The 600 pound gorilla in the room as far as trade balance goes is oil. Fix that and the US trade balance isn't that bad.
Of course you can't fix it short of running out of oil.
The problem is there is no real replacement for it. Liquid high energy density fuel is what the heavy transportation that is the heart of the economy runs on. Nuclear is an ok proposal for electricity generation - the question is can you build practical plants fast enough, but for running trains planes ships trucks etc. not so much.
If you look at the issuance rates of sub-prime loans you will find a remarkable coincidence - the rapid increase in generation of these loans is at the same time the capital requirements on large investment banks were lowered. With mortgage securitization fed by the immense amounts of money made available through increased leverage this crisis would have never happened. Blaming it on the CRA which happened nearly 20 years earlier is ludicrous.
Gross manufacturing output measurement is completely independent from GDP.
Here's the reference:
For the United States, the output measure for the manufacturing sector is a chain-weighted index of real gross product originating (deflated value added) produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. For more information on the U.S. measure, see "Improved Estimates of Gross Product by Industry for 1947-98," Survey of Current Business, June 2000, pp. 24-38 and "Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1947-86. New Estimates Based on the North American Industry Classification System," Survey of Current Business, December 2005, pp. 70-84.
As far as raw materials lasting for millennia into the future boy do I have news for you. Perhaps this site will give you a realistic assessment.
Nice rant but totally unrealistic. Economies can't grow without limits as the raw materials are not boundless.
Manufacturing jobs will always be eliminated over time as automation replaces people. The US right now has the largest manufacturing output of any nation in history, and it's doing it with only 8% of its population. The US output is larger than China, India and Brazil combined.
White collar jobs are headed the same way as software replaces people.
So what is left? Simply make do public sector jobs funded by taxation on productive work. There isn't any other possible outcome.
No, the problems go much deeper than that. One was mandating that banks make loans to people who aren't qualified and then having the government, more or less, guarantee these loans (this goes back to the Carter administration, but every president since then was also guilty of endorsing this).
Please explain where these so-called mandates to issue no-document subprime loans were enacted in law. The fact is that these mandates didn't exist. Nor were there guarantees for these banks making the loans. The problem really was that these loans were securitized, rated AAA and then sold to other financial institutions. The rating agencies and the companies buying the securities didn't do proper due diligence so they didn't realize the loans were crappy quality. Subprime, no documentation etc. When the issuing banks realized they could bundle and sell any old loans they obviously had no reason to hold back on the loans. At the same time the Feds dropped the reserve requirements for large investment banks, making a flood of money available for the purchase of these securities.
It's all a matter of people getting sloppy on the risk assessment. Total lack of responsibility and unfettered greed.
If analysis of social networks brings about correlations that can be used to reduce risk, and the issuing authorities use that information it's a good idea. If people don't want their information to be used that way, well maybe they shouldn't make their lives a matter of public record on the internet.
You can hardly fault the banks for using stuff people make publicly available.
There is nothing wrong about doing good due diligence before lending money. Maybe the economy would be in better shape if we had more of this going on.
Just because Monsanto hasn't gone after people with a small garden, doesn't mean they aren't allowed to do so - if something is patented (and the patent is still valid), you are not allowed reproduce it without a license.
So you are saying that we should abandon an extremely technology that may end up feeding billions of people and preventing total deforestation of the planet among other ecological disasters based on the idea that some legal fantasy might happen in the future? This is a TOTALLY ASININE idea.
Not so. I found this statement on the Canadian Chiropractic Association Web Site:
* Can chiropractic treatment cure colds, earaches and other ailments? [Top]
Chiropractic care cannot "cure" these conditions, but there is some evidence to indicate that adjustment may have a beneficial effect on a variety of conditions. Adjustment may alleviate some of the secondary, or referred pain, arising from the response of the musculoskeletal structures to the primary cause. For example, research conducted in Denmark resulted in chiropractic treatment being recommended for the relief of infantile colic. Similarly, a recent U.S. study concluded that the application of manipulative techniques in children with recurring ear infections can prevent or decrease surgical intervention or antibiotic overuse.
