The only point I was wishing to make was simply that once the genie is out of the bottle, you're committed. That's true whether it's handguns, fracking or nuclear power; there will be consequences and those selling the product will attempt to obscure tradeoffs with a "win-win" marketing ploy. The nuclear industry is one that has long been writing checks the public has had to cover, as your posts backhandedly expose.
John Tyndall demonstrated the effect on energy absorption gas composition had, some 152 years ago. It took until a few decades ago for anyone to put together what that might mean for the climate vis-a-vis human activities. With a track record like that, science and scientists would be wise not to trumpet the infallability of their judgment.
"Scientists" are not a homogenous group and its disingenuous to imply they are. More importantly, past technological development is no argument as to the future direction our efforts should be focused. You can't say "oh global warming turned out badly, clearly nuclear power will too". It's akin to "look what the machine gun did for war, we better be wary of these MRI scanners".
An F-35B takes a lot more than "a few tons" of supplies and "a few" maintenance personnel.
Compared to the thousands of personnel in a carrier strike group it would be a few tons
Why don't we just take over Bordj Mokhtar Airport in Algeria (or some other random airfield out there) and fly A-10's, F-16s, FA-18s, AH-64, AH-1s, SuperTucanos or any of a number of cheaper alternatives.
If by "take over" you mean "negotiate access to". sure but if they refuse it is not a good idea to "take over" sovereign territory in another country.
Well that is why the US has a large diplomatic corp. There's a long history of governments suddenly discovering they see a lot of benefits to cooperation: case in point, Pakistan.
Here is the paradox of the F-35B. - It is a stealthy, expensive, STOVL 5th gen fighter. If you need a stealthy 5th gen fighter, you don't want to be based close to that opponent. If you can be based near an opponent with reasonable security, you don't need a stealthy 5th gen fighter.
What if this year you need an aircraft based close to the enemy and next year you need a stealth aircraft to penetrate heavy AA? Do you have two aircraft types that will do each role or do you have one that can do both? The F-35B takes the second approach. One aircraft that can do both roles is less expensive than one aircraft for each role.
This observation hardly seems borne out of empirical evidence, seeing as how the one aircraft to do both roles presently is the single most expensive program in US military procurement - and again - hasn't actually demonstrated that it can fulfill any of those roles.
That's setting aside the fact that the VTOL variant of the craft is not the same one you'd be using for a long-range mission through heavy AA, since the VTOL engine means it can carry less fuel and payload. So, really it's one aircraft on the basis that the shared components might work out cheaper. Which again, is an unproven hypothesis.
The national road network of any country needs to be - essentially - totally rebuilt every 50 years or so. It's basically a continuous process, and when you stop doing it for cost savings it gets more expensive later and you begin to pay for the costs due to slow traffic. Late deliveries or more expense in trucking has an economic effect, not to mention negative consequences for those behind poor quality roads. The same is true of bridges: you are basically rebuilding them every N years in terms of maintenance, and the US has reached the point now where a huge number of them really are going to need to be torn down because it'll be cheaper to rebuild them then certify the existing ones as structurally sound.
High speed rail has been on the books since the 80s - look it up. There's a bunch of major links and extensions which have been evaluated, re-evaluated and are still evaluated because it turns out every time you propose better transportation the same ideas which were good before that you didn't do are still actually really good.
My problem is you are operating on -- seemingly -- no information, but are feeling incredibly shore that these are "pet projects" and would be wasteful spending. It's akin to the senator who decided to get in a huff about volcano monitoring as a waste of money, 2 weeks before a volcano in Alaska exploded.
I'm well aware (am Australian, also a huge supporter of it).
What I meant by copper was hooking up apartment buildings where you have old apartments with internal phone lines from a central switch. The current best-practice for those is to use the existing phone copper as ethernet and link fiber to the central switch, then use short-run ethernet for the internal wiring. That means with current technology you can do about 100 mbps easy on what's there, and it's a strata issue to upgrade the internals with Cat6 or better later.
Every new development has been fiber to the apartment for ages.
'Done right' is not the same as 'fiber everywhere'.
As always, it's more complicated then that. Fiber everywhere your digging up, sure. Fiber to all the 4G access points (they are almost certainly already done). But many places are better served by existing copper for the last mile. Many others are better served by wireless data.
Simple minded, single mode solutions to complicated problems. That always turns out well.
And comments sections are not the place to comprehensively outline them. I will say though that planning to reuse the existing copper is always the wrong answer. It means you have two supply chains you have to maintain and degrading copper infrastructure.
If the last mile can't be economically connected to fiber, the correct answer is to look at stationary wireless since it almost certainly isn't really economic to keep them connected to copper either, especially considering the disparity in maintenance costs.
