Provision of any service by a government not specifically enumerated in its founding documents is an illegitimate function, whether Federal, State, or Local. If not, then why bother having a founding document at all.
The prevailing governmental theory in the founding documents of all the states is that the documents are of a negative nature, stating only what is permitted to the government. You can keep moving down the line and making new arguments if you wish, but there is no denying that this is the main basis of governmental theory in the United States. In other nations and theories, perhaps, the government is given carte blanche. But not here, and rightly so.
Yeah, nice, change your line of argument when you're beaten. Good tactic. I seem to remember that it was you who brought up the Constitution in the first place.
If there's a mandatory price cap, what makes you think anybody will be interested in entering the market. Price caps only "work" once the technology or service has become a commodity and the businesses that provide it can be coerced by the government into continuing to provide it at a near loss.
Once they have the infrastructure in place, the government can muscle in and say, "Well, if you want to do business in this town, you have to agree not to make any money doing it. You can walk away and abandon your infrastructure investment, or you can play by our rules and not lose your shirts completely."
That's the nature of the great, altruistic, morally-superior-to-the-dirty-capitalists government for ya.
So move out of the damn sticks. Wahhh, wahhh, I don't have internet where I live! Take your own action to get it, don't rely on the tax dollars of everyone else.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly./i
So how many municipalities provide free water and electricity? Why should any utility be provided by the government?
The Constitution is a document which states what the government can do, not what it cannot. Hence, any power not specifically delegated via the Constitution to the government by the people is prohibited to the government.
Your comment arises from a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Constitution. Under the Constitution, anything not specifically allowed to the government is forbidden it. Anything not specifically prohibited to the people is allowed. In other words, if you're a citizen, what's not specifically illegal is legal. If you're the government, what's not specifically legal is illegal.
Just a touch on the elitist side, aren't we? Do you have any appreciation for the talents of the mechanical engineers who designed the engines and thrust structures, the machinists who built the millions of moving parts, or the technicians who put it all together?
Programming a computer is cool, but it's just desk-chair-lard-ass-nerd impressive. IMHO.
Has anyone ever noticed that traffic signals appear to simply impede the smooth flow of traffic? I think you could achieve the same "adaptive" traffic control capability by doing away with the lights and installing simple stop signs. Let the traffic control itself. I've been at innumberable intersections where the signals or human traffic directors have merely managed to create obstructions to flow, in both directions, tha wouldn't have happened without the attempt to "control" traffic.
In our haste to exercise control over everything, most stuff just slips through our fingers the tighter we squeeze (thanks, Leia Organa).
Hey, not to take anything away from NASA and company, but...
NASA's been running around in little circles since 1980. While their robotic program has had some stunning successes, up til now, they have done very little to advance the presence of humans in space. That's what makes the private space industry compelling--they're working to get everyone into space for relatively little money, not just those who can pay $20M to Russia or complete the decades of training (including postgraduate degrees or military service) necessary to become a professional astronaut.
Maybe with the new exploration initiative we can get NASA out of LEO (except as a staging area for deeper destinations) and free it up for some private competition.
It took deregulation of the telecom monopoly (when the public sector decidedly WAS involved in controlling the market) for you to be able to buy a phone of your own and hook it up to the network. Imagine that in today's world. I'm sorry sir, you have to buy your computer from the government mandated monopoly. It comes in Black, Black, or Black, and uses the latest state-of-the-art CPUs (from 1999). Sorry, no, you can't install "linux" on it, that's not standardized enough. Don't forget that you can't upgrade it since it belongs to the "Phone Company."
I just love it when you IT people get all pompous about economists. Of course you're all the smartest people on the face of the earth, so people who've actually STUDIED economics can't possibly be right about anything, especially when you disagree with it on a visceral level.
You guys sound as pathetic as the steel workers and miners where I grew up, compaining about how the corporate "man" keeps you down. Get with the times: many IT people were the first to say that to the "old economy" manufacturing employees back when getting an IT degree meant a paycheck that was completely outsized compared to your actual skills.
