This is why I support a change to a formal basic income. Looking at the stats and polls, though, I don't think it's likely in the near term.
- you are talking about increasing taxes on people who are still productive in the economy populated by more and more unproductive people. For me, as an employer and a person whose views on economics will not change the direction of a country at all the answer is also extremely obvious: outsourcing, which is what I do. 2/3 of my workforce is outsourced already, higher taxes and regulations will cause more outsourcing.
Isn't it clear that severe pain is on the way no matter what under the current economic model? I can't see a way out of it. At all.
- I do. But I understand the root problem, which is absolutely necessary to understand if you are interested in actual solution, not just kicking the proverbial can down the ever shortening road.
Individual freedom, removal of the central planning collectivism, dismantling 99% of the government, thus reducing taxes, regulation, money and interest rate manipulation, returning to a sound money system that promotes actual savings and productivity.
That is the actual way out of it, the Chinese understood it a few decades back, maybe it's time for the Western world to get it.
I have employees today and most of them make less than 15USD/hour (coding for me). There is a reason for outsourcing to other countries, of-course only part of it is price per hour, large part of it is all the regulations (which are taxes) and all other taxes that government imposes upon people who actually employ others.
Misuse of to/too, there/their/they're, your/you're, etc is ignorance.
- so you say.
I know what the difference between to and too is, they're different and there cannot be any doubt about their use. I think you're wrong about your automatic assertion that it is all ignorance though.
I type very fast in a number of languages that I speak, when I type I think in the language that I type. Once in a while I will insert 'here' when I mean to say 'hear' or the other way around. But I too cringe a bit when I see people using loose where they meant to say lose and so on but I can appreciate that the way a word sounds can have a negative impact on writing because very closely sounding words can get mixed into a paragraph, for myself I attribute it to somewhat of a mix of different languages in my head, English is a second... actually a fourth language for me if counted in a sequence of experiences and uses.
My point is that not every misuse of a word is an indicator of ignorance, sometimes a cigar just a cigar and sometimes and error is just an error.
I have been saying for years that an increase in the minimum wage can partly pay for itself by spurring automation. And that's a very good thing, for everyone.
- is automation a goal in itself? If a business can have employees vs using machines, what is the difference to you, as a customer? The bookstore in TFA is a small niche player, it will not automate, it will shut down. The automation will be afforded by much larger companies, but small niche players will simply disappear.
You will not have 1000 small bookstores, all automated, you will have Amazon and maybe Walmart will all the automation and nobody else. In case of small niche players maybe their entire 'shtick' is a personal touch - people serving people as opposed to robots serving people.
Some business owners might prefer to pay a bunch of people $1/hour to dig a ditch using a shovel, but at $15/hour, you gotta use a backhoe.
- right, but it doesn't matter what a business owner wants if nobody will work for him, it takes 2 to tango. A business owner may want to hire a bunch of people to dig with shovels for $1/hour (nothing wrong with that at all, by the way). His business may or may not exist at $15 an hour, but certainly a large business, that can afford to buy and maintain and service a backhoe will exist. What will not exist will be these low paying jobs available to people who cannot find better jobs at all because their skill sets and/or circumstances do not let them have a better job at the time.
I always find it funny when rightwingers complain that a minimum wage increase is simultaneously entirely inflationary AND that it will cause you to lose your job to automation.
- I don't know what it has to do with 'rightwingers', but a minimum wage increase will cause reduction of choices and will cause more automation, why is that a difficult concept? Whether prices will go up... they very well might!
By the way, I suppose when you are talking about 'inflation' you really mean: higher prices. AFAIC inflation only means one thing: expansion of the money supply. Whether prices rise due to that expansion irrelevant, they may or may not (some will absorb the cost of lower value dollar, some will raise prices).
Now, if you have a small company serving somebody in a niche market at lower prices than a large competitor because you are able to hire cheap labour locally, you are competing against much larger players in the market. Those larger players satisfy the demand of their customers. Get rid of the small niche players and now you are stuck with much fewer choices, this may very well mean that for the choices that you used to get you will have to pay premium simply because they are no longer available.
I've often thought that we are using far too LITTLE automation, not too much
- we have as much automation at any moment in time as the market really dictates. It's not 'too much' or 'too little', it's what the market (but of-course also the government) determines.
If burger flipping can be automated, why the heck aren't we automating it? Oh, right, because it's cheaper up-front (but not long-term) to just pay someone a poverty wage.
