Any website/magazine that has advertising or sponsorship paying the bills can and will give favourable reviews.
That's by no means always true. The late lamented BYTE Magazine, for example, had a very strict separation between advertising and editorial departments. I did a couple of hardware reviews for them, and can assure you that reviews were objective. I had to return the hardware when I was done evaluating it. (I did get paid by Byte/McGraw-Hill for the reviews but that was for the writing, not any particular slant.)
Of course, not all magazines are/were that honest.
Locally in the Denver area, we've got Ultimate Electronics which advertises price competitiveness with BB and CC. They used to be a high-end stereo/home-entertainment chain but were bought out a year or so ago and seem to have moved toward a more mass market approach.
For computer stuff there's Microcenter, usually better deals and more choice than Best Buy, roughly equivalent to Fry's (which we don't have in Denver) for parts, etc.
I stayed away from Circuit City stores for probably ten years because of the DIVX nonsense.
In fact even now I think the only purchase I've made at CC in years was a digital converter box because they were the only ones that had in stock something I could use my coupon on before it expired, but that's more because of crappy selection/prices.
The thing is, once you've been turned off of a dealer/manufacturer by some bad practice (hello Belkin, hello Sony), even once that's forgiven there's still a tendency to evaluate them negatively even where price on an item is comparable. (Of course in the case of Belkin, with their router fiasco a while back (inserting ads occasionally), it's not hard to never buy them because their prices are always ridiculous).
VentureStar was never anywhere near having all the bugs worked out. It was way over budget.
In addition to the above-mentioned problems with the V-shaped composite tank, the launch/landing profile (vertical takeoff, horizontal landing) meant that the structure was designed for perpendicular load paths, and there was no way to land after a launch abort until it had reached sufficient altitude/airspeed to turn around and return, and it had burned off/dumped enough fuel to be light enough for the landing gear (which unlike Skylon, were only designed to support the empty weight). They hadn't done much in-flight testing of the linear aerospike engine, either, although static ground tests were promising.
The 747 is a heavy beast indeed. In the early days of autoland systems (heavily used at airports that tend to be foggy, like Heathrow), the accuracy of the autoland system was so good that the 747s kept touching down on the same spot on the runway, overstressing that one spot. They fixed it by adding some slight dither to the autoland to spread the impacts out.
The landing gear for a 747 uses more wheels than Skylon which reduces the 747 point loads (in terms of PSI).
I think the DC-X, an unmanned prototype (for SSTO eventually) had composite tanks. There were serious problems with thermal flexing and penetration by cryogenic fluids that weakened the tanks.
No, DC-X had metal tanks (I forget whether straight Al or Al-Li). You're thinking of the X-33 (VentureStar prototype), that not only had composite tanks but the hydrogen tank was V shaped, putting extreme stresses on the joint (and leading to the flex/leakage problems). Reinforcing that joint overwhelmed the weight savings of using a composite tank.
So when they find the site of Apollo 16, that will leave them with a total of 7. But the NASA only did 6 missions to the moon! So who did the seventh?
The CIA, with leftover Apollo hardware, to check out an apparent Soviet landing. (That's actually the plot of my recent NaNoWriMo novel, still in progress.)
Yeah, you can do limited attitude control with solids, either by gimballing the expansion nozzle or by fluid injection, but it's not as responsive as gimballing liquid engines. (Well, not unless you add really heavy hydraulic systems. The moment arms for Shuttle vs Ares I are quite different, and Shuttle also had the SSMEs and the Orbiter's aerosurfaces to help control attitude. The Ares I's SRB has to do the whole job on its own self.
Might work, but I wouldn't ride the thing in its first few dozen flights.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. It is a fantastic report - read it here.
A report which has very little to do with the current architecture.
The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV). The recommended architecture becomes the basis of the Constellation architecture.
Where "becomes" means "no longer bears much relationship to". In terms of re-using shuttle-derived technology, Jupiter is closer to the ESAS study. Constellation doesn't use Shuttle SRBs, doesn't use Shuttle liquid tankage, doesn't use Shuttle engines (although that's a good thing), doesn't use Shuttle infrastructure.