Perhaps having 3x the number of people will make up for that? That means Aus only has 1/3 of the fibre to run, even if they are each, on average, longer.
Population density I imagine. The big cost is labor - the more density you have, the more you get done while paying the workmen in the street pretty much the same amount of money.
Last I remember the plan to do apartment buildings in a lot of places is to simply co-opt the existing telephone copper in the walls and use it for 100mbit ethernet and run a few fiber trunks into the basement.
There is not one square inch where one cannot purchase broadband in the United States. 100% of the US is covered by one broadband provider or another. Every address, every plot of land, every square inch.
Anyone in the US who wants to purchase broadband can do so.
No they can't. There are plenty of people, especially in rural areas, who can't purchase broadband and it depends on your definition of "broadband". More then enough companies regard 256 kbit ADSL as "broadband".
The logic goes beyond that though, otherwise extremely socialist countries would be better off - which they aren't. For it to work, the government has to spend the money in fashions that are economically efficient (Pareto Efficient) - which they usually don't. But to be fair to your argument, at least broadband access is a form of capital whereas the US stimulus package was pretty much pissed away...
In terms of infrastructure, the internet is hardly a bad investment in the current economic climate though. With all the focus on tech startups and the small internet businesses it's fairly easy to argue it's a good long-term enabling investment if it's done right (which means fiber everywhere).
What is the point of a carrier fleet if you need bases on the ground in Africa?
There's no advanced AA and also no real standing armies to fight. Drones which can loiter will rule the day, and strike missions could be run from carriers easily since they're not going to need the fuel for combat manoeuvering against non-existent air defenses.
Not really valid though: it would likely still be cost-effective to develop replacements for the old components with current technology, and probably a lot cheaper then it was originally. Airplanes don't sit around and age - you overhaul them constantly anyway and the principles of aviation haven't changed that much.
The A-10 is the most egrerious thing being replaced: it does it's job extremely well, and is notable because it does exactly what the US military needs for it's current operations (and likely future as well). Upgrading that package with new avionics, maybe investing in looking at some design changes for new planes, would be cheaper and more effective.
Except for NASA, infrastructure spending is almost always positive returns. It generally creates local jobs - and can usually provide long term stability depending on the size of the project - and the flow on effects of road, rail and internet access can be directly correlated to economic activity. I really struggle to see how "functional road and rail" is a pet project. It's a staple of civilization. Places without functional road and rail are 3rd world countries.
Speaking of NASA: it's not like fundamental R&D is a bad idea either. Again, it creates jobs and attracts talent - it means your universities and high-tech industries are engaged in cutting-edge work and develop and retain institutional knowledge and make other projects cheaper. The US is going to really suffer over the next two decades because it's allowed pretty much all it's major physics projects to be superceded by Europe. There's no replacement for the Tevatron at Fermilab and the consequence of that is that the US may lose the ability to even build particle accelerators in the next few years as all the people who know how you do that move on to other things or to facilities which do. The US is also cutting fusion funding with the exception of ITER - and may cut that - which is a huge strategic mistake for fairly obvious reasons.
This isn't stuff you can just write down and forget about - if you want to be at the forefront (which, when you do depend on a technologically advanced military, is kind of important) - then you need to have people active and working on those types of advanced projects - you need students in the same laboratories as the professors.
Also eliminating laws which require contracts to go to the lowest bidder. Removing discretion in procurement is as bad as having no oversight at all - it means the people making the decisions have no leeway when they see a bid they know can't quite work out, even if it would be very hard to prove why conclusively.
There was an example of this a while ago, where a bid to provide ammunition to the US army was made fraudulently, was incredibly low, and wound up killing a bunch of people when the guy who put it in's factory that was repackaging old Chinese bullets to the US army blew up in the middle of the town, killing 30 or so workers.
SS was predicated on productivity and thus tax revenues increasing year to year, which is not an unreasonable assumption since that's the overriding goal of the entire federal government's economic apparatus.
Of course, it doesn't work if you let the wealth stratify and migrate off-shore, since you can't tax the rich nearly as much - proportionally - as you can everyone else (i.e. people who earn wages and salaries, not dividends).
It also doesn't work if the fund is constantly borrowed from for endeavours which do not increase productivity or provide a positive return (wars, tax cuts etc.)
But, we've been doing it for a while with big powerplants anyway. It's not like it's unsolvable. Well, who knows - maybe it is. But if you're studying combustion, you study combustion - not coal-dust handling apparatus.
