Business is like the iterated prisoner's dilema, if you constantly screw over every customer, supplier, and even competitors then you will be retaliated against until no longer in business.
Quite true. In this sense, W. didn't cut taxes at all; he merely deferred them.
and hyper-inflation.
Maybe, maybe not.
On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes was right. Recessions are caused by too little spending. Right now, consumers are (on average) overextended, so cannot increase spending. Businesses see no economic returns on additional spending. So they can't increase spending. That leaves government.
Government could waste the money on warfare and bridges to nowhere. Waste is waste, and taxpayers would be paying for it for a long time. Wise governments, in these circumstances, would spend money to create assets that pay dividends long into the future. Improve infrastructure. Not just bridges and highways, but other transportation (rail), energy (R&D, conservation), communication (internet!).
The last thing the government should do is to pass permanent tax cuts. Once the economy starts going again, taxes will have to go up to pay interest on all the borrowing. If that doesn't happen, then inflation and hyperinflation are possibilities.
But the current idea of FOSS will be replacing software that generates a billion dollars in revenue from other companies. So the lobbyist will be full power to block this one.
Where does the billion dollars in lost revenue go? It does go somewhere; the companies that used to be paying out the wazoo for software now get it for free. They can take that money, and hire their own lobbyists, to balance out the scales.
They can take that money, and hire more people to do work that management believes will benefit the company. They can take that money, and give themselves bonuses, which they spend. They can return the money to shareholders as a special dividend. Or they can pass savings on to their customers by lowering prices.
German Submarine Pens built during WWII in France are still there. Hube blocks of concrete right at the edge of busy ports. Too big and expensive to remove.
One of the problems is that some managers evaluated traders' performances by only looking at a single number. And that number covered results in 99 buckets, and left the contents of the last bucket uncounted.
It's trivial to set up a game that pays off modestly 999 times out of 1000, but that last one wipes out all of your losses tenfold. And the Value At Risk metric, by design, doesn't show that one out of a thousand loss. The trader posts the modest profit 99.9% of the time. Every work day for four years. Then the designed-in "black swan" losses arrive. The trader has four years of bonuses, so he's not too bad off.
Putting the fox in charge of the henhouse also hurt California. Kenneth Lay of Enron proposed to George W. Bush the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whom he accepted. And then did a worse than "Brownie" quality job regulating electricity markets, as far as protecting consumers went. He did a magnificant job enhancing Enron's profits, though.
Trinity was a plutonium-implosion device, just like Fat Man that destroyed Nagasaki. So that one was already tested.
It was Little Boy, the uranium gun-type device, that was untested. The physicists thought they knew the physics so well, and the mechanism was so straight-forward, that there was no need for a test.
Space Elevators do reduce the amount of energy needed to achieve orbit. They reduce it to gravitational potential energy divided by the efficiency of the motors on the climbers, say 90%.
The amount of energy needed to achieve orbit via rockets is tremendously higher. Because rockets are far less than 90% efficient in converting chemical energy in the fuel into kinetic energy in the payload.
Sure. Given unlimited quantities of energy, you can get something very, very, very hot. Direct the photons boiling off of this hot thing to all go in the same direction. You end up going in the opposite direction.
Photons have no rest mass, but they do have momentum, proportional to their energy/frequency.
Exceeding the speed of light causes many problems with Relativity, which is only what, 105 years old?
Heavier-than-air flight was possible, because birds did it. It was just a matter of engineering before a vehicle that carried a person did it.
Supersonic speed is possible, because bullets did it. It was just a matter of engineering before a vehicle that carried a person did it.
There is no corresponding example of super-luminal travel. It is not possible given the current knowledge of physics, and that knowledge has been stable for a century. You are as likely to see violations of conservation of energy, or momentum, or baryon number (this is the one that nixes star-trek transporters) as you are a violation of the speed of light in vacuum.
You made up the part about "certain neighborhoods... had a high percentage of bad loans". Pure fiction. And you forgot to mention that borrowers were "ineligible" because of the color of their skin.
The CRA did not force any bank to make a bad loan; the CRA simply forced banks to stop discriminating based on race. They were still completely free to use creditworthiness part of their decision to write a loan.
These very same banks were required, by regulation, to provide bad loans.
There you go again. More right-wing nonsense. 19 of the top 20 originators of sub-prime loans were not subject to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, so you repeat untruths, told to you by untrustworthy sources.