The whole thing was bait-and-switch, just like Space Station was. (Remember the original design when NASA was first pushing Space Station? A couple of orbital modules and solar panels. Then the program was approved and the project mushroomed into Space Station Freedom with trussworks, modules, robot arms, etc, etc. Then budget overruns hit and it shrank to Space Station Fred and then F-stop, finally the whole think was canned as a NASA-only project and it became the International Space Station (with some major operational sacrifices like the higher-inclination orbit to satisfy the Russians). For that matter, just like Shuttle was -- remember 50 launches a year at less than $1000/kg to orbit, fully reusable?
Top heavy is a good thing, when the center of mass is ahead of the center of aerodynamics, the motor has a strong tendency to stay under on the bottom!
Yep, almost any kid who has built an Estes rocket knows about keeping the center of mass ahead of the center of pressure.
Now look at the Ares I design. The lightweight upper stage is wider than the heavy (thick steel casing) SRB lower stage. Where's the CoM and CoP again?
(Actually with a full fuel load the mass distribution might not be that bad. The aerodynamic pressure distribution still sucks. That's usually solved in real rockets by having gimballed engines which can adjust to keep things pointed in the right direction. While not impossible with solids, it's harder to do and the response time is slower, and the mechanism adds a bunch more weight.)
The DC-X (not Delta Clipper, which was the designation for the never-built full scale vehicle) was a 1/3 scale technology demonstrator. It did indeed demonstrate the technology remarkably well while SDIO was performing the test flights (including a successfully aborted launch after an at-ignition detonation of accumulated hydrogen gas external to the rocket blew off part of the fuselage).
It was a long way from carrying anything to orbit, though. (The next step would have been a 2/3 scale DC-Y to test higher and faster and evaluate performance and reentry loads before going to the full scale Delta Clipper.)
(Then there was the X-33/VentureStar, perhaps about which the less said the better. V-shaped pressurized composite tanks? Perpendicular load axes (vertical takeoff, horizontal landing)? Please.)
The thing is, Ares never looked all that good -- even on paper. The idea that an extended SRB is anything other than a new large solid is a fantasy; it was obvious to everyone with technical knowledge on the matter from the beginning that any nontrivial changes to the SRBs lost most of the advantages of keeping Shuttle hardware involved.
Amen.
To clarify for the non rocket engineers, in a solid rocket, the whole thing is your combustion chamber. The casing has to be designed to a certain operating pressure, and the shape of the hole through the center of the fuel also has to be shaped to maintain a certain thrust profile (thrust is going to depend on the surface area burning, and burn rate depends in part on the chamber pressure). Just adding another segment and a half onto the top of a Shuttle SRB isn't going to do it, no matter how attractive that might look to paper designers or model makers -- you need to redesign the whole stack to take the changes into account. At that point it's no longer Shuttle hardware.
Changes to the main fuel tank are less problematic, but still not wonderful.
From the pure rocket standpoint, agreed. But making the fuel tank wider means that all-new assembly tooling has to be made, the transport barge has to be modified (if not a new one built), and the platforms in the VAB have to be modified to accommodate. All added cost.
Using only a single (extended, and therefore new) SRB as the first stage of Ares I obviously had problems -- the performance characteristics meant it was being used in a highly suboptimal manner in that application.
Serious problems. Using a single solid engine as your main stage? That might be OK for ICBMs (where storage in a ready-to-launch configuration overrides some reliability issues). Not very steerable and no control over the throttle at all once the fuel is lit. On top of that the Ares I is a hammerhead design - the upper stage is wider than the SRB. Yes, that works for ELVs that have liquid first stages with gimballed engines, where you can react more quickly to odd aerodynamic loads (wind sheer, etc). The fact is that that configuration -- hammerhead on a single solid booster -- has (to my knowledge) never been used in 50 years of spaceflight. To me Ares I looks like an accident waiting to happen. I'm just waiting for them to decide to fix that by putting tail fins on the thing;-)
For the record, I think there is a lot less wrong with Ares V than there is with Ares I.
Agreed.
None of these are how I think the rocket *should* be designed, given ample time and budget -- but replacing the Shuttle is a project that doesn't have ample time. If NASA is to get anything flying soon, it will have to be a suboptimal design that has significant Shuttle heritage. Of such projects that I've seen proposed, DIRECT is the best compromise between doing the job well and something that could actually be built in time.
If any of the problems of developing a SDLV that have plagued Ares so far occur for Jupiter, then switching at this point will be a false economy.
