Aside from protectionism historical success in building the United States, and more recent examples, people who cite to the Economist often are simply embracing a dead system, for which protectionism is part of the solution.
The fundamental characteristic of the present economic system is speculation. We can validate this by looking at the the "real" economy outputs vs the extremely large speculative flows which dwarf real output. Since the speculative flows demand real wealth to validate their success (as at the gas pump in the United States, but not to say that currency is real), these speculators are parasites on the real economy. Eventually, the real economy, crippled by the outflow of wealth to the speculators, cannot support the speculative demands, and speculative bubbles burst, and as a side effect trash the real economy some more.
The present economy is characterized by such speculative bubbles in several areas, for instance, housing. The Fed trys to keep the bubbles going, but that just makes the inevitable bubble collapse worse. It seems likely that in this highly-leveraged speculative environment, if one bubbles goes, the remaining bubbles will also pop.
No one can say when the bubbles will burst, but maybe today, and so soon enough you will see that the hollowed out economy is not a myth, but an unavoidable reality.
It is useful to know that many relevant Labor Department statistics are cooked.
Lately we have had consistent reports touting job creation. Suppose Labor reports 300,000 new jobs this month. A tenth of these are real jobs. The remainder comes out of a new computer model, with the input that the economy is improving. The model then assumes many new startup businesses are being created and the new businesses have hired a lot of people.
Slashdot readers as a group I think will have a healthy suspicion of computer models, particularly with garbage input.
But maybe I do not know enough. Certainly, the fundies are a strategic threat to the United States, and a realized strategic threat at that. For instance, consider General Boykin. The lead article on my web site today, Memorial Day, has some new dirt on this fundie crusader. Now we can place him at the center of Iraq torture authorizations, which has caused perhaps the U.S.'s biggest foreign debacle in recent memory, and has been and will be highly damaging to the United States. But the torture authorizations came from higher up. Still, when Boykin spewed filthy nonsense in 2002 about the Arabs being Satan, he was protected and promoted. So perhaps the fundie networks you describe are involved in protecting Boykin. This would not surprise me. I just cannot directly reach fascist mass movement.
I think your use of rational is as a deductive argument. As had been demonstrated by deductive argument, with finite axioms, deductive arguments are not a path to truth.
As to using the term rational as a modifier on economic arguments, it makes me think of game theory. From where I sit, that is a severe criticism.
Looking broadly at your argument, it can never be economically justified to perform basic research. Nor can large infrastructure projects be implemented.
Looking specifically at your claims about human nature, it would seem to be fixed and a fit subject for despair. I much prefer Liebniz.
Problems with the supreme court are a little more fundamental. You might note that the Nazis had a rule of law. Some of the laws they kept secret, because they were so bad that even the "good" German would be outraged. We are so degenerate that we make equivalent laws public, and few protest. But it was a rule of law. Their law theory came largely from a guy named Carl Schmitt who later went to the United State and was moderately influencial. Some like Rinquist use arguments identical to Schmitt.
When you hear about some case that was decided on a "positive law" theory, you are hearing about something that is indistinguishable from Schmitt theories.
Put another way, there was a fascist architecture and there was fascist music, hmm, see my web site and look at the Wagner article someone submitted. And there was fascist law, justified by a fascist theory of law, and that theory now pretty well dominates the US Supreme Court. And that fits, because the laws we are getting are in prominent occasions fascist laws. You are probably thinking I am thinking about the Patriot act, but what I have most clearly in mind is a civil service reform recently done at the federal level.
The US is "administratively" fascist. What we are missing is a fascist mass movement. And it might be a left movement or a right movement. Then thing will really pop. The dynamics look like this: institutions continue to collapse, economic shocks dominate, people look for solutions and so new institutions come into existence. If there is not a vigorous positive alternative institution coming into being, then the fascist mass movement will take off instead. Do a reality check when oil hits seventy dollars a barrel.
My experience with vonage is that they have really pretty good customer service.
There is one exchange, a rural phone company, that I call and sometime have problems getting through.
Vonage voice quality is good for me, if I put their modem directly on my isp modem. The trick seems to be that they give priority to their traffic over your computer traffic. You could probably get the same effect behind a firewall, if the firewall was sophisticated and you could arrange to prioritize packets. Try openbsd.
I certainally like all the bells and whistles. But I keep a POTS too.
Notice though that their recommended setup puts your firewall in as a dchp client. If you are lucky enough to have static ips, then this might make you think a bit. The parent poster just hung it off the router so the modem quality of service attributes do not come into play. This in my experience reduces call quality sometimes, depending on the computer traffic.
This is a state tax issue, since a Governor was proposing it.
Currently, in the state of Washington, shrink wrap software gets a sales tax, but custom does not. My old employee, TOM Software makes a complicated full-featured multi-user accounting package which pretty much requires a reseller to install it. The software is typically customized by the reseller for the end user client. TOM Software did not figure they were selling shrinkwrap, but started being taxed. They went to court, and they lost.
The court case was probably ten years ago. As I recall, they took it up to appeals court, so in this state, it is all very official. I have not read the court decision. If you are going to look it up, TOM Software was know as Northwest Source Group at the time.