This is pure quackery. Batshit crazy.
Also naturopaths are quacks. 100%. Amoung other things they are another group that opposes vaccinations, an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS position to advocate.
The TS lens I use most is quite wide at 24 mm. One of the advantages of TS is that it gives you a wider image circle than a standard lens of the same focal length, so it can be seen as effectively a 16mm lens.
Rotating the lens can bring up the DOF so I can use a much wider aperture than a conventional lens. No loss of image quality because I have to close the aperture below the diffraction limit to get the DOF I want. It's much better than stopping down to F22 and praying.
The cost of the lens was only $400 more than the same quality non-TS 24mm offering in the same product line, and the weight was an insignificant 3oz. more.
As a result this lens functions as a great ultrawide for me with the added benefit of the TS capability.
It's very unlikely to be a 'brick' anytime soon.
Using the conventional techniques you mention to get the same effect as a TS lens are all accompanied with a loss of image quality, which is why these lenses are available on the market in the first place.
I'm glad Singh brings up the issue of GMOs in his interview. It's my opinion as well that the vast bulk of the evidence sited by GMO opponents is pseudoscience at best.
It is high time start recognizing what is going on with the anti-GMO campaign.
Going to a chiropractor for physical problems is a bat shit crazy thing to do. These people are not trained to diagnose or correctly recognize medical conditions that need real intervention and can do a lot of damage trying to treat muscle pains that arise from serious biological disease using 'manipulation'.
Go see an orthopedist and work with a physical therapist.
You will get far better results and won't put yourself in danger.
It's also a good idea to read the Wikipedia article on the history of chiropractic to understand what you are getting into when you go to one of these quacks.
"Chiropractors historically were strongly opposed to vaccination based on their belief that all diseases were traceable to causes in the spine, and therefore could not be affected by vaccines; D.D. Palmer wrote, "It is the very height of absurdity to strive to 'protect' any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison."
I agree that faith and belief in authority are crappy things to base belief on. So now the question is how to decide? Methodological naturalism works great, but most people don't have the capacity to go through that process every time they have to make a decision.
So then you have to look at sources that have applied methodological naturalism and go with the answer they got. I don't think that's faith, but rather it's a rational basis for making a decision based on the process that was used having a great track record over the past couple of millennia.
Yes, I can get gigapixel quality via simple panorama stitching. 50 images with my 5DII > 1 gigapixel. I fact production of high quality panoramas is one of the things that TS excels at.
Computer composition gives you arbitrary control of depth of field, including non-flat depth of field.
Once you have an image there isn't anything you can do about depth of field. Compositing a set of images to manage DOF when you can get the same benefit by turning a knob on a lens is an expensive and impractical process for a working photographer.
And you haven't mentioned focal plane control at all.
There is nothing you can do a tilt/shift camera that can't be done better and cheaper with computational photography.
Since computational photography software outside very basic effects, and hardware to support it is not generally available that is obviously a false statement.
It is amazing how few people have a sound understanding of logic.
You can say "all swans are white" based on the fact you haven't found a black swan. But you haven't proven that there aren't any black swans because you haven't examined ALL the swans to have ever existed. And when somebody finds that there are black swans in Australia, oh well for your theory.
It's the same thing only worse when you say that you are going to prove there is no 'God'. In the first case God is a supernatural being so you can't define repeatable circumstances under which he must be observed if he exists. Secondly you would have to conduct your study throughout all space and time, something not possible in a reasonable period of time.
So proving the non-existence of God is futile.
Then there is the issue that there is no experiment that can be defined where God can be shown to exist. Everything is based on 'faith' or some sort of hypothesis like 'Life is to complex to have evolved from processes defined by natural law'. Well of course none of that is admissible as evidence in the court of logic.
So the fact is that the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved.
This is where I have my biggest problem with the idea of God. Because if I were to accept the idea of God I'd have to give up on my idea that naturalistic philosophy is tool that can be used to describe the universe. Since over the course of my life I've found that this works quite well I am not at all prepared to do that. There are other smaller issues too - like invoking God has never been helpful in coming to a final explanation of the things I've observed.
