She seems to think that the 'sure thing' is always smart and that risks are always 'mistakes'. She must really like making 1% on her savings account. Wealth is not generated that way, nobody has ever been outstandingly successful by generating 1% growth. Human civilization is built on risks, and individually those have sometimes raised people up and sometimes dragged people down, but to categorize that behavior as 'stupid' or a 'mistake' is to spit upon the whole of human endeavor. But of course this makes me a sub-human fat-cat corporatist, so be sure to ignore me while I reap the rewards of more risky investments. Those were just stupid mistakes after all that just happen to defray my cost of living.
Your example is not parallel, as you assume that the transition from tokens for grapes to tokens for nothing is the equivalent of silver certificates for whatever you want to purchase transitioning to fiat currency for whatever you want to purchase. Let me see if you pick up the key element there...
...
That's right, people still get whatever they want to purchase. That they cannot trade a certificate for a set amount of precious metals is immaterial to most people, as precious metals themselves are of little direct utility outside of certain industries and therefore are as representational as the fiat currency itself.
This is not to say that I don't wholly support trying to accumulate concentrations of materials that have a real value irrespective of government policy (per se).
WA may be unusual, but they should be the model. I lived there most of my life and so long as you stayed out of King County (which I sadly couldn't) it was an awesome place to live. More states need to stand up to their representatives, and when their legislatures don't do what the people want, fuck `em. Pass the law yourselves.
Of course you're right that repeals are rare, especially at the federal level, but that doesn't stop the constant talk of repealing the Bush tax cuts does it?
The last two? The Constitution hasn't been worth the paper it's written on since at least FDR's threat to pack the courts. It wouldn't be unreasonable to take it back even further.
Providing of course that the majority of the electorate is on board, otherwise next election cycle those responsible are replaced and the taxes stricken from the books. Occasionally the latter is done by itself below the federal level, WA specifically has passed many 'tax revolt' initiatives.
And no doubt you expect it to 'lead' by eliminating the pesky 'free' part, just as China does. If the US government tried to shut down two thousand industrial facilities at a stroke, the people would vote that administration out and rightly. China can do what it does because these facilities are likely owned wholly or in large part by state industries, and whatever backlash might come from 'the people' (who supposedly own the industries through the auspice of the state) is rendered entirely meaningless through the lack of democratic accountability.
That plant was built in the sixties, so it's already lasted more than a few decades. Half of the new 787 production is done there and the 747 and 777 lines have just been revamped (I worked on a contract that supported the transition of 777 production from fixed gantries to a moving assembly line, so I know that building about a million times better than you do or will), which makes it likely that it will remain in operation for many decades yet. When you lay down that much capital, you do not toss away the produced infrastructure lightly (and it's not like Boeing is anywhere near leaving the widebody aircraft business).
Not to mention that these buildings are incalculably more useful than a simple geometric pile of rocks. If 'long term thinking' means wasting the resources of a nation just so one guy can have the bitchin'est pile of rocks on top of his corpse, then I posit that 'long term thinking' is a worthless crock of shit and that the 'short term thinking' that enables the foundation of international commerce and travel for hundreds of millions of people is what is actually praiseworthy.
There's water pretty much everywhere on Europa too, and where you have water you have oxygen and hydrogen. You can breath the former and use the latter as a basis for a hydrogen economy. Sprinkle in some old reliable nuclear fission power (waiting until fusion is unnecessary) and everything else is a matter of design problems.
(Oh and on the subject of locally produced energy for Antarctica, there are substancial deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas in and around the continent. These aren't pursued because the conditions are too hostile and would drive up the cost of extraction vs. other sites, and a bunch of whinging twits precluded it in the Antarctic-Environmental Protocol back in the 90s.)
I don't think you even know what 'cost effective' means. Let's compare and contrast (all the numbers below are completely made-up for illustrative purposes only):
Let's say it costs $20 per pound in logistical cost to get stuff to the middle of Antarctizzle. Let's say that a research station needs 100k pounds of food per year, so it costs $2m to transport food to the station. Let's say that creating a facility for growing food locally might cost $50m dollars to build and another million to run each year, meaning that a breakeven point would lie many decades down the road. Compare that with launch costs of $6000 per pound. Logistical costs might be $600m per year, whereupon building something that costs even half a billion would pay for itself in a single year so long as it eliminated that logistical transport cost. Hence, ta-da! Cost effective! ZOMG!