Which is a rather big "if". Since Jupiter is spec'd to use existing SRBs, existing tankage, existing engines, and existing manufacturing and assembly infrastructure, as compared to Ares' new (bigger) SRBs, new (wider) tankage, new (uprated) engines, and new (to fit the bigger tankage, longer SRBs, etc) manufacturing and assembly infrastructure, then the number of problems likely to be encountered are far fewer. Not to say it won't have any, but considering the Ares' schedule is slipping by more than a year per year because of problems, it's likely to come out ahead.
.the one watching as the damaged Enterprise pulls into Stardock in Star Trek III...
Nope, that was Grace Lee Whitney, Yeoman Janice Rand in the original series, and a CPO in ST IV. Apparently her brief appearance in ST III was not officially as Rand (probably for contractual reasons, I'm guessing) but her reaction makes more sense if she'd served on the Enterprise.
What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.?
Comes time to build electric (or hybrid) replacements for Humvees and the like, (as well as various robotic systems), you really don't want to be beholden to other countries for your battery supply. (Even if the manufacturing company is an ally, you have to worry about supply-line disruption.)
For that reason alone (and there are others), this is worth some government up-front money.
explain to me how the ratio of yards in a mile is a useful, everyday ratio.
It isn't, because body parts aren't always a nice everyday ratio. A mile is a thousand paces (double steps, from eg left foot to left foot), a yard is half an outstretched arm's span. If our legs were a bit longer (or a longer stride more comfortable) or our arms shorter, it would work out fine.
No one group of programmers programmed all these computers, there was no single set of specs for the whole network. All the components may well be "functioning exactly as they should be" (although in reality I'm sure there are a few bugs in the systems, but that's irrelevant here), but the system overall may behave in an unexpected way.
(That said, I don't think that's the whole problem either -- too many people playing a bit fast and loose and less than honestly with other people's money is also part of the problem.)
I'll pick one, in that it says that according to Keynesian Economics and Karl Marx the boom and bust cycle is inherent in the system, is contradicting the assumption that the free market always tries to maintain equilibrium between supply and demand.
That's not a contradiction, that's a side effect of how efficient (or not) the feedback mechanisms are in the market.
There are two components to correcting the behaviour of any system, whether that's the market or any other system. One is the information about the current state that is fed back to the controller (in the case of the free market, the controller is the collective input of all the actors), the other is the inputs from the controller to the system (in the market case, buying/selling/investing decisions).
If the feedback from the system to the controller is faster than the rate at which the controller can make changes to the system, all is good -- the controller can back off an input before the system overcorrects. If the input is slower, the controller may not realize the system is too far in one direction until it has already been pushed past that point, and there's a tendency to overcontrol. (In aircraft, this is called Pilot Induced Oscillation; in steering a car on a slippery road, this is oversteering which leads to fishtailing and spin-outs. In a market, it leads to boom/bust cycles.)
The more things you put in to slow up information feedback (worst case, a government-controlled command economy with multi-year plans) or amplify control inputs (computerized trading, anyone? or perhaps too-easy access to credit), the less stable it gets, and the more prone to oscillation (or in the case of rigid five-year plans, just going off the rails altogether).
Maybe if "the world" was smart they'd stop lending money to the U.S. and instead invest in the future of the new superpowers - Russia, China, and especially the European Union.
The thing is, most people with money to lend (invest) look at the history of places like Russia, China, and member nations of the European Union, vs the history of the U.S., and realize that whatever happens to the economy, they're less likely to lose their assets through nationalization if they invest it in the U.S. The latter has a much better track record of respecting private property rights (although that isn't saying much).
Slashdot Mirror
And oddly enough, most of the rags are now long gone...
There, fixed that for you.
BYTE actually outlasted most of them. The worst of that sort are so blatantly obvious they don't last long at all.
Any website/magazine that has advertising or sponsorship paying the bills can and will give favourable reviews.
That's by no means always true. The late lamented BYTE Magazine, for example, had a very strict separation between advertising and editorial departments. I did a couple of hardware reviews for them, and can assure you that reviews were objective. I had to return the hardware when I was done evaluating it. (I did get paid by Byte/McGraw-Hill for the reviews but that was for the writing, not any particular slant.)
