And is but one fiber/oilseed crop with this property. Honestly, hemp's stats aren't that impressive compared to a lot of its competitors. Yeah, it beats some common commercial crops, but there are other plants which beat it in the various properties people boast about for it (productivity, fiber strength, oil production, oil quality, etc).
We would do *nothing* else all day long except vote on issues we would barely understand.
And there's a very simple solution for this: delegation and override. You can delegate your default vote to anyone or any group you want, even have it broken down by group (aka, "I delegate my environmental-issue votes to the Sierra Club, my abortion votes to NARAL, my votes on the military to my friend Jim..." etc). Whenever you take the time to vote, it overrides your default. You can change your default at any time.
That is a lie. Point to me where in the fund's charter it says that it's government-backed.
That was entirely made up; what happened was that money that remained in the UK was seized under a piece of legislation that had originally been intended to seize, among other things, terrorists funds.
What you should be asking yourself is, "What do you think it means when you have anti-terrorism legislation invoked against you?" If that's hard for you, just picture it applied to other situations. "Hey everyone, we're pressing charges against James here with the Anti-Rape And Pedophilia Act of 2004. Oh, no, he's not a rapist or pedophile, we just chose that law..." Think James would be mad?
but the thing that really pissed off UK depositors was how our banks shut their doors so depositors couldn't get their money back, meanwhile branches in Iceland and cash machines were still spewing out money to any Icelander that wanted some, leaving less to pay off the banks creditors outside of the country
Because our goverment passed a new emergency law *after* the crash providing guarantees for Icelanders with Icesave accounts, at government expense, which is why they stayed open. Your government was more than free to do the same for you. It had absolutely no bearing on whether the Icesave were insured by the government before that (which, as you can plainly tell by reading the charter, linked above, they were not); the law didn't even exist when Brits were putting their money in. In short, our government could give everyone who had an Icesave account in Iceland a free pony if they wanted; it wouldn't mean you were owed one. "News Flash, Governments Spend Tax Money On Their Own Citizens".
Which makes more sense. Ask yourself this: what's the more important thing for your eye to catch, where thousands/millions/billions breaks, or where the decimal is? (I think almost anyone would respond "where the decimal is"). Now ask yourself, "which is a larger and more visible character, "," or "."?
I think it's hard to find a country that *wasn't* economically pillaged in some way or another by the British at some point in the past couple centuries. And much of it isn't ancient history, either.
Except they didn't. Even the simple firearms of the day were imported for many years.
Google the term "colonial gunsmith". In case you forgot, not only did the US produce guns, but it even invented some. Remember the Kentucky Longrifle? Wikipedia says (unreferenced) that the first gunsmith in the US was a german immigrant in 1620, which would put them right at the beginning of the British colonization. And even if the first ships didn't have a gunsmith, there's no reason they *couldn't* have. It only took one person to make guns, and the tools they used, any blacksmith could make.
Funny, that's exactly like early settlers colonizing the New World
That's simply not true. The early settlers relied on overseas supplies *where more convenient*, but had the capability to make (and did, to varying degrees) everything that they needed. They produced saltpeter, mined sulfur, and made charcoal for gunpowder. They mined and melted and cast lead for shot. They used charcoal to fire iron forges. All of this sort of stuff happened in amazingly short order. There were blacksmiths in the very first colonies.
Thought I responded to this already, but the response isn't here:( I'll just sum up very quickly: Already wrote about this elsewhere in this page, highly misleading, unemployment always lower in summer (seasonal jobs), Icelandic unemployment rate for the past several decades normally ranges 1-3%, sometimes below 1% (different countries have different "normal" unemployment rates, Iceland's is very low, so this is abnormally high). And people conveniently ignore all the facts that really suck about the current status in Iceland, like that in a country where most goods are imported, the currency is worth half of what it was before, and is staying the same or getting worse.
Does grounding a balloon work? Nope. And the dust will cling to practically anything anyway, it's just especially bad for something like a thin plastic film.
There is some in the ice caps and in the form of frost, but I thought it was unlikely to be enough for terraforming.
