Sounds like you're talking about a coal plant. Mercury, lead, arsenic, all that fun stuff.
Toxic waste, with a half-life of thousands of years, which would render land uninhabitable.
Lead, Mercury, and arsenic don't have halflives. They'll be as dangerous a million years in the future as they are today.
And which often takes dust form, blowing around, and rendering more land uninhabitable.
Lead can be powdered, Merucy can vaporize, then there's things like acid rain and such.
Which gives people cancer, causes birth defects, and is almost impossible to get rid of.
Coal power can also lead to Brain Damage, Asthma, heart attack/stroke, etc...
Which gets into the water supplies and contaminates more land, which gets into the ocean and kills fish. I have no words with which to describe your stupidity. None. No words suffice. Please go die to avoid further contamination of the human race.
Like coal power plants currently do.
Like it or not, nuclear power is FAR more enviromentally friendly than most of the alternatives. At least with nuclear power we contain the waste rather than spewing it into the enviroment.
Do you have a source on that? Current estimates are that a breeder reactor can run a positive energy balance based on using the electricity to extract radionucleatides from seawater.
A fuel rod produces more than enough energy during it's life to melt lots, and lots of glass. Vitrification might make the refining process more expensive - but it's still a more pure source of Uranium than the raw ore it comes from(yellowcake). Right now prices for uranium are depressed because many plants are burning through stocks released by weapon drawdowns. That's not going to last forever, and rising prices will make recycling more attractive.
The process also isn't as expensive when you've let the rods cool for 50 years or so, much less in radiation measures are necessary.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years. I'd argue that we've made more progress with them than we have for economic solar. 2a. The amount of water needed can be varied. In any case, the 'huge' amounts water used is generally put right back into the source, just maybe downstream less than a mile, and the only difference is that it's slightly warmer. A larger flow allows more cooling, increasing efficiency, while putting the water back at even less of a difference. It becomes a matter of - as long as we have the water, might as well use it. 2b. Coal powersuffers from the same problem, normally using loads of water as well. 3. No research necessary, the steam techniques for nuclear and coal power are identical - just more expensive than having a convienent river or lake. Even ocean, though the salt presents it's own problems. 4. Newer plant designs, possibly prototyped in India or China are much cheaper, and at least the current administration is working on streamlining/reducing the regulatory costs. As for the plebes - well, most don't actively remember Chernobyl, much less TMI. With the environmental concerns, I see resistance to nuclear power weakening. If they get smart and use the nuclear plant in a cogeneration/trigeneration fashion to support some industry(such as ethanol, depolymerization, oil sand/shale processing or hydrogen), you can get your load balancing and increase the efficiency of the plant by a great deal. 5. I don't see how Wind&Solar can cover our needs economically - and safety wise nuclear power is so safe that I wouldn't be surprised if the extra miles workers end up driving to perform maintenance leads to enough accidents to make it less safe than nuclear. 6. The price point to beat isn't 20 cents/KWh, it's more like 5 cents/KWh. 7. Variable rate billing already exists, I'm having it installed for this winter. Living in the boonies, I'm currently on propane heat. With oil prices - propane is now more expensive than electric, so I'm switching to an off-peak electrical heating system. If I _really_ need heat during a peak period(or the electric just can't keep up), then the propane furnace will kick on. 8. I'd love to see a battery that stores twice the electricity at half the price, but I haven't seen anything that's convinced me that it's not vapor at this point. We do have high efficiency alternative methods that are cheaper at utility levels, and if electric cars ever become major there's a lot of tricks you could play with them, but I'm not holding my breath.
You have to realize that despite being the 'Home of the Brave, Land of the Free', we're also the country that passed prohibition, had dry states, and still have 'dry' counties in a few spots were it's illegal to sell alcohol, period.
We do have quite a population of wanna-be nannies.
In the USA, you're 99% an adult at 18. You can vote, smoke, join the military without your parent's consent, get married, buy/own property, etc... Except for a number of political offices(with varying age rules), alcohol is about the only 'right' restricted to 21. Kinda like Australia's homosexual thing. It's more an exception.
