Basically, billionaires that feel old enough that they're willing to risk dying on an insufficiently tested space vehicle.
But also young enough that they can stand the rigors of launch and spaceflight. Seems like a fairly narrow window. Of course, all this presupposes that the Falcon Heavy will actually fly on schedule and that they fly all the missions on the books before this one. Hmmm, Elon is right in that window, I think this is going to be exactly like D.D. Harriman, right before the flight Elon will say "One of the mysterious passengers is me!" and his board of directors at Telsa will sue to stop him from going.
This is what they are trying to do, according to the quote from this space.com article:
"This would be a long loop around the moon It would skim the surface of the moon, go quite a bit further out into deep space and then loop back to Earth," Musk said during the teleconference. "So I'm guessing, distance-wise, maybe [300,000] or 400,000 miles [about 500,000 to 650,000 kilometers]."
If they do this, they will go down in the history books as the farthest people from the earth, I can see how a billionaire might be attracted to that.
Yeah, Elon is double-D but who are the mysterious customers? Since a Falcon Heavy launch is going to cost them about $100 million ($50 million each for 2 passengers) it has got to be a fairly short list of people who can afford it. I couldn't see a rich guy spending more than 5% of his fortune on a week long ride so we're talking billionaire or better.
Let's say he lives frugally and can live life on $2,000 a month
$2k per month is frugal?
That $3,000 a month might not even be a super nice place in a good neighborhood, either
Not everyone can live in a "super nice place" in an area that has continual high demand.
That's five years of frugal living, no car,
No car? If he doesn't have a car what the hell is this frugal guy spending $2k per month on? Food and clothes cost about the same as everywhere else, eating out is a little more expensive. Cars are about the same cost in California as everywhere else and insurance and taxes are only slightly higher than the national average. If most of the country can afford a car on their paltry wages why can't our guy with $2000 per month in discretionary cash?
If I want to defeat my own safety interlocks, that should be my right. The manufacturer should be able to say they won't honor the warranty if I enable the ability to shift into reverse at 50, but if it's my machine I should be able to do what I want with it.
Yes, if you are looking at the 1% by income. However, the biggest issue isn't income inequality, it's wealth inequality. To be in the top 1% in wealth you need around $8 million in assets. Very few Silicon Valley engineers or Boston lawyers have that kind of kitty.
The issue with wealth inequality is that money makes even more money and so the bulk of money made tends to flow to the people who already have the money and so they end up with more and more of it while there are fewer and fewer dollars available to labor. This has been a bug in capitalism from the start but so far we have largely worked around it with progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes. However, as automation and AI make labor less relevant to production, more production ends up going to capital and less to labor. When it gets to the point that automation completely obviates the need for human labor, those that have capital and up to now have been accruing most of the gains will now own everything and those that only provide labor to the economic system will have nothing and have no means of making any money. Unless something fundamentally changes about the economic systems in the west this is going to be the endgame for most countries, a small number of people will own all the means of production and have all the power.
People like to think when it comes to this point the poor and disenfranchised will just rise up and do away with the rich like in the French revolution, but in an automated society this might not be possible. In the past, the armies that protect the rich were hard to manage because during a revolution they are more likely to identify with the poor people and the army might quickly turn on their paymasters. If production is fully automated you better believe the people who own it all will have vast killbot armies to protect their investment. It's one thing for the mob to go against an army that they might sway to their side, it's another to fight against a horde of machines. If any uprising were attempted a lot of people from the mob would die but nobody from the rich would die, just their robots - whose replacements are continually rolling off the assembly line.
We're approaching a tipping point past which the ultra-rich will control enough capital and have enough influence on the government that this scenario is almost guaranteed. We might already be past this point, the top 1% already have 40% of the wealth in the US and have tremendous influence over the government.
Relax dude, most human beings understand that if the company they get insurance from stops existing, they no longer have insurance from that company.
Ummm, no!
In most civilized countries, you can't sell insurance without being regulated. Govt regulations require that insurers have adequate reserves to pay out their insurance claims. Insurers have to reasonably invest the premiums to get an adequate return.