In the past, groups of companies have shown a considerable degree of cooperation in trying to influence politics. Usually that takes the form of founding trade organizations which then do the actual lobbying. For instance the RIAA when it comes to lobbying for stricter copyright laws. No assumption here, simply observation;-)
The RIAA is a legal organization that acts overtly. It also doesn't consist of a bunch of companies agreeing to intentionally limit their core business activities.
Have we gotten the results from Curiosity's measurements during it's trip? I haven't seen anything come up but I thought that was one of the big things we were looking for - actual data on what to expect.
Tell that to denizens of Shanghai. 2 micron scale particles are surprisingly toxic to the respiratory system, and that's what choking Shanghai from their coal plants.
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
How's those lack of drilling permits, and cockblocking of things like Keystone XL working out for you guys these days anyway? Oh right...enjoy those soaring energy prices.
The US populace has no idea about what drives its energy costs. Keystone won't solve shit - it will however make a bunch of oil execs very rich, at the possible expense of thousands of kilometers of natural water resources. Oil is fungible - it makes no difference if it's refined in Canada or the US - the pipeline is purely about American oil interests getting to refine Canadian crude, as opposed to canadians, europeans, arabs or the chinese.
Demand is going up because demand is going up - keystone won't make a dent. But it might just end a bunch of important ecosystems.
But it was a research scale reactor. It would've been built out of on hand components, and costs cut where necessary - automated systems for new technology aren't easy to develop even if they're all understood principles. Far easier to have someone sleep next to the thing with an alarm clock and test the actual new technology.
Actually wind wise, the proliferation of anti-wind power sentiment is directly correllated with the arrival of lobbyists in small towns. Suddenly people go from mild interest to terrible concern that we just don't know that wind turbines don't cause cancer.
Cranks grab the nearest "mysterious" thing and claim to be exploiting it. It doesn't mean it can't actually do that, but they usually turn out to be devoid of the extraordinary evidence required to prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cowardly" is the word you use when you're on the losing end of an attack.
The only point I was wishing to make was simply that once the genie is out of the bottle, you're committed. That's true whether it's handguns, fracking or nuclear power; there will be consequences and those selling the product will attempt to obscure tradeoffs with a "win-win" marketing ploy. The nuclear industry is one that has long been writing checks the public has had to cover, as your posts backhandedly expose.
John Tyndall demonstrated the effect on energy absorption gas composition had, some 152 years ago. It took until a few decades ago for anyone to put together what that might mean for the climate vis-a-vis human activities. With a track record like that, science and scientists would be wise not to trumpet the infallability of their judgment.
"Scientists" are not a homogenous group and its disingenuous to imply they are. More importantly, past technological development is no argument as to the future direction our efforts should be focused. You can't say "oh global warming turned out badly, clearly nuclear power will too". It's akin to "look what the machine gun did for war, we better be wary of these MRI scanners".
An F-35B takes a lot more than "a few tons" of supplies and "a few" maintenance personnel.
Compared to the thousands of personnel in a carrier strike group it would be a few tons
Why don't we just take over Bordj Mokhtar Airport in Algeria (or some other random airfield out there) and fly A-10's, F-16s, FA-18s, AH-64, AH-1s, SuperTucanos or any of a number of cheaper alternatives.
If by "take over" you mean "negotiate access to". sure but if they refuse it is not a good idea to "take over" sovereign territory in another country.
Well that is why the US has a large diplomatic corp. There's a long history of governments suddenly discovering they see a lot of benefits to cooperation: case in point, Pakistan.
Here is the paradox of the F-35B. - It is a stealthy, expensive, STOVL 5th gen fighter. If you need a stealthy 5th gen fighter, you don't want to be based close to that opponent. If you can be based near an opponent with reasonable security, you don't need a stealthy 5th gen fighter.
What if this year you need an aircraft based close to the enemy and next year you need a stealth aircraft to penetrate heavy AA? Do you have two aircraft types that will do each role or do you have one that can do both? The F-35B takes the second approach. One aircraft that can do both roles is less expensive than one aircraft for each role.
This observation hardly seems borne out of empirical evidence, seeing as how the one aircraft to do both roles presently is the single most expensive program in US military procurement - and again - hasn't actually demonstrated that it can fulfill any of those roles.
That's setting aside the fact that the VTOL variant of the craft is not the same one you'd be using for a long-range mission through heavy AA, since the VTOL engine means it can carry less fuel and payload. So, really it's one aircraft on the basis that the shared components might work out cheaper. Which again, is an unproven hypothesis.
You're reading into things which aren't there.