And Fannie and Freddie came late to the mortgage slice-and-dice party. The very definition of "sub-prime" was loans that were not good enough to be backed by Fannie or Freddie. That changed in 2004.
All the people that said "heavier than air craft will never fly" had never noticed that birds were heavier than air, and flew.
All the people that said "aircraft cannot fly faster than the speed of sound" had never noticed that bullets flew faster than the speed of sound. The Bell X-1 was shaped after a 50-caliber bullet for exactly that reason.
Getting into space was "Just a Small Matter of Engineering Improvement (TM)" over Chinese firework rockets.
Anti-gravity, teleportation, or faster-than-light technologies all break fundamental rules of physics, and are not going to happen.
Airplanes can be made quieter, sure. But producing thrust in the air still means accelerating something, usually air but occasionally jet or rocket exhaust, out the back. Thrust = mass times acceleration, so you either have to move a lot of air with modest acceleration -- which means big fans or propellers, with consequent vibration and tips-at-sonic-speed noise issues, or a little bit of air with tremendous acceleration -- which isn't at all quiet.
But whatever alien life that could possibly be out there, will be made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And therefore, obey the same laws of chemistry as we observe here. Which limits the possibilities considerably.
Then all that is left is exhaustive search. Which may or may not be practical.
Theorem: There is no 6 foot long, invisible elephant in my cube. Proof: Stand in the middle of my cube, wave hands to show no invisible elephant occupies the middle of my cube, and show that a large, invisible elephant anywhere in my cube would have to occupy the middle of it.
Theorem: There are no tiny, 3 inch long, invisible elephants in my cube, that runs very quickly and quietly. Now the proof-by-exhaustive-search is much harder. You have to exclude all possible locations at the same time.
I've been pondering the five fingers/toes. Your upper arm and your thigh have one bone each. Forearm and lower leg have two bones. Then in your wrist and ankle, a layer of three bones, and then four. Then finally the five digits.
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That explains why Bill Gates is in the poorhouse.
Quite true. In this sense, W. didn't cut taxes at all; he merely deferred them.
Maybe, maybe not.
On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes was right. Recessions are caused by too little spending. Right now, consumers are (on average) overextended, so cannot increase spending. Businesses see no economic returns on additional spending. So they can't increase spending. That leaves government.
Government could waste the money on warfare and bridges to nowhere. Waste is waste, and taxpayers would be paying for it for a long time. Wise governments, in these circumstances, would spend money to create assets that pay dividends long into the future. Improve infrastructure. Not just bridges and highways, but other transportation (rail), energy (R&D, conservation), communication (internet!).
The last thing the government should do is to pass permanent tax cuts. Once the economy starts going again, taxes will have to go up to pay interest on all the borrowing. If that doesn't happen, then inflation and hyperinflation are possibilities.
Where does the billion dollars in lost revenue go? It does go somewhere; the companies that used to be paying out the wazoo for software now get it for free. They can take that money, and hire their own lobbyists, to balance out the scales.
They can take that money, and hire more people to do work that management believes will benefit the company. They can take that money, and give themselves bonuses, which they spend. They can return the money to shareholders as a special dividend. Or they can pass savings on to their customers by lowering prices.
My house is 105. Still very useful. Keeps my stuff dry. Keeps me warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.
German Submarine Pens built during WWII in France are still there. Hube blocks of concrete right at the edge of busy ports. Too big and expensive to remove.
He spends so much because he pays a premium to buy electricity from renewable resources.
And the house is his home office, so he doesn't have an employer paying for energy used during the day.
I love it!
One of the problems is that some managers evaluated traders' performances by only looking at a single number. And that number covered results in 99 buckets, and left the contents of the last bucket uncounted.
It's trivial to set up a game that pays off modestly 999 times out of 1000, but that last one wipes out all of your losses tenfold. And the Value At Risk metric, by design, doesn't show that one out of a thousand loss. The trader posts the modest profit 99.9% of the time. Every work day for four years. Then the designed-in "black swan" losses arrive. The trader has four years of bonuses, so he's not too bad off.
Putting the fox in charge of the henhouse also hurt California. Kenneth Lay of Enron proposed to George W. Bush the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whom he accepted. And then did a worse than "Brownie" quality job regulating electricity markets, as far as protecting consumers went. He did a magnificant job enhancing Enron's profits, though.
