America, am just getting back to it after being off for 2 years for medical and financial reasons, and it is the 1st of a series of 5 - 10 rally weekends all over the USA I intend to attend, with the last of them probably consecutive weekends in California. I sold my last car, a 2012 Subaru WRX in 2015, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. In other words, I drive _a lot._ Always have, mainly because I like it, and partly because I don't want to give the TSA a chance to feel me up nor the airlines a chance to beat me up. If they want to do that, they're going to have to chase me down on I-10 at 85 mph.
Since I can't really afford an "around town" car AND a rally car AND a car suitible for deer hunting at a distance (about 600 miles, which is where my hunting buddies are), whatever car(s) I buy have to perform as well as the ones I have now, including range and refueling. I know people that drive more than me. Soooo... will wait for the "do-it-all electric.
Agreeing NOT to steal $7,500 of your money if you buy an electric car is NOT a subsidy. A subsidy is when someone coughs up $X if you do Y.
Anyway, when they get them to perform like gasoline cars, and be price-competitive with gasoline cars, I'll buy one. I just booked a trip to Arizona next March. The 1st day, I'll drive down I-95 from Virginia, rather than cutting cross-country, and hang a right at I-10 and stay there until I get to the Valencia exit for Tucson.
This will avoid the possibility of running into a lot of snow. I'll drive 600 - 800 miles the 1st day. Gimmie an electric car that will do that for me and I'll be happy. The 800 miles is about as much as I can endure, and would be less if I had to wait around for a battery charge. Swap out the batteries and we're golden, but the electric has to do what my gas car does or its no sale.
"And return to the Gilded Age, where most families were literally owned by company towns and runaways were shot on site by private armed forces? No thanks."
Hadn't heard about that. Gilded age was 1865 - 1900, right? That was when many men carried firearms routinely, right? Must have been a real dangerous thing to try to chase one of those, when they can return fire.
I really doubt the ability to return to such a situation, esp. with >300,000,000 firearms in the country now.
If we were to geo-engineer, we should do it in a reversible manner. That is, say, do something in outer space that we could reverse by crashing whatever it is back into the ocean, rather than doing something to the ocean itself and maybe have that run away with itself and turn the planet into a snowball. Using biological entities to change things would seem particularly dangerous since they range from difficult to impossible to control if they start doing something counterproductive.
And I don't think "reducing" CO2 production is effective enough to contemplate. We need to zero CO2 production so that the atmosphere can start cleansing itself, rather than just increase the CO2 concentration more slowly.
With the big dollar signs at the end of the rainbow for anyone that can make our transport systems run on electricity, and for efficient wind and solar where the fuel cost for all is $0, we probably really don't have to do anything other than 1) make industry cheaper to do (what the President is trying to do with his tax cuts) and 2) Get the hell out of the way (stop impeding things with laws and regulations.) Someone will figure out the ultimate wind machine or solar electric generator, and someone else will either figure out the magic battery or a way to use grid electricity (I know one way... lots of infrastructure building associated with it) and we'll get our zeroized CO2 society. Probably 50 years from now before we can do it. But if we do it without making things more expensive because we're trying to do things before we're ready, we might not kill so many people by plunging them into poverty. Poverty kills more efficiently than even smoking. Smoking will take 7 years off your life on average, but living in poverty will take 10 years off your life - froze to death in a refrigerator carton under a bridge, failed to go to the doctor for lack of money and found to be terminal in the ER when the pain got too great, etc. Anyway, I think the best thing to do is to promote industry to the max, and let whatever genius tries the hardest succeed in saving us with electrical ways to do things. Electric cars are getting around 3 mi / KwH and a KwH around here is 12.5 cents. That's 33.3 KwH / 100 miles and therefore $4.16 / 100 miles. At 27 mi / gallon of premium at $2.70 / gallon, that's $10 / 100 miles, far more expensive, and electric would probably still be faster off the line than my very-quick Subaru WRX. Do I want an electric car like that? You bet. I sold my 2012 WRX in 2015, just 3 years old, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. Could I have saved a ton of money on fuel if it was electric and otherwise performed like my WRX? You bet. Some genius is just going to have to figure out how to refuel the car in the same time as gasoline - I drive 600 - 800 miles a day when I travel and that doesn't allow for sitting around for 1/2 hour each fueling, and the power companies are going to have to supply the electric. Hey, maybe charging electric car batteries AT the solar farm during the sunshine, and then trucking them to the refueling points out by the interstate will get around the devaluation of solar electricity that occurs now because of the oversupply of it when the sun shines, and the complete lack of it when it doesn't. Just some thoughts - hope it happens - I'm 70 and will be unlikely to see it. They'll probably figure all this out maybe 50 years from now, which will be plenty of time to start reversing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Oh, yeah,one other thing we could do to improve the CO2 situation is to wrest manufacturing from the likes of China, India, and the rest of the otherwise 3rd-world places where they use coal and get them into the USA by beating the hell out of those places in the marketplace. No, that isn't a function of those country's low wages, it is a function of our egregious income taxes. Zero the income taxes in the USA, and we could end up with the vast majority of the world's manufacturing, and would make things cleaner because of
Ha! First post with a clue. Yep, we don't have the tech to stop using fossil fuels. So, what we should probably be doing is working on that AND geo-engineering. One of them may eventually work. But the global warming people hyperventilate when you mention geo-engineering, its almost like they want to push their scarecrow to attempt to wreck the world economy by "conserving" fossil fuel usage when its not really possible. Couldn't be that, could it?