- what the hell is a 'poverty wage'? Poverty wage is 0. 0 dollars a day is a poverty wage, everything above that is a job. You can take the job or invent your own job. Of-course with the government and theft through taxation, inflation and borrowing (which is future taxation) it's also possible to run a ponzi collectivist (socialist/fascist) scam until it crashes the economy.
And it's also always funny to see rightwingers pull out the Luddite critique, i.e. that automation will put us out of jobs, when in fact we've had increasing automation for centuries, now, but not any lower voluntary unemployment. So the Luddite critique is ridiculous when OTHER people us
That entire document is bogus propaganda, calling 'externality costs' subsidies. They literally state in it: calculating these subsidies cannot be precise. That is because energy companies are not getting any money from the government in subsidies but because by the logic of this propaganda document energy companies are not being taxed enough.
The solar companies that fail in the real economy only exist because of the money subsidies coming to them in form of cash infusion, cash that is partially taken from the taxes that energy companies pay.
I need a gun for a different reason altogether. Imagine that there is a politician somewhere within a 100 meters from you, what do you do? I think guns are extremely important under those scenarios.
Precisely. I (and many others) used to print our assignments that way, issuing a print command from home, then picking up the paper later in the day. 'Hack' my ass. It is no more a hack than posting a comment on an open public forum with anonymous access.
How can it? Petya is a diminutive of the Russian name Petr or Peter for the English speakers. Petya is a little boy, running him on wine is illegal even in Russia;)
No, I would never presume to dictate to people how they should operate their business, that's the collectivist ideology of people who hate individual freedoms and want the State to tell everybody what's what.
What do you mean, 'a call'? Who uses their smartphone for calling people? Absurd. People show them off, twit and twat on them, chatroulette on them, Facebook, wechat, fiber, whatsup, tinder, etc, nobody calls or picksup anymore.
- ? what? People are making money by building and maintaining roads everywhere in the world. Hell, in Canada they do it, what are you talking about? I 100% prefer private roads that I can pay a fee to use to any form of government taxes.
Or does your solution of traveling around a city involve stopping for a toll booth every 50 feet?
- I am sure the free market can come up with a solution that is the most profitable, sustainable, while affordable and at high quality. That's what free market does. Would multiple road operators agree on a number of formats or standards to make toll roads as smooth as possible? I say yes, they would.
I'm still interested in knowing how you see this as a workable solution.
- it's a perfectly workable solution. The only requirement is that there shouldn't be any government taxing income and wealth, controlling money and interest rates, setting business rules (which are taxes), setting price minimums or maximums, including labour prices (minimum wage, etc.)
People find a way to make it work because it's profitable to make it work.
the only interesting part of this as always the fact that government de-facto is allowed to be involved in any at all trades by companies and individuals. It's despicable. It's despicable that people who were born in the country that was based on the principles of individual freedom are still more than OK with governments controlling trade, business, labour, pricing, money, interest rates, anything at all that governments really shouldn't be involved with at all.
The only question is: who owns the place? Whoever owns the place and rents/leases it out or uses it in other ways is the individual in charge, it is his place, his property, he maintains it in the same exact way an individual has to maintain any other property he owns for it not to fall apart.
The entire question is based on the premise that nobody owns the property, I disagree. AFAIC so called 'public ownership' is the problem that cannot be fixed because it's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Public property is the problem, the solution is private property.
Also, who decides to make a highway from one city to the next?
- ask yourself this question, why does USA have a system of interstate highways controlled by the federal government and what was there before? Before there was a system of rail roads, which were private. Those were built by private companies over the 19th century, eventually the federal government created the ICC and stepped into the game, imposed fixed prices to 'fight unfair prices', regulated the railroads to hell. Woodrow Wilson nationalized the rail road in 1917, destroyed profitability of the companies, imposed various taxes that made running rail impractical. Then government stepped in with a number of initiatives to prop up the car manufacturers, who appealed to the government (to the tune of tens of millions of then much more valuable dollars). The Railway Labor Act of 1930s made rail and air business not just impractical but completely unprofitable thus destroying the truly market based and efficient means of transportation for the entire nation actually.
Today rail and air are centrally controlled, taxed and subsidised in a way that obviously makes it unprofitable for individuals to run them all while the system of interstate highways is controlled and subsidised by government as well, making it extremely inefficient and completely unsustainable from point of view economics.
USA infrastructure will not exist once the government can no longer steal to subsidise it, all that infrastructure will fall into disarray and will be destroyed and otherwise dismantled.
