For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
That's pretty all inclusive. And if you actually read the sermon on the mount, it's pretty clear that the standards have been raised above what the law required for Christians. Not that we do a very good job of living up those raised standards most days.
Rarity has nothing to do with it. The problem is the economic cost of mining them. People have commented that the ocean is full of Lithium so why worry about that. The reason people aren't extracting it is that it isn't economically feasible. The more costly it becomes to produce electricity, the more your utility rates will jump. The bigger the holes and the deeper the mines and the more associated waste and environmental destruction ensues from going after the rare earths, the more people will scream. They already do - and not without reason - about coal mining in the east.
The amount that may eventually be found isn't the real problem. It's completely possible that there are more resources out there - or maybe not - we just don't know. But the difference is that coal and oil and natural gas exploration has been going on for much longer than the 17 years we may have left.
To ramp up a search for rare earths, lithium, and cobalt in such a short time and be successful in a search (assuming there are reserves to be found), to develop the mining site without causing more environmental damage that everyone complains about with the fossil fuels will be tough.
You can recycle, but meeting the projected demand may well be impossible. Much of the battery production will go into cars and other electronics and will not be available for utility scale operations. Sure a few utilities are getting in while batteries are cheap. That doesn't mean every utility will be able to do that due to resource and production capacity.
You are in denial. The problem is that the materials used in many batteries are finite and some are rare. I saw one report that at current production rates, we had about 365 years of lithium. At the ramped up rates predicted by Tesla for car and utility batteries, it drops to about 17 years. As the supplies go down, the price will go up and not down and at the end - way up. Other rare metals will also suffer - they're called rare for a reason - and all also have the problems of mining that people complain about with coal. There are also political issues with possible child labor in mining cobalt in the Congo.
Batteries are great - don't get me wrong. But pretending that they are some cure all for the future of humanity is nuts.
And the glowing hopeful future depends on there not being a war with China or other big suppliers of rare earths or Lithium or cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Check Portland, Oregon's efforts to block shipments of western coal through their port for sale to China. For news articles search portland coal shipments in google.
Coal getting harder to get? No - other than due to NIMBY problems. Harder to ship because environmental wing nuts don't want coal trains to cross their land or coal to be shipped out their ports - yes, but harder find and extract? No.
Battery factories aren't the problem. The materials that go into them are the issue. Even battery recycling doesn't address the problems the huge battery load would require. People earlier have complained about the cost of mining for coal. Out in WY, nobody cares as the land is reclaimed nicely and the coal is better quality anyway. But the same issues of coal mining are true for mining for rare earths needed for battery production. You might not have fly ash retention ponds, but you do have waste. Much of the rare earth mining is done in countries where supply lines could be eliminated quickly for political reasons. Batteries are great. Pumped water storage is great. Buried loop water storage is great. None of these have 0 environmental or economic cost. Just building more battery plants isn't a solution.
A broad mix is something nobody wants, but it's absolutely essential. Solar systems are going to be overtaxed if there's another really big volcanic eruption. Not that we won't have lots of other problems as well, but without power, it'll just be much worse. One volcanic eruption at a time is bad enough - Laki, Tambora, Krakatoa, to say nothing of the super volcanoes. Get several in a single year and it would be bad. Wildfires don't help either but are more localized.
Solar is great - as long as the sunshine can reliably hit the collectors.
Only problem is with the birthrate dropping fairly significantly in the US, stopping immigration puts us in the same position China and Japan are finding themselves in - way too many older folks and way to few workers. Here, however, we don't have the social structure in most families where the kids take care of the parents. So be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.
Start taxing the middle and lower class more - they're the ones with the power to vote out the politicians who keep doling out more and more benefits with no ability to pay for them and keep signing bigger and bigger spending bills for defense. When the politicians start getting voted out because everyone starts actually having to pay for what they are promising and voting for instead of rolling the debt bill astronomically higher, there will be change. The time is pretty short. Once more than 50% of the people are getting a free ride tax wise, there is no hope of change - not that there's much now.
