Ion thrusters do use fuel. They are extremely fuel efficient and can get quite far on not much (though the thrust is very low and it takes ages) but they do need fuel. Usual propellants are an inert gas like Argon or Xenon.
I don't think what you said and what I said are different. You can't tell people what they want to hear if you are trying to be accurate. Reality very rarely conforms to our desires.
>State based terrorism is incremental, this is an example
No. State based terrorism is when the guy who blew up your family was sent by a government as opposed to a non-government group.
It's the act of violence for political purposes that makes it terrorism, nothing less qualifies. And the USA has really only ever done that to foreigners. And you would note that I chose my list of examples carefully - they were the cases where you could make no claim of a "just war". The people attacked were not enemies, were not a threat in any way - and in several of them - were no war was even declared with their government. They got bombed, to replace their democratically elected leaders with puppet dictators (coincidentally - that's how Saddam got into power in the first place - so Iraq was the victim of American state-based terrorism at least 4 different times). This tends to happen whenever a democratically elected leader thinks his job is to serve his citizens rather than serve Coca-Cola's bottom line.
The definition of terrorism is "an act of violence for political purposes" -that definition comes, by the way, directly out of the state department handbook on the topic, has been in place since the 1970s, and is the same one used by all federal agencies.
I vehemently oppose government surveilance in general, and believe government should stay out of people's private lives. Yet I am quite unconcerned about them tracking money. Because money and spending is not private. Never was, never will be, never COULD be. By definition the transfer of money from one person to another is always a public act - since somebody else always knows. I don't care if government knows what I buy or not, I only care if and when they try to restrict what I can buy. They've been doing THAT for decades - they tell you you can't buy a blowjob or a pack of weed all the time. THAT Is an intrusion of liberty. Knowing you bought it so they can make sure the dealer pays his taxes ? I see no harm whatsoever in that.
Managing the economy is government's job, managing the flow of money is their JOB, knowing how it flows it pretty fucking essential to doing that job well. Them knowing a bit more about that, will only help them do their job better. We all benefit from a better run economy. We all benefit from a government that's better able to guage when to print more money and when to rather put up interest rates to manage inflation rates at the ideal point where economic growth can happen without grossly impoverishing everybody or pushing us into a deflationary depression.
Don't worry your head about "steps towards tyranny" - there's ZERO historical precedent for that. Tyranny doesn't come in small steps. It comes in giant, world-changing events that happen so fast that they tend to have installed the dictator-for-life with absolute power before you can even react. Hitler didn't come to power in a series of small steps. He tried a coup, failed, went to jail and wrote a book. built up his party for a decade, and then used the depression (and the resulting discontent) to win a bunch of seats in parliament in an ordinary election. Then the government gave him the presidency (a largely ceremonial position in Germany - I bet you don't even remember the current German president's name, I don't, but we ALL know the Chancelor is Angela Merkel). There was one major flaw in the German system of checks and balances unfortunately. In the event that the president or chancelor dies in office, they appointed each other's successor - and there was nothing restricting who they could appoint. The Chancelor died and Hitler appointed himself to that post - while retaining the presidency, merging them into 'Fuhrer'. Next step - the Reichstagh fire, then the execution of every liberal in parliament mere days later. The conversion from democratic, free country to total dictatorship took about 3 months. A series of massive steps - nothing small anywhere.
And that was a particularly long and convoluted one - the TYPICAL way it happens is
Oh it can be done - and if Trump was actually smart he would do it in a way that the democrats, liberals and environments would all be cheering him on right until it's too late.
1) Ban fracking. 2) Ban oil imports and domestic oil drilling 3) Build coal-to-oil-to-fuel conversion plants. 4) Lots of coal miners employed 5)... 6) Profit... no wait the other thing, what's it called again ? Oh right, LOSSES. Massive losses.
You need to ban fracking because that's where the competition for coal in power generation is from. That still won't be enough though - you need to create a new market, the only really viable one is to coal based petrol and diesel. This can be done in a pinch - South Africa did it right throughout the 1980s to keep their cars running during the oil sanctions, but it's expensive and not very efficient (which is good for the coal miners - inefficient conversion means you need more coal), that would put all the coal miners back to work (oil riggers would be PISSED though).
And yeah, it would be the most expensive and expansive government intervention in the economy in history - and make all sorts of polution problems (not just global warming) a lot worse, which would add even more cost.
A brutal dictator could do it - a president in a democracy who has, thus far, proven completely inept at actually getting things done in politics, has no skill at whipping votes, and couldn't even get republicans to repeal Obamacare ? Nah... never gonna happen.
In order to keep it from falling to earth it has to be orbiting. That means it has to orbit SOMETHING. Close to earth a relatively small sail could work (the moon can eclipse the entire sun and it's much smaller than earth) - but it only does that now and then - and eclipses don't happen over the whole planet.
