So how much more expensive is the second, "smoothing" phase than the original production phase? And how much more expensive is the later "interfacing" stage, where hydrophobic/philic lipid layers encase the dot in something like a hemi cell membrane for interfacing with biological spaces? Including the cost of a skilled operator, like the one in this video who seems priceless in marketing the process to nerds;).
And how much do the products of each of those phases currently cost, per (kilo)dot? In other words, what is the cost per dot in each phase, compared to the price per dot in each phase? Silicon chips are expensive to make - compared to, say, steel - but per saleable unit they're cheap. At least in the earliest, least packaged phases of the industrial supply chain.
How much does a tight glove box cost? How much do the "characterizing instruments" cost?
It seems to me that characterizing the dots requires only a calibrated source of UV (cheap) and a calibrated spectrometer (pretty cheap). At least in characterizing their phosphorescence, which is the characteristic that seems of main importance to this cancer lab, and to most optical switching applications.
Maybe too expensive for most Slashdotters, but not too expensive for even a paint factory. Or an inkjet ink factory.
That video showed a lot of mixing, boiling, separation. None of it looked very expensive. The presenter mentioned a second process that smooths the surface of the initial yield of dots which might be expensive. But that just makes the dots more efficient at processing light. If the initial process is really cheap, the lower quality might be a better value than continuing the second process for an improvement relatively small compared to its increased cost.
While we work in labs to cheapen the refinement process, we could get a lot of cheap dots to apply to other uses that will only improve when the refinement process becomes cheap enough. Getting the dots into industry will ramp up demand for the higher quality ones.
As a side effect, places like China that tolerate toxic products as we see being contained in that video could dominate the market for the initial products. But places like the US that are less tolerant of toxins in the workplace and in pollution, but are more geared towards specializing in higher quality products (refined in different ways for different properties), could refine the raw dots into more valuable and effective products. Leaving the US dependent on China for raw materials, but able to switch suppliers to some other place, like India, that is similarly tolerant - or make the raw dots ourselves if a crisis outweighed the protections from toxins we used in the course of normal business. All of which could make a proper market, with balanced protections, that gives the world lots of cheap, and sufficient amounts of quality, quantum dots. Whose efficiencies and effectiveness can eliminate toxins and pollutions these dots replace in the industries where they're adopted.
No, they read the snailmail letters from the lobbyists. Or rather their staff reads them. The letters tell them how to vote, and why they care. If you get your letter in there with the lobbyist's, you have a chance. The political game is entirely defined by access. And snailmail has access that email still does not.
I've worked with, for and among political offices. It's very well known in that biz that a written letter is much more effective than email, unless you're already an associate of the recipient.
Snail mail is always best for corresponding with politicians and officials with whom you don't already correspond regularly. They're more likely to have it handed to them, because they're mostly old and think email is for people who think for a living, not schmooze. And even if it's just a staffer who reads it (and maybe mentions it to the politico - or better yet, gets it to influence the work their office actually does among other staffers), a letter is better. Lawyers and other official correspondents use snail mail, sometimes as required by law or contract. And the people who write letters tend to be people who vote. Both because they tend to be older, and more office-oriented, and to be people who put actual time into the political process.
Teaching everyone in public school how to program might make more programmers, and maybe even better ones. But even more valuable will be showing the vast majority of people who will never program after they're forced to in class just what the basic practice is like for those of us who do. It won't be some exotic, perhaps damnable mystery. Getting everyone exposed to programming would humanize those of us who turn out to do it a lot.
I don't think it'll help much in protecting nerds from getting stuffed into lockers by jocks. But maybe later when that jock is the useless midlevel manager telling a programmer how the thing works the programmer is automating, or when the jock is thinking about asking a programmer for something, they'll have some recollection about doing it themself a little way back when, and so relate better to the "whiz", and maybe deal with them better.
Zibodiz further writes "Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Cisco had 12,900 employees that were doing things other than 'routing and switching, collaboration, virtualization, video, and... architecture.'"
No, Cisco probably is firing many thousands of workers who were working on those core business activities that Cisco is retaining. There's no simple relationship between what a worker was doing and what the corporate rulers say the corporation will now do, when the corporation fires so many people at once. Especially when the corporation was profitable and known for quality before the firings.
