You say that high end cars now have sensors and inflaters. A standalone AC powered compressor, hose and valve cost under $100, and would be much cheaper stripped to use the existing compressor HW already in all cars, perhaps slightly modified. The connection to the tire could be manual on demand for cheaper models, a hose in the trunk - also could power other maintenance devices in more expensive models or add-ons. Brake sensor HW could be piggybacked for pressure sensors and light the dashboard for maybe $30 extra manufacturing cost. The whole system could cost under $150 to make, and sell for under $300 as an option most people would buy, when the gas cost savings are marketed to them.
Most people buy cars so they won't have to do its work. The tire wear should be checked by the mechanic at regular oil changes and when rotating them - the average consumer shouldn't have to do more than trust their mechanic.
Only the tire inflater is expected to improve efficiency. The rest are for safety and convenience.
As for Bluetooth, you said yourself that the cheapest stereo has USB for a dongle that can pair with a phone. A dashboard charger should cost under $5 with a 12VDC/phone transformer. There's clearly no cost reason they're not standard, and should be as standard as seatbelts given the plague of people pressing phones to their faces or even texting from their laps.
My old BMW had a slot for a battery under the hood and another in the trunk, though I don't know whether both would be charged. But just a bigger battery which can't automatically drain below the juice to turn over the starter a half dozen times unless a dashboard button were pressed couldn't cost more than $50 per battery and $10 interface HW. I keep a DC-charged battery jumpstarter in my trunk, which I've wired to the "cigarette lighter" that I switch on to recharge every time I drive to refill my gas tank, which contains just such a battery and hardware, and it cost $50 retail, weighs under 5Kg. Surely a builtin would be smaller and cheaper, or retail for maybe $100 as an option. AAA gets $60 a year rescuing people (a 2-4 hour task) who'd just go to backup for less than the membership cost over their car's lifetime.
These technologies are already available fairly cheaply as add-ons (except powering the tire inflater now comes mostly in a can). Properly designed they shouldn't cost much to integrate, and are tiny costs for huge benefits - especially the Bluetooth speakerphone. The "no can do" attitude comes from the complacency at carmakers whose marketers focus on luxury and power instead of real operating performance. Otherwise the tire valve caps would long ago have required a driver unlock to remove them, or been quick-dis/connect parts built into either the tire or the wheel, since kids have been stealing them for over a century. This can all be done. And in fact I expect Chinese and/or Indian carmakers, which aren't shackled to the complacency and elitism of American/European carmakers (and their Japanese imitators) to see these opportunities to innovate and compete. Maybe then American cars will include these obviously demanded features - if they're still in business, other than as a brand for some Asian giant.
With telcos/cablecos rushing to destroy Net Neutrality so they can doublecharge us for carrying traffic between some endpoints (like competing services or customers of other ISPs), in addition to the fees they already collect from up and down the connection chains, we should all encrypt all of our traffic, and run it all through proxies. Then the backbones can do nothing but raise fees on their next hop neighbors, because they know only the QoS priority bits we choose to reveal in the envelope packets for the contained traffic.
We can do this today, though preconfigured edge HW we can carry with us (USB dongle, mobile phone) would make it easier to prepackage it for the masses. Where can I point non-techs today to find instructions for making an encrypted tunnel and proxy for all their traffic across their cablemodem/ISP, including browsing, email and downloads.
I don't know why cars don't come with a line that automatically keeps tires inflated to optimal pressure. Or at least show the pressure (vs optimal) on the dashboard, a warning to reinflate them. It's been over 100 years living with these machines, and the amount of gasoline we've just wasted on flat tires is criminal.
I also don't know why batteries don't come with two partitions, with enough juice in #2 to start the car even when we've left the lights on and killed partition #1.
Why don't cars all have a slot for a mobile phone with a charger and Bluetooth speakerphone/callerID over the stereo?
How much waste have we endured leaving out those two basic features we've all needed? Meanwhile, cars come with ass warmers and rainforest woods. No wonder all the carmakers collapsed towards bankruptcy when the loan money ran out.
So does that mean that this "open phone" still needs a SIM issued from the carrier, like AT&T or T-Mobile?
The phone also has to have an IMEI that the carrier recognizes, which means it can't be generated arbitrarily by this open phone, right? If so, can I clone the IMEI from a phone the carrier issued to me over to the open phone?
And will this stack run on an Android phone?