The national road network of any country needs to be - essentially - totally rebuilt every 50 years or so. It's basically a continuous process, and when you stop doing it for cost savings it gets more expensive later and you begin to pay for the costs due to slow traffic. Late deliveries or more expense in trucking has an economic effect, not to mention negative consequences for those behind poor quality roads. The same is true of bridges: you are basically rebuilding them every N years in terms of maintenance, and the US has reached the point now where a huge number of them really are going to need to be torn down because it'll be cheaper to rebuild them then certify the existing ones as structurally sound.
High speed rail has been on the books since the 80s - look it up. There's a bunch of major links and extensions which have been evaluated, re-evaluated and are still evaluated because it turns out every time you propose better transportation the same ideas which were good before that you didn't do are still actually really good.
My problem is you are operating on -- seemingly -- no information, but are feeling incredibly shore that these are "pet projects" and would be wasteful spending. It's akin to the senator who decided to get in a huff about volcano monitoring as a waste of money, 2 weeks before a volcano in Alaska exploded.
I'm well aware (am Australian, also a huge supporter of it).
What I meant by copper was hooking up apartment buildings where you have old apartments with internal phone lines from a central switch. The current best-practice for those is to use the existing phone copper as ethernet and link fiber to the central switch, then use short-run ethernet for the internal wiring. That means with current technology you can do about 100 mbps easy on what's there, and it's a strata issue to upgrade the internals with Cat6 or better later.
Every new development has been fiber to the apartment for ages.
'Done right' is not the same as 'fiber everywhere'.
As always, it's more complicated then that. Fiber everywhere your digging up, sure. Fiber to all the 4G access points (they are almost certainly already done). But many places are better served by existing copper for the last mile. Many others are better served by wireless data.
Simple minded, single mode solutions to complicated problems. That always turns out well.
And comments sections are not the place to comprehensively outline them. I will say though that planning to reuse the existing copper is always the wrong answer. It means you have two supply chains you have to maintain and degrading copper infrastructure.
If the last mile can't be economically connected to fiber, the correct answer is to look at stationary wireless since it almost certainly isn't really economic to keep them connected to copper either, especially considering the disparity in maintenance costs.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+france+vs+australia
Perhaps having 3x the number of people will make up for that? That means Aus only has 1/3 of the fibre to run, even if they are each, on average, longer.
Population density I imagine. The big cost is labor - the more density you have, the more you get done while paying the workmen in the street pretty much the same amount of money.
Last I remember the plan to do apartment buildings in a lot of places is to simply co-opt the existing telephone copper in the walls and use it for 100mbit ethernet and run a few fiber trunks into the basement.
Okay.
There is not one square inch where one cannot purchase broadband in the United States. 100% of the US is covered by one broadband provider or another. Every address, every plot of land, every square inch.
Anyone in the US who wants to purchase broadband can do so.
No they can't. There are plenty of people, especially in rural areas, who can't purchase broadband and it depends on your definition of "broadband". More then enough companies regard 256 kbit ADSL as "broadband".
For a certain definition of "running" when it comes to the copper network I'd say.
The logic goes beyond that though, otherwise extremely socialist countries would be better off - which they aren't. For it to work, the government has to spend the money in fashions that are economically efficient (Pareto Efficient) - which they usually don't. But to be fair to your argument, at least broadband access is a form of capital whereas the US stimulus package was pretty much pissed away...
In terms of infrastructure, the internet is hardly a bad investment in the current economic climate though. With all the focus on tech startups and the small internet businesses it's fairly easy to argue it's a good long-term enabling investment if it's done right (which means fiber everywhere).
Then explain me why France is the 2nd destination in Europe for foreign investments.
Second largest economy in Eurozone finds itself at the #2 spot in the volume of money handled. News at 11....
Meaning there's nothing really wrong?
Not strictly true but if things are as expected then you have to work a lot harder to show the doom and gloom the OP so freely claims.
What is the point of a carrier fleet if you need bases on the ground in Africa?
There's no advanced AA and also no real standing armies to fight. Drones which can loiter will rule the day, and strike missions could be run from carriers easily since they're not going to need the fuel for combat manoeuvering against non-existent air defenses.
Not really valid though: it would likely still be cost-effective to develop replacements for the old components with current technology, and probably a lot cheaper then it was originally. Airplanes don't sit around and age - you overhaul them constantly anyway and the principles of aviation haven't changed that much.
The A-10 is the most egrerious thing being replaced: it does it's job extremely well, and is notable because it does exactly what the US military needs for it's current operations (and likely future as well). Upgrading that package with new avionics, maybe investing in looking at some design changes for new planes, would be cheaper and more effective.
Fine?
Your statement reads like an angry 5 year old.
Please explain where a truly "free-market" society anywhere on Terra has "fell flat on its face".