But yes, Cisco surely had many employees who were doing other things. Like all the corporate execs and their ecosystem who are responsible for pure finance, including managing the company's publicly traded equity (stock) and publicly/privately juggled debt (bonds, mortgages, government loans, private loans, credit default swaps, other derivatives). When you're a big brand with lots of property like Cisco, especially when you define an industry - or a whole sector (like "the Internet), you make (and lose) lots of money in business purely derivative of your actual operating business.
And no, those finance parasites are probably not being fired. You almost never hear about these corporations firing lots of their banking interface infrastructure. Because the financial system is so deeply rigged to be both a money and an influence machine. Even when distracting a company out of real profitability. The guy who gets you into the casino is more tightly held than the guy who worked to give you your first ante.
Whether or not this is a true story, or whether or not it's a government project, there is as much budget-reserving in private industry like what you described as there is in government. Probably more, since government is more transparent than private business, and so more people have access to exposing that little game, which tends to inhibit it some.
You are lying. "GPGPU" is the technique of General Purpose computing on Graphic Processor Units. Nobody installs "GPGPUs"; there is no such hardware called that. People install GPUs to do GPGPU.
Sure, you architect the largest East Coast x86_64 supercomputers all the time. Bullshit.
They are buying a supercomputer because their lucrative medical research is too big for the smaller HPC, but not (yet) big enough for the biggest supercomputer of its type in the region. So they're also looking for some other apps to use the extra capacity instead of it going to waste.
That might not be true - this is just a Slashdot assertion. But there's nothing inconsistent in there to suggest it's false. It's perfectly plausible.
You are just one of the modern type of people who make up your mind on your preconceptions, say something out loud, then refuse to listen to any reason you could be wrong or might reconsider. Denial feels so powerful, who cares what's true, right?
The most interesting aspect of this discussion is that so many posters are whining about this supercomputer arriving without having any applications planned for it, so it's asking Slashdot for recommendations. It's hilarious not because it's probably fiction (though that's always possible), nor because Slashdot's reply is that it's fiction or some government or trust fund boondoggle. It's kinda hilarious because right there the poster says:
We primarily do life-science/health/biology related tasks on our existing (fairly small) HPC. We intend to continue this usage
It's perfectly clear that they're buying a bigger computer than they'll be able to use (at first), so they're looking for something else worthwhile as the machine starts to go stale (out of the oven, like bread). But they're doing the kind of computing already that makes big money from data crunching, though it's certainly possible they've bought bigger than they can deploy their current workload to for 100% capacity usage.
But what makes that so hilarious is that they've got a supercomputer burning a hole in their datacenter, and they think asking this gang of illiterates is the way to decide what to do with it. Of course they should mine bitcoins! It's idiot's delight in here.
You should run Lotus Notes on it. At least that's what the Guardian (giant NYC insurance/finance corp) did with their two IBM SP2 supercomputers in the late 1990s when I was bringing OOP to their development division.
No, I'm not kidding. Lotus Notes on 2 SP2s. To get the results they could have gotten with two Sparc20s running SENDMAIL, Apache and Sybase.
I tried to get them to switch to that alternative platform, and bet them an SP2 it would work as fast, and better. They didn't take my bet.
The US economy is growing by at least 2% every year. And it's already really huge - 2% growth is a lot of growth.
BTW, China's growth includes the parts of China that are owned by Americans and Europeans, the fastest part of that growth. At the deep costs to China's environment and labor health.
Government has more regulations now that 50 years ago. But fewer of them are effective at limiting corporations. Vastly more of those regulations were written by the corporations, especially since Reagan and then the 1990s Republican Congress.
You're an anarchist because your imaginary Teabagger government, as we move closer to it, opens more and more anarchy into which corporations move.
Your questions do answer one of my questions, though. Evidently you are an Apex Tech graduate. Or at least applicant.
It costs so much to drill here primarily because labor and environment are more protected than in foreign deserts, jungles and seafloors. When drillers cut costs, we get BP's Macondo blowout. Secondarily because the easiest oil to reach has already been pumped out of here. The places where it's cheaper to drill have by far the more controlling, corrupt and wasteful governments.