Quite true. There's a common myth that Mars has vast quantities of dry ice, but in reality, the northern polar cap is estimated to rarely get more than (if I'm remembering the numbers correctly) a meter or so deep, and the southern cap, 8 meters, in terms of dry ice. The rest is water ice.
Not as easy as it first sounds. Just to mention two big problems:
1) Plastics vs. martian dust. Picture what will happen probably within a matter of days as the whipping (low density, but high velocity) wind induces static charges on the thin plastic like rubbing a balloon in your hair.
2) Lifespan: Clear plastic films have enough trouble with ionizing radiation limiting their lifespans on Earth. A greenhouse on earth made of untreated polyethylene film is generally good for only one growing season, and polypropylene, two. Various chemical additives can extend the lifespan to as much as 10 years before they start to fog up too much or become too brittle to be practical. The factor that ages them is ionizing radiation, which ruins the bond structure by creating free radicals that catalytically destroy the film. Ionizing radiation on earth is very limited. Not so on Mars. Not to mention what most plants think of ionizing radiation, too...
Not saying they're impossible, but there's some really big challenges to deal with here... it might even just be easier to take the sun out of the picture and grow plants underground using electricity and lightning.
I wrote an essay about this in more detail here. To try to sum up: People often talk about colonizing another planet like early settlers colonizing the New World. But that's a bad analogy. Early settlers had dramatically simpler technology trees that they could readily assemble with their bare hands. Human survival on Mars depends entirely on new and replacement parts using modern technology (everything from CO2 scrubbers to space suits), which means to be self-sustaining, you have to implement a large chunk of our modern technology trees on Mars. How would you plan to do this staggeringly massive feat?
To elaborate on what I mean by "technology trees": Let's say you have a metal part designed to handle high temeratures, say, in some forge. High temperature alloys are typically some mix like titanium, nickel, and iron. So now we have three metal requirements; let's trace back the one that's usually easiest. Iron is typically produced from iron oxide, coke, limestone, oxygen, and fluxing agents such as fluorspar and magnesium minerals, as well as insert gases to ensure proper mixing, water for watercooling of parts, etc. That went from one required resource to "a bunch". Not to mention all the new parts you need to maintain and replace when they break: crucibles, slag skimmers, tubing of all sorts, valves of all sorts, cranes with cables and pulleys, bearings, and on and on. Now, iron oxide is readily available to be mined on mars. The others not so much. On Mars it gets a bit easier using the Linz-Donowitz process instead of a blast furnace, so you'd probably burn methane from the Sabatier process with insufficient oxygen from electrolysis with low-sulfur iron ore (sulfur reduced by yet process to generate the sulfuric acid needed for other industrial processes, since getting sulfur from petroleum isn't possible on mars). Limestone isn't as readily available on Mars; you need to use oolitic lime, or maybe dolomite as a substitute. And of course you need to mine and refine your fluxes (each of them having their own refining proceses).
Notice how quickly it expands? It keeps on going because each of those processes have their own inputs with their own processes and even something that sounds extremely simple - say, mining some abundant mineral - would involve a staggering array of mining machines (each with tons of parts to wear down and break, as well as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, etc), bucket loaders, trucks, separation processes (float baths, etc), ball mills, and of course various leaching and rinsing stages, all imparting their own dependency trees. Modern technology is dependent on tech based on tech based on tech; it's the nature of the beast.
If you want to try to at least simplify the "refining" stages, yes, there are other less "industrial" processes that can be used for isolating minerals, like, say, plasma centrifuges. But the rub is that everything has an opportunity cost, and when you're making yourself consume vast amounts of energy, labor, or separation facility resources in order to produce only small amounts of resources, you're imposing brand new requirements on what your colony must produce to yield those newly-imposed demands. Then on top of this, you have the fact that not every resource will be found in one spot. As on earth, Mars would need to ship resources from all around the planet. So you need to have a planetary transportation network that can move things in bulk, with minimal energy usage and usage of other consumables.
Raw elements must become compounds and alloys, in a variety of forging and refining processes (just think of the crazy complexity of an oil refinery and chemical plant for an example). Compounds must become parts, in a variety of casting and milling processes (and with the scale of all of the above, "one-off" rapid prototyping processes like 3d printing don't cut it except for suitable rare parts, or you hit the
One of the prime justifications of becoming a multi-planet species is that we could survive the loss of the Earth. Kind of hard to do that when your colonies need the Earth to survive.
