You are correct. Physical Laws do not exist. Human beings observe reality and construct laws based on their observations. Conservation of Momentum is such a law. HOWEVER, the way we decide which constructs are most useful and practical is by using the most elegant and parsimonious ones. LONG EXPERIENCE has shown us that when we construct elegant and parsimonious mathematical descriptions of nature that they have a power and utility far beyond what would be expected by just chance. We find that these laws in fact apply in much more wide-ranging and powerful ways than we ever imagined. Conservation of Momentum is a VERY core piece of this elegant description. It is what is called a 'global conservation law' and it arises out of what is called a mathematical symmetry. That is a way in which the mathematics of classical mechanics (and then again in various other places in SR/GR and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory) have a self-similarity at a deep level. This symmetry has allowed us to greatly extend the utility of our math, and in EVERY SINGLE CASE this vastly increased utility has led to the successful description of a vast array of phenomena with incredible precision. This is to the point where right now today EVERY SINGLE THING YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED DIRECTLY IN THE WORLD is completely explained to the limits of physical observation by existing theory. This is why we have to build 10 mile across atom-smashers to even do basic research anymore.
Now, when you stack THAT edifice up against a theoretically flawed thruster concept that if it was true would mean all sorts of things that we have observed and incorporated in our theory would be just pure random chance VS "it's bullshit" the its bullshit just has to win.
So yes, all of our theories and ideas can be wrong, in principle, but IN REALITY what we know today, and the mathematical structure that underpins it, is essentially unassailable. There are plenty of things we don't know. We can't say what happens in big bangs, black holes, or even for certain neutron stars and massively powerful fields of all sorts. In some very arcane technical sense some people can say "we don't understand anything at all" and they aren't 'wrong', but what we DO have is a vastly detailed and precise description of ordinary observable nature that has proven 100% consistent. In that sense some theories ARE proven, they simply aren't breakable anymore. They may prove to be approximations of reality that don't work at an event horizon or whatever, but they absolutely do describe what happens when you put a standing wave in an asymmetrical resonant cavity, and it ain't magical momentum-busting thrust.
No, actually it isn't. I'm a skeptic, I like to have evidence of things. I'm entirely supportive of research in areas which are not well understood, or even in areas of established science where there are valuable things left to be observed. This is just not one of those cases. This is a case where someone is saying something just as fundamental as "I'm going to drop this stone and it is going to fall upwards" it just isn't happening. We have already done MILLIONS of experiments which exclude the possibility of this one working. If it 150 years ago and someone had proposed this? I'd say "wow, interesting idea", but its not.
There's a right and proper place for doubt and curiosity and then there's just foolishness. What a good understanding of science will get you is the ability to tell the two apart.
Again though, you cannot break Conservation of Momentum alone, and it is NOT something that can be 'tweaked'. It either works as we think it does, or all of the existing laws of physics mathematically crumble to nothing. At that point you must now POST-HOC explain the entirety of 20th Century experimental physics and do it elegantly and parsimoniously. That means you have to construct an entirely new framework, not built on the symmetry concepts that give rise to the global conservation laws you have now discarded. This is not an evolution like when Einstein created a new set of laws that incorporated the existing ones as good approximations. This is blowing it all up and starting over from scratch, except you aren't just going back to the 18th Century and starting over with all new experiments, you have to explain all the experiments that were already done and why ALL OF THEM EXCEPT THIS ONE were consistent with a now-discarded mathematical approach. It is so fantastically preposterous that no experiments need even be done. When someone says "violates conservation of momentum" you are fully justified, even obliged if you are literate in the physics, to laugh them out of the room without a hearing.
No, that's just not true. Conservation of Momentum is a symmetry of the laws of nature. The entire mathematical edifice is built on the fact that using these symmetries we can have been able to build explanations for basically everything beyond the simplest view of classical mechanics (which itself is fraught with issues which is why we did this all in the first place). So you can't destroy the fundamental conservation laws without ripping down the whole edifice. You have to provide an equally compelling explanation for practically all of the experiments in physics done in the 20th Century. That's a huge and essentially impossible task, you're just not going to find a mathematical structure, post-hoc that fits the bill.