Hmmm? But no, really, modern engineering has achieved much greater things than simply piling a bunch of stones in one place. If you ever have the opportunity, you should take a tour of the Boeing factory in Everett, WA, the largest single building by volume of enclosed space. I worked there on a couple of different contracts, and it is awe-inspiring. It makes the 747s built there look small, and the same building manufactures three other types of aircraft. Dubai International and Beijing Capital International Airports' Terminals 3 are also incredibly impressive structures with over a million square meters of floor space. Hit up Google maps or something and check out those bad boys from space.
All of the most populous nations on earth have seen whole number reductions in their fertility rates in the last 50 years. 76 nations have fertility rates below replacement. Everybody who still tries to fearmonger about population growth is an idiot out of touch with the statistical reality.
Water is the second most common molecule in the universe and oxygen the third most common element, so leading off with "no oxygen, significant quantities of water" tells me you don't know the first thing about extraterrestrial conditions. As for air pressure that's pretty relative. As near as Venus air pressure is bitch, enough to crush the life out of you. And of course the disposition of other lifeforms is unknown. I think there is a better than 50% chance of life on Europa simply because if there are oceans and thermal vents there it would provide the same characteristics believed to have been necessary for abiogenesis on Earth.
For all the Trek talk of a "final frontier" it would be more appropriate to describe space as a "final empty wasteland."
Every thinly populated undeveloped space could be called an 'empty wasteland' before settlement and development. It's a given. I suppose you'd be there to decry Seward's Folly too?
No one ever calls the deepest oceans on earth a "new frontier,"
Ah, nothing like the conceit of the ignorant just because they don't bother to even ask questions before they make assertions. Ever heard of Dennis Chamberland?
You are quite right about there being no point B. I remember reading somewhere (and I don't want to take the time to find the source or verify the math) that if a ton of gold inexplicably showed up in LEO it would actually cost more to go up and get it than the value of the gold itself. What is needed is a 'killer app' for microgravity. As soon as there is some material that can only be produced in microgravity that has some vital purpose to future technology, then suddenly there is a reason to look at space as a resource.
The other big possibility for an extraterrestrial economy is lunar deposits of He-3 which could be joined with other mining operations.
Human lifespans have already doubled, and the cycle within which people think has shrank. It's not about how long people live (in fact I would argue that when people had shorter lives they more frequently thought about their legacies, for example the prevalence of dynastic/aristocratic hereditary power structures), it's about how technology impacts the cycle. Centuries ago during the Age of Sail you had to wait months to know if a ship in your employ was successful. Centuries before that an expedition to China like Marco Polo's took decades. Assuming I had a travel visa in hand I could be in Beijing in before this time tomorrow. When you don't have to wait for anything planning becomes a matter of resources, and time, far from being a barrier, becomes a resource in of itself.
Please tell me how any of the technologies required for Dr. Robert Zubrin's plans for Martian exploration and colonization are 'non-existent' or 'handwaving'. (And BTW, he is an engineer.)
Insofar as life cycles are intertwined and it is necessary for things to die in order to create nutrients for the living to consume. However this is not necessarily true in all cases. Trees do not die to create fruit (though depending on your ethics about what constitutes life you could by way of obtuse ethical gymnastics arrive at a way of equating eating a fruit with eating a fetus). Beyond even this there is possibility of growing cell structures ad hoc in labs divorced from the organisms that would normally produce them. It may in the future be possible to grow bacon or steaks directly in labs without actually killing pigs and cows. And while the cellular structures would be alive at a cellular level, they would not qualify as 'life' because they would lack the rest of the organism to do any of the normal functions of living and reproduction.
Point being that while death is a necessary part of life heretofore, it does not necessarily follow that it is required and that there are no ways around certain aspects of that dependency.