Really low-mass spacecraft launches are more expensive per kilogram; that's just the way it works. But it does go to show that all of the people on Slashdot several years ago talking about how Branson is just a hop, skip, and a jump from cheap orbital space travel because he made a suborbital joyride, and how their prices were going to blow everyone's away because the joyride cost hundreds of thousands per person instead of millions... well, I hope this is a dose of reality as to how much more expensive and difficult orbital travel is than suborbital.
First off, there were *three* cod wars, in case you forgot. After overfishing your waters (and the waters of several other countries - I've found the Irish people I've met have a lot to complain about on this front, too), you sent trawlers to overfish other people's waters. Iceland's among them, but hardly alone. You started doing that not long after you *invaded* and occupied Iceland, a neutral country, with one of the most bungling invasions ever, in order to prevent a nonexistent Nazi plan which existed only in your leaders' minds. But I digress. You started fishing as little as *4 kilometers* from Iceland's shore, meaning that Icelanders could sit there and easily watch your trawlers overfishing Iceland's waters. The first Cod War pushed you back to 12, which is still easily in sight of the shore, overfishing Iceland's waters with even more ships involved. The second Cod War pushed you back to what was then the international limit of 50km. However, by the 1970s, many nations had already began asserting 200km exclusive economic zones - in fact, the first ones were claimed in the 1940s. By the 1970s, they had become standard. Heck, the groundwork for the concept of the EEZ began from work from UK in *1939* with the Panama declaration, and then in 1942 concerning the Gulf of Paria. The UK claimed exclusive economic access to a wide range of area outside their territorial waters in 1964. And even if all this wasn't the case, it's ridiculous that Britain felt that it had the god-given right to trawl up the lion's share of the fish in waters right next to Iceland - let alone ignoring how much you were overexploiting the stocks (something Iceland immediately reversed). Iceland's actions were upheld by the International Court of Justice in 1974 (United Kingdom vs. Iceland, 1974 ICJ Rep 3, 75).
You were saying?
do you really think the cost would add up to the $5 billion you owe to Britain and the Netherlands?
Well, let's see... Iceland's fisheries are worth about $1.5 billion a year, and you were exploiting them from the 1940s to the 1970s... so no, you still owe us a damn lot more. Perhaps *you* should vote on a repayment plan.
concerning a single industry that really isn't that important.
Once again, the world revolves around you. Yeah, not that important for you. It's only 40% of our entire economy. Which was the crux of the whole problem.
Past problems aside, if someone lends you money you owe it to them to pay it back.
Companies go bankrupt. Deal with it. Just ignoring that there was clearly no government guarantee, who in their right mind expects a government backing on a 6% interest rate? What's next, do you want us to ensure that anyone who buys junk bonds to get their money back if they loses value? Full reward, no risk, is that the plan?
Especially if the countries lending it are currently hard up themselves
Oh yeah, really hard up compared to Iceland, which had just had the per-capita equivalent of 300 Lehman Brothers fail at once.
I was actually referring to the part just before that also: "Forstjóri Valitors á Íslandi, Viðar (TH)orkelsson, segir að (th)að hafi verið uppi vísbendingar um að starfsemi Wikileaks samræmdust ekki reglum sem al(th)jóðlegu kortasamtökin setja" - The president of Valitor in Iceland, Viðar (TH)orkelsson, says that there is evidence that the activities of Wikileaks are not in accordance with the laws/regulations which the international card agency set.".
Aka, they don't care about Wikileaks itself, but thinks that they were breaking the law/regulations concerning credit card payments.
Not true, fair troll, not true! "The banks" were not involved in the decision making process. The British and Dutch governments bailed out their citizens, and then demanded Iceland compensate them. The three primary players involved have been Iceland, the UK, and the Netherlands. The next biggest players have been the EU (in particular, the EFTA court system, but the EU has filed an amicus curae-type filing) and the IMF.