So what are the options ? Well firstly - what should it orbit ? Orbitting the earth is easiest - but you have the moon problem - it doesn't stay put. if you make it fairly big - you could have it block out the sun on whichever part of the earth it's over at the moment as it moves around - while the earth rotates as well of course, and possibly cut down on solar radiation a bit, but that would mean making it a lot bigger. Bigger sail needs more energy to get to orbit and even more energy to keep in orbit. Getting pricy. Alternatively we could make it orbit the sun - that's easier as we just need to put it in an orbit with the same period as earth's... oh wait, that would be the same orbit as earth since orbital periods are a factor of distance and shape. In the same orbit as earth - it is going to be REALLY hard to get it BETWEEN earth and the sun.
And even if you solve all that and figure out a way to get a sufficiently large sail in a position where it blocks a significant portion of the sun from hitting earth consistently (no mean feat - it may not even be possible) you now have new problems. If your sail is not absolutely reflective it's going to get hot (and nothing is absolutely 100% reflective at every frequency - even a mirror gets hot if you leave it in the sun) so you need some way to cool it or that heat will build up and eventually it will burn up. Vaccuums are terrible radiators and you're going to be bombarding this thing with radiation 24/7 for years and decades and centuries. So let's say you solve that... hey you know what we CALL a large sail being hit by the sun ? A solar sail. Photons reflecting off of an object pushes against it. Generally the force is too small to have any impact but a large lightweight object will measurably move from it. There are active plans to design space-craft that can use this for orbital thrust - and currently a project trying to build one. It's slow as all hell and you get very little thrust but you get it constantly and at almost no cost once you get that big cumbersome sail in place. But that's going to be a problem for this "sun-blocking" sail - because it's going to be getting a constant thrust - thrust on anything in orbit changes it's orbit. To stay in orbit, it would therefore need a compensating thrust... a rocket isn't practical, it will run out of fuel long before the sun stops pushing. Maybe if the EM-drive works you can use that, and stick some solar-panels on the sail to generate power for it, but even if the whole sail is photo-electric basic physics suggest that you can never generate as much thrust from converting that to electricity and back into thrust as you are getting from the same photons in the opposite direction.
Sooner or later, that constant push away from the sun will break the sail's alignment so it no longer works (that's the best case scenario).
Basically the idea is not just complicated and difficult - it's utterly impractical to the point where one would have to say that even it's possible it wouldn't be worth the investment. It would cost a LOT less to just reduce CO2 emissions to a level the earth's natural balancing forces can compensate for and avoid the problem in the first place.
Oh - and of course, it would not, actually, solve the problem unless we also reduce CO2 anyway. It would slow it down (less heat arriving means less heat being trapped) but unless you block ALL the sunlight it would STILL be warming up (just slower). And if you block ALL the sunlight we all freeze to death.
You and I see this: here is a theory with a lot of evidence. The deniers make a claim, it gets debunked so they make another claim and the cycle repeats endlessly as one bullshit claim after the other gets debunked.
But the people who believe the deniers don't see that. They see "For everything the scientist say the deniers make a counter-argument that sounds convincing to me".
At least part of the reason they see it so differently is that it's a helluva lot easier to sound convincing when you don't try to be accurate. Explaining complex science so laymen can understand it is hard - to do it convincingly as well is very hard. Reality doesn't care about your individual biases. It's the same reason people are scared of investing in long-term proven ways to grow your money - but will give their life savings to a conman after one meeting.
In it's day Apollo 8 cost 20 billion dollars. In today's money that's about 110 billion dollars. The SLS costing the about the same in today's money as Apollo 8 cost in 1968 dollars - is actually a MASSIVELY cheaper and more efficient project then. .
The argument is pretty flawed if you make such a silly mistake. Now let's consider the claim about amounts and where they go. Are these people seriously saying that ALL of what NASA does with their share is wasted effort ? Does NASA not have a stake in doing their own testing and validation - making sure that they get what they paid for and that their astronauts will be safe ? Outsourcing that seems seriously irresponsible but even if you DID the private sector companies would have to do the same tests. Maybe they COULD do it cheaper -but cheaper isn't the most important thing here, quality matters a lot more than price for this stuff.
Why exactly is it a bad thing if a large chunk of NASA's budget is spent on the parts NASA does ? Why are these people arguing that NASA should outsource more than they do ? NASA is the customer here - and this seems like a thinly veiled attempt to use politics to force the customer to buy more.
NASA is the dumbest thing to complain about in terms of cost anyway - as a fraction of the federal budget they are a blip. Seriously NASA has had it's funding cut so consistently for decades that, today, they are basically a rounding error on the budget.
Sorry the bias is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you think, because,contrary to what every rightwinger believe -corporate media is biased towards the corporate friendly party. The mainstream media is all rightwing biased. Fox's difference is that they are pro-CRAZY biased the others are not, they are just conservative biased. Old style conservative, like Reagan/Eisenhower conservative... whose policies of course would be labelled "extreme leftwing socialism" by the likes of you today.
>Well I got mugged by three guys last May and defended myself successfully. Drunk bogan morons don't need an excuse to start a fight.