There are other exceptions, of course, at the state level. We're more tightly bound than the EU, but less than other countries do for state levels. Can you name any other country in the world with varying rape/murder laws within subsections of the country itself? For example, one oddity is that the age for handling your own medical care in Nebraska is 19. Makes for some interesting situations at the University(lots of freshmen away from their parents)... The military simply ignores the law, of course, being a federal agency.
You still have to somehow set it up to continuously fudge the data - the longer that log runs, the more data to fudge, I imagine that you'd overwhelm the processor in a device such as this quickly. Don't forget some hidden method to tell it to STOP fudging the data after the cop gives you the ticket. Not to mention the difficulty of creating a custom firmware to do the job.
If I was creating a device such as this, either uploads to the company's site, or at the least signing the log data as unaltered using an internal private/public key. Sure, it might be hackable - but not one person in 10k can do that.
With a decent compression alogorithm, I wouldn't see it taking much to track speed every second or even half second.
There's only 86,400 seconds in a day. Figure 2 bytes for speed, and you can track in tenths of a mph. That's 169kb of data, uncompressed, per day. Track every half second, throw in some overhead such as occasional timestamps, GPS coordinates and headings(every 60 seconds or so), and you're up to around half a meg, per day. At an accuracy level sufficient to satisfy most racers.
Not to mention that somebody driving along with the cruise control activated is going to produce some highly compressible data.
Still, the device itself says 2MB/512KB, and advertises '30 second updates', but it's a cellular device - that could be that it uploads it's data every 30 seconds(if configured to do so), but the data could have average speed/max/location/heading/etc...
My dad's work installed devices at least like the rocky mountain ones(I don't know the brand) in their service vehicles - found quite a few instances of speeding/excess speeds at first. After that, reduced fuel usage(presumably from lower speeds and reduced idling*) has actually paid for the devices.
*They can even alert for a vehicle that's left on while stopped for too long.
Thing is, even if a GPS device takes a running average over 1-4 seconds, I don't see any street legal, non-modified car being able to go from 55 to 62 mph and back down during that period. For that matter, with a running average they would have had to go from something like 50-62-50 to prevent the average from showing a higher speed(and getting him in trouble with his parents).
And it's rather improbable for the cop to catch the peak, as well.
The quickest problem I can see with this sort of system in the USA is that you'd quickly develop 'bad' bulbs in the higher speed spots.
Even if you have them rotate/slide to prevent that, I can see people coming up with their own flashing solution - or even just 'adjust' the speedometer to say they're doing 65 when they're really doing 75.
Then again, when it comes to trucks, you're not going to see much speeding today - costs too much in fuel.
Glad they were able to get it dealt with, but paying an expert witness, all the legal fees, and everything else involved is incredibly expensive. And out of reach for 90% of the population that is 18 years old.
However, from this point on any lawyer worth his pay can reference this case and not have to have the expert witness. A real motivation to buy that model GPS device if you want to be able to have a cheaper defense. Or at least one with the same specifications.
Mostly because launching stuff into space isn't anywhere near 100% reliable, and honestly enough, what the politicians are calling 'waste' that has to be safely stored for 10k years is actually still 90-95% of what a nuclear engineer would call 'potential fuel'.
Let Uranium double in price and reprocessing is suddenly profitable, and not that expensive to do on rods that have been cooling off for the last hundred years.
But it wouldn't have worked on me, at least not for quite a bit longer and further.
I wandered away from my mom once - got hungry and went through a buffet line. They didn't even realize I wasn't around my parents until the adults on both sides disclaimed me.
The leash might of worked. Mostly as a reminder 'this is how far you're allowed from mom/dad'.
Here's the deal. Assuming that nuclear fusion doesn't hit it off anytime soon, or fission just ends up being cheaper in many cases, it'll be far less than 10k years before we're digging the stuff up to run in breeder reactors. After all, current high level 'waste' is still 90-95% uranium.