Otherwise people will buy insurance and the companies will quickly go out of business leaving customers high & dry.
Yeah, just like AIG, which was regulated so well they needed the largest government bailout in US history.
Not sure what you want me to look at on the Wikipedia article was it this? However, there have been instances where multiple individuals have been inadvertently assigned the same Social Security number
The reference actually only mentions a single instance of this happening, not multiple as the Wikipedia article says. Yes, that was a case of two people being assigned the same number. However, they also had the same name and same birthday, so your assertion that the federal government uses a combination of SSN and birthdate wouldn't do anything in that instance.
The second and third citation you provided are just the hysterical news stories brought on by the ID Analytics (LifeLock) study that I already mentioned. That study found nothing about people being issued duplicate numbers or that SSNs are not unique. None of the citations show any support for what you said:
SSNs are not unique. Many people share SSNs with other people that they have never met, and may not even be aware of. What is unique is the SSN+DOB combination. That is why any government form that asks for your SSN, will also ask for your DOB.
You've shown that there is at least one instance where two people were issued the same number (which was fixed), but shown no evidence that SSNs are not unique or that the purpose of the government asking for your DOB is that they use a DOB+SSN combination. The government doesn't (knowingly) issue the same number to multiple people. You claim "many people share SSNs" but that's not the case. That's like saying "many people share credit card numbers" because sometimes people use other people's credit card numbers for fraud. It's just not accurate.
Then congress should quit trying to do their social engineering through the tax code and remove all those deductions, the only thing I can see there that would require any input from the taxpayer is "received money from a friend/relative" and I'll guarantee 99% of such transactions go unreported anyway. If congress wants to encourage having children, or home ownership, or having solar panels, or being a blind railroad worker, let them make a direct appropriation and send checks to the people who they decide instead of lumping everything into the tax code. Of course, they don't want to do this as their handouts to their cronies will be more apparent.
Actually, it is not. SSNs are not unique. Many people share SSNs with other people that they have never met, and may not even be aware of. What is unique is the SSN+DOB combination. That is why any government form that asks for your SSN, will also ask for your DOB.
Citation needed. The SSA does not re-issue numbers. So far, it has issued 450 million out of about 1 billion numbers, but it hasn't issued any duplicates (although some people have been issued more than one). There were some news reports a while ago about a company that did analysis on databases they had access to and found that some numbers were associated with more than one name, but those were just examples of identity theft or clerical errors. Of course, the media immediately trumpeted "ZOMG other people share your SSN!" and did the usual scaremongering. Is that what you were remembering?
That's like saying, "I have this lump of charcoal, it's the exact same as this diamond because they are made of the same kind of atoms". When you are talking about structured matter, the arrangement of atoms matter. In humans you get cell aging, which makes genetic errors more likely as well as more macroscopic stuff like cartilage and ligaments wearing out. The human body doesn't regenerate certain kinds of tissue and often creates tissue that doesn't do the job as good as the original tissue where damage has occurred (scar tissue). There are a ton of different effects under the "aging" classification but they add up to a body that just doesn't work as well as when it was younger, just like an old car that has aged.
Did you even read the articles you linked? Some of the "facts" you state are directly refuted in the article. For example you wrote:
3. Anthony Johnson's first slave, John Casor, and most of the others he ended up owning, were white.
But the article you linked says:
In 1653, John Casor, a black indentured servant
Anthony Johnson himself was an indentured servant, just like John Casor, the only difference was that Casor was determined to have a lifetime indenture rather than a limited time like Johnson. A huge number of early colonists were in the US as indentured servants, they just didn't have the capital to move across an ocean and set themselves up without indenturing themselves.
5. Jefferson could not free his slaves as under the laws of the time, he would have been hanged.
Citation needed. You are claiming manumission in Virginia was a capital crime? Sounds like massive bullshit. Reading the Wikipedia article on manumission it specifically mentions laws being passed in Virginia to explicitly allow manumission, exactly what timeframe are you claiming it was a capital crime? Virginia did pass a law requiring a person to get the permission of the government to free a slave in 1723, but that was repealed in 1782:
The new government of Virginia repealed these laws in 1782 and declared freedom for slaves who had fought for the Colonies in the American Revolutionary War. The 1782 laws also permitted masters to free their slaves on their own accord
Heck, he could have freed them even earlier than that, since the 1723 law required permission from the Governor and from 1779-1780 he was the Governor.