And if it is, there's not one F'n thing that we can do about it. We don't have the tech to NOT burn fossil fuels. Try it, and food doesn't get to market, commerce goes to near-zero, people starve, etc. We _need_ the energy from fossil fuels, and whining about it just won't change that.
Wind and solar is cool, we should keep building it, and battery tech is getting better too. Will battery tech get to the point that it can replace the internal combustion engine? Maybe. If not, we then have to figure out how to deliver grid electricity to a car / truck / airplane / ship / etc. in motion.
And if this warming is due instead to natural forces as some believe, then we should be pouring a lot of effort into geo-engineering, which may be the only way to mitigate the temperature rise.
" that will be able to do just about anything we're able to do, job-wise."
I'm skeptical. I think that is a looooooong way off. Think about "truck driver." Gonna have a robot that jumps down out of the cab, tightens an insecure load, changes a flat on the inside dual, and continues a run? We're going to need robots with full-up human intelligence to do these things, and that is still pretty much an unknown "how to." Robots will be able to do a lot, but they're still going to lack for what a thinking human being will be able to do, I believe.
When we do get human-intelligence robots, then we're just going to have to tell them what we want done, and they're going to do it for us. UBI will not be necessary. Money will not be necessary. Humans will be doing absolutely nothing for a paycheck. The robots will be doing it all - mining the raw materials, manufacturing every widget, delivering every finished product to whomever wants one, etc. The challenge will then be how to distribute the 100 million Ferraris to the 200 million people that want one - even robots won't be able to mine enough minerals to build whatever everyone wants, nor will there be enough vegetable and animal-derived products to go to everyone. Sooo... who gets what? Money as a determination will be obsolete because no one will be working at all. How to do that? Some other figure of merit for a person besides what they can contribute economically? How many people love them? Invent an "asshole quotient" where people are pushed down the queue when they diminish others enjoyment of life? What?
I own several and belong to a lot of yahoogroups and didn't notice. I download posts via email, and just checked a particularly active group, the N3FJP software support forum, and it has posts for every day in recent history except for November 15. Of course, November 15th is the deer season opener most places, so I can understand why no one might have been on a computer, they were all sitting out in the woods with their rifles...
But, no, really, there were messages for every day except 15 Nov, for-real.
Spider Man Homecoming has been to my house and sent back already via Netflix DVD.
My 2012 Subaru WRX brake pads lasted 'til 110,000 miles sooo... what does brake pad wear prove?
Yeah, there's all kinds of corporate sins of short term profit reigning supreme, as well as most businesses not leaving the USA. But, a whale of a lot of MANUFACTURING left the USA, and that's important because those are one of the big 3 - agriculture, mining, and manufacturing that produce real wealth. That makes them also capable of providing the best jobs. Many miners in W. Va. that Obama nuked with his extreme global warming agenda were making $95K a year. That's good money, probably equivalent to working 4 Walmart jobs at $11 / hr.
But of those that DID leave, taxes were the biggest culprit. You can't have the gov't coming thru the door like Jesse James and demanding 35% of the profit when all the company has to do to avoid that is move out of the country.
Our best move would be to stop taxing income in all its forms - individual, corporate, capital gains, self employment, alternative minimum, estate, gift, yada yada and replace them with the Fair Tax, which has a monthly "prebate" to keep from taxing the poor, who would just show up at a welfare office to recover the money you'd be stealing from them anyway, in order not to starve. The Republican's tax plan will help somewhat, in the manner of the Fair Tax, just less effectively.
"Chairman Mao" disarmed his people, then killed 20 million of his countrymen who opposed him. The bottom line is that we vote against ANYONE that we feel is likely to pass even the slightest of "gun control" legislation. Between the despots exterminating opposition, and the fact that "gun control" legislation absolutely does not work, the opposition cannot find anyone that we would not vote for as long as Democrats demonstrate their willingness to go down the same road as past communists.
Oh, the "people in charge" don't know about the bad bearings? You must mean the managers.... yeah, the managers don't know s***, but the journeyman factory worker does. Why they weren't fixing it I can't guess.
As for automation, the bottom line is that they're still going to be employing some people. If it's 500 instead of 20,000, that's still 500 people. We'll make it up due to the overwhelming return of jobs from other countries if we just lower the damned taxes. The US taxes are why companies have fled the USA, not wages. If you study the Fair Tax, you find that their research pegged the US income tax burden at 22% of the selling price of anything built in this country. Meanwhile, building a car in this country takes 30 - 33 man-hours. Since the car companies were telling us that their cost per worker was $78 / hr in 2007 when they were going bankrupt, and wages have been stagnant, multiplying that out gives around $2500 of worker cost per vehicle, while for a $40K SUV, the tax burden is around $8,800. That's why the FairTaxers want to get rid of the income taxes, but even if we just lower the corporate income tax, that'll help. The ultimate key to putting rocket engines on the economy is abolition of the income taxes, but for now we need to take what we can get.
Bruce Bartlett is a leftist shill whose opinions are manufactured to support whatever globalist / communist theory that the left thinks they need supported. The left especially doesn't like the freedom from governmental interference that comes with something like a Fair Tax, so he attacks and attacks it. He is simply wrong.