Drunk people are not, exactly, an example of a mugging. I got mugged some 17 years ago - and that consisted of a stab-first-and-take-valuables-of-his-bleeding-body approach. Kind of hard to defend yourself after a person just walking past you on the street suddenly stuck a knife in your ribs.
>The world isn't a safe place That's a stupid response to an argument I didn't make. I merely said we can make it SAFER.
>You should teach your daughter that so she is strong enough to defend herself when the time comes. Fine, that does NOT mean that it is NOT stupid to do things that endanger yourself more - like carrying cash. The very BEST defense is not being a target.
> Exchanging freedom for safety There is no loss of freedom involved. Just a change in how I carry my money. If it's wrong to use technology to reduce our risk of being crime victims then you should get rid of any guns you may own. If you can use a gun to make yourself feel safer, I can use a smartphone for the same purpose. Neither affects how free we are in any way (contrary to what gun-nuts think - owning a gun does not make you freer nor is it 'freedom' to own one).
>I've been assisting someone who has had their identity stolen. He lost his house, $800,000 and was accused and tried of fraud despite the evidence available to say that he was just a naive old person being preyed upon. And that is terrible. But it's still better than dead.
>You haven't lived until you've had a body cavity search at every airport you go to. A ridiculous theater that does nothing to improve safety and thus is clearly not a good idea. On the other hand, not carrying cash, is PROVEN to reduce your risk of certain violent crimes - and thus is a good idea. My behavior, my ability to do the things I want to do, my capacity to live as I want to live is entirely unaffected. Government is not intruding in my behavior in any way, shape or form - I am merely making myself a less attractive target to desperate or evil people with deadly weapons.
>being raped in gaol after loosing everything you worked for all your life is not a good option either. That's pretty damn terrible... but it's better than dead.
>A change which promotes state based terrorism is worse than both of those things, IMHO. You've shown zero evidence whatsoever of this being true. Real state based terrorism has never happened in the USA. No, not even under Obama. State based terrorism by the US government tend to happen in other countries. It's what was done in Iraq. It's what was done in Nicaragua. It's what was done in Panama and Brazil. But in America ? Never happened. The risk in America is that you'll be killed by corporate terrorists after republican 'freedom lovers' finish getting rid of every law that stands between them and getting paid to kill you. Whether they get killed in cash or via an electronic payment system is really not going to make any difference. It doesn't matter if you can track the payment for a murder when the murder is no longer a crime.
What's more likely to affect my daughter this year ? The government knowing I bought her, her first trycicle or her dad getting killed by a mugger for his cash ?
The biggest advantage of going cashless is not convenience, it's SAFETY. Muggings have been dropping as cash use has declined because the reward for the risk is reduced. Cash is instantly spendable, cards run a real risk of being reported and cancelled before you can get the money out, cellphones you need to sell to get money. Nothing is more immediately valuable to a mugger than cash. Now of course, as muggings have declined - identity theft and similar crimes have gone up - because the money is now in computers, it makes more sense to rob the computers than to risk your life in person mugging somebody. At least there's no risk he turns out to be a black-ops trained marine vet who breaks your arm in four places. But this is actually an improvement - because while you lose money in EITHER an identity theft or a mugging - the former probably won't get you killed or in hospital. A change which forces a reduction in violent crime is a positive change - even if it comes with an uptick in white-collar crime.
>Free markets are where bread sits in lines waiting for me. The alternative is me waiting in lines for bread.
The real difference between those two scenarios is just that in your 'free market' a helluva lot of people can't get bread at all.
There is then more bread than people who CAN get it, and hence it sits and wait.
This is, obviously, great for you - being one of the few who can get bread - but it sucks for the people who can't.
Of course the OTHER thing it does it so perpetually increase the number of people who can't - so more and more bread goes to fewer and fewer people. We often refer to this effect by the shorthand name "rising inequality' - perhaps you've heard of it ?
But your BIGGEST mistake of all is thinking those are the only options. This is not an either-or question. Nothing that involves human beings is ever THAT simple. It's not a choice between "laizes faire capitalism" and "USSR style communism" -there are literally THOUSANDS of other ways we could organise the distribution of resources (which is all an economy is - a system to distribute resources). So while you feel the advantages of liazes-faire capitalism outweigh the problems (but only because none of the really BIG problems happen to you personally), a great many people do not and the argument that it's better than the downsides of Soviet Style communism is complete bullshit - because we don't need to choose EITHER. Are you seriously so closed-minded that you are convinced, among the thousands of other possible ways we can organise this activity - not ONE of them may offer better pro/con ratios than the one you love ?
Because I am. None of them can... for every resource, service and product. But for every resource, service or product there is a way to organise it that would be better than EITHER laizes-faire capitalism OR soviet-style communism - in THIS location. In another town - another one will work better for the same product. And somewhere in the world, there is one product which, in one town, will work best with laizes-faire capitalism and somewhere out there is one product which, in one town, will work best with soviet-style communism. But for all the millions of other products in the millions of other towns the best answer will be NEITHER of those.