Beyond that, there is the more practical consideration that this driver is simply too easy. If it works then nature finds it very easy to build reactionless drives and they should come up just by chance as natural phenomena that we should have observed already. It doesn't make sense, this thing is not reasonable.
No, not even. I read the original 'paper' if it can be called that. The authors couldn't even properly construct a Poynting vector. They DID admit that in order for their device to work the Law of Conservation of Momentum would have to stand aside. This is enough. While I understand the "keep an open mind" attitude there's nothing closed-minded about noting that 400 years worth of classical and modern physics, with its millions of consistent observations, has to crumble entirely in order for this one badly misconstructed hypothesis to prove true. Its not even worth testing, the thing can be dismissed out of hand without batting an eyelash. No scientist who can't do that is frankly qualified to work for NASA and they should be looking into who they need to fire for basic incompetency. Yes, its that bad.
If its in say LD4 in London, or NY7 in New Jersey then I'd make a crapton of money leasing it out or selling VMs to brokerages. If its in ho-hum Dallas Rackspace somewhere or whatever then its not that interesting. Still, its a lot of iron to be idle in a big DS for that long. You could run a pretty serious web site on that sort of infrastructure. Maybe find some startup and leverage it, give them a leg up in return for some cheap equity. If it goes bust its no worse than leaving the rack idle and if it takes off you make some bucks.
AND a large difference in acuity between my right and left eyes I find your idea puzzling at best. The near total lack of good depth-perception is profoundly disturbing. While I can certainly carry out all normal everyday activities I regularly encounter difficulties, especially in low-light and low-contrast situations. I'm ENTIRELY disbarred from any attempt to participate in any sport which requires any sort of hand-eye coordination as well, though I long ago resigned myself to that.
I'd be very glad if my divergence could be corrected. I'd be very glad if the difference in visual acuity between my two eyes could be decreased as well, as it is both confusing and stressful. I've also found that even the best opthalmologists have trouble properly prescribing for me, so I go through cycles of getting new glasses, making them redo one lens, then the other lens, etc. Its a real PITA to say the least.
I don't know if modern laser surgery is something I should consider, but it does sound tempting just to get the right eye up to similar to the left one.
This is true of all liquid-fueled rocket stages, the SSMEs fired up about 4 seconds before liftoff too. It takes them a couple seconds just to 'spin up' to 100% thrust. This a nice enough feature of liquid-fueled rockets, but its only necessitated by the fact that they are so complex they might NOT spin up. An SRM will never fail to start like that. Overall they are quite reliable, easy to design, and simple to operate, though per-launch they have costs similar to other types of motor.
Considering that there isn't ANY reusable rocket in existence today (IE no single liquid-fueled rocket stage has ever been launched, recovered, and reused to my knowledge) I fail to see how this is relevant. SRMs are very simple, there are NO moving parts, etc, so they really just don't fail these days. Its exceedingly rare, and the very few failures are attributable to things other than the construction of the SRM which couldn't be discovered by test firing it (IE the Challenger SRM failure, which wasn't a failure of the SRM per-se, it was simply fired outside its known operational envelope). I actually worked on avionics for these things. They really aren't unreliable and don't need to be individually tested, nor are liquid fueled stages normally test-fired either before launch.
As for re-usability, the STS SRMs WERE REUSED. Go look it up, almost every segment in every stack had multiple launches. In fact in the last several years of the program I believe they were running COMPLETELY on re-used segments. Now, maybe you have a point that hypothetically it MIGHT be cheaper to reuse a liquid-fueled rocket, but until we DO (soon presumably) we really won't know. Its also quite a bit less clear-cut than that because you have to launch a LOT larger and thus more expensive liquid-fueled rocket to equal a similar payload rocket that includes SRMs. SRMs are also USUALLY strapped onto existing designs to give them new capabilities, which would otherwise have to be achieved by a very expensive completely new program. So I am not even by half convinced that this 'SRMs make things more expensive' notion has any validity at all.