Uninhabited is mostly just perception. There's a lot of ranching and farming, but most of the buildings aren't close enough to a major road to see. The population density is very low though in many counties. For those many people living out on farms or ranches and away from the major towns or small cities, broadband and sometimes internet service at all is just as elusive as for our Canadian friends to the North.
There are many places in those states where even cell coverage is spotty. Some of this is to be expected (Yellowstone park for example), but there are many spots along the interstates where you hope you can get a ride if you break down as you can't get a cell signal - to say nothing of broadband. This is improving, but there is still work to be done. Unfortunately, it frequently depends on your cell carrier and phone as to how good a signal you will get.
The East - West interstates get a lot of traffic. The North - South - not so much. You can drive across much of Wyoming on I-25 and only have a few cars or trucks pass you or that you pass since everyone is moving pretty much 80 mph - at least until you head south of Cheyenne towards Denver. I-80 and I-90 are more active, but nothing like the interstates around major cities.
If you come through in late January or February, you'll know why most of it is uninhabited. Just be glad you weren't on a horse or foot.
It's not a question of tax distribution over the individual tax payer base. That's a completely separate question.
I'm just saying that by the time every company in a product or service chain adds their x% to cover the taxes they pay on their income the end cost of goods or services they provide is higher than it could be - and eventually people are the end purchasers. Even products bought and paid for by a company for internal use eventually get charged out as higher prices to their final consumers - whether it is goods or services. If the companies don't cover their expenses they eventually go broke. As mentioned above, there may be odd accounting games played to show loss or gain in particular areas, but the bottom line still has to be covered somehow.
Companies have an expense item called taxes (or multiple tax expense items depending on how big the company is and where it's located). That's it. Brand new companies may pay part of that from IPOs or seed capital (if they actually have a profit to pay on). Established companies pay it from prices charged on products and services. Since lower income people spend more on goods than the rich, you could even say that corporate income taxes are regressive when eventually recovered from the individual taxpayer.
I agree that the compensation paid to C level executives is excessive. But corporate income taxes in most cases won't do anything to change that. If you tie their stock options to performance which might be hurt by tax rate changes and they get annoyed, the finance audit committee will just change the comparison benchmarks or pick different companies so they can get their bonuses. They should just do away with everything except cash compensation and then adjust the tax rates from there. That would be a start.
No different here than there. Country X places taxes on say - google for ads. Google raises ad rates from that country to cover taxes + x% adder to keep the profit intact. Person placing the add raises costs to cover increased advertising cost + y% to cover their profit margin. Cost to consumer goes up. It isn't always this direct - long term advertising rate deals and the like might tweak the cost for smaller companies to cover bigger advertisers - but in the end no company ever pays taxes itself. It all gets passed on in some form to the customer or taken out of the employees paychecks (or future raises). By the time everyone in the food chain has added their x%, the end cost to the consumer is frequently more than if they had just had their taxes raised by the government itself.
Course the number of people that would advertise on google is somewhat self limiting, so the added good or service cost wouldn't be evenly distributed among all companies which would introduce more inefficiencies in the system. But in the end, the companies don't actually end up paying taxes if they are making a profit, and if they fail to make a profit long enough, they're history.
If they make a point like locking out UK facebook users, it will probably be minutes before the tax is repealed.
According to Bible prophecy scholars, the book of Daniel indicates the Antichrist would come from one of the four divisions of the old Grecian empire - part of the Seleucid empire according to Daniel 8 and 11. So although that covers a lot of territory, it also eliminates a vast amount more, including anyone from the United States.
If you read the text where the mark of the beast is mentioned, there is a direct tie to bowing down to worship the image of the beast - to accept the religion of the beast and worship it and the mark. I suspect that that is the primary problem associated with the mark of the beast. The mark itself is simply an acknowledgment that you have done the other to get it and thus are able to buy and sell merchandise in the open market. The Bible forbids accepting the mark (which is unidentified in form), the Antichrist's name or the number of his name.