The people and orgs that employ IT workers aren't failing to hire because the government taxes them and gives the money to others, either for them to do IT or for any other purpose. Indeed, I don't know what you're referring to about a lack of IT job options in 2006. Or how a NASA job is a "decidedly not government contract". The IT industry has had a synthetic brain drain into finance for the past 10-15 years, because deregulation made stealing money through fraud and market manipulation more profitable than anything else. I know: I helped automate the insurance industry (bringing OOP to MONY and The Guardian to the Internet) in the late 1990s, when "integrated financial services" eliminated the 1934 regulations preventing "another Great Depression" so they could sell Credit Default Swaps and other derivatives - that created the Great Depression. I also worked in 2009-2010 programming for some of the 10 biggest hedge funds, cleaning up their trading apps and DBs as they moved from the Bubble risk models to the new scams designed around the bailouts and more diversified robbery targets. My job was to delete the old stuff without breaking their $BILLION-daily businesses, not create the new criminal businesses replacing it, so my conscience is pretty clear. But I moved into energy management (and a pay cut) because I prefer to help solve the problem rather than help create it. During Bush/Cheney, 40% of the US GDP growth was in purely finance property: mostly a fraud, as the equities market it underwrote lost an eerily similar 40% of its value when they ran out of suckers and the vultures came home to roost with the ARMs finally rising to high contracted interest rates. There's only so many trillions around to work, and working them in finance that mostly adds no value (but does largely destroy value) did divert investment that in the 1990s built actual wealth by creating telecom systems people actually used to do real things beyond pure property trades.
I also don't know how you're comparing Houston's tolls to the Federal projects that built them (with the nation's taxes). Sure, when you've got bottlenecked road systems, it's trivial to make money tolling them, especially when you've conned the users into paying high starting tolls on promises of ending them promptly. But the Federal government's original construction of them, without tolls, wasn't planned to turn a profit, nor should it. The national public good of Houston's vehicles moving around for business and personal transit, and the military propaganda required in the 1950s to get Americans to invest in infrastructure, was worth the expense without direct use fees that didn't reflect the widespread national benefit. That Houston has taken to exploiting the infrastructure and its users for profit can't be compared to the Federal construction and operations that didn't work that way.
I'm reminded of Texas governor and presidential nomination candidate Rick Perry's claims to Texan job creation. Which turn out to be government jobs paid by Federal programs funded by national taxes. All while Perry rails against the Big Government that provided it, even threatening to secede from the nation when his cronies aren't in power (and while insisting he loves that nation from which he wants to secede). I understand that's the Texan way, now a permanent feature after Perry and Bush (and really forever, including Democratic governors/senators, including those who became president). But it still doesn't add up. Unless you're a crony. And I'm not.
The trucker union, the Teamsters, has some power, but it's not even enough to protect their pensions - let alone force the US to choose roads and airports over rails. The power is in the vehicle makers: car and truck makers, airplane makers. And of course the oil corps. Those corporations have been calling the shots since Henry Ford, and are the ones who tore up America's rail to replace with roads and cars. Those are the orgs that set up Houston, Oil City, the way you hate - not the unions.
You can tell me about how your family oil business knows there's so much oil left to drill, yet despite getting royalty-free drilling land practically wherever they ask, their industry doesn't drill. Except maybe when getting Federal money from the rest of us to multiply their profits. The actual unlimited supply is self-serving lies about where oil is or isn't coming from oil companies with agendas to maximize profit by increasing demand and decreasing supply. I know they're your family, but if they're like mine or any other family I know, they'll tell you the same lies they tell themselves that protect what they do that they know is wrong.
I can tell you from direct experience that NYC building owners don't invest in their operating capital even when the ROI is, as I told you, close to 100% or better, except when the government both forces them and pays them to do it. It doesn't make sense. But that's because economics is not like electronics, where consistency and actual value rule the actors. Economics is a measure of people's exchanges of value with each other and their environment. Which means it's governed by human social psychology, not primarily by the potential and limits of the material being exchanged. Despite their deserved reputation of being the worlds most determined capitalists, NYC building owners refuse to make rational investment decisions all the time. It's not because of property/zoning laws/regulations. It's because they are used to increasing profits only by cutting immediate costs (like cheaper maintenance workers) or by reducing the supply of real estate against the constantly increasing demand for it. Purely rational people would change despite what they're used to when there's double or triple digit ROIs from investing in necessary costs they have to pay anyway (boiler upgrades and fuel). Building owners don't change, because they wait for everyone around them to change, or to be forced to change, or to be paid to change - or all of them usually.