Other than those two dependencies, could I just switch over to an open phone I install on an Android phone available today?
Why hasn't Intel rolled out 3D chips stacked in layers, with microfluidics cooling between layers? I used to see all kinds of engineering PR about it, but it's been years since I saw any progress, and it's taken way longer than I expected.
3D would not only increase the amount of transistors (and other devices) fit into a "chip", but put the circuits closer together, requiring less voltage/power and shorter propagation times. What's holding it up?
Any ideas on the highest theoretical and actually achieved efficiency of the power converting laser light back to electric current (laser watts to electric watts)?
I don't want little zaps simulating texture. What I want is an electrically activated memory plastic screen that pops up (and releases down) little bumps under software control where the lines drawn on the GUI appear on the screen. Some raised textures on buttons and other GUI widgets. So I can feel where I'm touching, just as I can see where the widgets are. The hard part is making it all transparent, but that's it.
Thanks for the direct answer. It looks like only this year are researchers over the watershed of more laser than heat produced by a device. But 80% efficiency isn't the theoretical maximum, but rather an internal efficiency already withing reach of engineering:
However, although the internal quantum efficiency7, 8 can be engineered to be greater than 80% at low temperatures
So I'm still looking for the theoretical maximum.
Hopefully better techniques and tools for nanoengineering will improve the links in the chain to lasing that currently keep it at 53%, so we can reach well beyond 80%. If we can use lasers with the kind of efficiency with which we transduce energy between mechanical and electrical (over 95% in dynamos and motors), we could see lots of energy currently wasted instead saved with laser technology.
But those loans are funded by taxes the government uses to pay its bonds. Meanwhile Japan's government also buys up US Treasury debt in nearly the amounts China does, while Japan's GDP remains second only to the US (third if the EU is counted at #1). Debt (total) to GDP (annual) is a somewhat arbitrary measure, as you can see when Singapore's ratio is 113%. That ratio is mostly just a measure of how well the global banking industry has captured that country's fiscal policies, which marks economies at all points on the debt:GDP spectrum.
Japan's continued high living standards and low fraction of people suffering from what money can cure shows its economy is not on life support. Its lack of exploited natural resources other than its labor and its ports, while its personal consumption is fairly high, shows that its industrial efficiency is the foundation Japan's resilient economy is built on.
I think his role in punking the Business Plot, the fascist coup planned to usurp FDR, would be an excellent lesson for anyone in America's armed forces.
Though these days the Christianists in the Air Force need the lesson probably more than Marines do.
I'm not talking about exceeding the "ultimate intensity limit".
I want to know how many KW of power will come out of the kind of laser with the least loss when I put my precious KW of electricity into it. Which kind of laser has the most efficient lasing, what is the theoretical upper bound, and how close will we get to the theoretical max within the next 5-10 years.
In War Is A Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.
The work is divided into five chapters:
1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!
It contains this key summary:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
In another often cited quote from the book Butler says:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
There's a difference between simply breaching confidentiality and security vs whistleblowing. Which is why whistleblowing needs legal protection. When whistleblowing is legally protected, enforcing all the laws on unauthorized disclosures protects whistleblowers while leaving merely untrustworthy people subject to proper penalties and controls.
If someone can get your phone long enough to take these pictures of its screen, they can probably get into its cache of secrets. This is why phones should have more security features ensuring it doesn't leave its owner's possession without permission or for very long, and wipe all confidential info (including resetting remote passwords the phone had access to in cleartext).
When phones are locked down better, they'll be better "universal keys" to all the other devices we have to access. I wish my phone held a local log of every attempted access of every account of mine around the Internet, local logs of all financial transactions, or at least notifications on the phone that are logged at a remote server the phone can immediately access. For example, I hate having to rely on my bank to faithfully report all account activity, when my bank has been wrong / lied in the past in ways that have cost me money, and perhaps compromised my ID.
As many have pointed out in this discussion, and as the article itself alluded to, the Chinese manufacturing economy is seeing demand slack, which equals excess capacity. So really this story might be better summarized as China prioritizing factories to be closed among the excess capacity by which are the most energy/pollution inefficient.
It is indeed an awful lot of factories to close in two months (from now through September 30). But that's an awful lot of pollution and wasted energy cut out. Since the article also says there's labor shortages, and since these old factories have long ago paid for themselves (however you account for it in Maoist economics, with every detail of all labor coerced, and millions killed in the process), this seems more exhaustive than ruthless - though it's also pretty ruthless.