Why does he have to do NASA from 1958? How about from 2003? That's about $35 billion for NASA and around 2,000 billion for Iraq. You can call it 'liberal math' if you want, but the literal actual costs of Iraq, including replacement of drawn down military capabilities, paying off all the disabled vets, and the TO NOW economic costs of 1000's of dead and disabled people. Its Frigging Expensive. We won't pay down the cost of Georgie's War until somewhere around the year 2100. By then the Chinese will own near-Earth space...
SRMs are very powerful for their size. They are quite effective as boosters, a stage that will provide a lot of power for a shorter time at the start of a launch. This is one reason they are used on ICBMs, which were designed for 'fast boost' (IE burn for a very short time) to avoid any chance of intercept during launch, which would in theory be the most vulnerable phase of flight.
So SRMs are good, and likely to be used in pretty much every first stage from now to the day we invent a beanstalk or something and get rid of rockets. They have their downsides, they give a bumpy ride and you can't throttle them, but they're cheap, easy to handle (relatively), and powerful.
The greater danger in my mind is you will get a huge flood of cash into the process from the usual suspects and you'll just end up with some sort of Fascist constitution that enshrines the power of the current elite and its corporate stooges. That's all Congress is rapidly becoming anyway, with hacks like Roberts and Alito to rubber-stamp it. In a convention they'd be utterly free of any of the few constraints that still apply. If Congresspeople can't even pass patent reform or the President resist appointing a tool of the status quo to the USPTO then why would we in any way shape or form believe that the members of some Convention will be any more independent? They won't. Its not that they'll be too radical, its that they won't be radical at all, they'll be sheep, serving the richest masters.
Exactly, and ChrisMaple's logic is flawed. Just because he thinks the 16th and 17th amendemnts are 'horrible' is logically unrelated to the possible character of a convention. Congress has a very limited power to propose individual amendments. A convention would be much more far-ranging since it would be much more capable of proposing sweeping changes.
Honestly, I don't think such a convention would NECESSARILY be problematic, but there's no reason to assume it would be any more beholden to the will of the people than the existing ludicrous clown-filled House of Representatives. Presumably its finite lifetime and the ad-hoc nature of its constitution would make it quite amenable to corruption.
Actually 3/4 of the states can call for a Convention. Congress has no option to oppose that. Its not entirely clear what their 'calling' function entails, but if there were a clear unequivocal 3/4 of the States passing a single uniformly worded call for a Convention within a stated expiry period then LONG before it got to all 37 required states Congress would pass the desired amendment to avoid the spectre of an open Convention running the country virtually as a de-facto parliament. Honestly a Convention is sort of a 'nuclear option' anyway because NOBODY knows how corrupt (or not) such a body would be as we don't even have rules for its constituence. IMHO it would just be a repeat of the House without a constitution to reign it in. The threat is still potent however and its worked at least twice before.
You can buy a SIM and a month of service online from Straight Talk as well. They also support CDMA phones (but you get to use the Sprint network in that case). Straight Talk is actually a brand owned by TracPhone. In any case spare yourself the trip to Wallyworld, its not really worth seeing unless you're actually here and needing something NOW.
Isn't the influence of money and other forms of power simply infinitely plastic? If you block one path to influence it will simply take another path, there are infinitely many ways to get what you want, and if you have lots of money its always much easier to exercise them. So isn't the real question one of values, not of money?