I'd say less than 500, actually. Given active storage sites, language/skill drift won't be enough to really matter for the hazards - they'll probably want to re-assay the stuff again anyways. So, we're spending a massive amount of effort on something where it, honestly enough, won't matter. The remaining isotopes after reprocessing have shorter half-lifes, so again, much less hazardous in a shorter time.
To the point that if they're digging as deep as we're burying it, they already have substantial enviromental concerns anyways. So yes, they should be knowledgable.
Don't forget that we're almost as disparate a bunch as the republicans or democrats.
Unlike MBGMorden, I really don't like the democrat idea of social services. But my ideas on how to 'fix' various problems aren't what the republicans want either.
To Republicans: Stop trying to push your morality down my throat To Democrats: Stop trying to ban my stuff and take my money
To both parties: Balance the budget(several states have done it!), stop the huge waste of money that is the drug war, legalize prostitution while you're at it*. Stop handing subsidies out left and right. Stop the tendency to control state governments by the circle of taking money from a state's citizens, then making the local government agencies(such as schools) apply to get their own people's money back.
*"I've never understood why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Why isn't selling sex legal? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?" - George Carlin
Let me expand upon his version - they're exploiting the cheaper labor and taking jobs away from those of us in this country THAT NEED THOSE JOBS and they're giving it to OTHER PEOPLE ACROSS THE PLANET INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN.
Man, I'd suggest laying off the crack...
The USA, despite all these transfers still has employment figures better than France and most other European countries. I'd say it's not a huge economic crisis. Especially seeing as how in the last couple weeks I've heard about US manufacturing expanding again because getting stuff from china isn't cheaper anymore. Once China and India are up and running, we won't have huge amounts of outsourcing anymore, just mostly for things where the other country DOES have an advantage in a particular niche.
That should nicely trash the rest of your post, logic be damned. Corporations need to be DESTROYED, as all they're doing is helping themselves and hurting the country. What's the term for an entity that causes harm to its own country, WILLINGLY?
To a large extent, what the corporations did actually helped the USA(by helping to provide cheap goods) more than it harmed us. The fact that it benefited the Chinese 100x more is a side effect.
Now yes, I'd work on putting some barriors up to at least slow it - but I wouldn't try to stop it.
You have a very curious version of exploitation. By that scale, you could complain about the midwest. On average the midwest has lower wages than the coasts, but proportionally lower living expenses as well.
By your comments, you seem to prefer that the worker in india NOT get that $1k/month job. Honestly enough, this is an educated Indian, so he's likely to get another job. Maybe one at $600/month. That means he can't afford as much to pay for other trinkets - and the collective effect is more people stay at the suckiest subsidence levels.
You can of course say that it isn't exploitation, but helping them by funneling money into their society. But the truth is, that as long as there is a huge salary difference for the same amount and type of job, there is exploitation going on.
In my mind, your exploitation = willing trade. We benefit, they benefit, we're both happy. Realistically speaking, this will also result in a downward push on our wages(I think we're lucky we've been merely stagnant), and an upward pressure on theirs. If you look at the mean/median for India and China, you'll find that their wages have been increasing at far above inflation. Which is to be expected. This will continue until China/India have modernized and pretty much eliminated the subsidence farmer class. If shipping costs remain high, that will relax the pressure to outsource jobs long before that, but by then they'll have enough internal economy to keep the process up.
And the grandparent was correct. These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
Free trade laws, they're being paid well above minimum wage in their country, and the cost of living is such that paying them US minimum wage would be somewhat silly in that you'd have telemarketers and tech support people making more than the local doctors?
globalization is of net benefit to everyone. It's just that, as we were the top dogs, it's of the least benefit to us.
I have to agree - this doesn't inspire confidence in me.
I'd much rather see samples sent off to independent testing labs. Heck, I'm sure there's some mechanical equivalents to Dan out there.
Heck, Popular Mechanics and consumer reports will occasionally provide free testing of various 'too good to be true' methods and devices.