Eventually private people will rebuilt self sustainable infrastructure but not without a huge amount of economic destruction that will precede it.
Why does government do all these things? Because they are profitable for politicians, not for the economy of the society they are destroying.
I'm very confused about how infrastructure even stays usable under your philosophy. Individuals benefiting themselves aren't going to fix the roads.
- of-course they do, there are thousands of privately owned roads fixed by individuals (when I say individuals I mean by private people, owners of the road). That's how and why infrastructure should be built - somebody with access to a pool of capital seeing a way to profit by providing people with infrastructure that wasn't there before. Doing this from completely selfish motives of making money and thus ensuring that we have infrastructure that is sustainable without any subsidies of oppression via taxation whatsoever.
I disagree, I am acutely aware of what we can achieve as individuals who are looking to improve their own lives and providing services and products to others. There is no conflict here between my ideas on freedom of the individual working to benefit himself and by extension improving the society and completely disagreeing with creating an atmosphere of collectivism, that removes individual freedoms to achieve extremely questionable goals with even unquestionably horrible means.
I have 0 interest in achieving the collectivist goals and don't want what you call 'society' to 'work'. To me hearing about a 'working society' from a collectivist = oppression of my individual freedoms.
The only thing that society can do to make it 'work' is to stop forcing individual people from doing things that the mob wants as a collective.
I wouldn't be talking about a level of intelligence specifically but I want to point out that anybody who is focused on a goal will feel irritated when detracted from the task in front of them that works towards that goal and having friends invite you to various social interactions is taking time away from those tasks. I know it first hand, I had to decline quite a number of invitations over the years because I do not have time for this, I am busy and what I am busy with is part of my overall goal.
Collectivists of all colours are masquerading as people with good intentions. Of course their results at the end are the same: destruction of individual freedoms, destruction of the human right for self determination, confiscation of income and wealth by the oppressive, authoritarian government to build the power of the state. I see socialists, fascists, communists, feminists, greens, all religions for what they are: murderers, thieves, dictators, nothing less and nothing more.
Liberal used to mean free from government oppression while socialist always meant authoritarian collectivist. The so called 'democratic socialism' of Sanders is government oppression of some based on the voting of the majority to steal and redistribute, basically collectivist or mob oppression of minorities. In the USA, liberal today in the basically socialist.
To me all forms of collectivism, socialism, fascism, religious, nationalist is no different from authoritarian and oppressive, anti individual freedom, anti humanist. Collectivism brings us the evil of the gulags, government taxation of income and wealth with the intent of equalization and so called 'solidarity', which is a misnomer for theft and oppression. I have never and will not ever feel and have any solidarity with anybody based on oppression, coercion and violence and all that government is - it is oppression, coercion and violence.
I am automating logistics, shipping, retail, supply chain. Cashiers are not that difficult to replace completely, it is a case by case basis, but basically 80% can be automated away in just a few years.
The project raises concern among bird lovers, who have long decried the number of birds and bats killed by wind turbines. The proposition of humongous facilities makes conservation groups nervous.
"The higher you go, you start potentially impacting more migratory birds that otherwise would have flown over the tops of [smaller] turbines," said Michael Parr, vice president and chief conservation officer for the American Bird Conservancy.
Researchers acknowledge the anxiety over how 656.2-foot blades â" officially called Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotors â" would affect the environment.
If the technology works, Loth wants to avoid putting the big-blade facilities on land. Instead they would be put offshore â" some 20 to 25 miles from the coast.
"I really want to focus on going far enough offshore that we're away from the migratory patterns of the birds," Loth said.
But Parr said an offshore wind farm might not be an improvement.
"The problem with offshore turbines is that it's virtually impossible to know and track over time what impact they're having [on bird deaths] because any birds that get struck will fall directly into the ocean and be washed away by the currents or get eaten by sharks," he said.
- seriously...
I wonder if these bird lovers ever considered what coal and diesel power plant pollution does to birds, migratory or otherwise? How many birds die, I wonder, because of the pollution that is spewed into the atmosphere by the billions of tons around the world?
This turbine is a fine concept I think, though I think nuclear is the way to go of-course, why not build more wind turbines, especially in the oceans. Do it if it works. The birds will learn to avoid the turbine blades but they definitely cannot do much about the dirty air that we produce.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I support a change to a formal basic income. Looking at the stats and polls, though, I don't think it's likely in the near term.