Again, this is not some kind of guess at what might happen. Also, your statement that the rich in NYC are taxed so much that they flee to other states is just a lie. Except for the extremely rich who move across the state line to Connecticut. It's not that they're taxed so much in NYC, but that they're taxed so little in CT. So when rivers overflow in predictable storms, they're surrounded by a moat their private airlifts have to get across with food and diesel for their generators. Because without taxes and working government their infrastructure, like roads, powerlines and drainage, can't withstand the changes their businesses are making. They are the tiny minority. NYC is full of the richest people in the world, not despite the taxation but because of the services it pays for. And every day more rich people come here, to pay the taxes and consume the services.
FYI, NASA is not a good example to contest government leading energy efficiency, because building efficiency is not rocket science. NASA as run by either a Republican president or Congress or both for the past couple of generations is like any other large government procurement system: corporate welfare for those who sell by the part# through their DC lobbyists. NYC law, like practically all energy efficiency regulations these days, requires only performance standards and energy improvement results (or just standardized reporting in physical units).
I'm always fascinated by the people whose entire career
Almost all of the time. The US has by far the world's most powerful military, and has for over a half century. For over a century before that the US military was among the top 5, though probably actually still the most powerful since about the 1860s, but confined to North America. During that time the US has invaded only its neighbors to the west (native nations) and south (Spanish Mexico, and then Mexican Mexico), and not for a century now, and very occasionally small distant countries with either no substantial military (Grenada), or similarly sized military (Iraq, Nazi Germany), or substantial counter-insurgency communities (Vietnam, Afghanistan).
Yes, the US is at war (overt or covert) almost all of the time. But there have always been far more opportunities for the US to make war with its huge military and bloodthirsty population than it has exploited. During most of its history other nations with big militaries have made more war.
So while most of US history has featured acts of war by the US, that's just a small percentage of the time the US could have committed acts of war. Most of the time something's stopping us, because we aren't doing nearly as much as we could.
We have plenty of oil here we're not allowed to get
No we don't.
and we're rapidly developing technology to reduce our need for it.
Yes we are.
Get the government out of the way and we can cut our demand to quarter of it's current amount in the foreseeable future.
No we can't. I run the tech for an energy management equipment/network/software/support company in NYC that cuts energy consumption an average of 20%, mostly in heating oil/gas. The notoriously greedy building owners never pay the upfront costs, even when it pays back in under a year - that's close to 100% ROI, and rising with energy costs. The only way they do it is when there's government money and/or requirements to do it. Until NYC's law kicked in this year, building owners refused to even measure their energy consumption, let alone reduce it. This is the reality, not the "Mayor of Sim City" Ron Paul LARPing Ayn Rand.
The right thing would have been an "Apollo programme" for energy efficiency/alternatives to get our money, and the troops that always follow it, out of the Mideast. By now, a decade later, we could have cut our energy consumption by at least 30%, maybe more, and set trade policies to get all of our oil/gas from our biggest sources: Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean (and some gas from the Pacific). Instead we invaded Iraq, sending oil to $100:bbl for most of a decade, while promoting SUVs and even Hummers that get 1/3 the mileage we should require from cars. We could have interconnected regional and commuter rail, built more cargo and passenger interlinks. The $3 TRILLION we spent in Iraq so far could have bought us an energy, transit and building infrastructure that got the Mideast and much of the global corruption out of our hair permanently. Instead we spent the time, money and lives making things worse.
We don't need to do wild science fiction to solve our core economic/political problems. We need to do straightforward science and engineering. Which should be the easiest politics of all. Instead, we wanted a flight suit, a megaphone, and blood. We sure got it.
We've often discussed the consequences of the attack
The main consequence of the attack was that Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It's now over 8 years later, and we're still at war in Iraq. No WMD, no Binladen connection, or any of Bush/Cheney's other lies were ever proven anything but lies. Like "the war will pay for itself". The Iraq War has cost us well over $3 TRILLION. It has cost us almost 5000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. Not to mention the severe costs of Americans torturing so many people.
We'll memorialize 9/11/2001 for a long time. But 3/19/03? What's that? It's the date the US invaded Iraq. Nobody wants to talk about that, so the war never ends.