4. Thomas Jefferson, the most-oft cited slave-owning Founder, never bought nor sold a single slave. He inherited them from his in-laws
Not completely true, he first inherited 52 slaves from his father, in 1767. He didn't inherit slaves from his in-laws until 1773. Also, Jefferson did free some of his slaves in his lifetime, from this page
In 1794 and 1796, Jefferson manumitted by deed two of his male slaves; they had been trained and were qualified to hold employment.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your claims, are you just making this shit up or do you have an actual source for any of your assertions?
Work in LEO is expensive because everything requires consumables that must be launched (humans in particular). Work on the moon is vastly moreso because it requires vastly more delta-V to get there.
This is incorrect, going to the moon does not require vastly more delta-V than getting to LEO. Once you are in earth orbit it's not that much more delta-V to get to the moon. Here is a chart with the Apollo fuel budget, it looks like trans-lunar injection is about 3000 m/s. Getting to LEO is generally 9000-10000 m/s. Even with injection, lunar orbit insertion, and landing you still are only looking at about 6000 m/s. Your point is still totally valid, it's a lot cheaper to launch an interplanetary ship from the ground and assemble it in LEO than it would be to try to make the moon capable of supplying fuel or parts, I just wanted to pick a nit at that statement.
But the problem is that with the current economic system a small number of people take most of the cake and put it in their cake vault, the workers get enough cake to survive on and some people get no cake at all. If robots can replace all the current workers then why would the owners of the robots give away any of their large stash of cake when they don't have to?
If the cake is large enough to feed everyone why are we making more cake? Just so the cake hoarders can put even more cake in their vaults?
How much engineering do you really think the space pen took? From this page
"A common urban legend states that, faced with the fact that ball-point pens would not write in zero-gravity, NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils. The Fisher Space Pen was actually developed independently and privately in the 1960s, NASA later purchasing 400 of the pens at $6 each. The Soviets followed as well."
At any rate, if a company wants to spend the money to develop a space pen or a new straw, why the fuck do you care? How does it harm you?
Really? There have been instances of almost intact mammoths being found in receding glaciers, how bad does DNA get degraded from freezing? Heck, in this find blood was actually flowing out of the carcass as it thawed. If we can sequence the neanderthal genome using much older samples I don't see a reason we couldn't sequence the much more recent mammoth genome.
The Republicans took over using the same fear and tactics Democrats are using now with their tea party early in Obama's tenure and still own both houses today.
My prediction is Democrats will swing both houses back if Trump is a divider and will hold him in check and roadblock until a liberal is president again.
Great prediction, care to lay some money on it? It will be a huge hill for the democrats to climb to gain any seats in the Senate in the 2018 midterms, there are 25 democratic seats up for grabs but only 8 republican. Sure, the democrats might hold on to all 25 and gain some of the 8 but it's not very likely.
It was determined during the late 1980's and early 1990's that an artificially lowered prime rate would spur the economy better than a "normal" or "fair" prime rate.
What? Rates were pretty high in the late 80s and early 90s, in 1990 the average prime rate was over 10%. (source) It's hard to pay off the mortgage on your $300,000 house when the first $30k goes to interest each year.
1) Lowered mortgage interest. People who are in debt can afford to stay in debt. Banks love this because they basically own you if you're in debt to them.
On the other hand, people can afford to pay off their mortgage because they aren't paying so much in interest. Banks don't own you just because you decided to take their money. Nobody forces you to take a mortgage, if you want to save up or get private loans to finance your home nobody is stopping you.
2) Lowered savings interest. People who aren't in debt are getting screwed. Banks love this because it encourages everyone else to spend themselves into slavery to the banks.
Spend themselves into slavery? Why would they spend themselves into slavery (and why would they be slaves to the bank if they aren't in debt?) just because fixed-income instruments aren't giving a good return? Wouldn't prudent people just reallocate their savings to other investments, like real estate or stocks?