The Journolist was just a mailing list of journalists discussing stories. Just like every other profession does. The list was a "conspiracy" the way that this Slashdot discussion is a conspiracy. All of which was perfectly evident to anyone looking at the details of this manufactured "scandal". Unless the details were only those reported by rightwing propaganda hacks, like Byron York, Tucker Carlson, and the rest. Who really are a conspiracy in actual collusion through emails and faxes all day, every day. That's how come the right wing noise machine manages such consistent echoes of the same catchphrases about the same focused set of complaints every day, day in, day out.
In order to be a "Conservative" these days you have to open your mind wide enough to snap it, but only for the briefest moment while the rightwing propaganda is inserted. Then slam it shut as reality recoils at the propaganda assault, sending back the actual picture out there for anyone to see. Denial of your own rightwing conspiracies (and all the rest of your rightwing evils) is projected onto an imagined left wing boogeyman.
Just dreams. The Conservative world is the American Nightmare.
Except selling the stocks to devalue them costs more than the decrease in value that can be bought up. Which is why only someone who controls the market can do so, otherwise every market would be "cornered" that way. Which is why the markets are diversified and regulated to prevent that most obvious gaming.
Who were these people in the 1950s and 1960s who were paranoid of Soviet efficiency? I'm not even going to ask about your incomprehensible statement about "handwringing". But what collapse are you referring to?
The 1980s Japanese economy failed because the Japanese banks invested in corporate debt and worthless real estate after Reagan/Bush deregulated the prohibitions on it. The Japanese economy has survived despite its financial failures precisely because its industrial economy is so efficient.
The 1990s-2000s US banking collapse had nothing to do with low income people buying homes. Those loans have a much lower default rate than those made to people with higher incomes.
You don't know anything except what you're hearing on Glenn Beck and Limbo. For you "lightly regulated" will never be light enough, because you've bought into the lies sold you by the crony capitalists of the Rupert Murdoch empire.
When companies shut down factories suddenly in the US, they're usually breaking contracts with the unions that organize their labor. Those contracts were agreed to by unions and their members based on the terms that the contract would run for however many years, which often include years of paying pensions. Those pensions are money the workers agreed not to get paid up front, in exchange for the company paying them out later. All of which is a good deal for the company. Closing the factory means breaking that contract, and making the good deal into a great deal. All at the expense of the workers, who got ripped off.
Then the union tries to stop the company from breaking the contract. The union points out that breaking the contract is increasing the profits (and speculation gains) shared by investors in their invested discretionary income, but forcing the ripped off workers to starve.
At that point, you attack the workers and protect the company.
You made quite the baseless assertion there. You really don't know anything about the manufacturing or energy business, do you?
Increasing energy efficiency is one of the best ways to save money (= more profit) and to make future costs more predictable and manageable. The pollution costs that have been "externalized" (dumped on the public or consumers) for so long are finally being accounted properly and forced by consumers and the public into the actual cost of the products, so cutting pollution also cuts those costs (= more profit). It costs money to retool, but that's an investment in more profit. An investment that isn't speculative like the equity markets, but rather in one's own core business.
The US has new building codes that require new buildings to be pretty energy efficient, so lower pollution. We have a lot of turnover in buildings, so we don't have to order old ones to be closed in order to replace them with new ones.
The US is also already much more energy efficient than China (3x the GDP, lower energy consumption and much lower Greenhouse pollution). So we can afford to do through incentives what China does through force.
However, the US should increase the incentives, and decrease the subsidies to the old inefficient ways. We're ahead of China, and we're a better place to live, but China is gaining. We need to do more upgrading our own way, or China's forced upgrades will leave the US behind.
As the article describes, the factories being phased out were built a long time ago, like in the 1950s. They're throwing away factories that were probably as efficient as the ones built in the US in the 1920s (ie. very inefficient) during a flattening of demand, replacing them with new factories that are more efficient. Which saves them money, directly in fuel and indirectly in pollution.
This all seems very reasonable. China's still very inefficient compared to the US: consuming more energy to produce 1/3 the GDP, producing much more pollution to produce that 1/3 the GDP. This move shows real insight, which the US is not matching to keep our lead.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that high end cars now have sensors and inflaters. A standalone AC powered compressor, hose and valve cost under $100, and would be much cheaper stripped to use the existing compressor HW already in all cars, perhaps slightly modified. The connection to the tire could be manual on demand for cheaper models, a hose in the trunk - also could power other maintenance devices in more expensive models or add-ons. Brake sensor HW could be piggybacked for pressure sensors and light the dashboard for maybe $30 extra manufacturing cost. The whole system could cost under $150 to make, and sell for under $300 as an option most people would buy, when the gas cost savings are marketed to them.