Now that you're not making mad money right out of college, you're all more than willing to join up with the Union and be protectionists.
It's a known economic fact that lower labor costs translate to lower finished goods costs. You think you'd be able to afford the latest graphics hardware and a new box everytime the next killer FPS came out if they weren't being manufactured overseas for way less than they could be made in the U.S.? You all benefit from outsourcing and globalization, but you're too fixated on your own careers to see the benefits.
Hey, I did this 2.5 years ago with a 'plog' that I wrote in PHP using PostgreSQL to keep track of water treatment pilot tests that my company does. Should have patented it. Since I'm not a programmer by trade, it's not very elegant, but it does the jobe very well, allowing multiple engineers, salespeople, etc. to keep track of projects and keep others updated on news, etc.
Obviously the writer of this comment did not bother to read the actual article, only the Slashdot readers' meta-comments.
The article states that the original, mistaken, media estimate of $1T was based on just such an assumption, only taking the 1989 proposal, not the Apollo program, as baseline. The large estimate came from a misunderstanding of what was included in the 1989 plan/budget. In fact, because several of the prospecting missions and technological developments that the 1989 plan relied upon have already been completed, the new price tag is significantly less.
The journalists who had to be the first to get their story out are at fault for simply repeating what one reporter wrote without checking the facts, and waiting until the actual proposal came out, rather than making up numbers unrelated to the actual initiative.
You're proving the article's point by simply parroting what you've heard in the past, without critically examining the uninformed claims that flew around at the time the initiative was proposed.
Come back when you understand that to have a valuable opinion on an issue, you need to be well-informed. In this case it should have been easy, since all it would have taken to make an informed comment on the linked article would have been to read it.
Completely ignoring the point that this reactor can function on alot higher water->ethanol ratio then normal ethanol combustion engines
What about the mash residue which will surely gum up the works. The water percentage in the corn has nothing to do with the water in the product ethanol, since you have to add water to make the fermentation mash and then remove it later on!
Even if you can use 50% water/ethanol, you still have to purify it to that point. Also, consider that it costs an awful lot more per unit energy to transport 50/50 ethanol/water than it costs to transport 90/10 or 85/15. Water's heavy stuff, and costs a lot to move around. For every gallon of water in the tanker truck, that's a gallon of ethanol that's not there. And that means more trucks, and more fuel burned delivering the same unit energy to the customer.
At the end of the day, the energy spent to deliver one unit energy in the form of gasoline is lower than that to deliver one unit energy in the form of ethanol.
Since the mass of crude oil is almost entirely given over to useful chemical-energy-bearing material, and the mass of corn is almost entirely given over to water, the energy density of petroleum is far higher than the energy density of corn.
Thus the transportation and processing costs for a unit of energy in corn form is far higher than those for petroleum.
Cool! Can you tell me what a good number for production of useful corn biomass per sq. km is? I've seen some estimates, but I'm not sure which ones are good.
I'll go over the papers at the Argonne site...on a cursory inspection, the paper (#141) only appears to conclude that internal combustion engines operate more efficiently with a gasoline-ethanol blend, not that the production of ethanol itself is energy-efficient.
I'd agree with you on the sugar cane thing--since the sugar density in cane is so much higher than in corn. Unfortunately the US gov't. subsidies on cane make it extremely cost-prohibitive as a feedstock.
But it CAN be produced from Petroleum! And it's cheaper to do it that way than to make it from corn. Cheaper in terms of energy spent, that is, which directly translates into money spent.
First off: I'd love to see a process that "turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity". This would be the first scientifically verified instance of alchemy and element transmutation EVER!
On a more serious note, from an earlier post:
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria.
If you don't care that your ethanol also contains about 60%-80% water, mash residue, and other contaminants, that's correct. Some processes can produce a fermentor concentration of up to about 50% EtOH without killing the organisms but require a gas stripping operation which uses energy to pump the byproduct CO2 back through the fermentation reactor.