Indeed it's impossible to predict what the best answer will be. The only way to discover it is to experiment with all of them - in every town and for every product- and record the results. The only way to get an economy with minimum downsides and maximum benefits - is to have an economy that's created by the scientific method, experiment, test, improve - and consider all answers to be local to the specific parameters of the experiment. Just because in bummsville Idaho the best way to distribute apples turned out to be "plant an apple tree on every street corner and let everybody pick when they want" doesn't mean it's true for oranges in bummsville idaho and doesn't mean it's true for apples in New York.
This seems intuitively right, but doesn't quite gel with statistics. According to the FBI - the vast majority of terrorists are rightwing Christian-Nationalists (like the trump-lover who shot up Canada a month ago, or the guy in the recent NY attack).
But they get very little publicity - far less than Islamic terrorists do (indeed so MUCH less that most people refuse to believe there are actually more of them and they strike more often). Hell when they do make the news - we go to great lengths to avoid using the word 'terrorist' for them (as if there is any doubt that Dylan Roof was a terrorist). Yet DESPITE getting less publicity, not getting credited as 'terrorists' and the public being in denial of their existence - they remain the biggest threat we face.
Now, of course, that still doesn't justify panicky over-reaction. It doesn't make it smart to break crucial encryption or give backdoors to governments. Terrorism remains a minor risk - even if you add all the worst examples together - you'd save far more lives if you can get rid of drunk drivers. I'd much rather see the more draconian-minded politicians focus on penalizing those guys to hell. As far as I'm concerned- everybody KNOWS the risks of drunk driving so if you're caught driving drunk you should be charged with attempted murder. That's what you did - you tried to kill innocent people. Or maybe getting serious about enforcing safety regulations on corporations. If CEOs can't kill people their profit margines would, admittedly, be a lot lower -but you'd save thousands more lives per year than you would even if you could completely eradicate terrorism.
So yes - it makes sense ot see terorism in perspective and plan responses according to how small a problem it really is. But don't imagine that lack of publicity and credit will end it either. It's just that it's such a small problem that trying to end it isn't actually worth the cost in freedom.
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all. It also did not affect the global temperature at all. It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
>North Carolina allows amending the birth certificate of a post-op trans person born in North Carolina [cnn.com].
Well that's great if you are post-op and was born there... but that's one very risky, very expensive op - so a great many trans people do not get the option to go for it, and even those that do not until later in life. According to Google only 33% of trans people have undergone any surgery at all - and only 14% went whole-hog sex-change. Lets be generous and assume the NC bill would apply for partial gender confirmation surgeries (like breast enhancements only) - that only one-third who have the option, but now it's further narrowed by the requirement that you be born in the state - which is will reduce the number of eligible folks (all adults - the people harmed the least by these laws). Sure, if you're from another state it may be possible (depending which state) to get that state to alter it but that would likely require an expensive trip back to a place you no longer live -and may not have lived for decades. So even if we are generous and assume less than full sex-changes would qualify - we're probably only talking about say 20% of the people affected having an out. That's probably still being too generous - that 33% was a national figure - I'm willing to wager that in a conservative community like NC the figure is significantly lower (not least because access to doctors willing to do it is harder) - and most of that 33% are living in liberal cities on the coast.
If it's the 14% who had a full sex change... well that reduces the number of people who have this option to what ? Maybe 5% ?
All that said though - my use of the example wasn't really intended to trigger a debate about which side is right here (I did state clearly which side I'm on but that's it) - I was merely using it as one of many examples where cities and states have had differing views on a topic and I think it's overreach for the state to force the city to change, especially since conservative/liberal attitudes very frequently get bordered by city-lines. Cities have a tendency to attract and foster liberal attitudes.
Right now, the federal government has not done it's job and determined if it is, in fact, a human right for people to be a gender other than the one commonly associated with their sex (to my mind - it's impossible to deny that without also denying basic freedom of expression and freedom of thought) - so in the meantime, at least allow citizens to decide for themselves, even if states and cities disagree on the outcome - it would be better than having states take away the few cities where government is NOT being obsessed with people's genitals.
I'll never understand how 'small government' republicans who always talk about keeping government out of people's lives are so happy to invite it into people's pants.
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Ion thrusters do use fuel. They are extremely fuel efficient and can get quite far on not much (though the thrust is very low and it takes ages) but they do need fuel. Usual propellants are an inert gas like Argon or Xenon.
>Realistically it's going to be more like a space van
So instead of space hillbillies it will be driven by space hippies smoking weed and playing bad folk music on box guitars ?
Not all planets. In fact, only one planet is known to meet that description. You're standing on it.
I don't think what you said and what I said are different. You can't tell people what they want to hear if you are trying to be accurate. Reality very rarely conforms to our desires.
>State based terrorism is incremental, this is an example
No. State based terrorism is when the guy who blew up your family was sent by a government as opposed to a non-government group.