- you are talking about increasing taxes on people who are still productive in the economy populated by more and more unproductive people. For me, as an employer and a person whose views on economics will not change the direction of a country at all the answer is also extremely obvious: outsourcing, which is what I do. 2/3 of my workforce is outsourced already, higher taxes and regulations will cause more outsourcing.
Isn't it clear that severe pain is on the way no matter what under the current economic model? I can't see a way out of it. At all.
- I do. But I understand the root problem, which is absolutely necessary to understand if you are interested in actual solution, not just kicking the proverbial can down the ever shortening road.
Individual freedom, removal of the central planning collectivism, dismantling 99% of the government, thus reducing taxes, regulation, money and interest rate manipulation, returning to a sound money system that promotes actual savings and productivity.
That is the actual way out of it, the Chinese understood it a few decades back, maybe it's time for the Western world to get it.
I have employees today and most of them make less than 15USD/hour (coding for me). There is a reason for outsourcing to other countries, of-course only part of it is price per hour, large part of it is all the regulations (which are taxes) and all other taxes that government imposes upon people who actually employ others.
Misuse of to/too, there/their/they're, your/you're, etc is ignorance.
- so you say.
I know what the difference between to and too is, they're different and there cannot be any doubt about their use. I think you're wrong about your automatic assertion that it is all ignorance though.
I type very fast in a number of languages that I speak, when I type I think in the language that I type. Once in a while I will insert 'here' when I mean to say 'hear' or the other way around. But I too cringe a bit when I see people using loose where they meant to say lose and so on but I can appreciate that the way a word sounds can have a negative impact on writing because very closely sounding words can get mixed into a paragraph, for myself I attribute it to somewhat of a mix of different languages in my head, English is a second... actually a fourth language for me if counted in a sequence of experiences and uses.
My point is that not every misuse of a word is an indicator of ignorance, sometimes a cigar just a cigar and sometimes and error is just an error.
I have been saying for years that an increase in the minimum wage can partly pay for itself by spurring automation. And that's a very good thing, for everyone.
- is automation a goal in itself? If a business can have employees vs using machines, what is the difference to you, as a customer? The bookstore in TFA is a small niche player, it will not automate, it will shut down. The automation will be afforded by much larger companies, but small niche players will simply disappear.
You will not have 1000 small bookstores, all automated, you will have Amazon and maybe Walmart will all the automation and nobody else. In case of small niche players maybe their entire 'shtick' is a personal touch - people serving people as opposed to robots serving people.
Some business owners might prefer to pay a bunch of people $1/hour to dig a ditch using a shovel, but at $15/hour, you gotta use a backhoe.
- right, but it doesn't matter what a business owner wants if nobody will work for him, it takes 2 to tango. A business owner may want to hire a bunch of people to dig with shovels for $1/hour (nothing wrong with that at all, by the way). His business may or may not exist at $15 an hour, but certainly a large business, that can afford to buy and maintain and service a backhoe will exist. What will not exist will be these low paying jobs available to people who cannot find better jobs at all because their skill sets and/or circumstances do not let them have a better job at the time.
I always find it funny when rightwingers complain that a minimum wage increase is simultaneously entirely inflationary AND that it will cause you to lose your job to automation.
- I don't know what it has to do with 'rightwingers', but a minimum wage increase will cause reduction of choices and will cause more automation, why is that a difficult concept? Whether prices will go up... they very well might!
By the way, I suppose when you are talking about 'inflation' you really mean: higher prices. AFAIC inflation only means one thing: expansion of the money supply. Whether prices rise due to that expansion irrelevant, they may or may not (some will absorb the cost of lower value dollar, some will raise prices).
Now, if you have a small company serving somebody in a niche market at lower prices than a large competitor because you are able to hire cheap labour locally, you are competing against much larger players in the market. Those larger players satisfy the demand of their customers. Get rid of the small niche players and now you are stuck with much fewer choices, this may very well mean that for the choices that you used to get you will have to pay premium simply because they are no longer available.
I've often thought that we are using far too LITTLE automation, not too much
- we have as much automation at any moment in time as the market really dictates. It's not 'too much' or 'too little', it's what the market (but of-course also the government) determines.
If burger flipping can be automated, why the heck aren't we automating it? Oh, right, because it's cheaper up-front (but not long-term) to just pay someone a poverty wage.
- what the hell is a 'poverty wage'? Poverty wage is 0. 0 dollars a day is a poverty wage, everything above that is a job. You can take the job or invent your own job. Of-course with the government and theft through taxation, inflation and borrowing (which is future taxation) it's also possible to run a ponzi collectivist (socialist/fascist) scam until it crashes the economy.