Trinity was a plutonium-implosion device, just like Fat Man that destroyed Nagasaki. So that one was already tested.
It was Little Boy, the uranium gun-type device, that was untested. The physicists thought they knew the physics so well, and the mechanism was so straight-forward, that there was no need for a test.
Space Elevators do reduce the amount of energy needed to achieve orbit. They reduce it to gravitational potential energy divided by the efficiency of the motors on the climbers, say 90%.
The amount of energy needed to achieve orbit via rockets is tremendously higher. Because rockets are far less than 90% efficient in converting chemical energy in the fuel into kinetic energy in the payload.
Sure. Given unlimited quantities of energy, you can get something very, very, very hot. Direct the photons boiling off of this hot thing to all go in the same direction. You end up going in the opposite direction.
Photons have no rest mass, but they do have momentum, proportional to their energy/frequency.
Exceeding the speed of light causes many problems with Relativity, which is only what, 105 years old?
Heavier-than-air flight was possible, because birds did it. It was just a matter of engineering before a vehicle that carried a person did it.
Supersonic speed is possible, because bullets did it. It was just a matter of engineering before a vehicle that carried a person did it.
There is no corresponding example of super-luminal travel. It is not possible given the current knowledge of physics, and that knowledge has been stable for a century. You are as likely to see violations of conservation of energy, or momentum, or baryon number (this is the one that nixes star-trek transporters) as you are a violation of the speed of light in vacuum.
See "Hughes Medical Foundation".
Now it's Haiku!
You made up the part about "certain neighborhoods ... had a high percentage of bad loans". Pure fiction. And you forgot to mention that borrowers were "ineligible" because of the color of their skin.
The CRA did not force any bank to make a bad loan; the CRA simply forced banks to stop discriminating based on race. They were still completely free to use creditworthiness part of their decision to write a loan.
There you go again. More right-wing nonsense. 19 of the top 20 originators of sub-prime loans were not subject to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, so you repeat untruths, told to you by untrustworthy sources.
And Fannie and Freddie came late to the mortgage slice-and-dice party. The very definition of "sub-prime" was loans that were not good enough to be backed by Fannie or Freddie. That changed in 2004.
All the people that said "heavier than air craft will never fly" had never noticed that birds were heavier than air, and flew.
All the people that said "aircraft cannot fly faster than the speed of sound" had never noticed that bullets flew faster than the speed of sound. The Bell X-1 was shaped after a 50-caliber bullet for exactly that reason.
Getting into space was "Just a Small Matter of Engineering Improvement (TM)" over Chinese firework rockets.
Anti-gravity, teleportation, or faster-than-light technologies all break fundamental rules of physics, and are not going to happen.
Airplanes can be made quieter, sure. But producing thrust in the air still means accelerating something, usually air but occasionally jet or rocket exhaust, out the back. Thrust = mass times acceleration, so you either have to move a lot of air with modest acceleration -- which means big fans or propellers, with consequent vibration and tips-at-sonic-speed noise issues, or a little bit of air with tremendous acceleration -- which isn't at all quiet.
It means you definitely had more money. You don't have it any more, you spent it getting the certification.
Heavy freight could go on rail, and rails can be electrified. And (some of the) electricity generated by wind, solar, tide power, and so on.
But whatever alien life that could possibly be out there, will be made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And therefore, obey the same laws of chemistry as we observe here. Which limits the possibilities considerably.
Lego is unable to retain its trademark
(or, in particular, the red, 2x4 block). So it sounds like others will be able to make compatible blocks.
Had Lego lost their trademark on the Lego name, that would have been much worse.
Then all that is left is exhaustive search. Which may or may not be practical.
Theorem: There is no 6 foot long, invisible elephant in my cube.
Proof: Stand in the middle of my cube, wave hands to show no invisible elephant occupies the middle of my cube, and show that a large, invisible elephant anywhere in my cube would have to occupy the middle of it.
Theorem: There are no tiny, 3 inch long, invisible elephants in my cube, that runs very quickly and quietly.
Now the proof-by-exhaustive-search is much harder. You have to exclude all possible locations at the same time.
I've been pondering the five fingers/toes. Your upper arm and your thigh have one bone each. Forearm and lower leg have two bones. Then in your wrist and ankle, a layer of three bones, and then four. Then finally the five digits.
Is there anything to this pattern?
If by "He was defeated" you mean "His party drew the most support and won the most seats".