Slashdot Mirror
And is but one fiber/oilseed crop with this property. Honestly, hemp's stats aren't that impressive compared to a lot of its competitors. Yeah, it beats some common commercial crops, but there are other plants which beat it in the various properties people boast about for it (productivity, fiber strength, oil production, oil quality, etc).
And there's a very simple solution for this: delegation and override. You can delegate your default vote to anyone or any group you want, even have it broken down by group (aka, "I delegate my environmental-issue votes to the Sierra Club, my abortion votes to NARAL, my votes on the military to my friend Jim..." etc). Whenever you take the time to vote, it overrides your default. You can change your default at any time.
Sounds like the obvious solution to me.
That is a lie. Point to me where in the fund's charter it says that it's government-backed.
What you should be asking yourself is, "What do you think it means when you have anti-terrorism legislation invoked against you?" If that's hard for you, just picture it applied to other situations. "Hey everyone, we're pressing charges against James here with the Anti-Rape And Pedophilia Act of 2004. Oh, no, he's not a rapist or pedophile, we just chose that law..." Think James would be mad?
Because our goverment passed a new emergency law *after* the crash providing guarantees for Icelanders with Icesave accounts, at government expense, which is why they stayed open. Your government was more than free to do the same for you. It had absolutely no bearing on whether the Icesave were insured by the government before that (which, as you can plainly tell by reading the charter, linked above, they were not); the law didn't even exist when Brits were putting their money in. In short, our government could give everyone who had an Icesave account in Iceland a free pony if they wanted; it wouldn't mean you were owed one. "News Flash, Governments Spend Tax Money On Their Own Citizens".
It's because the comma is the decimal separator.
Which makes more sense. Ask yourself this: what's the more important thing for your eye to catch, where thousands/millions/billions breaks, or where the decimal is? (I think almost anyone would respond "where the decimal is"). Now ask yourself, "which is a larger and more visible character, "," or "."?
I think it's hard to find a country that *wasn't* economically pillaged in some way or another by the British at some point in the past couple centuries. And much of it isn't ancient history, either.
And I wasn't meaning to disparage yours either - you're quite lucky that you can get that kind of interest rate. That's truly remarkable!
Google the term "colonial gunsmith". In case you forgot, not only did the US produce guns, but it even invented some. Remember the Kentucky Longrifle? Wikipedia says (unreferenced) that the first gunsmith in the US was a german immigrant in 1620, which would put them right at the beginning of the British colonization. And even if the first ships didn't have a gunsmith, there's no reason they *couldn't* have. It only took one person to make guns, and the tools they used, any blacksmith could make.
That's simply not true. The early settlers relied on overseas supplies *where more convenient*, but had the capability to make (and did, to varying degrees) everything that they needed. They produced saltpeter, mined sulfur, and made charcoal for gunpowder. They mined and melted and cast lead for shot. They used charcoal to fire iron forges. All of this sort of stuff happened in amazingly short order. There were blacksmiths in the very first colonies.
Or south, for that matter. I live in Iceland. I doubt it'll be dark enough at night to see northern lights unless they're *really* bright.
Thought I responded to this already, but the response isn't here :( I'll just sum up very quickly: Already wrote about this elsewhere in this page, highly misleading, unemployment always lower in summer (seasonal jobs), Icelandic unemployment rate for the past several decades normally ranges 1-3%, sometimes below 1% (different countries have different "normal" unemployment rates, Iceland's is very low, so this is abnormally high). And people conveniently ignore all the facts that really suck about the current status in Iceland, like that in a country where most goods are imported, the currency is worth half of what it was before, and is staying the same or getting worse.
Does grounding a balloon work? Nope. And the dust will cling to practically anything anyway, it's just especially bad for something like a thin plastic film.
Quite true. There's a common myth that Mars has vast quantities of dry ice, but in reality, the northern polar cap is estimated to rarely get more than (if I'm remembering the numbers correctly) a meter or so deep, and the southern cap, 8 meters, in terms of dry ice. The rest is water ice.
Lots of water ice on Mars, at least...
Not as easy as it first sounds. Just to mention two big problems:
1) Plastics vs. martian dust. Picture what will happen probably within a matter of days as the whipping (low density, but high velocity) wind induces static charges on the thin plastic like rubbing a balloon in your hair.