The RFID chip or whatever the mark turns out to be in and of itself is probably of no consequence. It is the worship and acceptance of the beast that gets the person on the condemned list. The mark is the evidence that that has happened.
God does send angels throughout the world preaching the Gospel message to everyone who is left to accept Christ and reject the beast and warning them of the consequences in their own native tongues so none will have an excuse.
Revelation and Daniel and some other passages are rich in imagery. We won't know until the events unfold what exactly the proper interpretation is. And really, if you've accepted Christ as Savior, it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong about what the proper interpretation of Revelation is. It will be seen in the fullness of time.
The beast, however, is symbolic of many things: a man (the Antichrist, some supernatural being released from the Abyss, and an eighth kingdom on Earth). The seven heads are symbolic. The 10 horns and the little horn are symbolic. It is interpreted in Revelation itself (chapter 17). The seven heads and ten horns are commonly interpreted as seven world empires - mountains with rulers. Five had fallen in John's day (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece). One existed (Rome). One was to come - of the 10 kingdoms oppressing Israel in the end times. The Antichrist would form the eighth. The seven heads and 10 horns are in parallel with the interpretation of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream with a head to the 10 toes of various materials which are also interpreted the same. The 10 toes represented kingdoms to come in the area of the old Roman Empire (the legs of the statue) but made of clay as not lasting. If you do a count, there are at least that many royal autocratic countries in the area of the old Roman Empire now - from England to various Islamic countries. There is no reason to come to different conclusions about what the Bible itself clearly interprets.
Regardless of the nature of the mark of the beast it is evidently needed according to prophecy to buy and sell at some point in the future. Hardly symbolic.
If the outcomes of the battle of Armageddon or the battle at the end of the millennial period were in doubt, your statements might be valid, but the they are not. In fact, the Bible states that the enemies will be defeated by the word of Christ and the armies coming with Christ won't need to raise a finger to assist Him.
Considering humanity, just because a person is maximally powerful doesn't mean they don't have enemies and it doesn't mean they won't be attacked to try to depose them even if the odds are against the attacker. You can look at countless examples through history. The spiritual realm is not stated to be any different - starting with Satan's original rebellion when he lost his place of power and honor in heaven and carrying through human history to the end recorded in Revelation.
Early manuscripts tend to point to a copying error and indicate the original text as having 616 instead of 666, probably blowing your Nero theory.
Regardless, Revelation had both historical and prophetical implications. You can't study Revelation by itself. You need to throw in Daniel, several of the minor prophets of the Old Testament, and some of Christ's teachings and comments if you want to try to understand the end time prophetical implications of the text.
While the Swedish actions don't fall into the mark of the beast territory, getting people used to this technology will make it easier for the anti Christ to implement when he comes to power. It's pretty clear that he won't be 100% successful, but those who resist will pay a high price.
Using 2017 IMF numbers from Wikipedia, the GDP per capita of China puts them at 72/188. The US, which you pointed to as a counter example is 7/188. The question isn't when are they at the top or in the top 10. The question is at what point does developing make no sense. At this point, it doesn't.
I agree that just as in the US, not every Chinese citizen has benefited from the changes in China. However, once a country starts its own export import bank and starts trying to buy influence in other poorer countries (African operations come to mind), it is arguable that the developing category is no longer appropriate.
China can't have it both ways. It can't make a case for moving the world reserve currency away from the dollar and make massive investments in the rest of the world buying a presence in many countries and then whine that they are still developing. That time is long past.
The fact that much of the country hasn't benefited isn't really the world's problem. It is China's.
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For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. That's pretty all inclusive. And if you actually read the sermon on the mount, it's pretty clear that the standards have been raised above what the law required for Christians. Not that we do a very good job of living up those raised standards most days.