Well, the women are awesome. The rest of it? Sure, the government is pro-business and pro-capitalism, except its THEIR business and capitalism. In China the govt officials are the ones with the money, and LOTS of it. Corruption is astronomical. Unless you're in cahoots with some guys with a lot of 'face' you aren't going anywhere, and you can bet they get the fillet mignon cut of whatever you build. It makes the tax rates in the US quite equitable. There's LOTS of red tape too, though of course again how much that matters depends on whom you are connected to. The middle class in China is microscopic. If you were in downtown of a tier 1 city then you might get the impression, surrounded in your nice westerner bubble, that there were lots of well-off people around, but if you actually went out and met the regular Chinese people and talked to the people serving you food and selling you things and made friends with them you'd find out that life for the average chinese is pretty rough. Now go out to the countryside, or even tier 3 cities (prefect level towns for instance) of which there are 1000's and you find there's only a very small veneer of 'middle class' people.
As for the economy being 'robust', the banks all collapsed in the late 90's, ALL of them are insolvent. Most of the major businesses, same thing (the state owned ones). There's a whole zombie financial and economic sector that is just propped up with tax money or patronage in some form or other. There are a lot of businesses, yes, and a huge export sector, lots of growth, etc. There is also 300 million underemployed people, etc. The realestate bubble in China is 10x the size of the US one, and its teetering right now. Frankly I'm out, and I'm getting my g/f out too before something busts loose and it goes down like the US did in '07. Even the big financial analysts are looking pretty scared now. Housing is slowing and China is going to have a big bump.
Yeah, good luck, your lifespan is measured in days. If you are careful and lucky you can complain about SOME things, and people do let their opinions be known about GENERAL things "its very polluted here, this should be fixed!" or "food is too expensive!" etc. The government is pretty sensitive about public opinion up to a certain point. It is just always hard to tell if they will react to your complaints by fixing the problem, or killing you.
Well, I agree that spread sheets can be pretty obscure and there's a point where they aren't the best solution, perhaps. Of course if you do it right you can migrate a lot of the logic to a backend database or into code modules that still provide inputs to the spread sheet. Sheets are great for presentation and organization of certain types of numerical data, and with the built-in charting features they can be pretty good general data visualization tools. You just have to understand at what point to offload onto some other tool at least part of the work.
LOOKING AT the code is not testing it, 90% of all issues won't show up when you look at a piece of code, unless you're so thorough that you might as well have written tests (which is always a better way). Spread sheets are IDEALLY testable, each cell has defined inputs and outputs and you have a built-in way to enter data into it. You can also build another spreadsheet of expected outputs (heck, maybe that's just a cut and paste of the values you got the first time you used the thing, but at least that lets you test regression). Once you have expected outputs you can check them AUTOMATICALLY with a third sheet (IE difference the actual vs the expected, you should get all zeros). This kind of thing is trivial.
Sheesh, the problem here is people are LAZY. They want things to just be correct magically without any work. I got news for you, it ain't ever so. My first job was validating that a critical part of the flight control system of the 747-400 actually worked as advertised under all circumstances. You think we LOOKED AT THE CODE???!!! lol. Likewise, if you're going to make very expensive business and economic decisions then you FRIGGING SPEND THE TIME TO TEST, and once you decide you're going to do that, spread sheets are eminently testable.
Well, what makes you think that Gates, Buffet, or Slim work harder than anyone else? Clearly there is plenty of luck involved, so R can be greater than G but there is a LOT of noise. As for expecting the richest man to be a Rockefeller, who says the Rockefellers aren't vastly more wealthy than Gates or any other one of these people that Forbes lists? Do you think they keep their money around in places where it can be counted? Nobody has EVEN THE SLIGHTEST IDEA how much money the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Fuggers, the Carnegies etc have. These great fortunes almost never die and entry into the top ranks of the world's wealthiest people is exceedingly difficult and rare.
I really don't know if Piketty's mistakes are all so dire as to erase his conclusions, or if they are warranted in the first place on the face of it, but I think you're very wrong about the nature of wealth and fortunes.