His idea, taken raw, sounds a lot like thermal depolymerization, which does have a test plant up. But the TD guys aren't proposing a 100% replacement for oil, or making claims that their fuel is almost magical(the lower heat). It IS naturally lower in a number of contaminants such as sulfur, but nothing magical.
Indeed, as it is, biodiesel has killed the old process for obtaining glycerin - industry gets all it wants(and more) from biodiesel production. Still, as it becomes cheaper so shouldn't premium soaps, and I'm sure we can come up with some more uses for it.
It's one thing to make BD out of waste oils today - quite another if you're looking at powering 10-100% of the diesel vehicles on the road with it.
I don't have a media library for it's nice looks. I have a library because I like to read, listen, and watch stuff.
Over time I've gathered enough books, CDs, and movies to make tracking down the specific piece is a pain in the butt, thus my preference for digital media disconnected from a specific storage medium.
Too large. Personally, I figure a mating between a Tivo and iTunes to be the future - buy your movie online, have it download to your media center for play. Time needed? With a good internet connection, about what you'd need to run to the store, find the movie, purchase it, and get home. Even for HD, you'd have enough buffer built up by then to be able to watch the rest of it.
Either that or you do a jpg style 'don't need all the data to show a lower res picture'. Give it more time to download and you get a better picture.
If you DO manage to fill up the 2 1TB HDs, have some sort of predictive system that deletes the less popular movies, keeping them available to download again if you decide to watch it again.
It's not so much 'pull out in 16 months', it's 'pull out gradually, finishing in 16 months'.
What happens if Iraq goes to heck in the process? Is he willing to adjust?
Right now the Iraqi security forces to have taken over responsibility over much of Iraq, and violence is dropping. Well, to the point that we're looking at having to concentrate on Afghanistan again.
Other than that, more diplomacy and aid. While I don't disagree with the aid(believing that people with jobs tend to stay out of trouble), but I tend to discount diplomacy a bit - talk doesn't do much without something to back it up.
Have you ever bought anything from ebay? Or another auction? Out of the paper? From a pawn shop?
There's plenty of ways for a thief to wash the goods, as long as they're reasonably generic.
Sure, the final recipient is on the hook for giving it back - and has a legitimate suit against whoever sold it to them(on up the line to the criminal).
But causing lots of damage isn't fair. Well, unless you have PROOF it's the criminal that actually stole it(or knows it was stolen), but at that point I'd rather the courts figure it out and use the resources that would have been ruined to pay restitution fees.
I think the idea is sort of like the laws against false advertising. If I'm in trouble and run to where I've 'seen' a camera, so actions against me can be witnessed, I'd be pissed if it turned out to be fake and there's no video evidence of my being assaulted.
But, approach it from a different angle - the very appearance of security cameras deters crime, maybe. On the other hand, odds are fake cameras will eventually be found out, then the public will be operating on a false sense of security. Not good.
Oh, and going by crime statistics, the cameras in London don't do much good - you're worse off than NYC! I've read that cameras, at most, shifted crimes. Many times the perp would commit the crime right in front of the camera counting on the fact that a random cop or victim looking at the camera isn't going to be able to identify him - there's just too many faces. Thus the push for face recognition software. Then that gives you hurdle 2- you now know who perp Y is, but now you need to find out where he's living this week and actually send an officer around to arrest him. Police departments everywhere seem to fall down a lot on the second one. As studies have shown, actually following through(even if you 'don't have enough resources') tends to disproportionately reduce crime - after all, that purse snatcher, burgler, or mugger is very likely have committed crimes in the past, and commit more in the future if he's not caught and subjected to an effective correction*.
*Chosen over punishment. I don't care as much about the retribution portion as the 'make sure they aren't going to do it again'.
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Burn toxic waste and spread it around easily.
Sounds like you're talking about a coal plant. Mercury, lead, arsenic, all that fun stuff.
Toxic waste, with a half-life of thousands of years, which would render land uninhabitable.
Lead, Mercury, and arsenic don't have halflives. They'll be as dangerous a million years in the future as they are today.