Poverty of imagination. Human's can't survive anywhere else in the solar system eh? Humans couldn't survive in the middle of Antarctica either, except that they brought the infrastructure with them to do it (and are resupplied at will, though independence in that area would be possible if it were necessary and cost effective, which it is neither). Humans could survive any number of places elsewhere in the solar system provided they have the infrastructure for controlling their environment, feeding and powering themselves.
There are only two real problems to getting people up and out sustainably:
1) It costs a ton to get anything out of the gravity well.
2) The potential for a small group to psychosocially devolve in isolation (experiments in this field are ongoing).
The solution to the first problem is probably focusing on building a space elevator or the establishment of a base in the asteroid belt for extraction and manufacturing. If we could build structures outside of any appreciable gravity well then the cost of operations would be drastically reduced (though the initial expense would be, heh, astronomical).
The solution to the second problem is to make the group of people as large as possible and inject new people and things into it as frequently as possible to mitigate the psychosocial effects of isolation.
What ignorance. Life is about metabolism and maintaining the efficiency of cells and the integrity of genetic sequences through cycle after cycle of mitosis. Most organisms degrade as this process repeats, leading to senescence AKA aging; however, some organisms such as Hydras are biologically immortal because they do not suffer the effects of senescence. Moreover there is a species of jellyfish that can actually reverse its life cycle and thereby is biologically immortal.
Death is biological problem, but there are signs in organisms that it is a problem that can be solved.
And what is Dr. Stephen Hawking supposed to have developed? The guy deals with gravitational theory. I suppose you think he should have come up with some kind of Star Trek 'singularity drive' or something as a consequence? Please.
As with most things, it is pure cost that prevents in-system colonization not technological failings. The main cost is simply the size and fuel for the launch vehicle especially as it must be quite heavy to include enough radiation shielding.
I carry guns into banks all the time as I live in one of few states that allows the unlicensed open carry of firearms. Possession in and of itself is absolutely harmless (even of bombs and the like), it's how you use a thing that is important. I trust people with lethal force (regardless of type), from private citizens to government employees of various stripes, so long as they don't try to use it without cause and due consideration of collateral damage.
Slashdot Mirror
She seems to think that the 'sure thing' is always smart and that risks are always 'mistakes'. She must really like making 1% on her savings account. Wealth is not generated that way, nobody has ever been outstandingly successful by generating 1% growth. Human civilization is built on risks, and individually those have sometimes raised people up and sometimes dragged people down, but to categorize that behavior as 'stupid' or a 'mistake' is to spit upon the whole of human endeavor. But of course this makes me a sub-human fat-cat corporatist, so be sure to ignore me while I reap the rewards of more risky investments. Those were just stupid mistakes after all that just happen to defray my cost of living.
Your example is not parallel, as you assume that the transition from tokens for grapes to tokens for nothing is the equivalent of silver certificates for whatever you want to purchase transitioning to fiat currency for whatever you want to purchase. Let me see if you pick up the key element there...
...
That's right, people still get whatever they want to purchase. That they cannot trade a certificate for a set amount of precious metals is immaterial to most people, as precious metals themselves are of little direct utility outside of certain industries and therefore are as representational as the fiat currency itself.
This is not to say that I don't wholly support trying to accumulate concentrations of materials that have a real value irrespective of government policy (per se).
WA may be unusual, but they should be the model. I lived there most of my life and so long as you stayed out of King County (which I sadly couldn't) it was an awesome place to live. More states need to stand up to their representatives, and when their legislatures don't do what the people want, fuck `em. Pass the law yourselves.
Of course you're right that repeals are rare, especially at the federal level, but that doesn't stop the constant talk of repealing the Bush tax cuts does it?
The last two? The Constitution hasn't been worth the paper it's written on since at least FDR's threat to pack the courts. It wouldn't be unreasonable to take it back even further.
Providing of course that the majority of the electorate is on board, otherwise next election cycle those responsible are replaced and the taxes stricken from the books. Occasionally the latter is done by itself below the federal level, WA specifically has passed many 'tax revolt' initiatives.
And no doubt you expect it to 'lead' by eliminating the pesky 'free' part, just as China does. If the US government tried to shut down two thousand industrial facilities at a stroke, the people would vote that administration out and rightly. China can do what it does because these facilities are likely owned wholly or in large part by state industries, and whatever backlash might come from 'the people' (who supposedly own the industries through the auspice of the state) is rendered entirely meaningless through the lack of democratic accountability.