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You are correct. Physical Laws do not exist. Human beings observe reality and construct laws based on their observations. Conservation of Momentum is such a law. HOWEVER, the way we decide which constructs are most useful and practical is by using the most elegant and parsimonious ones. LONG EXPERIENCE has shown us that when we construct elegant and parsimonious mathematical descriptions of nature that they have a power and utility far beyond what would be expected by just chance. We find that these laws in fact apply in much more wide-ranging and powerful ways than we ever imagined. Conservation of Momentum is a VERY core piece of this elegant description. It is what is called a 'global conservation law' and it arises out of what is called a mathematical symmetry. That is a way in which the mathematics of classical mechanics (and then again in various other places in SR/GR and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory) have a self-similarity at a deep level. This symmetry has allowed us to greatly extend the utility of our math, and in EVERY SINGLE CASE this vastly increased utility has led to the successful description of a vast array of phenomena with incredible precision. This is to the point where right now today EVERY SINGLE THING YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED DIRECTLY IN THE WORLD is completely explained to the limits of physical observation by existing theory. This is why we have to build 10 mile across atom-smashers to even do basic research anymore.
Now, when you stack THAT edifice up against a theoretically flawed thruster concept that if it was true would mean all sorts of things that we have observed and incorporated in our theory would be just pure random chance VS "it's bullshit" the its bullshit just has to win.
So yes, all of our theories and ideas can be wrong, in principle, but IN REALITY what we know today, and the mathematical structure that underpins it, is essentially unassailable. There are plenty of things we don't know. We can't say what happens in big bangs, black holes, or even for certain neutron stars and massively powerful fields of all sorts. In some very arcane technical sense some people can say "we don't understand anything at all" and they aren't 'wrong', but what we DO have is a vastly detailed and precise description of ordinary observable nature that has proven 100% consistent. In that sense some theories ARE proven, they simply aren't breakable anymore. They may prove to be approximations of reality that don't work at an event horizon or whatever, but they absolutely do describe what happens when you put a standing wave in an asymmetrical resonant cavity, and it ain't magical momentum-busting thrust.
No, actually it isn't. I'm a skeptic, I like to have evidence of things. I'm entirely supportive of research in areas which are not well understood, or even in areas of established science where there are valuable things left to be observed. This is just not one of those cases. This is a case where someone is saying something just as fundamental as "I'm going to drop this stone and it is going to fall upwards" it just isn't happening. We have already done MILLIONS of experiments which exclude the possibility of this one working. If it 150 years ago and someone had proposed this? I'd say "wow, interesting idea", but its not.
There's a right and proper place for doubt and curiosity and then there's just foolishness. What a good understanding of science will get you is the ability to tell the two apart.
Again though, you cannot break Conservation of Momentum alone, and it is NOT something that can be 'tweaked'. It either works as we think it does, or all of the existing laws of physics mathematically crumble to nothing. At that point you must now POST-HOC explain the entirety of 20th Century experimental physics and do it elegantly and parsimoniously. That means you have to construct an entirely new framework, not built on the symmetry concepts that give rise to the global conservation laws you have now discarded. This is not an evolution like when Einstein created a new set of laws that incorporated the existing ones as good approximations. This is blowing it all up and starting over from scratch, except you aren't just going back to the 18th Century and starting over with all new experiments, you have to explain all the experiments that were already done and why ALL OF THEM EXCEPT THIS ONE were consistent with a now-discarded mathematical approach. It is so fantastically preposterous that no experiments need even be done. When someone says "violates conservation of momentum" you are fully justified, even obliged if you are literate in the physics, to laugh them out of the room without a hearing.
No, that's just not true. Conservation of Momentum is a symmetry of the laws of nature. The entire mathematical edifice is built on the fact that using these symmetries we can have been able to build explanations for basically everything beyond the simplest view of classical mechanics (which itself is fraught with issues which is why we did this all in the first place). So you can't destroy the fundamental conservation laws without ripping down the whole edifice. You have to provide an equally compelling explanation for practically all of the experiments in physics done in the 20th Century. That's a huge and essentially impossible task, you're just not going to find a mathematical structure, post-hoc that fits the bill.