Of course, not all magazines are/were that honest.
Look around, there may be competitors.
Locally in the Denver area, we've got Ultimate Electronics which advertises price competitiveness with BB and CC. They used to be a high-end stereo/home-entertainment chain but were bought out a year or so ago and seem to have moved toward a more mass market approach.
For computer stuff there's Microcenter, usually better deals and more choice than Best Buy, roughly equivalent to Fry's (which we don't have in Denver) for parts, etc.
I stayed away from Circuit City stores for probably ten years because of the DIVX nonsense.
In fact even now I think the only purchase I've made at CC in years was a digital converter box because they were the only ones that had in stock something I could use my coupon on before it expired, but that's more because of crappy selection/prices.
The thing is, once you've been turned off of a dealer/manufacturer by some bad practice (hello Belkin, hello Sony), even once that's forgiven there's still a tendency to evaluate them negatively even where price on an item is comparable. (Of course in the case of Belkin, with their router fiasco a while back (inserting ads occasionally), it's not hard to never buy them because their prices are always ridiculous).
VentureStar was never anywhere near having all the bugs worked out. It was way over budget.
In addition to the above-mentioned problems with the V-shaped composite tank, the launch/landing profile (vertical takeoff, horizontal landing) meant that the structure was designed for perpendicular load paths, and there was no way to land after a launch abort until it had reached sufficient altitude/airspeed to turn around and return, and it had burned off/dumped enough fuel to be light enough for the landing gear (which unlike Skylon, were only designed to support the empty weight). They hadn't done much in-flight testing of the linear aerospike engine, either, although static ground tests were promising.
The 747 is a heavy beast indeed. In the early days of autoland systems (heavily used at airports that tend to be foggy, like Heathrow), the accuracy of the autoland system was so good that the 747s kept touching down on the same spot on the runway, overstressing that one spot. They fixed it by adding some slight dither to the autoland to spread the impacts out.
The landing gear for a 747 uses more wheels than Skylon which reduces the 747 point loads (in terms of PSI).
I think the DC-X, an unmanned prototype (for SSTO eventually) had composite tanks. There were serious problems with thermal flexing and penetration by cryogenic fluids that weakened the tanks.
No, DC-X had metal tanks (I forget whether straight Al or Al-Li). You're thinking of the X-33 (VentureStar prototype), that not only had composite tanks but the hydrogen tank was V shaped, putting extreme stresses on the joint (and leading to the flex/leakage problems). Reinforcing that joint overwhelmed the weight savings of using a composite tank.
(whoosh)
Apollo 13 never landed on the Moon, so there's no 13 landing site. There should be an Apollo 16 landing site on that list.
So when they find the site of Apollo 16, that will leave them with a total of 7. But the NASA only did 6 missions to the moon! So who did the seventh?
The CIA, with leftover Apollo hardware, to check out an apparent Soviet landing. (That's actually the plot of my recent NaNoWriMo novel, still in progress.)
"Chandrayaan has mapped 6 Apollo landing sites on the Moon (Apollo 11, 12, 14 15 and 17)"
I count that as five. So the Apollo 16 landing (only) was faked?
Yeah, you can do limited attitude control with solids, either by gimballing the expansion nozzle or by fluid injection, but it's not as responsive as gimballing liquid engines. (Well, not unless you add really heavy hydraulic systems. The moment arms for Shuttle vs Ares I are quite different, and Shuttle also had the SSMEs and the Orbiter's aerosurfaces to help control attitude. The Ares I's SRB has to do the whole job on its own self.
Might work, but I wouldn't ride the thing in its first few dozen flights.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. It is a fantastic report - read it here.
A report which has very little to do with the current architecture.
The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV). The recommended architecture becomes the basis of the Constellation architecture.
Where "becomes" means "no longer bears much relationship to". In terms of re-using shuttle-derived technology, Jupiter is closer to the ESAS study. Constellation doesn't use Shuttle SRBs, doesn't use Shuttle liquid tankage, doesn't use Shuttle engines (although that's a good thing), doesn't use Shuttle infrastructure.