2) Lifespan: Clear plastic films have enough trouble with ionizing radiation limiting their lifespans on Earth. A greenhouse on earth made of untreated polyethylene film is generally good for only one growing season, and polypropylene, two. Various chemical additives can extend the lifespan to as much as 10 years before they start to fog up too much or become too brittle to be practical. The factor that ages them is ionizing radiation, which ruins the bond structure by creating free radicals that catalytically destroy the film. Ionizing radiation on earth is very limited. Not so on Mars. Not to mention what most plants think of ionizing radiation, too...
Not saying they're impossible, but there's some really big challenges to deal with here... it might even just be easier to take the sun out of the picture and grow plants underground using electricity and lightning.
I wrote an essay about this in more detail here. To try to sum up: People often talk about colonizing another planet like early settlers colonizing the New World. But that's a bad analogy. Early settlers had dramatically simpler technology trees that they could readily assemble with their bare hands. Human survival on Mars depends entirely on new and replacement parts using modern technology (everything from CO2 scrubbers to space suits), which means to be self-sustaining, you have to implement a large chunk of our modern technology trees on Mars. How would you plan to do this staggeringly massive feat?
To elaborate on what I mean by "technology trees": Let's say you have a metal part designed to handle high temeratures, say, in some forge. High temperature alloys are typically some mix like titanium, nickel, and iron. So now we have three metal requirements; let's trace back the one that's usually easiest. Iron is typically produced from iron oxide, coke, limestone, oxygen, and fluxing agents such as fluorspar and magnesium minerals, as well as insert gases to ensure proper mixing, water for watercooling of parts, etc. That went from one required resource to "a bunch". Not to mention all the new parts you need to maintain and replace when they break: crucibles, slag skimmers, tubing of all sorts, valves of all sorts, cranes with cables and pulleys, bearings, and on and on. Now, iron oxide is readily available to be mined on mars. The others not so much. On Mars it gets a bit easier using the Linz-Donowitz process instead of a blast furnace, so you'd probably burn methane from the Sabatier process with insufficient oxygen from electrolysis with low-sulfur iron ore (sulfur reduced by yet process to generate the sulfuric acid needed for other industrial processes, since getting sulfur from petroleum isn't possible on mars). Limestone isn't as readily available on Mars; you need to use oolitic lime, or maybe dolomite as a substitute. And of course you need to mine and refine your fluxes (each of them having their own refining proceses).
Notice how quickly it expands? It keeps on going because each of those processes have their own inputs with their own processes and even something that sounds extremely simple - say, mining some abundant mineral - would involve a staggering array of mining machines (each with tons of parts to wear down and break, as well as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, etc), bucket loaders, trucks, separation processes (float baths, etc), ball mills, and of course various leaching and rinsing stages, all imparting their own dependency trees. Modern technology is dependent on tech based on tech based on tech; it's the nature of the beast.
If you want to try to at least simplify the "refining" stages, yes, there are other less "industrial" processes that can be used for isolating minerals, like, say, plasma centrifuges. But the rub is that everything has an opportunity cost, and when you're making yourself consume vast amounts of energy, labor, or separation facility resources in order to produce only small amounts of resources, you're imposing brand new requirements on what your colony must produce to yield those newly-imposed demands. Then on top of this, you have the fact that not every resource will be found in one spot. As on earth, Mars would need to ship resources from all around the planet. So you need to have a planetary transportation network that can move things in bulk, with minimal energy usage and usage of other consumables.
Raw elements must become compounds and alloys, in a variety of forging and refining processes (just think of the crazy complexity of an oil refinery and chemical plant for an example). Compounds must become parts, in a variety of casting and milling processes (and with the scale of all of the above, "one-off" rapid prototyping processes like 3d printing don't cut it except for suitable rare parts, or you hit the
One of the prime justifications of becoming a multi-planet species is that we could survive the loss of the Earth. Kind of hard to do that when your colonies need the Earth to survive.