Beyond that, there is the more practical consideration that this driver is simply too easy. If it works then nature finds it very easy to build reactionless drives and they should come up just by chance as natural phenomena that we should have observed already. It doesn't make sense, this thing is not reasonable.
No, not even. I read the original 'paper' if it can be called that. The authors couldn't even properly construct a Poynting vector. They DID admit that in order for their device to work the Law of Conservation of Momentum would have to stand aside. This is enough. While I understand the "keep an open mind" attitude there's nothing closed-minded about noting that 400 years worth of classical and modern physics, with its millions of consistent observations, has to crumble entirely in order for this one badly misconstructed hypothesis to prove true. Its not even worth testing, the thing can be dismissed out of hand without batting an eyelash. No scientist who can't do that is frankly qualified to work for NASA and they should be looking into who they need to fire for basic incompetency. Yes, its that bad.
More like blinded TO science.
Any 2nd year physics student should be able to laugh this garbage right off a lab bench without even running an experiment. Its truly pathetic.
If its in say LD4 in London, or NY7 in New Jersey then I'd make a crapton of money leasing it out or selling VMs to brokerages. If its in ho-hum Dallas Rackspace somewhere or whatever then its not that interesting. Still, its a lot of iron to be idle in a big DS for that long. You could run a pretty serious web site on that sort of infrastructure. Maybe find some startup and leverage it, give them a leg up in return for some cheap equity. If it goes bust its no worse than leaving the rack idle and if it takes off you make some bucks.
AND a large difference in acuity between my right and left eyes I find your idea puzzling at best. The near total lack of good depth-perception is profoundly disturbing. While I can certainly carry out all normal everyday activities I regularly encounter difficulties, especially in low-light and low-contrast situations. I'm ENTIRELY disbarred from any attempt to participate in any sport which requires any sort of hand-eye coordination as well, though I long ago resigned myself to that.
I'd be very glad if my divergence could be corrected. I'd be very glad if the difference in visual acuity between my two eyes could be decreased as well, as it is both confusing and stressful. I've also found that even the best opthalmologists have trouble properly prescribing for me, so I go through cycles of getting new glasses, making them redo one lens, then the other lens, etc. Its a real PITA to say the least.
I don't know if modern laser surgery is something I should consider, but it does sound tempting just to get the right eye up to similar to the left one.
This is true of all liquid-fueled rocket stages, the SSMEs fired up about 4 seconds before liftoff too. It takes them a couple seconds just to 'spin up' to 100% thrust. This a nice enough feature of liquid-fueled rockets, but its only necessitated by the fact that they are so complex they might NOT spin up. An SRM will never fail to start like that. Overall they are quite reliable, easy to design, and simple to operate, though per-launch they have costs similar to other types of motor.
Considering that there isn't ANY reusable rocket in existence today (IE no single liquid-fueled rocket stage has ever been launched, recovered, and reused to my knowledge) I fail to see how this is relevant. SRMs are very simple, there are NO moving parts, etc, so they really just don't fail these days. Its exceedingly rare, and the very few failures are attributable to things other than the construction of the SRM which couldn't be discovered by test firing it (IE the Challenger SRM failure, which wasn't a failure of the SRM per-se, it was simply fired outside its known operational envelope). I actually worked on avionics for these things. They really aren't unreliable and don't need to be individually tested, nor are liquid fueled stages normally test-fired either before launch.
As for re-usability, the STS SRMs WERE REUSED. Go look it up, almost every segment in every stack had multiple launches. In fact in the last several years of the program I believe they were running COMPLETELY on re-used segments. Now, maybe you have a point that hypothetically it MIGHT be cheaper to reuse a liquid-fueled rocket, but until we DO (soon presumably) we really won't know. Its also quite a bit less clear-cut than that because you have to launch a LOT larger and thus more expensive liquid-fueled rocket to equal a similar payload rocket that includes SRMs. SRMs are also USUALLY strapped onto existing designs to give them new capabilities, which would otherwise have to be achieved by a very expensive completely new program. So I am not even by half convinced that this 'SRMs make things more expensive' notion has any validity at all.