And it's also always funny to see rightwingers pull out the Luddite critique, i.e. that automation will put us out of jobs, when in fact we've had increasing automation for centuries, now, but not any lower voluntary unemployment. So the Luddite critique is ridiculous when OTHER people us
That entire document is bogus propaganda, calling 'externality costs' subsidies. They literally state in it: calculating these subsidies cannot be precise. That is because energy companies are not getting any money from the government in subsidies but because by the logic of this propaganda document energy companies are not being taxed enough.
The solar companies that fail in the real economy only exist because of the money subsidies coming to them in form of cash infusion, cash that is partially taken from the taxes that energy companies pay.
I need a gun for a different reason altogether. Imagine that there is a politician somewhere within a 100 meters from you, what do you do? I think guns are extremely important under those scenarios.
Precisely. I (and many others) used to print our assignments that way, issuing a print command from home, then picking up the paper later in the day. 'Hack' my ass. It is no more a hack than posting a comment on an open public forum with anonymous access.
I support nuclear 100% and by the way, the more anti nuclear propaganda I see from shills like mdsolar the more I support nuclear.
How can it? Petya is a diminutive of the Russian name Petr or Peter for the English speakers. Petya is a little boy, running him on wine is illegal even in Russia ;)
Oh, please, if there is one class of people in today's America that you can absolutely openly discriminate against, it's white males.
No, I would never presume to dictate to people how they should operate their business, that's the collectivist ideology of people who hate individual freedoms and want the State to tell everybody what's what.
What do you mean, 'a call'? Who uses their smartphone for calling people? Absurd. People show them off, twit and twat on them, chatroulette on them, Facebook, wechat, fiber, whatsup, tinder, etc, nobody calls or picksup anymore.
Why would anyone want to own a road?
- ? what? People are making money by building and maintaining roads everywhere in the world. Hell, in Canada they do it, what are you talking about? I 100% prefer private roads that I can pay a fee to use to any form of government taxes.
Or does your solution of traveling around a city involve stopping for a toll booth every 50 feet?
- I am sure the free market can come up with a solution that is the most profitable, sustainable, while affordable and at high quality. That's what free market does. Would multiple road operators agree on a number of formats or standards to make toll roads as smooth as possible? I say yes, they would.
I'm still interested in knowing how you see this as a workable solution.
- it's a perfectly workable solution. The only requirement is that there shouldn't be any government taxing income and wealth, controlling money and interest rates, setting business rules (which are taxes), setting price minimums or maximums, including labour prices (minimum wage, etc.)
People find a way to make it work because it's profitable to make it work.
the only interesting part of this as always the fact that government de-facto is allowed to be involved in any at all trades by companies and individuals. It's despicable. It's despicable that people who were born in the country that was based on the principles of individual freedom are still more than OK with governments controlling trade, business, labour, pricing, money, interest rates, anything at all that governments really shouldn't be involved with at all.
The only question is: who owns the place? Whoever owns the place and rents/leases it out or uses it in other ways is the individual in charge, it is his place, his property, he maintains it in the same exact way an individual has to maintain any other property he owns for it not to fall apart.
The entire question is based on the premise that nobody owns the property, I disagree. AFAIC so called 'public ownership' is the problem that cannot be fixed because it's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Public property is the problem, the solution is private property.
Also, who decides to make a highway from one city to the next?
- ask yourself this question, why does USA have a system of interstate highways controlled by the federal government and what was there before? Before there was a system of rail roads, which were private. Those were built by private companies over the 19th century, eventually the federal government created the ICC and stepped into the game, imposed fixed prices to 'fight unfair prices', regulated the railroads to hell. Woodrow Wilson nationalized the rail road in 1917, destroyed profitability of the companies, imposed various taxes that made running rail impractical. Then government stepped in with a number of initiatives to prop up the car manufacturers, who appealed to the government (to the tune of tens of millions of then much more valuable dollars). The Railway Labor Act of 1930s made rail and air business not just impractical but completely unprofitable thus destroying the truly market based and efficient means of transportation for the entire nation actually.
Today rail and air are centrally controlled, taxed and subsidised in a way that obviously makes it unprofitable for individuals to run them all while the system of interstate highways is controlled and subsidised by government as well, making it extremely inefficient and completely unsustainable from point of view economics.