Rarity has nothing to do with it. The problem is the economic cost of mining them. People have commented that the ocean is full of Lithium so why worry about that. The reason people aren't extracting it is that it isn't economically feasible. The more costly it becomes to produce electricity, the more your utility rates will jump. The bigger the holes and the deeper the mines and the more associated waste and environmental destruction ensues from going after the rare earths, the more people will scream. They already do - and not without reason - about coal mining in the east.
The amount that may eventually be found isn't the real problem. It's completely possible that there are more resources out there - or maybe not - we just don't know. But the difference is that coal and oil and natural gas exploration has been going on for much longer than the 17 years we may have left.
To ramp up a search for rare earths, lithium, and cobalt in such a short time and be successful in a search (assuming there are reserves to be found), to develop the mining site without causing more environmental damage that everyone complains about with the fossil fuels will be tough.
You can recycle, but meeting the projected demand may well be impossible. Much of the battery production will go into cars and other electronics and will not be available for utility scale operations. Sure a few utilities are getting in while batteries are cheap. That doesn't mean every utility will be able to do that due to resource and production capacity.
You are in denial. The problem is that the materials used in many batteries are finite and some are rare. I saw one report that at current production rates, we had about 365 years of lithium. At the ramped up rates predicted by Tesla for car and utility batteries, it drops to about 17 years. As the supplies go down, the price will go up and not down and at the end - way up. Other rare metals will also suffer - they're called rare for a reason - and all also have the problems of mining that people complain about with coal. There are also political issues with possible child labor in mining cobalt in the Congo.
Batteries are great - don't get me wrong. But pretending that they are some cure all for the future of humanity is nuts.
And the glowing hopeful future depends on there not being a war with China or other big suppliers of rare earths or Lithium or cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Eastern coal mining != Western coal mining.
Check Portland, Oregon's efforts to block shipments of western coal through their port for sale to China. For news articles search portland coal shipments in google.
Coal getting harder to get? No - other than due to NIMBY problems. Harder to ship because environmental wing nuts don't want coal trains to cross their land or coal to be shipped out their ports - yes, but harder find and extract? No.
Battery factories aren't the problem. The materials that go into them are the issue. Even battery recycling doesn't address the problems the huge battery load would require. People earlier have complained about the cost of mining for coal. Out in WY, nobody cares as the land is reclaimed nicely and the coal is better quality anyway. But the same issues of coal mining are true for mining for rare earths needed for battery production. You might not have fly ash retention ponds, but you do have waste. Much of the rare earth mining is done in countries where supply lines could be eliminated quickly for political reasons. Batteries are great. Pumped water storage is great. Buried loop water storage is great. None of these have 0 environmental or economic cost. Just building more battery plants isn't a solution.
A broad mix is something nobody wants, but it's absolutely essential. Solar systems are going to be overtaxed if there's another really big volcanic eruption. Not that we won't have lots of other problems as well, but without power, it'll just be much worse. One volcanic eruption at a time is bad enough - Laki, Tambora, Krakatoa, to say nothing of the super volcanoes. Get several in a single year and it would be bad. Wildfires don't help either but are more localized. Solar is great - as long as the sunshine can reliably hit the collectors.
I don't disagree with your point that people should take the proper steps and do it legally. I do think we put too many roadblocks in the way though.
Didn't say we needed more kids. My point is that immigration isn't nearly as bad a thing as some make it out to be.
Only problem is with the birthrate dropping fairly significantly in the US, stopping immigration puts us in the same position China and Japan are finding themselves in - way too many older folks and way to few workers. Here, however, we don't have the social structure in most families where the kids take care of the parents. So be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.
Start taxing the middle and lower class more - they're the ones with the power to vote out the politicians who keep doling out more and more benefits with no ability to pay for them and keep signing bigger and bigger spending bills for defense. When the politicians start getting voted out because everyone starts actually having to pay for what they are promising and voting for instead of rolling the debt bill astronomically higher, there will be change. The time is pretty short. Once more than 50% of the people are getting a free ride tax wise, there is no hope of change - not that there's much now.