The whole thing was bait-and-switch, just like Space Station was. (Remember the original design when NASA was first pushing Space Station? A couple of orbital modules and solar panels. Then the program was approved and the project mushroomed into Space Station Freedom with trussworks, modules, robot arms, etc, etc. Then budget overruns hit and it shrank to Space Station Fred and then F-stop, finally the whole think was canned as a NASA-only project and it became the International Space Station (with some major operational sacrifices like the higher-inclination orbit to satisfy the Russians). For that matter, just like Shuttle was -- remember 50 launches a year at less than $1000/kg to orbit, fully reusable?
Top heavy is a good thing, when the center of mass is ahead of the center of aerodynamics, the motor has a strong tendency to stay under on the bottom!
Yep, almost any kid who has built an Estes rocket knows about keeping the center of mass ahead of the center of pressure.
Now look at the Ares I design. The lightweight upper stage is wider than the heavy (thick steel casing) SRB lower stage. Where's the CoM and CoP again?
(Actually with a full fuel load the mass distribution might not be that bad. The aerodynamic pressure distribution still sucks. That's usually solved in real rockets by having gimballed engines which can adjust to keep things pointed in the right direction. While not impossible with solids, it's harder to do and the response time is slower, and the mechanism adds a bunch more weight.)
The DC-X (not Delta Clipper, which was the designation for the never-built full scale vehicle) was a 1/3 scale technology demonstrator. It did indeed demonstrate the technology remarkably well while SDIO was performing the test flights (including a successfully aborted launch after an at-ignition detonation of accumulated hydrogen gas external to the rocket blew off part of the fuselage).
It was a long way from carrying anything to orbit, though. (The next step would have been a 2/3 scale DC-Y to test higher and faster and evaluate performance and reentry loads before going to the full scale Delta Clipper.)
(Then there was the X-33/VentureStar, perhaps about which the less said the better. V-shaped pressurized composite tanks? Perpendicular load axes (vertical takeoff, horizontal landing)? Please.)
The thing is, Ares never looked all that good -- even on paper. The idea that an extended SRB is anything other than a new large solid is a fantasy; it was obvious to everyone with technical knowledge on the matter from the beginning that any nontrivial changes to the SRBs lost most of the advantages of keeping Shuttle hardware involved.
Amen.
To clarify for the non rocket engineers, in a solid rocket, the whole thing is your combustion chamber. The casing has to be designed to a certain operating pressure, and the shape of the hole through the center of the fuel also has to be shaped to maintain a certain thrust profile (thrust is going to depend on the surface area burning, and burn rate depends in part on the chamber pressure). Just adding another segment and a half onto the top of a Shuttle SRB isn't going to do it, no matter how attractive that might look to paper designers or model makers -- you need to redesign the whole stack to take the changes into account. At that point it's no longer Shuttle hardware.
Changes to the main fuel tank are less problematic, but still not wonderful.
From the pure rocket standpoint, agreed. But making the fuel tank wider means that all-new assembly tooling has to be made, the transport barge has to be modified (if not a new one built), and the platforms in the VAB have to be modified to accommodate. All added cost.
Using only a single (extended, and therefore new) SRB as the first stage of Ares I obviously had problems -- the performance characteristics meant it was being used in a highly suboptimal manner in that application.
Serious problems. Using a single solid engine as your main stage? That might be OK for ICBMs (where storage in a ready-to-launch configuration overrides some reliability issues). Not very steerable and no control over the throttle at all once the fuel is lit. On top of that the Ares I is a hammerhead design - the upper stage is wider than the SRB. Yes, that works for ELVs that have liquid first stages with gimballed engines, where you can react more quickly to odd aerodynamic loads (wind sheer, etc). The fact is that that configuration -- hammerhead on a single solid booster -- has (to my knowledge) never been used in 50 years of spaceflight. To me Ares I looks like an accident waiting to happen. I'm just waiting for them to decide to fix that by putting tail fins on the thing ;-)
For the record, I think there is a lot less wrong with Ares V than there is with Ares I.
Agreed.
None of these are how I think the rocket *should* be designed, given ample time and budget -- but replacing the Shuttle is a project that doesn't have ample time. If NASA is to get anything flying soon, it will have to be a suboptimal design that has significant Shuttle heritage. Of such projects that I've seen proposed, DIRECT is the best compromise between doing the job well and something that could actually be built in time.
Also agreed.
If any of the problems of developing a SDLV that have plagued Ares so far occur for Jupiter, then switching at this point will be a false economy.