So it gets down to what I put in my tag line. It's a quote from Laplace - when he was asked by Napoleon why his book on celestial mechanics did not mention God, his answer was "I have no need for that hypothesis". In French of course.
Ansel Adams viewed the process of making a print as two stages - taking the photograph and developing the print. Taking the photo was the craft and the art came during the developing process. He would often share his negatives with students in order to provide them with starting material for their development as artists.
If you equate the prints Adams produced with the process of taking the image with a camera you are making a big mistake. His artistic contribution came during the printing process.
I am sure that Adams would have used all the image taking tools available to him. The real question is whether Adams would have been able to achieve the same level of artistic expression in a digital print vs. a silver print.
I bother because tilt and shift provides far better image quality. Photoshop doesn't correct for depth of field nor does it give you control of the focal plane.
It also makes possible a lot of other techniques that are not possible to create with Photoshop.
There is no need to disprove God. In fact it is logically futile to try to disprove the existence of anything.
The proving needs to be done by those who claim existence. If you have a hypothesis that states xyz exists, it is up to you to provide the evidence for that hypothesis.
That's silly. You have no evidence whatsoever for the existence of a "Creator", or some immortal invisible being with a mind named "God".
If you feel a need for something to have created gravity or the universe, it logically follows to ask the same thing of "God". In other words who or what created "God"?
The reason these other database types went away is because the relational db + SQL handles ad-hoc queries very well. In many if not most db applications that is a killer application.
Slashdot Mirror
The 600 pound gorilla in the room as far as trade balance goes is oil. Fix that and the US trade balance isn't that bad.
Of course you can't fix it short of running out of oil.
The problem is there is no real replacement for it. Liquid high energy density fuel is what the heavy transportation that is the heart of the economy runs on. Nuclear is an ok proposal for electricity generation - the question is can you build practical plants fast enough, but for running trains planes ships trucks etc. not so much.
If you look at the issuance rates of sub-prime loans you will find a remarkable coincidence - the rapid increase in generation of these loans is at the same time the capital requirements on large investment banks were lowered. With mortgage securitization fed by the immense amounts of money made available through increased leverage this crisis would have never happened. Blaming it on the CRA which happened nearly 20 years earlier is ludicrous.
Gross manufacturing output measurement is completely independent from GDP.
Here's the reference:
For the United States, the output measure for the manufacturing sector is a chain-weighted index of real gross product originating (deflated value added) produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. For more information on the U.S. measure, see "Improved Estimates of Gross Product by Industry for 1947-98," Survey of Current Business, June 2000, pp. 24-38 and "Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1947-86. New Estimates Based on the North American Industry Classification System," Survey of Current Business, December 2005, pp. 70-84.
As far as raw materials lasting for millennia into the future boy do I have news for you. Perhaps this site will give you a realistic assessment.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
And as far as human ingenuity, sure we can do a lot with that. But thermodynamics is immutable, and that's end of story.
Nice rant but totally unrealistic. Economies can't grow without limits as the raw materials are not boundless.
Manufacturing jobs will always be eliminated over time as automation replaces people. The US right now has the largest manufacturing output of any nation in history, and it's doing it with only 8% of its population. The US output is larger than China, India and Brazil combined.
White collar jobs are headed the same way as software replaces people.
So what is left? Simply make do public sector jobs funded by taxation on productive work. There isn't any other possible outcome.
No, the problems go much deeper than that. One was mandating that banks make loans to people who aren't qualified and then having the government, more or less, guarantee these loans (this goes back to the Carter administration, but every president since then was also guilty of endorsing this).
Please explain where these so-called mandates to issue no-document subprime loans were enacted in law. The fact is that these mandates didn't exist. Nor were there guarantees for these banks making the loans. The problem really was that these loans were securitized, rated AAA and then sold to other financial institutions. The rating agencies and the companies buying the securities didn't do proper due diligence so they didn't realize the loans were crappy quality. Subprime, no documentation etc. When the issuing banks realized they could bundle and sell any old loans they obviously had no reason to hold back on the loans. At the same time the Feds dropped the reserve requirements for large investment banks, making a flood of money available for the purchase of these securities.