Uninhabited is mostly just perception. There's a lot of ranching and farming, but most of the buildings aren't close enough to a major road to see. The population density is very low though in many counties. For those many people living out on farms or ranches and away from the major towns or small cities, broadband and sometimes internet service at all is just as elusive as for our Canadian friends to the North.
There are many places in those states where even cell coverage is spotty. Some of this is to be expected (Yellowstone park for example), but there are many spots along the interstates where you hope you can get a ride if you break down as you can't get a cell signal - to say nothing of broadband. This is improving, but there is still work to be done. Unfortunately, it frequently depends on your cell carrier and phone as to how good a signal you will get.
The East - West interstates get a lot of traffic. The North - South - not so much. You can drive across much of Wyoming on I-25 and only have a few cars or trucks pass you or that you pass since everyone is moving pretty much 80 mph - at least until you head south of Cheyenne towards Denver. I-80 and I-90 are more active, but nothing like the interstates around major cities.
If you come through in late January or February, you'll know why most of it is uninhabited. Just be glad you weren't on a horse or foot.
Space elevators show promise. They've been around in Sci-Fi genre for a long time, but people are beginning to give them serious consideration.
Bandwidth problems would have made the problem obvious much too quickly.
It's not a question of tax distribution over the individual tax payer base. That's a completely separate question.
I'm just saying that by the time every company in a product or service chain adds their x% to cover the taxes they pay on their income the end cost of goods or services they provide is higher than it could be - and eventually people are the end purchasers. Even products bought and paid for by a company for internal use eventually get charged out as higher prices to their final consumers - whether it is goods or services. If the companies don't cover their expenses they eventually go broke. As mentioned above, there may be odd accounting games played to show loss or gain in particular areas, but the bottom line still has to be covered somehow.
Companies have an expense item called taxes (or multiple tax expense items depending on how big the company is and where it's located). That's it. Brand new companies may pay part of that from IPOs or seed capital (if they actually have a profit to pay on). Established companies pay it from prices charged on products and services. Since lower income people spend more on goods than the rich, you could even say that corporate income taxes are regressive when eventually recovered from the individual taxpayer.
I agree that the compensation paid to C level executives is excessive. But corporate income taxes in most cases won't do anything to change that. If you tie their stock options to performance which might be hurt by tax rate changes and they get annoyed, the finance audit committee will just change the comparison benchmarks or pick different companies so they can get their bonuses. They should just do away with everything except cash compensation and then adjust the tax rates from there. That would be a start.
No different here than there. Country X places taxes on say - google for ads. Google raises ad rates from that country to cover taxes + x% adder to keep the profit intact. Person placing the add raises costs to cover increased advertising cost + y% to cover their profit margin. Cost to consumer goes up. It isn't always this direct - long term advertising rate deals and the like might tweak the cost for smaller companies to cover bigger advertisers - but in the end no company ever pays taxes itself. It all gets passed on in some form to the customer or taken out of the employees paychecks (or future raises). By the time everyone in the food chain has added their x%, the end cost to the consumer is frequently more than if they had just had their taxes raised by the government itself.
Course the number of people that would advertise on google is somewhat self limiting, so the added good or service cost wouldn't be evenly distributed among all companies which would introduce more inefficiencies in the system. But in the end, the companies don't actually end up paying taxes if they are making a profit, and if they fail to make a profit long enough, they're history.
If they make a point like locking out UK facebook users, it will probably be minutes before the tax is repealed.
Cause it wasn't quite bad enough for systemF.
Close - but not quite there... yet.
Cause Red Hat is a big benefactor.
According to Bible prophecy scholars, the book of Daniel indicates the Antichrist would come from one of the four divisions of the old Grecian empire - part of the Seleucid empire according to Daniel 8 and 11. So although that covers a lot of territory, it also eliminates a vast amount more, including anyone from the United States.