Why does he have to do NASA from 1958? How about from 2003? That's about $35 billion for NASA and around 2,000 billion for Iraq. You can call it 'liberal math' if you want, but the literal actual costs of Iraq, including replacement of drawn down military capabilities, paying off all the disabled vets, and the TO NOW economic costs of 1000's of dead and disabled people. Its Frigging Expensive. We won't pay down the cost of Georgie's War until somewhere around the year 2100. By then the Chinese will own near-Earth space...
We could be living in space colonies for the cost of Iraq.
SRMs are very powerful for their size. They are quite effective as boosters, a stage that will provide a lot of power for a shorter time at the start of a launch. This is one reason they are used on ICBMs, which were designed for 'fast boost' (IE burn for a very short time) to avoid any chance of intercept during launch, which would in theory be the most vulnerable phase of flight.
So SRMs are good, and likely to be used in pretty much every first stage from now to the day we invent a beanstalk or something and get rid of rockets. They have their downsides, they give a bumpy ride and you can't throttle them, but they're cheap, easy to handle (relatively), and powerful.
The greater danger in my mind is you will get a huge flood of cash into the process from the usual suspects and you'll just end up with some sort of Fascist constitution that enshrines the power of the current elite and its corporate stooges. That's all Congress is rapidly becoming anyway, with hacks like Roberts and Alito to rubber-stamp it. In a convention they'd be utterly free of any of the few constraints that still apply. If Congresspeople can't even pass patent reform or the President resist appointing a tool of the status quo to the USPTO then why would we in any way shape or form believe that the members of some Convention will be any more independent? They won't. Its not that they'll be too radical, its that they won't be radical at all, they'll be sheep, serving the richest masters.
Exactly, and ChrisMaple's logic is flawed. Just because he thinks the 16th and 17th amendemnts are 'horrible' is logically unrelated to the possible character of a convention. Congress has a very limited power to propose individual amendments. A convention would be much more far-ranging since it would be much more capable of proposing sweeping changes.
Honestly, I don't think such a convention would NECESSARILY be problematic, but there's no reason to assume it would be any more beholden to the will of the people than the existing ludicrous clown-filled House of Representatives. Presumably its finite lifetime and the ad-hoc nature of its constitution would make it quite amenable to corruption.
I stand corrected. You're right of course, 3/4 are still required to actually pass the amendment.
Actually 3/4 of the states can call for a Convention. Congress has no option to oppose that. Its not entirely clear what their 'calling' function entails, but if there were a clear unequivocal 3/4 of the States passing a single uniformly worded call for a Convention within a stated expiry period then LONG before it got to all 37 required states Congress would pass the desired amendment to avoid the spectre of an open Convention running the country virtually as a de-facto parliament. Honestly a Convention is sort of a 'nuclear option' anyway because NOBODY knows how corrupt (or not) such a body would be as we don't even have rules for its constituence. IMHO it would just be a repeat of the House without a constitution to reign it in. The threat is still potent however and its worked at least twice before.
You can buy a SIM and a month of service online from Straight Talk as well. They also support CDMA phones (but you get to use the Sprint network in that case). Straight Talk is actually a brand owned by TracPhone. In any case spare yourself the trip to Wallyworld, its not really worth seeing unless you're actually here and needing something NOW.
Isn't the influence of money and other forms of power simply infinitely plastic? If you block one path to influence it will simply take another path, there are infinitely many ways to get what you want, and if you have lots of money its always much easier to exercise them. So isn't the real question one of values, not of money?