And which often takes dust form, blowing around, and rendering more land uninhabitable.
Lead can be powdered, Merucy can vaporize, then there's things like acid rain and such.
Which gives people cancer, causes birth defects, and is almost impossible to get rid of.
Coal power can also lead to Brain Damage, Asthma, heart attack/stroke, etc...
Which gets into the water supplies and contaminates more land, which gets into the ocean and kills fish. I have no words with which to describe your stupidity. None. No words suffice. Please go die to avoid further contamination of the human race.
Like coal power plants currently do.
Like it or not, nuclear power is FAR more enviromentally friendly than most of the alternatives. At least with nuclear power we contain the waste rather than spewing it into the enviroment.
It'd make it more expensive, sure, but that doesn't mean we can't still separate it. If anything, it'll still be easier than starting from raw ore.
Do you have a link that shows why vitrified waste can't still be seperated out?
Do you have a source on that? Current estimates are that a breeder reactor can run a positive energy balance based on using the electricity to extract radionucleatides from seawater.
A fuel rod produces more than enough energy during it's life to melt lots, and lots of glass. Vitrification might make the refining process more expensive - but it's still a more pure source of Uranium than the raw ore it comes from(yellowcake). Right now prices for uranium are depressed because many plants are burning through stocks released by weapon drawdowns. That's not going to last forever, and rising prices will make recycling more attractive.
The process also isn't as expensive when you've let the rods cool for 50 years or so, much less in radiation measures are necessary.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years. I'd argue that we've made more progress with them than we have for economic solar.
2a. The amount of water needed can be varied. In any case, the 'huge' amounts water used is generally put right back into the source, just maybe downstream less than a mile, and the only difference is that it's slightly warmer. A larger flow allows more cooling, increasing efficiency, while putting the water back at even less of a difference. It becomes a matter of - as long as we have the water, might as well use it.
2b. Coal power suffers from the same problem, normally using loads of water as well.
3. No research necessary, the steam techniques for nuclear and coal power are identical - just more expensive than having a convienent river or lake. Even ocean, though the salt presents it's own problems.
4. Newer plant designs, possibly prototyped in India or China are much cheaper, and at least the current administration is working on streamlining/reducing the regulatory costs. As for the plebes - well, most don't actively remember Chernobyl, much less TMI. With the environmental concerns, I see resistance to nuclear power weakening. If they get smart and use the nuclear plant in a cogeneration/trigeneration fashion to support some industry(such as ethanol, depolymerization, oil sand/shale processing or hydrogen), you can get your load balancing and increase the efficiency of the plant by a great deal.
5. I don't see how Wind&Solar can cover our needs economically - and safety wise nuclear power is so safe that I wouldn't be surprised if the extra miles workers end up driving to perform maintenance leads to enough accidents to make it less safe than nuclear.
6. The price point to beat isn't 20 cents/KWh, it's more like 5 cents/KWh.
7. Variable rate billing already exists, I'm having it installed for this winter. Living in the boonies, I'm currently on propane heat. With oil prices - propane is now more expensive than electric, so I'm switching to an off-peak electrical heating system. If I _really_ need heat during a peak period(or the electric just can't keep up), then the propane furnace will kick on.
8. I'd love to see a battery that stores twice the electricity at half the price, but I haven't seen anything that's convinced me that it's not vapor at this point. We do have high efficiency alternative methods that are cheaper at utility levels, and if electric cars ever become major there's a lot of tricks you could play with them, but I'm not holding my breath.
You have to realize that despite being the 'Home of the Brave, Land of the Free', we're also the country that passed prohibition, had dry states, and still have 'dry' counties in a few spots were it's illegal to sell alcohol, period.
We do have quite a population of wanna-be nannies.
In the USA, you're 99% an adult at 18. You can vote, smoke, join the military without your parent's consent, get married, buy/own property, etc... Except for a number of political offices(with varying age rules), alcohol is about the only 'right' restricted to 21. Kinda like Australia's homosexual thing. It's more an exception.