Slashdot Mirror
How about you give us the prices, and answer the question? For all I know, those chemicals are cheaper than gasoline.
BTW, an industrial diamond looks like just another diamond, but it's a lot cheaper.
So how much more expensive is the second, "smoothing" phase than the original production phase? And how much more expensive is the later "interfacing" stage, where hydrophobic/philic lipid layers encase the dot in something like a hemi cell membrane for interfacing with biological spaces? Including the cost of a skilled operator, like the one in this video who seems priceless in marketing the process to nerds ;).
And how much do the products of each of those phases currently cost, per (kilo)dot? In other words, what is the cost per dot in each phase, compared to the price per dot in each phase? Silicon chips are expensive to make - compared to, say, steel - but per saleable unit they're cheap. At least in the earliest, least packaged phases of the industrial supply chain.
How much does a tight glove box cost? How much do the "characterizing instruments" cost?
It seems to me that characterizing the dots requires only a calibrated source of UV (cheap) and a calibrated spectrometer (pretty cheap). At least in characterizing their phosphorescence, which is the characteristic that seems of main importance to this cancer lab, and to most optical switching applications.
Maybe too expensive for most Slashdotters, but not too expensive for even a paint factory. Or an inkjet ink factory.
That video showed a lot of mixing, boiling, separation. None of it looked very expensive. The presenter mentioned a second process that smooths the surface of the initial yield of dots which might be expensive. But that just makes the dots more efficient at processing light. If the initial process is really cheap, the lower quality might be a better value than continuing the second process for an improvement relatively small compared to its increased cost.
While we work in labs to cheapen the refinement process, we could get a lot of cheap dots to apply to other uses that will only improve when the refinement process becomes cheap enough. Getting the dots into industry will ramp up demand for the higher quality ones.
As a side effect, places like China that tolerate toxic products as we see being contained in that video could dominate the market for the initial products. But places like the US that are less tolerant of toxins in the workplace and in pollution, but are more geared towards specializing in higher quality products (refined in different ways for different properties), could refine the raw dots into more valuable and effective products. Leaving the US dependent on China for raw materials, but able to switch suppliers to some other place, like India, that is similarly tolerant - or make the raw dots ourselves if a crisis outweighed the protections from toxins we used in the course of normal business. All of which could make a proper market, with balanced protections, that gives the world lots of cheap, and sufficient amounts of quality, quantum dots. Whose efficiencies and effectiveness can eliminate toxins and pollutions these dots replace in the industries where they're adopted.
Before you were born. Who cares?
Republican congressmembers are busted every year. Constant and recent behavior is not equal to acts decades old.
You Republicans can't even get "A = B" right, you're so sick.
No, they read the snailmail letters from the lobbyists. Or rather their staff reads them. The letters tell them how to vote, and why they care. If you get your letter in there with the lobbyist's, you have a chance. The political game is entirely defined by access. And snailmail has access that email still does not.
English troll is talking about their own country.
Who was the last Democratic congressmember to get caught with a prostitute - pudgy, female or otherwise?
I've worked with, for and among political offices. It's very well known in that biz that a written letter is much more effective than email, unless you're already an associate of the recipient.
Snail mail is always best for corresponding with politicians and officials with whom you don't already correspond regularly. They're more likely to have it handed to them, because they're mostly old and think email is for people who think for a living, not schmooze. And even if it's just a staffer who reads it (and maybe mentions it to the politico - or better yet, gets it to influence the work their office actually does among other staffers), a letter is better. Lawyers and other official correspondents use snail mail, sometimes as required by law or contract. And the people who write letters tend to be people who vote. Both because they tend to be older, and more office-oriented, and to be people who put actual time into the political process.
Teaching everyone in public school how to program might make more programmers, and maybe even better ones. But even more valuable will be showing the vast majority of people who will never program after they're forced to in class just what the basic practice is like for those of us who do. It won't be some exotic, perhaps damnable mystery. Getting everyone exposed to programming would humanize those of us who turn out to do it a lot.
I don't think it'll help much in protecting nerds from getting stuffed into lockers by jocks. But maybe later when that jock is the useless midlevel manager telling a programmer how the thing works the programmer is automating, or when the jock is thinking about asking a programmer for something, they'll have some recollection about doing it themself a little way back when, and so relate better to the "whiz", and maybe deal with them better.