Most people buy cars so they won't have to do its work. The tire wear should be checked by the mechanic at regular oil changes and when rotating them - the average consumer shouldn't have to do more than trust their mechanic.
Only the tire inflater is expected to improve efficiency. The rest are for safety and convenience.
As for Bluetooth, you said yourself that the cheapest stereo has USB for a dongle that can pair with a phone. A dashboard charger should cost under $5 with a 12VDC/phone transformer. There's clearly no cost reason they're not standard, and should be as standard as seatbelts given the plague of people pressing phones to their faces or even texting from their laps.
My old BMW had a slot for a battery under the hood and another in the trunk, though I don't know whether both would be charged. But just a bigger battery which can't automatically drain below the juice to turn over the starter a half dozen times unless a dashboard button were pressed couldn't cost more than $50 per battery and $10 interface HW. I keep a DC-charged battery jumpstarter in my trunk, which I've wired to the "cigarette lighter" that I switch on to recharge every time I drive to refill my gas tank, which contains just such a battery and hardware, and it cost $50 retail, weighs under 5Kg. Surely a builtin would be smaller and cheaper, or retail for maybe $100 as an option. AAA gets $60 a year rescuing people (a 2-4 hour task) who'd just go to backup for less than the membership cost over their car's lifetime.
These technologies are already available fairly cheaply as add-ons (except powering the tire inflater now comes mostly in a can). Properly designed they shouldn't cost much to integrate, and are tiny costs for huge benefits - especially the Bluetooth speakerphone. The "no can do" attitude comes from the complacency at carmakers whose marketers focus on luxury and power instead of real operating performance. Otherwise the tire valve caps would long ago have required a driver unlock to remove them, or been quick-dis/connect parts built into either the tire or the wheel, since kids have been stealing them for over a century. This can all be done. And in fact I expect Chinese and/or Indian carmakers, which aren't shackled to the complacency and elitism of American/European carmakers (and their Japanese imitators) to see these opportunities to innovate and compete. Maybe then American cars will include these obviously demanded features - if they're still in business, other than as a brand for some Asian giant.
With telcos/cablecos rushing to destroy Net Neutrality so they can doublecharge us for carrying traffic between some endpoints (like competing services or customers of other ISPs), in addition to the fees they already collect from up and down the connection chains, we should all encrypt all of our traffic, and run it all through proxies. Then the backbones can do nothing but raise fees on their next hop neighbors, because they know only the QoS priority bits we choose to reveal in the envelope packets for the contained traffic.
We can do this today, though preconfigured edge HW we can carry with us (USB dongle, mobile phone) would make it easier to prepackage it for the masses. Where can I point non-techs today to find instructions for making an encrypted tunnel and proxy for all their traffic across their cablemodem/ISP, including browsing, email and downloads.
I don't know why cars don't come with a line that automatically keeps tires inflated to optimal pressure. Or at least show the pressure (vs optimal) on the dashboard, a warning to reinflate them. It's been over 100 years living with these machines, and the amount of gasoline we've just wasted on flat tires is criminal.
I also don't know why batteries don't come with two partitions, with enough juice in #2 to start the car even when we've left the lights on and killed partition #1.
Why don't cars all have a slot for a mobile phone with a charger and Bluetooth speakerphone/callerID over the stereo?
How much waste have we endured leaving out those two basic features we've all needed? Meanwhile, cars come with ass warmers and rainforest woods. No wonder all the carmakers collapsed towards bankruptcy when the loan money ran out.
So does that mean that this "open phone" still needs a SIM issued from the carrier, like AT&T or T-Mobile?
The phone also has to have an IMEI that the carrier recognizes, which means it can't be generated arbitrarily by this open phone, right? If so, can I clone the IMEI from a phone the carrier issued to me over to the open phone?
And will this stack run on an Android phone?
Other than those two dependencies, could I just switch over to an open phone I install on an Android phone available today?
Why hasn't Intel rolled out 3D chips stacked in layers, with microfluidics cooling between layers? I used to see all kinds of engineering PR about it, but it's been years since I saw any progress, and it's taken way longer than I expected.