Please explain where a truly free-market society has ever existed, then perhaps consider why no one ever quite seems to "get there".
Except for NASA, infrastructure spending is almost always positive returns. It generally creates local jobs - and can usually provide long term stability depending on the size of the project - and the flow on effects of road, rail and internet access can be directly correlated to economic activity. I really struggle to see how "functional road and rail" is a pet project. It's a staple of civilization. Places without functional road and rail are 3rd world countries.
Speaking of NASA: it's not like fundamental R&D is a bad idea either. Again, it creates jobs and attracts talent - it means your universities and high-tech industries are engaged in cutting-edge work and develop and retain institutional knowledge and make other projects cheaper. The US is going to really suffer over the next two decades because it's allowed pretty much all it's major physics projects to be superceded by Europe. There's no replacement for the Tevatron at Fermilab and the consequence of that is that the US may lose the ability to even build particle accelerators in the next few years as all the people who know how you do that move on to other things or to facilities which do. The US is also cutting fusion funding with the exception of ITER - and may cut that - which is a huge strategic mistake for fairly obvious reasons.
This isn't stuff you can just write down and forget about - if you want to be at the forefront (which, when you do depend on a technologically advanced military, is kind of important) - then you need to have people active and working on those types of advanced projects - you need students in the same laboratories as the professors.
Also eliminating laws which require contracts to go to the lowest bidder. Removing discretion in procurement is as bad as having no oversight at all - it means the people making the decisions have no leeway when they see a bid they know can't quite work out, even if it would be very hard to prove why conclusively.
There was an example of this a while ago, where a bid to provide ammunition to the US army was made fraudulently, was incredibly low, and wound up killing a bunch of people when the guy who put it in's factory that was repackaging old Chinese bullets to the US army blew up in the middle of the town, killing 30 or so workers.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/firing-blanks-afghanistan
SS was predicated on productivity and thus tax revenues increasing year to year, which is not an unreasonable assumption since that's the overriding goal of the entire federal government's economic apparatus.
Of course, it doesn't work if you let the wealth stratify and migrate off-shore, since you can't tax the rich nearly as much - proportionally - as you can everyone else (i.e. people who earn wages and salaries, not dividends).
It also doesn't work if the fund is constantly borrowed from for endeavours which do not increase productivity or provide a positive return (wars, tax cuts etc.)
But, we've been doing it for a while with big powerplants anyway. It's not like it's unsolvable. Well, who knows - maybe it is. But if you're studying combustion, you study combustion - not coal-dust handling apparatus.
In the past, groups of companies have shown a considerable degree of cooperation in trying to influence politics. Usually that takes the form of founding trade organizations which then do the actual lobbying. For instance the RIAA when it comes to lobbying for stricter copyright laws. No assumption here, simply observation ;-)
For an example of suppression that has at least some evidence behind it, consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries.
The RIAA is a legal organization that acts overtly. It also doesn't consist of a bunch of companies agreeing to intentionally limit their core business activities.
Have we gotten the results from Curiosity's measurements during it's trip? I haven't seen anything come up but I thought that was one of the big things we were looking for - actual data on what to expect.
Tell that to denizens of Shanghai. 2 micron scale particles are surprisingly toxic to the respiratory system, and that's what choking Shanghai from their coal plants.
Access to natural gas in Russia? Not access to natural gas within EU borders? That is hardly comparable to the quantities of natural gas that the US has within its US borders.
How's those lack of drilling permits, and cockblocking of things like Keystone XL working out for you guys these days anyway? Oh right...enjoy those soaring energy prices.
The US populace has no idea about what drives its energy costs. Keystone won't solve shit - it will however make a bunch of oil execs very rich, at the possible expense of thousands of kilometers of natural water resources. Oil is fungible - it makes no difference if it's refined in Canada or the US - the pipeline is purely about American oil interests getting to refine Canadian crude, as opposed to canadians, europeans, arabs or the chinese.
Demand is going up because demand is going up - keystone won't make a dent. But it might just end a bunch of important ecosystems.
But it was a research scale reactor. It would've been built out of on hand components, and costs cut where necessary - automated systems for new technology aren't easy to develop even if they're all understood principles. Far easier to have someone sleep next to the thing with an alarm clock and test the actual new technology.
Actually wind wise, the proliferation of anti-wind power sentiment is directly correllated with the arrival of lobbyists in small towns. Suddenly people go from mild interest to terrible concern that we just don't know that wind turbines don't cause cancer.
Cranks grab the nearest "mysterious" thing and claim to be exploiting it. It doesn't mean it can't actually do that, but they usually turn out to be devoid of the extraordinary evidence required to prove it.