No, Cisco probably is firing many thousands of workers who were working on those core business activities that Cisco is retaining. There's no simple relationship between what a worker was doing and what the corporate rulers say the corporation will now do, when the corporation fires so many people at once. Especially when the corporation was profitable and known for quality before the firings.
But yes, Cisco surely had many employees who were doing other things. Like all the corporate execs and their ecosystem who are responsible for pure finance, including managing the company's publicly traded equity (stock) and publicly/privately juggled debt (bonds, mortgages, government loans, private loans, credit default swaps, other derivatives). When you're a big brand with lots of property like Cisco, especially when you define an industry - or a whole sector (like "the Internet), you make (and lose) lots of money in business purely derivative of your actual operating business.
And no, those finance parasites are probably not being fired. You almost never hear about these corporations firing lots of their banking interface infrastructure. Because the financial system is so deeply rigged to be both a money and an influence machine. Even when distracting a company out of real profitability. The guy who gets you into the casino is more tightly held than the guy who worked to give you your first ante.
Whether or not this is a true story, or whether or not it's a government project, there is as much budget-reserving in private industry like what you described as there is in government. Probably more, since government is more transparent than private business, and so more people have access to exposing that little game, which tends to inhibit it some.
You are lying. "GPGPU" is the technique of General Purpose computing on Graphic Processor Units. Nobody installs "GPGPUs"; there is no such hardware called that. People install GPUs to do GPGPU.
Sure, you architect the largest East Coast x86_64 supercomputers all the time. Bullshit.
They are buying a supercomputer because their lucrative medical research is too big for the smaller HPC, but not (yet) big enough for the biggest supercomputer of its type in the region. So they're also looking for some other apps to use the extra capacity instead of it going to waste.
That might not be true - this is just a Slashdot assertion. But there's nothing inconsistent in there to suggest it's false. It's perfectly plausible.
You are just one of the modern type of people who make up your mind on your preconceptions, say something out loud, then refuse to listen to any reason you could be wrong or might reconsider. Denial feels so powerful, who cares what's true, right?
The most interesting aspect of this discussion is that so many posters are whining about this supercomputer arriving without having any applications planned for it, so it's asking Slashdot for recommendations. It's hilarious not because it's probably fiction (though that's always possible), nor because Slashdot's reply is that it's fiction or some government or trust fund boondoggle. It's kinda hilarious because right there the poster says:
It's perfectly clear that they're buying a bigger computer than they'll be able to use (at first), so they're looking for something else worthwhile as the machine starts to go stale (out of the oven, like bread). But they're doing the kind of computing already that makes big money from data crunching, though it's certainly possible they've bought bigger than they can deploy their current workload to for 100% capacity usage.
But what makes that so hilarious is that they've got a supercomputer burning a hole in their datacenter, and they think asking this gang of illiterates is the way to decide what to do with it. Of course they should mine bitcoins! It's idiot's delight in here.
You are at least as big an idiot as they are.
You should run Lotus Notes on it. At least that's what the Guardian (giant NYC insurance/finance corp) did with their two IBM SP2 supercomputers in the late 1990s when I was bringing OOP to their development division.
No, I'm not kidding. Lotus Notes on 2 SP2s. To get the results they could have gotten with two Sparc20s running SENDMAIL, Apache and Sybase.
I tried to get them to switch to that alternative platform, and bet them an SP2 it would work as fast, and better. They didn't take my bet.
The US economy is growing by at least 2% every year. And it's already really huge - 2% growth is a lot of growth.
BTW, China's growth includes the parts of China that are owned by Americans and Europeans, the fastest part of that growth. At the deep costs to China's environment and labor health.
Government has more regulations now that 50 years ago. But fewer of them are effective at limiting corporations. Vastly more of those regulations were written by the corporations, especially since Reagan and then the 1990s Republican Congress.
You're an anarchist because your imaginary Teabagger government, as we move closer to it, opens more and more anarchy into which corporations move.
Your questions do answer one of my questions, though. Evidently you are an Apex Tech graduate. Or at least applicant.
It costs so much to drill here primarily because labor and environment are more protected than in foreign deserts, jungles and seafloors. When drillers cut costs, we get BP's Macondo blowout. Secondarily because the easiest oil to reach has already been pumped out of here. The places where it's cheaper to drill have by far the more controlling, corrupt and wasteful governments.