It's the act of violence for political purposes that makes it terrorism, nothing less qualifies. And the USA has really only ever done that to foreigners. And you would note that I chose my list of examples carefully - they were the cases where you could make no claim of a "just war". The people attacked were not enemies, were not a threat in any way - and in several of them - were no war was even declared with their government. They got bombed, to replace their democratically elected leaders with puppet dictators (coincidentally - that's how Saddam got into power in the first place - so Iraq was the victim of American state-based terrorism at least 4 different times). This tends to happen whenever a democratically elected leader thinks his job is to serve his citizens rather than serve Coca-Cola's bottom line.
The definition of terrorism is "an act of violence for political purposes" -that definition comes, by the way, directly out of the state department handbook on the topic, has been in place since the 1970s, and is the same one used by all federal agencies.
I vehemently oppose government surveilance in general, and believe government should stay out of people's private lives. Yet I am quite unconcerned about them tracking money. Because money and spending is not private. Never was, never will be, never COULD be. By definition the transfer of money from one person to another is always a public act - since somebody else always knows. I don't care if government knows what I buy or not, I only care if and when they try to restrict what I can buy.
They've been doing THAT for decades - they tell you you can't buy a blowjob or a pack of weed all the time. THAT Is an intrusion of liberty. Knowing you bought it so they can make sure the dealer pays his taxes ? I see no harm whatsoever in that.
Managing the economy is government's job, managing the flow of money is their JOB, knowing how it flows it pretty fucking essential to doing that job well. Them knowing a bit more about that, will only help them do their job better. We all benefit from a better run economy. We all benefit from a government that's better able to guage when to print more money and when to rather put up interest rates to manage inflation rates at the ideal point where economic growth can happen without grossly impoverishing everybody or pushing us into a deflationary depression.
Don't worry your head about "steps towards tyranny" - there's ZERO historical precedent for that. Tyranny doesn't come in small steps. It comes in giant, world-changing events that happen so fast that they tend to have installed the dictator-for-life with absolute power before you can even react. Hitler didn't come to power in a series of small steps. He tried a coup, failed, went to jail and wrote a book. built up his party for a decade, and then used the depression (and the resulting discontent) to win a bunch of seats in parliament in an ordinary election. Then the government gave him the presidency (a largely ceremonial position in Germany - I bet you don't even remember the current German president's name, I don't, but we ALL know the Chancelor is Angela Merkel). There was one major flaw in the German system of checks and balances unfortunately. In the event that the president or chancelor dies in office, they appointed each other's successor - and there was nothing restricting who they could appoint. The Chancelor died and Hitler appointed himself to that post - while retaining the presidency, merging them into 'Fuhrer'. Next step - the Reichstagh fire, then the execution of every liberal in parliament mere days later.
The conversion from democratic, free country to total dictatorship took about 3 months. A series of massive steps - nothing small anywhere.
And that was a particularly long and convoluted one - the TYPICAL way it happens is
Oh it can be done - and if Trump was actually smart he would do it in a way that the democrats, liberals and environments would all be cheering him on right until it's too late.
1) Ban fracking. ...
2) Ban oil imports and domestic oil drilling
3) Build coal-to-oil-to-fuel conversion plants.
4) Lots of coal miners employed
5)
6) Profit... no wait the other thing, what's it called again ? Oh right, LOSSES. Massive losses.
You need to ban fracking because that's where the competition for coal in power generation is from. That still won't be enough though - you need to create a new market, the only really viable one is to coal based petrol and diesel. This can be done in a pinch - South Africa did it right throughout the 1980s to keep their cars running during the oil sanctions, but it's expensive and not very efficient (which is good for the coal miners - inefficient conversion means you need more coal), that would put all the coal miners back to work (oil riggers would be PISSED though).
And yeah, it would be the most expensive and expansive government intervention in the economy in history - and make all sorts of polution problems (not just global warming) a lot worse, which would add even more cost.
A brutal dictator could do it - a president in a democracy who has, thus far, proven completely inept at actually getting things done in politics, has no skill at whipping votes, and couldn't even get republicans to repeal Obamacare ? Nah... never gonna happen.
In order to keep it from falling to earth it has to be orbiting. That means it has to orbit SOMETHING. Close to earth a relatively small sail could work (the moon can eclipse the entire sun and it's much smaller than earth) - but it only does that now and then - and eclipses don't happen over the whole planet.
So what are the options ? Well firstly - what should it orbit ? Orbitting the earth is easiest - but you have the moon problem - it doesn't stay put. if you make it fairly big - you could have it block out the sun on whichever part of the earth it's over at the moment as it moves around - while the earth rotates as well of course, and possibly cut down on solar radiation a bit, but that would mean making it a lot bigger. Bigger sail needs more energy to get to orbit and even more energy to keep in orbit. Getting pricy. ... oh wait, that would be the same orbit as earth since orbital periods are a factor of distance and shape. In the same orbit as earth - it is going to be REALLY hard to get it BETWEEN earth and the sun.