Yes, I'm sure that Zhongnanhai doesn't care about the growth of the RMB over the last forty years. Not at all.
That plant was built in the sixties, so it's already lasted more than a few decades. Half of the new 787 production is done there and the 747 and 777 lines have just been revamped (I worked on a contract that supported the transition of 777 production from fixed gantries to a moving assembly line, so I know that building about a million times better than you do or will), which makes it likely that it will remain in operation for many decades yet. When you lay down that much capital, you do not toss away the produced infrastructure lightly (and it's not like Boeing is anywhere near leaving the widebody aircraft business).
Not to mention that these buildings are incalculably more useful than a simple geometric pile of rocks. If 'long term thinking' means wasting the resources of a nation just so one guy can have the bitchin'est pile of rocks on top of his corpse, then I posit that 'long term thinking' is a worthless crock of shit and that the 'short term thinking' that enables the foundation of international commerce and travel for hundreds of millions of people is what is actually praiseworthy.
There's water pretty much everywhere on Europa too, and where you have water you have oxygen and hydrogen. You can breath the former and use the latter as a basis for a hydrogen economy. Sprinkle in some old reliable nuclear fission power (waiting until fusion is unnecessary) and everything else is a matter of design problems.
(Oh and on the subject of locally produced energy for Antarctica, there are substancial deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas in and around the continent. These aren't pursued because the conditions are too hostile and would drive up the cost of extraction vs. other sites, and a bunch of whinging twits precluded it in the Antarctic-Environmental Protocol back in the 90s.)
I don't think you even know what 'cost effective' means. Let's compare and contrast (all the numbers below are completely made-up for illustrative purposes only):
Let's say it costs $20 per pound in logistical cost to get stuff to the middle of Antarctizzle. Let's say that a research station needs 100k pounds of food per year, so it costs $2m to transport food to the station. Let's say that creating a facility for growing food locally might cost $50m dollars to build and another million to run each year, meaning that a breakeven point would lie many decades down the road. Compare that with launch costs of $6000 per pound. Logistical costs might be $600m per year, whereupon building something that costs even half a billion would pay for itself in a single year so long as it eliminated that logistical transport cost. Hence, ta-da! Cost effective! ZOMG!
Hmmm? But no, really, modern engineering has achieved much greater things than simply piling a bunch of stones in one place. If you ever have the opportunity, you should take a tour of the Boeing factory in Everett, WA, the largest single building by volume of enclosed space. I worked there on a couple of different contracts, and it is awe-inspiring. It makes the 747s built there look small, and the same building manufactures three other types of aircraft. Dubai International and Beijing Capital International Airports' Terminals 3 are also incredibly impressive structures with over a million square meters of floor space. Hit up Google maps or something and check out those bad boys from space.
Don't be silly. Mars is no place to raise a kid, and there's no one there to raise 'em if you did...
In fact, it's cold as hell.
(I'm not the man they think I am at home...)
All of the most populous nations on earth have seen whole number reductions in their fertility rates in the last 50 years. 76 nations have fertility rates below replacement. Everybody who still tries to fearmonger about population growth is an idiot out of touch with the statistical reality.
For all the Trek talk of a "final frontier" it would be more appropriate to describe space as a "final empty wasteland."
Every thinly populated undeveloped space could be called an 'empty wasteland' before settlement and development. It's a given. I suppose you'd be there to decry Seward's Folly too?
No one ever calls the deepest oceans on earth a "new frontier,"
Ah, nothing like the conceit of the ignorant just because they don't bother to even ask questions before they make assertions. Ever heard of Dennis Chamberland?
You are quite right about there being no point B. I remember reading somewhere (and I don't want to take the time to find the source or verify the math) that if a ton of gold inexplicably showed up in LEO it would actually cost more to go up and get it than the value of the gold itself. What is needed is a 'killer app' for microgravity. As soon as there is some material that can only be produced in microgravity that has some vital purpose to future technology, then suddenly there is a reason to look at space as a resource.