There are other exceptions, of course, at the state level. We're more tightly bound than the EU, but less than other countries do for state levels. Can you name any other country in the world with varying rape/murder laws within subsections of the country itself? For example, one oddity is that the age for handling your own medical care in Nebraska is 19. Makes for some interesting situations at the University(lots of freshmen away from their parents)... The military simply ignores the law, of course, being a federal agency.
You still have to somehow set it up to continuously fudge the data - the longer that log runs, the more data to fudge, I imagine that you'd overwhelm the processor in a device such as this quickly. Don't forget some hidden method to tell it to STOP fudging the data after the cop gives you the ticket. Not to mention the difficulty of creating a custom firmware to do the job.
If I was creating a device such as this, either uploads to the company's site, or at the least signing the log data as unaltered using an internal private/public key. Sure, it might be hackable - but not one person in 10k can do that.
With a decent compression alogorithm, I wouldn't see it taking much to track speed every second or even half second.
There's only 86,400 seconds in a day. Figure 2 bytes for speed, and you can track in tenths of a mph. That's 169kb of data, uncompressed, per day. Track every half second, throw in some overhead such as occasional timestamps, GPS coordinates and headings(every 60 seconds or so), and you're up to around half a meg, per day. At an accuracy level sufficient to satisfy most racers.
Not to mention that somebody driving along with the cruise control activated is going to produce some highly compressible data.
Still, the device itself says 2MB/512KB, and advertises '30 second updates', but it's a cellular device - that could be that it uploads it's data every 30 seconds(if configured to do so), but the data could have average speed/max/location/heading/etc...
My dad's work installed devices at least like the rocky mountain ones(I don't know the brand) in their service vehicles - found quite a few instances of speeding/excess speeds at first. After that, reduced fuel usage(presumably from lower speeds and reduced idling*) has actually paid for the devices.
*They can even alert for a vehicle that's left on while stopped for too long.
Thing is, even if a GPS device takes a running average over 1-4 seconds, I don't see any street legal, non-modified car being able to go from 55 to 62 mph and back down during that period. For that matter, with a running average they would have had to go from something like 50-62-50 to prevent the average from showing a higher speed(and getting him in trouble with his parents).
And it's rather improbable for the cop to catch the peak, as well.
The quickest problem I can see with this sort of system in the USA is that you'd quickly develop 'bad' bulbs in the higher speed spots.
Even if you have them rotate/slide to prevent that, I can see people coming up with their own flashing solution - or even just 'adjust' the speedometer to say they're doing 65 when they're really doing 75.
Then again, when it comes to trucks, you're not going to see much speeding today - costs too much in fuel.
Glad they were able to get it dealt with, but paying an expert witness, all the legal fees, and everything else involved is incredibly expensive. And out of reach for 90% of the population that is 18 years old.
However, from this point on any lawyer worth his pay can reference this case and not have to have the expert witness. A real motivation to buy that model GPS device if you want to be able to have a cheaper defense. Or at least one with the same specifications.
Mostly because launching stuff into space isn't anywhere near 100% reliable, and honestly enough, what the politicians are calling 'waste' that has to be safely stored for 10k years is actually still 90-95% of what a nuclear engineer would call 'potential fuel'.
Let Uranium double in price and reprocessing is suddenly profitable, and not that expensive to do on rods that have been cooling off for the last hundred years.
But it wouldn't have worked on me, at least not for quite a bit longer and further.
I wandered away from my mom once - got hungry and went through a buffet line. They didn't even realize I wasn't around my parents until the adults on both sides disclaimed me.
The leash might of worked. Mostly as a reminder 'this is how far you're allowed from mom/dad'.
Here's the deal. Assuming that nuclear fusion doesn't hit it off anytime soon, or fission just ends up being cheaper in many cases, it'll be far less than 10k years before we're digging the stuff up to run in breeder reactors. After all, current high level 'waste' is still 90-95% uranium.