Alternatively we could make it orbit the sun - that's easier as we just need to put it in an orbit with the same period as earth's
And even if you solve all that and figure out a way to get a sufficiently large sail in a position where it blocks a significant portion of the sun from hitting earth consistently (no mean feat - it may not even be possible) you now have new problems. If your sail is not absolutely reflective it's going to get hot (and nothing is absolutely 100% reflective at every frequency - even a mirror gets hot if you leave it in the sun) so you need some way to cool it or that heat will build up and eventually it will burn up. Vaccuums are terrible radiators and you're going to be bombarding this thing with radiation 24/7 for years and decades and centuries. So let's say you solve that... hey you know what we CALL a large sail being hit by the sun ? A solar sail. Photons reflecting off of an object pushes against it. Generally the force is too small to have any impact but a large lightweight object will measurably move from it. There are active plans to design space-craft that can use this for orbital thrust - and currently a project trying to build one. It's slow as all hell and you get very little thrust but you get it constantly and at almost no cost once you get that big cumbersome sail in place.
But that's going to be a problem for this "sun-blocking" sail - because it's going to be getting a constant thrust - thrust on anything in orbit changes it's orbit. To stay in orbit, it would therefore need a compensating thrust... a rocket isn't practical, it will run out of fuel long before the sun stops pushing. Maybe if the EM-drive works you can use that, and stick some solar-panels on the sail to generate power for it, but even if the whole sail is photo-electric basic physics suggest that you can never generate as much thrust from converting that to electricity and back into thrust as you are getting from the same photons in the opposite direction.
Sooner or later, that constant push away from the sun will break the sail's alignment so it no longer works (that's the best case scenario).
Basically the idea is not just complicated and difficult - it's utterly impractical to the point where one would have to say that even it's possible it wouldn't be worth the investment. It would cost a LOT less to just reduce CO2 emissions to a level the earth's natural balancing forces can compensate for and avoid the problem in the first place.
Oh - and of course, it would not, actually, solve the problem unless we also reduce CO2 anyway. It would slow it down (less heat arriving means less heat being trapped) but unless you block ALL the sunlight it would STILL be warming up (just slower). And if you block ALL the sunlight we all freeze to death.
Remember most deniers are also fans of austerity: the economic equivalent of saving on your heating bill by burning your paycheck for warmth.
With that in mind, perhaps we should try a different metaphor:
You are developing third degree burns on your asshole. Do you
1) Deny the existence of assholes
2) Deny the existence of burns
3) Stop sitting on the fucking stove - or at least turn the plate down ?
You and I see this: here is a theory with a lot of evidence. The deniers make a claim, it gets debunked so they make another claim and the cycle repeats endlessly as one bullshit claim after the other gets debunked.
But the people who believe the deniers don't see that. They see "For everything the scientist say the deniers make a counter-argument that sounds convincing to me".
At least part of the reason they see it so differently is that it's a helluva lot easier to sound convincing when you don't try to be accurate. Explaining complex science so laymen can understand it is hard - to do it convincingly as well is very hard. Reality doesn't care about your individual biases. It's the same reason people are scared of investing in long-term proven ways to grow your money - but will give their life savings to a conman after one meeting.
He has an MBA (Multiple Blog-reader Award) and a PHD (Plentiful Hogwash and Disinformation)
In it's day Apollo 8 cost 20 billion dollars. In today's money that's about 110 billion dollars.
The SLS costing the about the same in today's money as Apollo 8 cost in 1968 dollars - is actually a MASSIVELY cheaper and more efficient project then. .
The argument is pretty flawed if you make such a silly mistake. Now let's consider the claim about amounts and where they go. Are these people seriously saying that ALL of what NASA does with their share is wasted effort ? Does NASA not have a stake in doing their own testing and validation - making sure that they get what they paid for and that their astronauts will be safe ? Outsourcing that seems seriously irresponsible but even if you DID the private sector companies would have to do the same tests. Maybe they COULD do it cheaper -but cheaper isn't the most important thing here, quality matters a lot more than price for this stuff.
Why exactly is it a bad thing if a large chunk of NASA's budget is spent on the parts NASA does ? Why are these people arguing that NASA should outsource more than they do ? NASA is the customer here - and this seems like a thinly veiled attempt to use politics to force the customer to buy more.
NASA is the dumbest thing to complain about in terms of cost anyway - as a fraction of the federal budget they are a blip. Seriously NASA has had it's funding cut so consistently for decades that, today, they are basically a rounding error on the budget.
https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/f...
Citation provided.
Sorry the bias is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you think, because,contrary to what every rightwinger believe -corporate media is biased towards the corporate friendly party. The mainstream media is all rightwing biased. Fox's difference is that they are pro-CRAZY biased the others are not, they are just conservative biased. Old style conservative, like Reagan/Eisenhower conservative... whose policies of course would be labelled "extreme leftwing socialism" by the likes of you today.
https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/f...
Please go fuck yourself for not trusting real news.