You may not care about that, but I guarantee your fuel cell or internal combustion engine cares.
Purification of ethanol is the most energy-intensive part of the whole process. There are a bunch of novel purification processes out there, but so far none uses less energy per unit mass of ethanol produced than is available for later use per unit mass.
I used to be a 100% booster of ethanol fuels, but I've since changed my thinking. I've done the mass and energy balances, and with current technology, there's no way you can produce ethanol cheaper (read: by spending less energy making it than you get out of it later).
Ethanol looks, on the surface, to be a great "renewable" fuel source, but one has to take into account an enormous number of inputs to determine whether or not there's a surplus of available chemical energy at the end of the day.
Consider, for instance, the costs of:
Fuel for farm implements power for pumping irrigation water power to transport the corn to the factory power for the fermentation equipment power for the solids separation equipment power for the purification equipment (i.e., distillation, gas absorption, pervaporation (which can't be done yet on a large enough scale to matter), etc.)
Unfortunately, no one has been able to demonstrate a process that, when taking all the energy costs into consideration, that can show a positive energy balance once you subtract the energy expended during ethanol production from the energy input from the sun in the first place.
The old chemical engineering standby (backed by the Laws of Thermodynamics) equation for energy balances:
At the end of the day, with current separation technology, A is always negative for ethanol production processes from biomass. That is, the net available energy on earth is actually less at the end of the process than when you started.
Slashdot Mirror
Provision of any service by a government not specifically enumerated in its founding documents is an illegitimate function, whether Federal, State, or Local. If not, then why bother having a founding document at all.
The prevailing governmental theory in the founding documents of all the states is that the documents are of a negative nature, stating only what is permitted to the government. You can keep moving down the line and making new arguments if you wish, but there is no denying that this is the main basis of governmental theory in the United States. In other nations and theories, perhaps, the government is given carte blanche. But not here, and rightly so.
Yeah, nice, change your line of argument when you're beaten. Good tactic. I seem to remember that it was you who brought up the Constitution in the first place.
If there's a mandatory price cap, what makes you think anybody will be interested in entering the market. Price caps only "work" once the technology or service has become a commodity and the businesses that provide it can be coerced by the government into continuing to provide it at a near loss.
Once they have the infrastructure in place, the government can muscle in and say, "Well, if you want to do business in this town, you have to agree not to make any money doing it. You can walk away and abandon your infrastructure investment, or you can play by our rules and not lose your shirts completely."
That's the nature of the great, altruistic, morally-superior-to-the-dirty-capitalists government for ya.
So move out of the damn sticks. Wahhh, wahhh, I don't have internet where I live! Take your own action to get it, don't rely on the tax dollars of everyone else.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly./i
So how many municipalities provide free water and electricity? Why should any utility be provided by the government?
The Constitution is a document which states what the government can do, not what it cannot. Hence, any power not specifically delegated via the Constitution to the government by the people is prohibited to the government.
Your comment arises from a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Constitution. Under the Constitution, anything not specifically allowed to the government is forbidden it. Anything not specifically prohibited to the people is allowed. In other words, if you're a citizen, what's not specifically illegal is legal. If you're the government, what's not specifically legal is illegal.
TANSTAAFL
There is no such thing as "free" wireless.
Besides which, providing wireless access is not a legitimate function of government.
"grease monkey impressive?"
Just a touch on the elitist side, aren't we? Do you have any appreciation for the talents of the mechanical engineers who designed the engines and thrust structures, the machinists who built the millions of moving parts, or the technicians who put it all together?
Programming a computer is cool, but it's just desk-chair-lard-ass-nerd impressive. IMHO.
Heh heh heh. Richard Kiehl. DNA.
Am I the only one who thought of the MST3k episode where they did "The Human Duplicators?"