It's all a matter of people getting sloppy on the risk assessment. Total lack of responsibility and unfettered greed.
If analysis of social networks brings about correlations that can be used to reduce risk, and the issuing authorities use that information it's a good idea. If people don't want their information to be used that way, well maybe they shouldn't make their lives a matter of public record on the internet.
You can hardly fault the banks for using stuff people make publicly available.
There is nothing wrong about doing good due diligence before lending money. Maybe the economy would be in better shape if we had more of this going on.
Just because Monsanto hasn't gone after people with a small garden, doesn't mean they aren't allowed to do so - if something is patented (and the patent is still valid), you are not allowed reproduce it without a license.
So you are saying that we should abandon an extremely technology that may end up feeding billions of people and preventing total deforestation of the planet among other ecological disasters based on the idea that some legal fantasy might happen in the future? This is a TOTALLY ASININE idea.
Read the article. It talks specifically about why common sense can't be relied on.
Not so. I found this statement on the Canadian Chiropractic Association Web Site:
* Can chiropractic treatment cure colds, earaches and other ailments? [Top]
Chiropractic care cannot "cure" these conditions, but there is some evidence to indicate that adjustment may have a beneficial effect on a variety of conditions. Adjustment may alleviate some of the secondary, or referred pain, arising from the response of the musculoskeletal structures to the primary cause. For example, research conducted in Denmark resulted in chiropractic treatment being recommended for the relief of infantile colic. Similarly, a recent U.S. study concluded that the application of manipulative techniques in children with recurring ear infections can prevent or decrease surgical intervention or antibiotic overuse.
This is pure quackery. Batshit crazy.
Also naturopaths are quacks. 100%. Amoung other things they are another group that opposes vaccinations, an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS position to advocate.
The TS lens I use most is quite wide at 24 mm. One of the advantages of TS is that it gives you a wider image circle than a standard lens of the same focal length, so it can be seen as effectively a 16mm lens.
Rotating the lens can bring up the DOF so I can use a much wider aperture than a conventional lens. No loss of image quality because I have to close the aperture below the diffraction limit to get the DOF I want. It's much better than stopping down to F22 and praying.
The cost of the lens was only $400 more than the same quality non-TS 24mm offering in the same product line, and the weight was an insignificant 3oz. more.
As a result this lens functions as a great ultrawide for me with the added benefit of the TS capability.
It's very unlikely to be a 'brick' anytime soon.
Using the conventional techniques you mention to get the same effect as a TS lens are all accompanied with a loss of image quality, which is why these lenses are available on the market in the first place.
View cameras are hugely expensive, and transporting them and setting them up is as well.
I am not talking about a view camera here. This is a TS lens used on a DSLR. Cost is $1000-$2000. Portability and convenience is exemplary.
In addition you can use it to record video as well:
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/06/12/amazing-tilt-shift-video-of-swiss-landscape-and-trains/
Perhaps the fact that they are in direct conflict with the EU Human Rights Convention will eventually trigger reform.
I'm glad Singh brings up the issue of GMOs in his interview. It's my opinion as well that the vast bulk of the evidence sited by GMO opponents is pseudoscience at best.
It is high time start recognizing what is going on with the anti-GMO campaign.
Going to a chiropractor for physical problems is a bat shit crazy thing to do. These people are not trained to diagnose or correctly recognize medical conditions that need real intervention and can do a lot of damage trying to treat muscle pains that arise from serious biological disease using 'manipulation'.
Go see an orthopedist and work with a physical therapist.
You will get far better results and won't put yourself in danger.
It's also a good idea to read the Wikipedia article on the history of chiropractic to understand what you are getting into when you go to one of these quacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_history
From the article:
"Chiropractors historically were strongly opposed to vaccination based on their belief that all diseases were traceable to causes in the spine, and therefore could not be affected by vaccines; D.D. Palmer wrote, "It is the very height of absurdity to strive to 'protect' any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison."