Look, most of the large banks are pretty evil and do some incredibly shady shit but for the most part lending money to consumers isn't on that list. If you want to rail against the banks, at least educate yourself on the more egregious shenanigans they have pulled instead of whining about having to pay back money that YOU chose to borrow or claim to be a slave to the bank because you have no debt.
In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000
What is the median years of experience for both years? In 1977, a larger percentage of the workforce did not attend college so they would have have had more years to build up experience and pay raises. Going to college will increase your overall lifetime compensation but that is weighted more heavily in the later years, your overall compensation in your 20's will often be lower than someone who went to work directly out of high school. The median age for graduating with a bachelor's degree has also gone up, so that will affect your statistics as well. If someone went to college until they were 26 then it is highly likely that they wouldn't make as much as their peers by age 30, particularly if they studied a major that isn't very marketable. Overall, wages have risen in the last 40 years, although not at the rate of productivity increases.
The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted. The median home sale price today is about $325,000
I don't have numbers for 1977, but this article says that the median square footage of homes has gone up over 1000 square feet between 1973 and 2013 and with the lower median household size the living space per person has doubled. The median price per square foot has stayed pretty stable in the last 40 years. If you want the price they were paying in 1977, simply buy the size of house they were buying in 1977.
In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees. Today, that's $38,600.
This is the only expense you cited that appears to actually have changed much and it's primarily changed for 3 reasons: easier availability of money (student loans), cutbacks in budgets for state universities and greater demand. I think it's silly for an 18 year old to borrow that kind of money, but it is even more silly to loan that kind of money to 18 year olds. I think the solution to this problem is pretty clear, make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy. This would force lenders to actually evaluate the loan and the likelyhood of repayment instead of just approving anyone who says they need money. The people who are not able to get loans can go to college the old-fashioned way: grants (for the truly needy), scholarships, and work.
Overall, millennials are not as disadvantaged as they think they are. Yes, there are some obstacles to overcome but every generation has had its obstacles.
It's very clear what he's saying there. He also doesn't deny anything else, such as mandatory overtime. That's the classic way companies worldwide are now getting around minimum wages and cutting corners - by making you work more than your 'official' hours for the same money. H1B visas work on exactly that principal, so wait until Trump gets around to them;-).
Huh? The worker says they were forced to work overtime, not that they weren't paid for it. California has relatively generous overtime laws, guaranteeing 1.5x time for over 8 hours in a day or 40 in a week and double time for over 12 hours in a day or over 8 hours if you have worked more than 6 days in a row. H1b visas have nothing to do with it, those are usually salaried positions and auto workers are hourly.
And when that business dries up they will just go back to selling securities it knows are toxic to its customers and then selling those securities short so they profit when their customer loses. Now with the new fiduciary rule (which would require financial advisors for your retirement accounts to put your interests ahead of their profit) being "reviewed" before it can even go into effect and many former Goldman Sachs employees in senior cabinet positions expect more of the same, investment banks fleecing their customers, other investors and taxpayers for every cent they can.
For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.
That's why solar thermal with a molten salt reservoir makes sense for utility-scale solar. For example, the Crescent Dunes project in Nevada can store 1.1 GWh of power which is 10 hours if it is running at full capacity (110 MW). This allows you to timeshift the power between when the sun is shining and when demand is greatest. Solar could conceivably power the entire grid with a mixture of these plants and PV plants. Not that I think it should, it's quite expensive and nuclear would be more efficient at providing baseload power but solar thermal plants are great for providing peaking capability and to help smooth out inconsistent PV and wind sources.
What you say is all true. The biggest issue (at least for Americans) with global warming is the cost. It's not going to kill a bunch of people by itself, although it may kill a few extra with storm surges, heatwaves, drought, etc., but as sea levels rise we will need to either build up coastal areas with seawalls and levees or move away from the current shoreline. This will be hugely expensive, a large portion of our population and industry is on the coast. For low-lying poor countries (like Bangladesh) it will probably be the end of their country but for first world countries it probably just means a good percentage of the GDP will be going to mitigation efforts.