Which is a rather big "if". Since Jupiter is spec'd to use existing SRBs, existing tankage, existing engines, and existing manufacturing and assembly infrastructure, as compared to Ares' new (bigger) SRBs, new (wider) tankage, new (uprated) engines, and new (to fit the bigger tankage, longer SRBs, etc) manufacturing and assembly infrastructure, then the number of problems likely to be encountered are far fewer. Not to say it won't have any, but considering the Ares' schedule is slipping by more than a year per year because of problems, it's likely to come out ahead.
.the one watching as the damaged Enterprise pulls into Stardock in Star Trek III...
Nope, that was Grace Lee Whitney, Yeoman Janice Rand in the original series, and a CPO in ST IV. Apparently her brief appearance in ST III was not officially as Rand (probably for contractual reasons, I'm guessing) but her reaction makes more sense if she'd served on the Enterprise.
If we want advanced batteries, we will buy them from China. That's why we need them built in China.
And if China doesn't want to sell them to us? Consider hybrid/electric military vehicles or robots.
You give the peasants half a handful of rice over there, and they toil for 23 hours a day in an atmosphere of nickel and cadmium.
Has anyone made NiCad batteries in the last decade? That's last-millenium technology. TFA mentions Li-poly and newer.
What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.?
Comes time to build electric (or hybrid) replacements for Humvees and the like, (as well as various robotic systems), you really don't want to be beholden to other countries for your battery supply. (Even if the manufacturing company is an ally, you have to worry about supply-line disruption.)
For that reason alone (and there are others), this is worth some government up-front money.
That varies greatly by leg length. I take it you're tall?
explain to me how the ratio of yards in a mile is a useful, everyday ratio.
It isn't, because body parts aren't always a nice everyday ratio. A mile is a thousand paces (double steps, from eg left foot to left foot), a yard is half an outstretched arm's span. If our legs were a bit longer (or a longer stride more comfortable) or our arms shorter, it would work out fine.
Personally, I prefer the unit "cubic attoparsec" for ordering beer,
You order your beer by the (approximate) ounce? Better that than the barn megaparsec, I suppose. The latter's handy for recipes.
Two words: "emergent behaviour".
No one group of programmers programmed all these computers, there was no single set of specs for the whole network. All the components may well be "functioning exactly as they should be" (although in reality I'm sure there are a few bugs in the systems, but that's irrelevant here), but the system overall may behave in an unexpected way.
(That said, I don't think that's the whole problem either -- too many people playing a bit fast and loose and less than honestly with other people's money is also part of the problem.)
I'll pick one, in that it says that according to Keynesian Economics and Karl Marx the boom and bust cycle is inherent in the system, is contradicting the assumption that the free market always tries to maintain equilibrium between supply and demand.
That's not a contradiction, that's a side effect of how efficient (or not) the feedback mechanisms are in the market.
There are two components to correcting the behaviour of any system, whether that's the market or any other system. One is the information about the current state that is fed back to the controller (in the case of the free market, the controller is the collective input of all the actors), the other is the inputs from the controller to the system (in the market case, buying/selling/investing decisions).
If the feedback from the system to the controller is faster than the rate at which the controller can make changes to the system, all is good -- the controller can back off an input before the system overcorrects. If the input is slower, the controller may not realize the system is too far in one direction until it has already been pushed past that point, and there's a tendency to overcontrol. (In aircraft, this is called Pilot Induced Oscillation; in steering a car on a slippery road, this is oversteering which leads to fishtailing and spin-outs. In a market, it leads to boom/bust cycles.)
The more things you put in to slow up information feedback (worst case, a government-controlled command economy with multi-year plans) or amplify control inputs (computerized trading, anyone? or perhaps too-easy access to credit), the less stable it gets, and the more prone to oscillation (or in the case of rigid five-year plans, just going off the rails altogether).
Maybe if "the world" was smart they'd stop lending money to the U.S. and instead invest in the future of the new superpowers - Russia, China, and especially the European Union.
The thing is, most people with money to lend (invest) look at the history of places like Russia, China, and member nations of the European Union, vs the history of the U.S., and realize that whatever happens to the economy, they're less likely to lose their assets through nationalization if they invest it in the U.S. The latter has a much better track record of respecting private property rights (although that isn't saying much).