USA infrastructure will not exist once the government can no longer steal to subsidise it, all that infrastructure will fall into disarray and will be destroyed and otherwise dismantled.
Eventually private people will rebuilt self sustainable infrastructure but not without a huge amount of economic destruction that will precede it.
Why does government do all these things? Because they are profitable for politicians, not for the economy of the society they are destroying.
I'm very confused about how infrastructure even stays usable under your philosophy. Individuals benefiting themselves aren't going to fix the roads.
- of-course they do, there are thousands of privately owned roads fixed by individuals (when I say individuals I mean by private people, owners of the road). That's how and why infrastructure should be built - somebody with access to a pool of capital seeing a way to profit by providing people with infrastructure that wasn't there before. Doing this from completely selfish motives of making money and thus ensuring that we have infrastructure that is sustainable without any subsidies of oppression via taxation whatsoever.
I disagree, I am acutely aware of what we can achieve as individuals who are looking to improve their own lives and providing services and products to others. There is no conflict here between my ideas on freedom of the individual working to benefit himself and by extension improving the society and completely disagreeing with creating an atmosphere of collectivism, that removes individual freedoms to achieve extremely questionable goals with even unquestionably horrible means.
I have 0 interest in achieving the collectivist goals and don't want what you call 'society' to 'work'. To me hearing about a 'working society' from a collectivist = oppression of my individual freedoms.
The only thing that society can do to make it 'work' is to stop forcing individual people from doing things that the mob wants as a collective.
I know, it is amazing, sometimes the objective truth gets upvotes.
I wouldn't be talking about a level of intelligence specifically but I want to point out that anybody who is focused on a goal will feel irritated when detracted from the task in front of them that works towards that goal and having friends invite you to various social interactions is taking time away from those tasks. I know it first hand, I had to decline quite a number of invitations over the years because I do not have time for this, I am busy and what I am busy with is part of my overall goal.
Collectivists of all colours are masquerading as people with good intentions. Of course their results at the end are the same: destruction of individual freedoms, destruction of the human right for self determination, confiscation of income and wealth by the oppressive, authoritarian government to build the power of the state. I see socialists, fascists, communists, feminists, greens, all religions for what they are: murderers, thieves, dictators, nothing less and nothing more.
Liberal used to mean free from government oppression while socialist always meant authoritarian collectivist. The so called 'democratic socialism' of Sanders is government oppression of some based on the voting of the majority to steal and redistribute, basically collectivist or mob oppression of minorities. In the USA, liberal today in the basically socialist.
To me all forms of collectivism, socialism, fascism, religious, nationalist is no different from authoritarian and oppressive, anti individual freedom, anti humanist. Collectivism brings us the evil of the gulags, government taxation of income and wealth with the intent of equalization and so called 'solidarity', which is a misnomer for theft and oppression. I have never and will not ever feel and have any solidarity with anybody based on oppression, coercion and violence and all that government is - it is oppression, coercion and violence.
I am automating logistics, shipping, retail, supply chain. Cashiers are not that difficult to replace completely, it is a case by case basis, but basically 80% can be automated away in just a few years.
From TFA:
The project raises concern among bird lovers, who have long decried the number of birds and bats killed by wind turbines. The proposition of humongous facilities makes conservation groups nervous.
"The higher you go, you start potentially impacting more migratory birds that otherwise would have flown over the tops of [smaller] turbines," said Michael Parr, vice president and chief conservation officer for the American Bird Conservancy.
Researchers acknowledge the anxiety over how 656.2-foot blades â" officially called Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotors â" would affect the environment.
If the technology works, Loth wants to avoid putting the big-blade facilities on land. Instead they would be put offshore â" some 20 to 25 miles from the coast.
"I really want to focus on going far enough offshore that we're away from the migratory patterns of the birds," Loth said.
But Parr said an offshore wind farm might not be an improvement.
"The problem with offshore turbines is that it's virtually impossible to know and track over time what impact they're having [on bird deaths] because any birds that get struck will fall directly into the ocean and be washed away by the currents or get eaten by sharks," he said.
- seriously...
I wonder if these bird lovers ever considered what coal and diesel power plant pollution does to birds, migratory or otherwise? How many birds die, I wonder, because of the pollution that is spewed into the atmosphere by the billions of tons around the world?
This turbine is a fine concept I think, though I think nuclear is the way to go of-course, why not build more wind turbines, especially in the oceans. Do it if it works. The birds will learn to avoid the turbine blades but they definitely cannot do much about the dirty air that we produce.