Really low-mass spacecraft launches are more expensive per kilogram; that's just the way it works. But it does go to show that all of the people on Slashdot several years ago talking about how Branson is just a hop, skip, and a jump from cheap orbital space travel because he made a suborbital joyride, and how their prices were going to blow everyone's away because the joyride cost hundreds of thousands per person instead of millions ... well, I hope this is a dose of reality as to how much more expensive and difficult orbital travel is than suborbital.
Maybe for something the size of a dog or smaller. At $10m a pop.
Most of the mass of a spacecraft is not the mass of its occupants.
Scaled Composites (Branson) built some of the structural components for the Pegasus. It's not an entirely new field for them.
It's using this algorithm.
It's just a palette swap from a blue sprite. Try attacking it with ice or water attacks.
Pliny actually calls it "Scatinavia". I have no idea whether that was A) based in reality, or B) had any influence on the modern naming. But it is it.
6% on an account with no limitations on where you can take money out? Wow, where do I sign up?
(Actually, I can't, as there are currency trading restrictions here, but...)
First off, there were *three* cod wars, in case you forgot. After overfishing your waters (and the waters of several other countries - I've found the Irish people I've met have a lot to complain about on this front, too), you sent trawlers to overfish other people's waters. Iceland's among them, but hardly alone. You started doing that not long after you *invaded* and occupied Iceland, a neutral country, with one of the most bungling invasions ever, in order to prevent a nonexistent Nazi plan which existed only in your leaders' minds. But I digress. You started fishing as little as *4 kilometers* from Iceland's shore, meaning that Icelanders could sit there and easily watch your trawlers overfishing Iceland's waters. The first Cod War pushed you back to 12, which is still easily in sight of the shore, overfishing Iceland's waters with even more ships involved. The second Cod War pushed you back to what was then the international limit of 50km. However, by the 1970s, many nations had already began asserting 200km exclusive economic zones - in fact, the first ones were claimed in the 1940s. By the 1970s, they had become standard. Heck, the groundwork for the concept of the EEZ began from work from UK in *1939* with the Panama declaration, and then in 1942 concerning the Gulf of Paria. The UK claimed exclusive economic access to a wide range of area outside their territorial waters in 1964. And even if all this wasn't the case, it's ridiculous that Britain felt that it had the god-given right to trawl up the lion's share of the fish in waters right next to Iceland - let alone ignoring how much you were overexploiting the stocks (something Iceland immediately reversed). Iceland's actions were upheld by the International Court of Justice in 1974 (United Kingdom vs. Iceland, 1974 ICJ Rep 3, 75).
You were saying?
Well, let's see... Iceland's fisheries are worth about $1.5 billion a year, and you were exploiting them from the 1940s to the 1970s... so no, you still owe us a damn lot more. Perhaps *you* should vote on a repayment plan.
Once again, the world revolves around you. Yeah, not that important for you. It's only 40% of our entire economy. Which was the crux of the whole problem.
Companies go bankrupt. Deal with it. Just ignoring that there was clearly no government guarantee, who in their right mind expects a government backing on a 6% interest rate? What's next, do you want us to ensure that anyone who buys junk bonds to get their money back if they loses value? Full reward, no risk, is that the plan?
Oh yeah, really hard up compared to Iceland, which had just had the per-capita equivalent of 300 Lehman Brothers fail at once.
Nah, pylsur and handball ;)
I was actually referring to the part just before that also: "Forstjóri Valitors á Íslandi, Viðar (TH)orkelsson, segir að (th)að hafi verið uppi vísbendingar um að starfsemi Wikileaks samræmdust ekki reglum sem al(th)jóðlegu kortasamtökin setja" - The president of Valitor in Iceland, Viðar (TH)orkelsson, says that there is evidence that the activities of Wikileaks are not in accordance with the laws/regulations which the international card agency set.".
Aka, they don't care about Wikileaks itself, but thinks that they were breaking the law/regulations concerning credit card payments.
Not true, fair troll, not true! "The banks" were not involved in the decision making process. The British and Dutch governments bailed out their citizens, and then demanded Iceland compensate them. The three primary players involved have been Iceland, the UK, and the Netherlands. The next biggest players have been the EU (in particular, the EFTA court system, but the EU has filed an amicus curae-type filing) and the IMF.
FYI, I live in Iceland.