Actually, I'm not a liberal at all, I'm not on either "team". But my (or your) political philosophy doesn't have any bearing on the conversation -- if there are facts you would like to dispute from either organization, I would love to hear them. Otherwise, please stay in your "everything is a liberal conspiracy" bubble and leave the debate to the adults.
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Basically, billionaires that feel old enough that they're willing to risk dying on an insufficiently tested space vehicle.
But also young enough that they can stand the rigors of launch and spaceflight. Seems like a fairly narrow window. Of course, all this presupposes that the Falcon Heavy will actually fly on schedule and that they fly all the missions on the books before this one. Hmmm, Elon is right in that window, I think this is going to be exactly like D.D. Harriman, right before the flight Elon will say "One of the mysterious passengers is me!" and his board of directors at Telsa will sue to stop him from going.
This is what they are trying to do, according to the quote from this space.com article:
If they do this, they will go down in the history books as the farthest people from the earth, I can see how a billionaire might be attracted to that.
Yeah, Elon is double-D but who are the mysterious customers? Since a Falcon Heavy launch is going to cost them about $100 million ($50 million each for 2 passengers) it has got to be a fairly short list of people who can afford it. I couldn't see a rich guy spending more than 5% of his fortune on a week long ride so we're talking billionaire or better.
Let's say he lives frugally and can live life on $2,000 a month
$2k per month is frugal?
That $3,000 a month might not even be a super nice place in a good neighborhood, either
Not everyone can live in a "super nice place" in an area that has continual high demand.
That's five years of frugal living, no car,
No car? If he doesn't have a car what the hell is this frugal guy spending $2k per month on? Food and clothes cost about the same as everywhere else, eating out is a little more expensive. Cars are about the same cost in California as everywhere else and insurance and taxes are only slightly higher than the national average. If most of the country can afford a car on their paltry wages why can't our guy with $2000 per month in discretionary cash?
If I want to defeat my own safety interlocks, that should be my right. The manufacturer should be able to say they won't honor the warranty if I enable the ability to shift into reverse at 50, but if it's my machine I should be able to do what I want with it.
Yes, if you are looking at the 1% by income. However, the biggest issue isn't income inequality, it's wealth inequality. To be in the top 1% in wealth you need around $8 million in assets. Very few Silicon Valley engineers or Boston lawyers have that kind of kitty.
The issue with wealth inequality is that money makes even more money and so the bulk of money made tends to flow to the people who already have the money and so they end up with more and more of it while there are fewer and fewer dollars available to labor. This has been a bug in capitalism from the start but so far we have largely worked around it with progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes. However, as automation and AI make labor less relevant to production, more production ends up going to capital and less to labor. When it gets to the point that automation completely obviates the need for human labor, those that have capital and up to now have been accruing most of the gains will now own everything and those that only provide labor to the economic system will have nothing and have no means of making any money. Unless something fundamentally changes about the economic systems in the west this is going to be the endgame for most countries, a small number of people will own all the means of production and have all the power.
People like to think when it comes to this point the poor and disenfranchised will just rise up and do away with the rich like in the French revolution, but in an automated society this might not be possible. In the past, the armies that protect the rich were hard to manage because during a revolution they are more likely to identify with the poor people and the army might quickly turn on their paymasters. If production is fully automated you better believe the people who own it all will have vast killbot armies to protect their investment. It's one thing for the mob to go against an army that they might sway to their side, it's another to fight against a horde of machines. If any uprising were attempted a lot of people from the mob would die but nobody from the rich would die, just their robots - whose replacements are continually rolling off the assembly line.
We're approaching a tipping point past which the ultra-rich will control enough capital and have enough influence on the government that this scenario is almost guaranteed. We might already be past this point, the top 1% already have 40% of the wealth in the US and have tremendous influence over the government.
Relax dude, most human beings understand that if the company they get insurance from stops existing, they no longer have insurance from that company.
Ummm, no!
In most civilized countries, you can't sell insurance without being regulated. Govt regulations require that insurers have adequate reserves to pay out their insurance claims. Insurers have to reasonably invest the premiums to get an adequate return.
Otherwise people will buy insurance and the companies will quickly go out of business leaving customers high & dry.