I agree that faith and belief in authority are crappy things to base belief on. So now the question is how to decide? Methodological naturalism works great, but most people don't have the capacity to go through that process every time they have to make a decision.
So then you have to look at sources that have applied methodological naturalism and go with the answer they got. I don't think that's faith, but rather it's a rational basis for making a decision based on the process that was used having a great track record over the past couple of millennia.
That's ok. I feel the same way.
Yes, I can get gigapixel quality via simple panorama stitching. 50 images with my 5DII > 1 gigapixel. I fact production of high quality panoramas is one of the things that TS excels at.
Computer composition gives you arbitrary control of depth of field, including non-flat depth of field.
Once you have an image there isn't anything you can do about depth of field. Compositing a set of images to manage DOF when you can get the same benefit by turning a knob on a lens is an expensive and impractical process for a working photographer.
And you haven't mentioned focal plane control at all.
There is nothing you can do a tilt/shift camera that can't be done better and cheaper with computational photography.
Since computational photography software outside very basic effects, and hardware to support it is not generally available that is obviously a false statement.
There is a great need to root it all out and the only way that will happen is to finally eschew all faith based beliefs.
It is amazing how few people have a sound understanding of logic.
You can say "all swans are white" based on the fact you haven't found a black swan. But you haven't proven that there aren't any black swans because you haven't examined ALL the swans to have ever existed. And when somebody finds that there are black swans in Australia, oh well for your theory.
It's the same thing only worse when you say that you are going to prove there is no 'God'. In the first case God is a supernatural being so you can't define repeatable circumstances under which he must be observed if he exists. Secondly you would have to conduct your study throughout all space and time, something not possible in a reasonable period of time.
So proving the non-existence of God is futile.
Then there is the issue that there is no experiment that can be defined where God can be shown to exist. Everything is based on 'faith' or some sort of hypothesis like 'Life is to complex to have evolved from processes defined by natural law'. Well of course none of that is admissible as evidence in the court of logic.
So the fact is that the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved.
This is where I have my biggest problem with the idea of God. Because if I were to accept the idea of God I'd have to give up on my idea that naturalistic philosophy is tool that can be used to describe the universe. Since over the course of my life I've found that this works quite well I am not at all prepared to do that. There are other smaller issues too - like invoking God has never been helpful in coming to a final explanation of the things I've observed.
So it gets down to what I put in my tag line. It's a quote from Laplace - when he was asked by Napoleon why his book on celestial mechanics did not mention God, his answer was "I have no need for that hypothesis". In French of course.
It pretty much sums up my view too.
Ansel Adams viewed the process of making a print as two stages - taking the photograph and developing the print. Taking the photo was the craft and the art came during the developing process. He would often share his negatives with students in order to provide them with starting material for their development as artists.
If you equate the prints Adams produced with the process of taking the image with a camera you are making a big mistake. His artistic contribution came during the printing process.
I am sure that Adams would have used all the image taking tools available to him. The real question is whether Adams would have been able to achieve the same level of artistic expression in a digital print vs. a silver print.
I bother because tilt and shift provides far better image quality. Photoshop doesn't correct for depth of field nor does it give you control of the focal plane.
It also makes possible a lot of other techniques that are not possible to create with Photoshop.
There is no need to disprove God. In fact it is logically futile to try to disprove the existence of anything.
The proving needs to be done by those who claim existence. If you have a hypothesis that states xyz exists, it is up to you to provide the evidence for that hypothesis.
That's silly. You have no evidence whatsoever for the existence of a "Creator", or some immortal invisible being with a mind named "God".
If you feel a need for something to have created gravity or the universe, it logically follows to ask the same thing of "God". In other words who or what created "God"?
The reason these other database types went away is because the relational db + SQL handles ad-hoc queries very well. In many if not most db applications that is a killer application.
Hmmm surface of the Earth is 70% covered by water. Why not under the water first? Gotta be easier than going all the way out to the asteroid belt.