>Well I got mugged by three guys last May and defended myself successfully. Drunk bogan morons don't need an excuse to start a fight.
Drunk people are not, exactly, an example of a mugging. I got mugged some 17 years ago - and that consisted of a stab-first-and-take-valuables-of-his-bleeding-body approach. Kind of hard to defend yourself after a person just walking past you on the street suddenly stuck a knife in your ribs.
>The world isn't a safe place
That's a stupid response to an argument I didn't make. I merely said we can make it SAFER.
>You should teach your daughter that so she is strong enough to defend herself when the time comes.
Fine, that does NOT mean that it is NOT stupid to do things that endanger yourself more - like carrying cash. The very BEST defense is not being a target.
> Exchanging freedom for safety
There is no loss of freedom involved. Just a change in how I carry my money. If it's wrong to use technology to reduce our risk of being crime victims then you should get rid of any guns you may own. If you can use a gun to make yourself feel safer, I can use a smartphone for the same purpose. Neither affects how free we are in any way (contrary to what gun-nuts think - owning a gun does not make you freer nor is it 'freedom' to own one).
>I've been assisting someone who has had their identity stolen. He lost his house, $800,000 and was accused and tried of fraud despite the evidence available to say that he was just a naive old person being preyed upon.
And that is terrible. But it's still better than dead.
>You haven't lived until you've had a body cavity search at every airport you go to.
A ridiculous theater that does nothing to improve safety and thus is clearly not a good idea. On the other hand, not carrying cash, is PROVEN to reduce your risk of certain violent crimes - and thus is a good idea. My behavior, my ability to do the things I want to do, my capacity to live as I want to live is entirely unaffected. Government is not intruding in my behavior in any way, shape or form - I am merely making myself a less attractive target to desperate or evil people with deadly weapons.
>being raped in gaol after loosing everything you worked for all your life is not a good option either.
That's pretty damn terrible... but it's better than dead.
>A change which promotes state based terrorism is worse than both of those things, IMHO.
You've shown zero evidence whatsoever of this being true. Real state based terrorism has never happened in the USA. No, not even under Obama. State based terrorism by the US government tend to happen in other countries. It's what was done in Iraq. It's what was done in Nicaragua. It's what was done in Panama and Brazil.
But in America ? Never happened. The risk in America is that you'll be killed by corporate terrorists after republican 'freedom lovers' finish getting rid of every law that stands between them and getting paid to kill you. Whether they get killed in cash or via an electronic payment system is really not going to make any difference. It doesn't matter if you can track the payment for a murder when the murder is no longer a crime.
What's more likely to affect my daughter this year ? The government knowing I bought her, her first trycicle or her dad getting killed by a mugger for his cash ?
The biggest advantage of going cashless is not convenience, it's SAFETY. Muggings have been dropping as cash use has declined because the reward for the risk is reduced. Cash is instantly spendable, cards run a real risk of being reported and cancelled before you can get the money out, cellphones you need to sell to get money.
Nothing is more immediately valuable to a mugger than cash. Now of course, as muggings have declined - identity theft and similar crimes have gone up - because the money is now in computers, it makes more sense to rob the computers than to risk your life in person mugging somebody. At least there's no risk he turns out to be a black-ops trained marine vet who breaks your arm in four places.
But this is actually an improvement - because while you lose money in EITHER an identity theft or a mugging - the former probably won't get you killed or in hospital.
A change which forces a reduction in violent crime is a positive change - even if it comes with an uptick in white-collar crime.
>Free markets are where bread sits in lines waiting for me. The alternative is me waiting in lines for bread.
The real difference between those two scenarios is just that in your 'free market' a helluva lot of people can't get bread at all.
There is then more bread than people who CAN get it, and hence it sits and wait.
This is, obviously, great for you - being one of the few who can get bread - but it sucks for the people who can't.
Of course the OTHER thing it does it so perpetually increase the number of people who can't - so more and more bread goes to fewer and fewer people. We often refer to this effect by the shorthand name "rising inequality' - perhaps you've heard of it ?
But your BIGGEST mistake of all is thinking those are the only options. This is not an either-or question. Nothing that involves human beings is ever THAT simple. It's not a choice between "laizes faire capitalism" and "USSR style communism" -there are literally THOUSANDS of other ways we could organise the distribution of resources (which is all an economy is - a system to distribute resources). So while you feel the advantages of liazes-faire capitalism outweigh the problems (but only because none of the really BIG problems happen to you personally), a great many people do not and the argument that it's better than the downsides of Soviet Style communism is complete bullshit - because we don't need to choose EITHER.
Are you seriously so closed-minded that you are convinced, among the thousands of other possible ways we can organise this activity - not ONE of them may offer better pro/con ratios than the one you love ?
Because I am. None of them can... for every resource, service and product. But for every resource, service or product there is a way to organise it that would be better than EITHER laizes-faire capitalism OR soviet-style communism - in THIS location. In another town - another one will work better for the same product. And somewhere in the world, there is one product which, in one town, will work best with laizes-faire capitalism and somewhere out there is one product which, in one town, will work best with soviet-style communism. But for all the millions of other products in the millions of other towns the best answer will be NEITHER of those.