I'd say less than 500, actually. Given active storage sites, language/skill drift won't be enough to really matter for the hazards - they'll probably want to re-assay the stuff again anyways. So, we're spending a massive amount of effort on something where it, honestly enough, won't matter. The remaining isotopes after reprocessing have shorter half-lifes, so again, much less hazardous in a shorter time.
To the point that if they're digging as deep as we're burying it, they already have substantial enviromental concerns anyways. So yes, they should be knowledgable.
Don't forget that we're almost as disparate a bunch as the republicans or democrats.
Unlike MBGMorden, I really don't like the democrat idea of social services. But my ideas on how to 'fix' various problems aren't what the republicans want either.
To Republicans: Stop trying to push your morality down my throat
To Democrats: Stop trying to ban my stuff and take my money
To both parties: Balance the budget(several states have done it!), stop the huge waste of money that is the drug war, legalize prostitution while you're at it*. Stop handing subsidies out left and right. Stop the tendency to control state governments by the circle of taking money from a state's citizens, then making the local government agencies(such as schools) apply to get their own people's money back.
*"I've never understood why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Why isn't selling sex legal? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?" - George Carlin
Let me expand upon his version - they're exploiting the cheaper labor and taking jobs away from those of us in this country THAT NEED THOSE JOBS and they're giving it to OTHER PEOPLE ACROSS THE PLANET INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN.
Man, I'd suggest laying off the crack...
The USA, despite all these transfers still has employment figures better than France and most other European countries. I'd say it's not a huge economic crisis. Especially seeing as how in the last couple weeks I've heard about US manufacturing expanding again because getting stuff from china isn't cheaper anymore. Once China and India are up and running, we won't have huge amounts of outsourcing anymore, just mostly for things where the other country DOES have an advantage in a particular niche.
That should nicely trash the rest of your post, logic be damned. Corporations need to be DESTROYED, as all they're doing is helping themselves and hurting the country. What's the term for an entity that causes harm to its own country, WILLINGLY?
To a large extent, what the corporations did actually helped the USA(by helping to provide cheap goods) more than it harmed us. The fact that it benefited the Chinese 100x more is a side effect.
Now yes, I'd work on putting some barriors up to at least slow it - but I wouldn't try to stop it.
So, yes it is exploitation.
You have a very curious version of exploitation. By that scale, you could complain about the midwest. On average the midwest has lower wages than the coasts, but proportionally lower living expenses as well.
By your comments, you seem to prefer that the worker in india NOT get that $1k/month job. Honestly enough, this is an educated Indian, so he's likely to get another job. Maybe one at $600/month. That means he can't afford as much to pay for other trinkets - and the collective effect is more people stay at the suckiest subsidence levels.
You can of course say that it isn't exploitation, but helping them by funneling money into their society. But the truth is, that as long as there is a huge salary difference for the same amount and type of job, there is exploitation going on.
In my mind, your exploitation = willing trade. We benefit, they benefit, we're both happy. Realistically speaking, this will also result in a downward push on our wages(I think we're lucky we've been merely stagnant), and an upward pressure on theirs. If you look at the mean/median for India and China, you'll find that their wages have been increasing at far above inflation. Which is to be expected. This will continue until China/India have modernized and pretty much eliminated the subsidence farmer class. If shipping costs remain high, that will relax the pressure to outsource jobs long before that, but by then they'll have enough internal economy to keep the process up.
And the grandparent was correct. These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
Free trade laws, they're being paid well above minimum wage in their country, and the cost of living is such that paying them US minimum wage would be somewhat silly in that you'd have telemarketers and tech support people making more than the local doctors?
globalization is of net benefit to everyone. It's just that, as we were the top dogs, it's of the least benefit to us.
I have to agree - this doesn't inspire confidence in me.
I'd much rather see samples sent off to independent testing labs. Heck, I'm sure there's some mechanical equivalents to Dan out there.
Heck, Popular Mechanics and consumer reports will occasionally provide free testing of various 'too good to be true' methods and devices.
His idea, taken raw, sounds a lot like thermal depolymerization, which does have a test plant up. But the TD guys aren't proposing a 100% replacement for oil, or making claims that their fuel is almost magical(the lower heat). It IS naturally lower in a number of contaminants such as sulfur, but nothing magical.