3D would not only increase the amount of transistors (and other devices) fit into a "chip", but put the circuits closer together, requiring less voltage/power and shorter propagation times. What's holding it up?
Any ideas on the highest theoretical and actually achieved efficiency of the power converting laser light back to electric current (laser watts to electric watts)?
I don't want little zaps simulating texture. What I want is an electrically activated memory plastic screen that pops up (and releases down) little bumps under software control where the lines drawn on the GUI appear on the screen. Some raised textures on buttons and other GUI widgets. So I can feel where I'm touching, just as I can see where the widgets are. The hard part is making it all transparent, but that's it.
Thanks for the direct answer. It looks like only this year are researchers over the watershed of more laser than heat produced by a device. But 80% efficiency isn't the theoretical maximum, but rather an internal efficiency already withing reach of engineering:
So I'm still looking for the theoretical maximum.
Hopefully better techniques and tools for nanoengineering will improve the links in the chain to lasing that currently keep it at 53%, so we can reach well beyond 80%. If we can use lasers with the kind of efficiency with which we transduce energy between mechanical and electrical (over 95% in dynamos and motors), we could see lots of energy currently wasted instead saved with laser technology.
But those loans are funded by taxes the government uses to pay its bonds. Meanwhile Japan's government also buys up US Treasury debt in nearly the amounts China does, while Japan's GDP remains second only to the US (third if the EU is counted at #1). Debt (total) to GDP (annual) is a somewhat arbitrary measure, as you can see when Singapore's ratio is 113%. That ratio is mostly just a measure of how well the global banking industry has captured that country's fiscal policies, which marks economies at all points on the debt:GDP spectrum.
Japan's continued high living standards and low fraction of people suffering from what money can cure shows its economy is not on life support. Its lack of exploited natural resources other than its labor and its ports, while its personal consumption is fairly high, shows that its industrial efficiency is the foundation Japan's resilient economy is built on.
I think his role in punking the Business Plot, the fascist coup planned to usurp FDR, would be an excellent lesson for anyone in America's armed forces.
Though these days the Christianists in the Air Force need the lesson probably more than Marines do.
I'm not talking about exceeding the "ultimate intensity limit".
I want to know how many KW of power will come out of the kind of laser with the least loss when I put my precious KW of electricity into it. Which kind of laser has the most efficient lasing, what is the theoretical upper bound, and how close will we get to the theoretical max within the next 5-10 years.
Everyone should read War is a Racket, written by Marine Major General Smedley Butler in the early 1930s:
There's a difference between simply breaching confidentiality and security vs whistleblowing. Which is why whistleblowing needs legal protection. When whistleblowing is legally protected, enforcing all the laws on unauthorized disclosures protects whistleblowers while leaving merely untrustworthy people subject to proper penalties and controls.
Is there a theoretical upper bound to the maximum efficiency of converting energy into coherent light (lasing), other than the obvious "nearly 100%"?
What is the most energy efficient laser in production today, and how close to the theoretical max will lasers get within the next 5-10 years?
If someone can get your phone long enough to take these pictures of its screen, they can probably get into its cache of secrets. This is why phones should have more security features ensuring it doesn't leave its owner's possession without permission or for very long, and wipe all confidential info (including resetting remote passwords the phone had access to in cleartext).
When phones are locked down better, they'll be better "universal keys" to all the other devices we have to access. I wish my phone held a local log of every attempted access of every account of mine around the Internet, local logs of all financial transactions, or at least notifications on the phone that are logged at a remote server the phone can immediately access. For example, I hate having to rely on my bank to faithfully report all account activity, when my bank has been wrong / lied in the past in ways that have cost me money, and perhaps compromised my ID.
As many have pointed out in this discussion, and as the article itself alluded to, the Chinese manufacturing economy is seeing demand slack, which equals excess capacity. So really this story might be better summarized as China prioritizing factories to be closed among the excess capacity by which are the most energy/pollution inefficient.
It is indeed an awful lot of factories to close in two months (from now through September 30). But that's an awful lot of pollution and wasted energy cut out. Since the article also says there's labor shortages, and since these old factories have long ago paid for themselves (however you account for it in Maoist economics, with every detail of all labor coerced, and millions killed in the process), this seems more exhaustive than ruthless - though it's also pretty ruthless.
Yes, just dreams.