Indeed it's impossible to predict what the best answer will be. The only way to discover it is to experiment with all of them - in every town and for every product- and record the results. The only way to get an economy with minimum downsides and maximum benefits - is to have an economy that's created by the scientific method, experiment, test, improve - and consider all answers to be local to the specific parameters of the experiment. Just because in bummsville Idaho the best way to distribute apples turned out to be "plant an apple tree on every street corner and let everybody pick when they want" doesn't mean it's true for oranges in bummsville idaho and doesn't mean it's true for apples in New York.
This seems intuitively right, but doesn't quite gel with statistics. According to the FBI - the vast majority of terrorists are rightwing Christian-Nationalists (like the trump-lover who shot up Canada a month ago, or the guy in the recent NY attack).
But they get very little publicity - far less than Islamic terrorists do (indeed so MUCH less that most people refuse to believe there are actually more of them and they strike more often). Hell when they do make the news - we go to great lengths to avoid using the word 'terrorist' for them (as if there is any doubt that Dylan Roof was a terrorist).
Yet DESPITE getting less publicity, not getting credited as 'terrorists' and the public being in denial of their existence - they remain the biggest threat we face.
Now, of course, that still doesn't justify panicky over-reaction. It doesn't make it smart to break crucial encryption or give backdoors to governments. Terrorism remains a minor risk - even if you add all the worst examples together - you'd save far more lives if you can get rid of drunk drivers. I'd much rather see the more draconian-minded politicians focus on penalizing those guys to hell. As far as I'm concerned- everybody KNOWS the risks of drunk driving so if you're caught driving drunk you should be charged with attempted murder. That's what you did - you tried to kill innocent people.
Or maybe getting serious about enforcing safety regulations on corporations. If CEOs can't kill people their profit margines would, admittedly, be a lot lower -but you'd save thousands more lives per year than you would even if you could completely eradicate terrorism.
So yes - it makes sense ot see terorism in perspective and plan responses according to how small a problem it really is. But don't imagine that lack of publicity and credit will end it either. It's just that it's such a small problem that trying to end it isn't actually worth the cost in freedom.
"Please keep the kettle on luv, I'll be a little late for afternoon tea. Politics you know."
Yes. when I said "nothign like this" I was including the speed in that assessment.
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all. It also did not affect the global temperature at all. It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
Nope, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Somebody behaves like a dick.
Person who has balls: "You're being a dick"
Person who lacks balls: "Don't tell him he's being a dick er er er grow some balls".
"Rocks don't have a point of view." - Terry Pratchett.
Key point here is: humans DO have a point of view and you are belittling people's real life struggles. Which makes you kind of a dick.
The lesson to learn here is: do not use a word in a metaphoric way in the exact context for which it's literal meaning was coined.
>North Carolina allows amending the birth certificate of a post-op trans person born in North Carolina [cnn.com].
Well that's great if you are post-op and was born there... but that's one very risky, very expensive op - so a great many trans people do not get the option to go for it, and even those that do not until later in life. According to Google only 33% of trans people have undergone any surgery at all - and only 14% went whole-hog sex-change. Lets be generous and assume the NC bill would apply for partial gender confirmation surgeries (like breast enhancements only) - that only one-third who have the option, but now it's further narrowed by the requirement that you be born in the state - which is will reduce the number of eligible folks (all adults - the people harmed the least by these laws). Sure, if you're from another state it may be possible (depending which state) to get that state to alter it but that would likely require an expensive trip back to a place you no longer live -and may not have lived for decades. So even if we are generous and assume less than full sex-changes would qualify - we're probably only talking about say 20% of the people affected having an out. That's probably still being too generous - that 33% was a national figure - I'm willing to wager that in a conservative community like NC the figure is significantly lower (not least because access to doctors willing to do it is harder) - and most of that 33% are living in liberal cities on the coast.
If it's the 14% who had a full sex change... well that reduces the number of people who have this option to what ? Maybe 5% ?
All that said though - my use of the example wasn't really intended to trigger a debate about which side is right here (I did state clearly which side I'm on but that's it) - I was merely using it as one of many examples where cities and states have had differing views on a topic and I think it's overreach for the state to force the city to change, especially since conservative/liberal attitudes very frequently get bordered by city-lines. Cities have a tendency to attract and foster liberal attitudes.
Right now, the federal government has not done it's job and determined if it is, in fact, a human right for people to be a gender other than the one commonly associated with their sex (to my mind - it's impossible to deny that without also denying basic freedom of expression and freedom of thought) - so in the meantime, at least allow citizens to decide for themselves, even if states and cities disagree on the outcome - it would be better than having states take away the few cities where government is NOT being obsessed with people's genitals.
I'll never understand how 'small government' republicans who always talk about keeping government out of people's lives are so happy to invite it into people's pants.