If you read the text where the mark of the beast is mentioned, there is a direct tie to bowing down to worship the image of the beast - to accept the religion of the beast and worship it and the mark. I suspect that that is the primary problem associated with the mark of the beast. The mark itself is simply an acknowledgment that you have done the other to get it and thus are able to buy and sell merchandise in the open market. The Bible forbids accepting the mark (which is unidentified in form), the Antichrist's name or the number of his name.
The RFID chip or whatever the mark turns out to be in and of itself is probably of no consequence. It is the worship and acceptance of the beast that gets the person on the condemned list. The mark is the evidence that that has happened.
God does send angels throughout the world preaching the Gospel message to everyone who is left to accept Christ and reject the beast and warning them of the consequences in their own native tongues so none will have an excuse.
Revelation and Daniel and some other passages are rich in imagery. We won't know until the events unfold what exactly the proper interpretation is. And really, if you've accepted Christ as Savior, it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong about what the proper interpretation of Revelation is. It will be seen in the fullness of time.
The beast, however, is symbolic of many things: a man (the Antichrist, some supernatural being released from the Abyss, and an eighth kingdom on Earth). The seven heads are symbolic. The 10 horns and the little horn are symbolic. It is interpreted in Revelation itself (chapter 17). The seven heads and ten horns are commonly interpreted as seven world empires - mountains with rulers. Five had fallen in John's day (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece). One existed (Rome). One was to come - of the 10 kingdoms oppressing Israel in the end times. The Antichrist would form the eighth. The seven heads and 10 horns are in parallel with the interpretation of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream with a head to the 10 toes of various materials which are also interpreted the same. The 10 toes represented kingdoms to come in the area of the old Roman Empire (the legs of the statue) but made of clay as not lasting. If you do a count, there are at least that many royal autocratic countries in the area of the old Roman Empire now - from England to various Islamic countries. There is no reason to come to different conclusions about what the Bible itself clearly interprets.
Regardless of the nature of the mark of the beast it is evidently needed according to prophecy to buy and sell at some point in the future. Hardly symbolic.
If the outcomes of the battle of Armageddon or the battle at the end of the millennial period were in doubt, your statements might be valid, but the they are not. In fact, the Bible states that the enemies will be defeated by the word of Christ and the armies coming with Christ won't need to raise a finger to assist Him.
Considering humanity, just because a person is maximally powerful doesn't mean they don't have enemies and it doesn't mean they won't be attacked to try to depose them even if the odds are against the attacker. You can look at countless examples through history. The spiritual realm is not stated to be any different - starting with Satan's original rebellion when he lost his place of power and honor in heaven and carrying through human history to the end recorded in Revelation.
Early manuscripts tend to point to a copying error and indicate the original text as having 616 instead of 666, probably blowing your Nero theory.
Regardless, Revelation had both historical and prophetical implications. You can't study Revelation by itself. You need to throw in Daniel, several of the minor prophets of the Old Testament, and some of Christ's teachings and comments if you want to try to understand the end time prophetical implications of the text.
While the Swedish actions don't fall into the mark of the beast territory, getting people used to this technology will make it easier for the anti Christ to implement when he comes to power. It's pretty clear that he won't be 100% successful, but those who resist will pay a high price.
Using 2017 IMF numbers from Wikipedia, the GDP per capita of China puts them at 72/188. The US, which you pointed to as a counter example is 7/188. The question isn't when are they at the top or in the top 10. The question is at what point does developing make no sense. At this point, it doesn't.
I agree that just as in the US, not every Chinese citizen has benefited from the changes in China. However, once a country starts its own export import bank and starts trying to buy influence in other poorer countries (African operations come to mind), it is arguable that the developing category is no longer appropriate.
China can't have it both ways. It can't make a case for moving the world reserve currency away from the dollar and make massive investments in the rest of the world buying a presence in many countries and then whine that they are still developing. That time is long past.
The fact that much of the country hasn't benefited isn't really the world's problem. It is China's.