The Journolist was just a mailing list of journalists discussing stories. Just like every other profession does. The list was a "conspiracy" the way that this Slashdot discussion is a conspiracy. All of which was perfectly evident to anyone looking at the details of this manufactured "scandal". Unless the details were only those reported by rightwing propaganda hacks, like Byron York, Tucker Carlson, and the rest. Who really are a conspiracy in actual collusion through emails and faxes all day, every day. That's how come the right wing noise machine manages such consistent echoes of the same catchphrases about the same focused set of complaints every day, day in, day out.
In order to be a "Conservative" these days you have to open your mind wide enough to snap it, but only for the briefest moment while the rightwing propaganda is inserted. Then slam it shut as reality recoils at the propaganda assault, sending back the actual picture out there for anyone to see. Denial of your own rightwing conspiracies (and all the rest of your rightwing evils) is projected onto an imagined left wing boogeyman.
Just dreams. The Conservative world is the American Nightmare.
Where are you getting that info? It is totally false. The opposite is true.
You can't just repeat what you heard on the Glenn Beck Horror Story Hour, even if you wish it were true.
Except selling the stocks to devalue them costs more than the decrease in value that can be bought up. Which is why only someone who controls the market can do so, otherwise every market would be "cornered" that way. Which is why the markets are diversified and regulated to prevent that most obvious gaming.
*Duh*
Who were these people in the 1950s and 1960s who were paranoid of Soviet efficiency? I'm not even going to ask about your incomprehensible statement about "handwringing". But what collapse are you referring to?
The 1980s Japanese economy failed because the Japanese banks invested in corporate debt and worthless real estate after Reagan/Bush deregulated the prohibitions on it. The Japanese economy has survived despite its financial failures precisely because its industrial economy is so efficient.
The 1990s-2000s US banking collapse had nothing to do with low income people buying homes. Those loans have a much lower default rate than those made to people with higher incomes.
You don't know anything except what you're hearing on Glenn Beck and Limbo. For you "lightly regulated" will never be light enough, because you've bought into the lies sold you by the crony capitalists of the Rupert Murdoch empire.
When companies shut down factories suddenly in the US, they're usually breaking contracts with the unions that organize their labor. Those contracts were agreed to by unions and their members based on the terms that the contract would run for however many years, which often include years of paying pensions. Those pensions are money the workers agreed not to get paid up front, in exchange for the company paying them out later. All of which is a good deal for the company. Closing the factory means breaking that contract, and making the good deal into a great deal. All at the expense of the workers, who got ripped off.
Then the union tries to stop the company from breaking the contract. The union points out that breaking the contract is increasing the profits (and speculation gains) shared by investors in their invested discretionary income, but forcing the ripped off workers to starve.
At that point, you attack the workers and protect the company.
You made quite the baseless assertion there. You really don't know anything about the manufacturing or energy business, do you?
Increasing energy efficiency is one of the best ways to save money (= more profit) and to make future costs more predictable and manageable. The pollution costs that have been "externalized" (dumped on the public or consumers) for so long are finally being accounted properly and forced by consumers and the public into the actual cost of the products, so cutting pollution also cuts those costs (= more profit). It costs money to retool, but that's an investment in more profit. An investment that isn't speculative like the equity markets, but rather in one's own core business.
The US has new building codes that require new buildings to be pretty energy efficient, so lower pollution. We have a lot of turnover in buildings, so we don't have to order old ones to be closed in order to replace them with new ones.
The US is also already much more energy efficient than China (3x the GDP, lower energy consumption and much lower Greenhouse pollution). So we can afford to do through incentives what China does through force.
However, the US should increase the incentives, and decrease the subsidies to the old inefficient ways. We're ahead of China, and we're a better place to live, but China is gaining. We need to do more upgrading our own way, or China's forced upgrades will leave the US behind.
As the article describes, the factories being phased out were built a long time ago, like in the 1950s. They're throwing away factories that were probably as efficient as the ones built in the US in the 1920s (ie. very inefficient) during a flattening of demand, replacing them with new factories that are more efficient. Which saves them money, directly in fuel and indirectly in pollution.
This all seems very reasonable. China's still very inefficient compared to the US: consuming more energy to produce 1/3 the GDP, producing much more pollution to produce that 1/3 the GDP. This move shows real insight, which the US is not matching to keep our lead.
All you've got is dreams. You can't come up with something, so you're making it up. Just like a Republican.