Well, the women are awesome. The rest of it? Sure, the government is pro-business and pro-capitalism, except its THEIR business and capitalism. In China the govt officials are the ones with the money, and LOTS of it. Corruption is astronomical. Unless you're in cahoots with some guys with a lot of 'face' you aren't going anywhere, and you can bet they get the fillet mignon cut of whatever you build. It makes the tax rates in the US quite equitable. There's LOTS of red tape too, though of course again how much that matters depends on whom you are connected to. The middle class in China is microscopic. If you were in downtown of a tier 1 city then you might get the impression, surrounded in your nice westerner bubble, that there were lots of well-off people around, but if you actually went out and met the regular Chinese people and talked to the people serving you food and selling you things and made friends with them you'd find out that life for the average chinese is pretty rough. Now go out to the countryside, or even tier 3 cities (prefect level towns for instance) of which there are 1000's and you find there's only a very small veneer of 'middle class' people.
As for the economy being 'robust', the banks all collapsed in the late 90's, ALL of them are insolvent. Most of the major businesses, same thing (the state owned ones). There's a whole zombie financial and economic sector that is just propped up with tax money or patronage in some form or other. There are a lot of businesses, yes, and a huge export sector, lots of growth, etc. There is also 300 million underemployed people, etc. The realestate bubble in China is 10x the size of the US one, and its teetering right now. Frankly I'm out, and I'm getting my g/f out too before something busts loose and it goes down like the US did in '07. Even the big financial analysts are looking pretty scared now. Housing is slowing and China is going to have a big bump.
Yeah, good luck, your lifespan is measured in days. If you are careful and lucky you can complain about SOME things, and people do let their opinions be known about GENERAL things "its very polluted here, this should be fixed!" or "food is too expensive!" etc. The government is pretty sensitive about public opinion up to a certain point. It is just always hard to tell if they will react to your complaints by fixing the problem, or killing you.
A LOT! I don't want your average bozo website running any script on my machine anyway...
Well, I agree that spread sheets can be pretty obscure and there's a point where they aren't the best solution, perhaps. Of course if you do it right you can migrate a lot of the logic to a backend database or into code modules that still provide inputs to the spread sheet. Sheets are great for presentation and organization of certain types of numerical data, and with the built-in charting features they can be pretty good general data visualization tools. You just have to understand at what point to offload onto some other tool at least part of the work.
LOOKING AT the code is not testing it, 90% of all issues won't show up when you look at a piece of code, unless you're so thorough that you might as well have written tests (which is always a better way). Spread sheets are IDEALLY testable, each cell has defined inputs and outputs and you have a built-in way to enter data into it. You can also build another spreadsheet of expected outputs (heck, maybe that's just a cut and paste of the values you got the first time you used the thing, but at least that lets you test regression). Once you have expected outputs you can check them AUTOMATICALLY with a third sheet (IE difference the actual vs the expected, you should get all zeros). This kind of thing is trivial.
Sheesh, the problem here is people are LAZY. They want things to just be correct magically without any work. I got news for you, it ain't ever so. My first job was validating that a critical part of the flight control system of the 747-400 actually worked as advertised under all circumstances. You think we LOOKED AT THE CODE???!!! lol. Likewise, if you're going to make very expensive business and economic decisions then you FRIGGING SPEND THE TIME TO TEST, and once you decide you're going to do that, spread sheets are eminently testable.
Well, what makes you think that Gates, Buffet, or Slim work harder than anyone else? Clearly there is plenty of luck involved, so R can be greater than G but there is a LOT of noise. As for expecting the richest man to be a Rockefeller, who says the Rockefellers aren't vastly more wealthy than Gates or any other one of these people that Forbes lists? Do you think they keep their money around in places where it can be counted? Nobody has EVEN THE SLIGHTEST IDEA how much money the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Fuggers, the Carnegies etc have. These great fortunes almost never die and entry into the top ranks of the world's wealthiest people is exceedingly difficult and rare.
I really don't know if Piketty's mistakes are all so dire as to erase his conclusions, or if they are warranted in the first place on the face of it, but I think you're very wrong about the nature of wealth and fortunes.