The other big possibility for an extraterrestrial economy is lunar deposits of He-3 which could be joined with other mining operations.
Human lifespans have already doubled, and the cycle within which people think has shrank. It's not about how long people live (in fact I would argue that when people had shorter lives they more frequently thought about their legacies, for example the prevalence of dynastic/aristocratic hereditary power structures), it's about how technology impacts the cycle. Centuries ago during the Age of Sail you had to wait months to know if a ship in your employ was successful. Centuries before that an expedition to China like Marco Polo's took decades. Assuming I had a travel visa in hand I could be in Beijing in before this time tomorrow. When you don't have to wait for anything planning becomes a matter of resources, and time, far from being a barrier, becomes a resource in of itself.
Please tell me how any of the technologies required for Dr. Robert Zubrin's plans for Martian exploration and colonization are 'non-existent' or 'handwaving'. (And BTW, he is an engineer.)
Insofar as life cycles are intertwined and it is necessary for things to die in order to create nutrients for the living to consume. However this is not necessarily true in all cases. Trees do not die to create fruit (though depending on your ethics about what constitutes life you could by way of obtuse ethical gymnastics arrive at a way of equating eating a fruit with eating a fetus). Beyond even this there is possibility of growing cell structures ad hoc in labs divorced from the organisms that would normally produce them. It may in the future be possible to grow bacon or steaks directly in labs without actually killing pigs and cows. And while the cellular structures would be alive at a cellular level, they would not qualify as 'life' because they would lack the rest of the organism to do any of the normal functions of living and reproduction.
Point being that while death is a necessary part of life heretofore, it does not necessarily follow that it is required and that there are no ways around certain aspects of that dependency.
Poverty of imagination. Human's can't survive anywhere else in the solar system eh? Humans couldn't survive in the middle of Antarctica either, except that they brought the infrastructure with them to do it (and are resupplied at will, though independence in that area would be possible if it were necessary and cost effective, which it is neither). Humans could survive any number of places elsewhere in the solar system provided they have the infrastructure for controlling their environment, feeding and powering themselves.
There are only two real problems to getting people up and out sustainably:
1) It costs a ton to get anything out of the gravity well.
2) The potential for a small group to psychosocially devolve in isolation (experiments in this field are ongoing).
The solution to the first problem is probably focusing on building a space elevator or the establishment of a base in the asteroid belt for extraction and manufacturing. If we could build structures outside of any appreciable gravity well then the cost of operations would be drastically reduced (though the initial expense would be, heh, astronomical).
The solution to the second problem is to make the group of people as large as possible and inject new people and things into it as frequently as possible to mitigate the psychosocial effects of isolation.
What ignorance. Life is about metabolism and maintaining the efficiency of cells and the integrity of genetic sequences through cycle after cycle of mitosis. Most organisms degrade as this process repeats, leading to senescence AKA aging; however, some organisms such as Hydras are biologically immortal because they do not suffer the effects of senescence. Moreover there is a species of jellyfish that can actually reverse its life cycle and thereby is biologically immortal.
Death is biological problem, but there are signs in organisms that it is a problem that can be solved.
Why should Og leave cave? Cave not perfect yet. Others that leave caves irresponsible!
And what is Dr. Stephen Hawking supposed to have developed? The guy deals with gravitational theory. I suppose you think he should have come up with some kind of Star Trek 'singularity drive' or something as a consequence? Please.
As with most things, it is pure cost that prevents in-system colonization not technological failings. The main cost is simply the size and fuel for the launch vehicle especially as it must be quite heavy to include enough radiation shielding.
As ol' Dr. Zubrin says, "It shouldn't be humans to Mars in fifty years, it should be humans to Mars in ten."
I carry guns into banks all the time as I live in one of few states that allows the unlicensed open carry of firearms. Possession in and of itself is absolutely harmless (even of bombs and the like), it's how you use a thing that is important. I trust people with lethal force (regardless of type), from private citizens to government employees of various stripes, so long as they don't try to use it without cause and due consideration of collateral damage.
You're missing the link to terrorism here, girls between the ages of 16 and 19 1/2 could be from the Castle Anthrax .
Quite potentially perilous I should think.