Has anyone ever noticed that traffic signals appear to simply impede the smooth flow of traffic? I think you could achieve the same "adaptive" traffic control capability by doing away with the lights and installing simple stop signs. Let the traffic control itself. I've been at innumberable intersections where the signals or human traffic directors have merely managed to create obstructions to flow, in both directions, tha wouldn't have happened without the attempt to "control" traffic.
In our haste to exercise control over everything, most stuff just slips through our fingers the tighter we squeeze (thanks, Leia Organa).
Hey, not to take anything away from NASA and company, but...
NASA's been running around in little circles since 1980. While their robotic program has had some stunning successes, up til now, they have done very little to advance the presence of humans in space. That's what makes the private space industry compelling--they're working to get everyone into space for relatively little money, not just those who can pay $20M to Russia or complete the decades of training (including postgraduate degrees or military service) necessary to become a professional astronaut.
Maybe with the new exploration initiative we can get NASA out of LEO (except as a staging area for deeper destinations) and free it up for some private competition.
The underlying article is a day late. The test is currently happening.
Have a look at:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/x43a/status.html
PayPal's outdated. They're on a social engineering crusade.
Use e-gold instead.
The subject says it all.
You have absolutely got to be kidding.
It took deregulation of the telecom monopoly (when the public sector decidedly WAS involved in controlling the market) for you to be able to buy a phone of your own and hook it up to the network. Imagine that in today's world. I'm sorry sir, you have to buy your computer from the government mandated monopoly. It comes in Black, Black, or Black, and uses the latest state-of-the-art CPUs (from 1999). Sorry, no, you can't install "linux" on it, that's not standardized enough. Don't forget that you can't upgrade it since it belongs to the "Phone Company."
Don't be stupid. There's obviously a breakpoint where the economy will settle into a steady state. Your retort is simple-minded in the extreme.
I just love it when you IT people get all pompous about economists. Of course you're all the smartest people on the face of the earth, so people who've actually STUDIED economics can't possibly be right about anything, especially when you disagree with it on a visceral level.
You guys sound as pathetic as the steel workers and miners where I grew up, compaining about how the corporate "man" keeps you down. Get with the times: many IT people were the first to say that to the "old economy" manufacturing employees back when getting an IT degree meant a paycheck that was completely outsized compared to your actual skills.
Now that you're not making mad money right out of college, you're all more than willing to join up with the Union and be protectionists.
It's a known economic fact that lower labor costs translate to lower finished goods costs. You think you'd be able to afford the latest graphics hardware and a new box everytime the next killer FPS came out if they weren't being manufactured overseas for way less than they could be made in the U.S.? You all benefit from outsourcing and globalization, but you're too fixated on your own careers to see the benefits.
Hey, I did this 2.5 years ago with a 'plog' that I wrote in PHP using PostgreSQL to keep track of water treatment pilot tests that my company does. Should have patented it. Since I'm not a programmer by trade, it's not very elegant, but it does the jobe very well, allowing multiple engineers, salespeople, etc. to keep track of projects and keep others updated on news, etc.
Insightful? Come on.
Obviously the writer of this comment did not bother to read the actual article, only the Slashdot readers' meta-comments.
The article states that the original, mistaken, media estimate of $1T was based on just such an assumption, only taking the 1989 proposal, not the Apollo program, as baseline. The large estimate came from a misunderstanding of what was included in the 1989 plan/budget. In fact, because several of the prospecting missions and technological developments that the 1989 plan relied upon have already been completed, the new price tag is significantly less.
The journalists who had to be the first to get their story out are at fault for simply repeating what one reporter wrote without checking the facts, and waiting until the actual proposal came out, rather than making up numbers unrelated to the actual initiative.
You're proving the article's point by simply parroting what you've heard in the past, without critically examining the uninformed claims that flew around at the time the initiative was proposed.
Come back when you understand that to have a valuable opinion on an issue, you need to be well-informed. In this case it should have been easy, since all it would have taken to make an informed comment on the linked article would have been to read it.