The people and orgs that employ IT workers aren't failing to hire because the government taxes them and gives the money to others, either for them to do IT or for any other purpose. Indeed, I don't know what you're referring to about a lack of IT job options in 2006. Or how a NASA job is a "decidedly not government contract". The IT industry has had a synthetic brain drain into finance for the past 10-15 years, because deregulation made stealing money through fraud and market manipulation more profitable than anything else. I know: I helped automate the insurance industry (bringing OOP to MONY and The Guardian to the Internet) in the late 1990s, when "integrated financial services" eliminated the 1934 regulations preventing "another Great Depression" so they could sell Credit Default Swaps and other derivatives - that created the Great Depression. I also worked in 2009-2010 programming for some of the 10 biggest hedge funds, cleaning up their trading apps and DBs as they moved from the Bubble risk models to the new scams designed around the bailouts and more diversified robbery targets. My job was to delete the old stuff without breaking their $BILLION-daily businesses, not create the new criminal businesses replacing it, so my conscience is pretty clear. But I moved into energy management (and a pay cut) because I prefer to help solve the problem rather than help create it. During Bush/Cheney, 40% of the US GDP growth was in purely finance property: mostly a fraud, as the equities market it underwrote lost an eerily similar 40% of its value when they ran out of suckers and the vultures came home to roost with the ARMs finally rising to high contracted interest rates. There's only so many trillions around to work, and working them in finance that mostly adds no value (but does largely destroy value) did divert investment that in the 1990s built actual wealth by creating telecom systems people actually used to do real things beyond pure property trades.
I also don't know how you're comparing Houston's tolls to the Federal projects that built them (with the nation's taxes). Sure, when you've got bottlenecked road systems, it's trivial to make money tolling them, especially when you've conned the users into paying high starting tolls on promises of ending them promptly. But the Federal government's original construction of them, without tolls, wasn't planned to turn a profit, nor should it. The national public good of Houston's vehicles moving around for business and personal transit, and the military propaganda required in the 1950s to get Americans to invest in infrastructure, was worth the expense without direct use fees that didn't reflect the widespread national benefit. That Houston has taken to exploiting the infrastructure and its users for profit can't be compared to the Federal construction and operations that didn't work that way.
I'm reminded of Texas governor and presidential nomination candidate Rick Perry's claims to Texan job creation. Which turn out to be government jobs paid by Federal programs funded by national taxes. All while Perry rails against the Big Government that provided it, even threatening to secede from the nation when his cronies aren't in power (and while insisting he loves that nation from which he wants to secede). I understand that's the Texan way, now a permanent feature after Perry and Bush (and really forever, including Democratic governors/senators, including those who became president). But it still doesn't add up. Unless you're a crony. And I'm not.
The trucker union, the Teamsters, has some power, but it's not even enough to protect their pensions - let alone force the US to choose roads and airports over rails. The power is in the vehicle makers: car and truck makers, airplane makers. And of course the oil corps. Those corporations have been calling the shots since Henry Ford, and are the ones who tore up America's rail to replace with roads and cars. Those are the orgs that set up Houston, Oil City, the way you hate - not the unions.
You can tell me about how your family oil business knows there's so much oil left to drill, yet despite getting royalty-free drilling land practically wherever they ask, their industry doesn't drill. Except maybe when getting Federal money from the rest of us to multiply their profits. The actual unlimited supply is self-serving lies about where oil is or isn't coming from oil companies with agendas to maximize profit by increasing demand and decreasing supply. I know they're your family, but if they're like mine or any other family I know, they'll tell you the same lies they tell themselves that protect what they do that they know is wrong.
I can tell you from direct experience that NYC building owners don't invest in their operating capital even when the ROI is, as I told you, close to 100% or better, except when the government both forces them and pays them to do it. It doesn't make sense. But that's because economics is not like electronics, where consistency and actual value rule the actors. Economics is a measure of people's exchanges of value with each other and their environment. Which means it's governed by human social psychology, not primarily by the potential and limits of the material being exchanged. Despite their deserved reputation of being the worlds most determined capitalists, NYC building owners refuse to make rational investment decisions all the time. It's not because of property/zoning laws/regulations. It's because they are used to increasing profits only by cutting immediate costs (like cheaper maintenance workers) or by reducing the supply of real estate against the constantly increasing demand for it. Purely rational people would change despite what they're used to when there's double or triple digit ROIs from investing in necessary costs they have to pay anyway (boiler upgrades and fuel). Building owners don't change, because they wait for everyone around them to change, or to be forced to change, or to be paid to change - or all of them usually.