Yeah, just like AIG, which was regulated so well they needed the largest government bailout in US history.
Not sure what you want me to look at on the Wikipedia article was it this?
However, there have been instances where multiple individuals have been inadvertently assigned the same Social Security number
The reference actually only mentions a single instance of this happening, not multiple as the Wikipedia article says. Yes, that was a case of two people being assigned the same number. However, they also had the same name and same birthday, so your assertion that the federal government uses a combination of SSN and birthdate wouldn't do anything in that instance.
The second and third citation you provided are just the hysterical news stories brought on by the ID Analytics (LifeLock) study that I already mentioned. That study found nothing about people being issued duplicate numbers or that SSNs are not unique. None of the citations show any support for what you said:
SSNs are not unique. Many people share SSNs with other people that they have never met, and may not even be aware of. What is unique is the SSN+DOB combination. That is why any government form that asks for your SSN, will also ask for your DOB.
You've shown that there is at least one instance where two people were issued the same number (which was fixed), but shown no evidence that SSNs are not unique or that the purpose of the government asking for your DOB is that they use a DOB+SSN combination. The government doesn't (knowingly) issue the same number to multiple people. You claim "many people share SSNs" but that's not the case. That's like saying "many people share credit card numbers" because sometimes people use other people's credit card numbers for fraud. It's just not accurate.
Then congress should quit trying to do their social engineering through the tax code and remove all those deductions, the only thing I can see there that would require any input from the taxpayer is "received money from a friend/relative" and I'll guarantee 99% of such transactions go unreported anyway. If congress wants to encourage having children, or home ownership, or having solar panels, or being a blind railroad worker, let them make a direct appropriation and send checks to the people who they decide instead of lumping everything into the tax code. Of course, they don't want to do this as their handouts to their cronies will be more apparent.
Actually, it is not. SSNs are not unique. Many people share SSNs with other people that they have never met, and may not even be aware of. What is unique is the SSN+DOB combination. That is why any government form that asks for your SSN, will also ask for your DOB.
Citation needed. The SSA does not re-issue numbers. So far, it has issued 450 million out of about 1 billion numbers, but it hasn't issued any duplicates (although some people have been issued more than one). There were some news reports a while ago about a company that did analysis on databases they had access to and found that some numbers were associated with more than one name, but those were just examples of identity theft or clerical errors. Of course, the media immediately trumpeted "ZOMG other people share your SSN!" and did the usual scaremongering. Is that what you were remembering?
That's like saying, "I have this lump of charcoal, it's the exact same as this diamond because they are made of the same kind of atoms". When you are talking about structured matter, the arrangement of atoms matter. In humans you get cell aging, which makes genetic errors more likely as well as more macroscopic stuff like cartilage and ligaments wearing out. The human body doesn't regenerate certain kinds of tissue and often creates tissue that doesn't do the job as good as the original tissue where damage has occurred (scar tissue). There are a ton of different effects under the "aging" classification but they add up to a body that just doesn't work as well as when it was younger, just like an old car that has aged.
Did you even read the articles you linked? Some of the "facts" you state are directly refuted in the article. For example you wrote:
3. Anthony Johnson's first slave, John Casor, and most of the others he ended up owning, were white.
But the article you linked says:
Anthony Johnson himself was an indentured servant, just like John Casor, the only difference was that Casor was determined to have a lifetime indenture rather than a limited time like Johnson. A huge number of early colonists were in the US as indentured servants, they just didn't have the capital to move across an ocean and set themselves up without indenturing themselves.
5. Jefferson could not free his slaves as under the laws of the time, he would have been hanged.
Citation needed. You are claiming manumission in Virginia was a capital crime? Sounds like massive bullshit. Reading the Wikipedia article on manumission it specifically mentions laws being passed in Virginia to explicitly allow manumission, exactly what timeframe are you claiming it was a capital crime? Virginia did pass a law requiring a person to get the permission of the government to free a slave in 1723, but that was repealed in 1782:
Heck, he could have freed them even earlier than that, since the 1723 law required permission from the Governor and from 1779-1780 he was the Governor.