Indeed, as it is, biodiesel has killed the old process for obtaining glycerin - industry gets all it wants(and more) from biodiesel production. Still, as it becomes cheaper so shouldn't premium soaps, and I'm sure we can come up with some more uses for it.
It's one thing to make BD out of waste oils today - quite another if you're looking at powering 10-100% of the diesel vehicles on the road with it.
I don't have a media library for it's nice looks. I have a library because I like to read, listen, and watch stuff.
Over time I've gathered enough books, CDs, and movies to make tracking down the specific piece is a pain in the butt, thus my preference for digital media disconnected from a specific storage medium.
Too large. Personally, I figure a mating between a Tivo and iTunes to be the future - buy your movie online, have it download to your media center for play. Time needed? With a good internet connection, about what you'd need to run to the store, find the movie, purchase it, and get home. Even for HD, you'd have enough buffer built up by then to be able to watch the rest of it.
Either that or you do a jpg style 'don't need all the data to show a lower res picture'. Give it more time to download and you get a better picture.
If you DO manage to fill up the 2 1TB HDs, have some sort of predictive system that deletes the less popular movies, keeping them available to download again if you decide to watch it again.
Ah...
It's not so much 'pull out in 16 months', it's 'pull out gradually, finishing in 16 months'.
What happens if Iraq goes to heck in the process? Is he willing to adjust?
Right now the Iraqi security forces to have taken over responsibility over much of Iraq, and violence is dropping. Well, to the point that we're looking at having to concentrate on Afghanistan again.
Other than that, more diplomacy and aid. While I don't disagree with the aid(believing that people with jobs tend to stay out of trouble), but I tend to discount diplomacy a bit - talk doesn't do much without something to back it up.
I'd certainly like to hear more details than 'pull out in 16 months'.
Last time we used a timetable like that, it didn't turn out so well.
If you were mugged by a guy with a fake gun, do you sue him for giving you a false sense of peril?
legally speaking, there's no difference in the charges between robbing a bank with a fake gun rather than a real one.
So I imagine that I could.
That's why, in order to protect the effectiveness of security cameras, you want as many of them real/operational as possible.
Have you ever bought anything from ebay? Or another auction? Out of the paper? From a pawn shop?
There's plenty of ways for a thief to wash the goods, as long as they're reasonably generic.
Sure, the final recipient is on the hook for giving it back - and has a legitimate suit against whoever sold it to them(on up the line to the criminal).
But causing lots of damage isn't fair. Well, unless you have PROOF it's the criminal that actually stole it(or knows it was stolen), but at that point I'd rather the courts figure it out and use the resources that would have been ruined to pay restitution fees.
I think the idea is sort of like the laws against false advertising. If I'm in trouble and run to where I've 'seen' a camera, so actions against me can be witnessed, I'd be pissed if it turned out to be fake and there's no video evidence of my being assaulted.
But, approach it from a different angle - the very appearance of security cameras deters crime, maybe. On the other hand, odds are fake cameras will eventually be found out, then the public will be operating on a false sense of security. Not good.
Oh, and going by crime statistics, the cameras in London don't do much good - you're worse off than NYC! I've read that cameras, at most, shifted crimes. Many times the perp would commit the crime right in front of the camera counting on the fact that a random cop or victim looking at the camera isn't going to be able to identify him - there's just too many faces. Thus the push for face recognition software. Then that gives you hurdle 2- you now know who perp Y is, but now you need to find out where he's living this week and actually send an officer around to arrest him. Police departments everywhere seem to fall down a lot on the second one. As studies have shown, actually following through(even if you 'don't have enough resources') tends to disproportionately reduce crime - after all, that purse snatcher, burgler, or mugger is very likely have committed crimes in the past, and commit more in the future if he's not caught and subjected to an effective correction*.
*Chosen over punishment. I don't care as much about the retribution portion as the 'make sure they aren't going to do it again'.