Again, this is not some kind of guess at what might happen. Also, your statement that the rich in NYC are taxed so much that they flee to other states is just a lie. Except for the extremely rich who move across the state line to Connecticut. It's not that they're taxed so much in NYC, but that they're taxed so little in CT. So when rivers overflow in predictable storms, they're surrounded by a moat their private airlifts have to get across with food and diesel for their generators. Because without taxes and working government their infrastructure, like roads, powerlines and drainage, can't withstand the changes their businesses are making. They are the tiny minority. NYC is full of the richest people in the world, not despite the taxation but because of the services it pays for. And every day more rich people come here, to pay the taxes and consume the services.
FYI, NASA is not a good example to contest government leading energy efficiency, because building efficiency is not rocket science. NASA as run by either a Republican president or Congress or both for the past couple of generations is like any other large government procurement system: corporate welfare for those who sell by the part# through their DC lobbyists. NYC law, like practically all energy efficiency regulations these days, requires only performance standards and energy improvement results (or just standardized reporting in physical units).
I'm always fascinated by the people whose entire career
Almost all of the time. The US has by far the world's most powerful military, and has for over a half century. For over a century before that the US military was among the top 5, though probably actually still the most powerful since about the 1860s, but confined to North America. During that time the US has invaded only its neighbors to the west (native nations) and south (Spanish Mexico, and then Mexican Mexico), and not for a century now, and very occasionally small distant countries with either no substantial military (Grenada), or similarly sized military (Iraq, Nazi Germany), or substantial counter-insurgency communities (Vietnam, Afghanistan).
Yes, the US is at war (overt or covert) almost all of the time. But there have always been far more opportunities for the US to make war with its huge military and bloodthirsty population than it has exploited. During most of its history other nations with big militaries have made more war.
So while most of US history has featured acts of war by the US, that's just a small percentage of the time the US could have committed acts of war. Most of the time something's stopping us, because we aren't doing nearly as much as we could.
Who are the innocent people the US is killing in Iran?
No we don't.
Yes we are.
No we can't. I run the tech for an energy management equipment/network/software/support company in NYC that cuts energy consumption an average of 20%, mostly in heating oil/gas. The notoriously greedy building owners never pay the upfront costs, even when it pays back in under a year - that's close to 100% ROI, and rising with energy costs. The only way they do it is when there's government money and/or requirements to do it. Until NYC's law kicked in this year, building owners refused to even measure their energy consumption, let alone reduce it. This is the reality, not the "Mayor of Sim City" Ron Paul LARPing Ayn Rand.
The right thing would have been an "Apollo programme" for energy efficiency/alternatives to get our money, and the troops that always follow it, out of the Mideast. By now, a decade later, we could have cut our energy consumption by at least 30%, maybe more, and set trade policies to get all of our oil/gas from our biggest sources: Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean (and some gas from the Pacific). Instead we invaded Iraq, sending oil to $100:bbl for most of a decade, while promoting SUVs and even Hummers that get 1/3 the mileage we should require from cars. We could have interconnected regional and commuter rail, built more cargo and passenger interlinks. The $3 TRILLION we spent in Iraq so far could have bought us an energy, transit and building infrastructure that got the Mideast and much of the global corruption out of our hair permanently. Instead we spent the time, money and lives making things worse.
We don't need to do wild science fiction to solve our core economic/political problems. We need to do straightforward science and engineering. Which should be the easiest politics of all. Instead, we wanted a flight suit, a megaphone, and blood. We sure got it.
The main consequence of the attack was that Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It's now over 8 years later, and we're still at war in Iraq. No WMD, no Binladen connection, or any of Bush/Cheney's other lies were ever proven anything but lies. Like "the war will pay for itself". The Iraq War has cost us well over $3 TRILLION. It has cost us almost 5000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. Not to mention the severe costs of Americans torturing so many people.
We'll memorialize 9/11/2001 for a long time. But 3/19/03? What's that? It's the date the US invaded Iraq. Nobody wants to talk about that, so the war never ends.