4. Thomas Jefferson, the most-oft cited slave-owning Founder, never bought nor sold a single slave. He inherited them from his in-laws
Not completely true, he first inherited 52 slaves from his father, in 1767. He didn't inherit slaves from his in-laws until 1773. Also, Jefferson did free some of his slaves in his lifetime, from this page
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your claims, are you just making this shit up or do you have an actual source for any of your assertions?
Work in LEO is expensive because everything requires consumables that must be launched (humans in particular). Work on the moon is vastly moreso because it requires vastly more delta-V to get there.
This is incorrect, going to the moon does not require vastly more delta-V than getting to LEO. Once you are in earth orbit it's not that much more delta-V to get to the moon. Here is a chart with the Apollo fuel budget, it looks like trans-lunar injection is about 3000 m/s. Getting to LEO is generally 9000-10000 m/s. Even with injection, lunar orbit insertion, and landing you still are only looking at about 6000 m/s. Your point is still totally valid, it's a lot cheaper to launch an interplanetary ship from the ground and assemble it in LEO than it would be to try to make the moon capable of supplying fuel or parts, I just wanted to pick a nit at that statement.
But the problem is that with the current economic system a small number of people take most of the cake and put it in their cake vault, the workers get enough cake to survive on and some people get no cake at all. If robots can replace all the current workers then why would the owners of the robots give away any of their large stash of cake when they don't have to?
If the cake is large enough to feed everyone why are we making more cake? Just so the cake hoarders can put even more cake in their vaults?
How much engineering do you really think the space pen took? From this page
"A common urban legend states that, faced with the fact that ball-point pens would not write in zero-gravity, NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils. The Fisher Space Pen was actually developed independently and privately in the 1960s, NASA later purchasing 400 of the pens at $6 each. The Soviets followed as well."
At any rate, if a company wants to spend the money to develop a space pen or a new straw, why the fuck do you care? How does it harm you?
Really? There have been instances of almost intact mammoths being found in receding glaciers, how bad does DNA get degraded from freezing? Heck, in this find blood was actually flowing out of the carcass as it thawed. If we can sequence the neanderthal genome using much older samples I don't see a reason we couldn't sequence the much more recent mammoth genome.
The Republicans took over using the same fear and tactics Democrats are using now with their tea party early in Obama's tenure and still own both houses today.
My prediction is Democrats will swing both houses back if Trump is a divider and will hold him in check and roadblock until a liberal is president again.
Great prediction, care to lay some money on it? It will be a huge hill for the democrats to climb to gain any seats in the Senate in the 2018 midterms, there are 25 democratic seats up for grabs but only 8 republican. Sure, the democrats might hold on to all 25 and gain some of the 8 but it's not very likely.
It was determined during the late 1980's and early 1990's that an artificially lowered prime rate would spur the economy better than a "normal" or "fair" prime rate.
What? Rates were pretty high in the late 80s and early 90s, in 1990 the average prime rate was over 10%. (source) It's hard to pay off the mortgage on your $300,000 house when the first $30k goes to interest each year.
1) Lowered mortgage interest. People who are in debt can afford to stay in debt. Banks love this because they basically own you if you're in debt to them.
On the other hand, people can afford to pay off their mortgage because they aren't paying so much in interest. Banks don't own you just because you decided to take their money. Nobody forces you to take a mortgage, if you want to save up or get private loans to finance your home nobody is stopping you.
2) Lowered savings interest. People who aren't in debt are getting screwed. Banks love this because it encourages everyone else to spend themselves into slavery to the banks.
Spend themselves into slavery? Why would they spend themselves into slavery (and why would they be slaves to the bank if they aren't in debt?) just because fixed-income instruments aren't giving a good return? Wouldn't prudent people just reallocate their savings to other investments, like real estate or stocks?
Look, most of the large banks are pretty evil and do some incredibly shady shit but for the most part lending money to consumers isn't on that list. If you want to rail against the banks, at least educate yourself on the more egregious shenanigans they have pulled instead of whining about having to pay back money that YOU chose to borrow or claim to be a slave to the bank because you have no debt.