Completely ignoring the point that this reactor can function on alot higher water->ethanol ratio then normal ethanol combustion engines
What about the mash residue which will surely gum up the works. The water percentage in the corn has nothing to do with the water in the product ethanol, since you have to add water to make the fermentation mash and then remove it later on!
Even if you can use 50% water/ethanol, you still have to purify it to that point. Also, consider that it costs an awful lot more per unit energy to transport 50/50 ethanol/water than it costs to transport 90/10 or 85/15. Water's heavy stuff, and costs a lot to move around. For every gallon of water in the tanker truck, that's a gallon of ethanol that's not there. And that means more trucks, and more fuel burned delivering the same unit energy to the customer.
So you lose out on the deal either way.
At the end of the day, the energy spent to deliver one unit energy in the form of gasoline is lower than that to deliver one unit energy in the form of ethanol.
Since the mass of crude oil is almost entirely given over to useful chemical-energy-bearing material, and the mass of corn is almost entirely given over to water, the energy density of petroleum is far higher than the energy density of corn.
Thus the transportation and processing costs for a unit of energy in corn form is far higher than those for petroleum.
That is the point.
Yes, IAAAE (I Am An Agricultural Economist)
Cool! Can you tell me what a good number for production of useful corn biomass per sq. km is? I've seen some estimates, but I'm not sure which ones are good.
I'll go over the papers at the Argonne site...on a cursory inspection, the paper (#141) only appears to conclude that internal combustion engines operate more efficiently with a gasoline-ethanol blend, not that the production of ethanol itself is energy-efficient.
I'd agree with you on the sugar cane thing--since the sugar density in cane is so much higher than in corn. Unfortunately the US gov't. subsidies on cane make it extremely cost-prohibitive as a feedstock.
But it CAN be produced from Petroleum! And it's cheaper to do it that way than to make it from corn. Cheaper in terms of energy spent, that is, which directly translates into money spent.
Damn. I thought for sure I was right on the alchemy part. Oh well.
First off: I'd love to see a process that "turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity". This would be the first scientifically verified instance of alchemy and element transmutation EVER!
On a more serious note, from an earlier post:
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria.
If you don't care that your ethanol also contains about 60%-80% water, mash residue, and other contaminants, that's correct. Some processes can produce a fermentor concentration of up to about 50% EtOH without killing the organisms but require a gas stripping operation which uses energy to pump the byproduct CO2 back through the fermentation reactor.
You may not care about that, but I guarantee your fuel cell or internal combustion engine cares.
Purification of ethanol is the most energy-intensive part of the whole process. There are a bunch of novel purification processes out there, but so far none uses less energy per unit mass of ethanol produced than is available for later use per unit mass.
I used to be a 100% booster of ethanol fuels, but I've since changed my thinking. I've done the mass and energy balances, and with current technology, there's no way you can produce ethanol cheaper (read: by spending less energy making it than you get out of it later).
Ethanol looks, on the surface, to be a great "renewable" fuel source, but one has to take into account an enormous number of inputs to determine whether or not there's a surplus of available chemical energy at the end of the day.
Consider, for instance, the costs of:
Fuel for farm implements
power for pumping irrigation water
power to transport the corn to the factory
power for the fermentation equipment
power for the solids separation equipment
power for the purification equipment (i.e., distillation, gas absorption, pervaporation (which can't be done yet on a large enough scale to matter), etc.)
Unfortunately, no one has been able to demonstrate a process that, when taking all the energy costs into consideration, that can show a positive energy balance once you subtract the energy expended during ethanol production from the energy input from the sun in the first place.
The old chemical engineering standby (backed by the Laws of Thermodynamics) equation for energy balances:
A = I - O + G -C
Accumulation = Input - Output + Generation - Consumption
At the end of the day, with current separation technology, A is always negative for ethanol production processes from biomass. That is, the net available energy on earth is actually less at the end of the process than when you started.
It's an unfortunate reality, but it's reality.