In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000
What is the median years of experience for both years? In 1977, a larger percentage of the workforce did not attend college so they would have have had more years to build up experience and pay raises. Going to college will increase your overall lifetime compensation but that is weighted more heavily in the later years, your overall compensation in your 20's will often be lower than someone who went to work directly out of high school. The median age for graduating with a bachelor's degree has also gone up, so that will affect your statistics as well. If someone went to college until they were 26 then it is highly likely that they wouldn't make as much as their peers by age 30, particularly if they studied a major that isn't very marketable. Overall, wages have risen in the last 40 years, although not at the rate of productivity increases.
The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted. The median home sale price today is about $325,000
I don't have numbers for 1977, but this article says that the median square footage of homes has gone up over 1000 square feet between 1973 and 2013 and with the lower median household size the living space per person has doubled. The median price per square foot has stayed pretty stable in the last 40 years. If you want the price they were paying in 1977, simply buy the size of house they were buying in 1977.
In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees. Today, that's $38,600.
This is the only expense you cited that appears to actually have changed much and it's primarily changed for 3 reasons: easier availability of money (student loans), cutbacks in budgets for state universities and greater demand. I think it's silly for an 18 year old to borrow that kind of money, but it is even more silly to loan that kind of money to 18 year olds. I think the solution to this problem is pretty clear, make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy. This would force lenders to actually evaluate the loan and the likelyhood of repayment instead of just approving anyone who says they need money. The people who are not able to get loans can go to college the old-fashioned way: grants (for the truly needy), scholarships, and work.
Overall, millennials are not as disadvantaged as they think they are. Yes, there are some obstacles to overcome but every generation has had its obstacles.
It's very clear what he's saying there. He also doesn't deny anything else, such as mandatory overtime. That's the classic way companies worldwide are now getting around minimum wages and cutting corners - by making you work more than your 'official' hours for the same money. H1B visas work on exactly that principal, so wait until Trump gets around to them ;-).
Huh? The worker says they were forced to work overtime, not that they weren't paid for it. California has relatively generous overtime laws, guaranteeing 1.5x time for over 8 hours in a day or 40 in a week and double time for over 12 hours in a day or over 8 hours if you have worked more than 6 days in a row. H1b visas have nothing to do with it, those are usually salaried positions and auto workers are hourly.
And when that business dries up they will just go back to selling securities it knows are toxic to its customers and then selling those securities short so they profit when their customer loses. Now with the new fiduciary rule (which would require financial advisors for your retirement accounts to put your interests ahead of their profit) being "reviewed" before it can even go into effect and many former Goldman Sachs employees in senior cabinet positions expect more of the same, investment banks fleecing their customers, other investors and taxpayers for every cent they can.
For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.
That's why solar thermal with a molten salt reservoir makes sense for utility-scale solar. For example, the Crescent Dunes project in Nevada can store 1.1 GWh of power which is 10 hours if it is running at full capacity (110 MW). This allows you to timeshift the power between when the sun is shining and when demand is greatest. Solar could conceivably power the entire grid with a mixture of these plants and PV plants. Not that I think it should, it's quite expensive and nuclear would be more efficient at providing baseload power but solar thermal plants are great for providing peaking capability and to help smooth out inconsistent PV and wind sources.
I always ask, how many dollars per nose.
There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.
Why do you have to ask? That information is right there in the summary, unasked for.
What you say is all true. The biggest issue (at least for Americans) with global warming is the cost. It's not going to kill a bunch of people by itself, although it may kill a few extra with storm surges, heatwaves, drought, etc., but as sea levels rise we will need to either build up coastal areas with seawalls and levees or move away from the current shoreline. This will be hugely expensive, a large portion of our population and industry is on the coast. For low-lying poor countries (like Bangladesh) it will probably be the end of their country but for first world countries it probably just means a good percentage of the GDP will be going to mitigation efforts.
Actually, I'm not a liberal at all, I'm not on either "team". But my (or your) political philosophy doesn't have any bearing on the conversation -- if there are facts you would like to dispute from either organization, I would love to hear them. Otherwise, please stay in your "everything is a liberal conspiracy" bubble and leave the debate to the adults.