[source: wires, April 5; NERC, DOE, Detroit Free Press, April 6]
BLACKOUT REPORT OMITS THE CAUSE WAS DEREGULATION. The U.S.-Canadian Task Force investigating the blackout on August 14, 2003, which left 50 million people in the dark, released its final report on April 5, detailing the chronology of the grid failure, but not the policies that created it. Much of the blame was placed on Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., which failed to adequately trim trees, setting off a chain of events that cascaded through much of the Midwest, eastern Canada, and New York. Tree trimming is one of the maintenance activities that has been curtailed nationally, thanks to cost-cutting deregulation. It is still not entirely clear why the problem spread.
That single-point transmission failure could have been isolated, were it not for the chaos that deregulation has introduced into the system as a whole. The Task Force found, for example, that the generating companies in the region do not produce enough reactive power to keep the grid stable. This is not power that is sold, but is needed to maintain the voltage and stability of the transmission system. But in today's world of competition, why should a company want to dedicate generating capacity to produce power they don't get paid for? While the report did state that the burden of long-distance power transmission, known as ``economy transfers'' did contribute to the lack of reactive power, they recommended nothing to deal with this problem. The transmission system was never intended for such transfers sent over the transmission lines so a company can buy cheaper power, even thousands of miles away, to make a profit.
In its defense, FirstEnergy said that power being shipped long-distance from southern Ohio through its wires to Ontario, Canada was one cause of the company's problems the day of the blackout, and that this was being glossed over. In response to the suggestion that if FirstEnergy had shed about 1,5000 MW of load by blacking out Cleveland to prevent the problem from spreading, the company's senior vice president responded that that may or may not have prevented the event, and ``We take exception to the idea that you should interrupt local customers in favor of long-distance transactions,'' apparently regardless of the consequences.
The remedy proposed by the Department of Energy and the Task Force is mandatory reliability standards, with government power to levy fines to punish violators. There is no way, however, to force companies to comply with standards--many would find it cheaper to pay the fines than follow the rules. Only reversing deregulation, so the organizing principle of the industry is the mandate to provide affordable, reliable electric power, rather than profit and greed, will change the deteriorating grid situation. [mgf]"
Many people have a religious tendency. Most versions would be called delusional by an unbiased observer. But since it is "normal", it is accepted and not in the mental health manuals. So Ashcroft is not nuts.
But it is useful to remember things like the Hundred Years war. That particular war was settled by the Treaty of Westphalia, which is where we get the codification of the modern nation state and freedom of conscience. Note that Ashcroft's fellow travelers are explicitly attacking the Treaty of Westphalia. The usual interpretation is that they want to do away with the nation state in favor of Empire, but I would not be surprised if the fundies would support this initiative based on the observation that it is an attack also on freedom of conscience.
The underlying cause of the blackout was speculation by energy pirates.
What happened is that in order to "wheel" power for speculation, reliability standards were ignored. The wires got hot and sagged too much.
Beyond that, the cause is ideological, with the especially Republican worship of the Free-Trade God and in particularly the dismantling of the FDR-era regulatory environment.
This report is as a result a simple white-wash. We need regulation of essential services. We need more power plants. But when your "friend" tells you to pay for new transmission facilities, they are in the pocket of energy pirates. A better solution is get rid of Cheney, put his friends in jail, and dump free-trade ideologies.
Seems to me, progress in fusion has been funding limited. There have been several "small" experiments that show a lot of promise, but commericialization would imply big boxes. The funding has always been just enough to make a not big enough box. The "wisdom" behind this is to explore scaling parameters in detail and to work on engineering issues.
Interestingly enough we could have built a net positive fusion reactor in the 1960's. The tech was zeta-pinch and it was a long tube. To get net positive, make the tube 2 klicks long.
And a last point, I observe a data set that says when we increase the energy-density available in our economic processes, then we get to transform the economy with new tech. Might be a meta-law of nature. Fusion reactors seem to fit the bill. So maybe think about more than your electric light switch.
I rather imagine at&t had been committing a crime in their false reassurances to the client. They probably bent over backwards to avoid a complaint to the state utilities and trade commission.
I have a little knowledge since I am trying to do something similar.
IMO, use of the Gutenberg name is a no-no. Further, they are using Project Gutenberg material.
On the Gutenberg name, the original Project specifies that if you distribute for money, do not use Project Gutenberg in your promotional material. Even given the disclaimers in Gutenberg II, I think Project Gutenberg would have a ligit complaint.
On the material, it is obvious that some Gutenberg 2 material comes from the Project Gutenberg archives. So I do not know what used no content from Project Gutenberg means, quoting from their web site. But I do the same thing at Fircrest Bookstore. My understanding is the Project Gutenberg wants 20% of my profits, and I would suppose Gutenberg 2 would honor that request, although it may not be enforceable.
Note that Fictionwise also sells PDFs of among other things, Project Gutenberg material. My little site is a reaction to the poor quality of some of the material there. I am experimenting with micropay systems and the possibility of doing machine generated "good" html, with live links to the footnotes and between the texts.
I think in the end people might want to evaluate both on price and how good the presentation is, assuming the legals are okay.
Project Gutenberg is free, but ascii text is not very nice. Fictionwise is relatively expensive, almost $4 each for Project Gutenberg material I am interested in, and the formatting is bad. Gutenberg 2 at $8.95 a year is really inexpensive, and the formatting is better than Fictionwise, but not quite perfect. All in all, I would consider the formatting acceptable. My little site has a sort of arbitrary $.25 micropay fee, but the html is a little better in layout and I use links extensively. My site will probably never be commercially successful, give the good enough aspects of Gutenberg 2.
The innovation of Gutenberg 2, IMO, is the emphasis of the read aloud capability of the format. This fits in well with their literacy orientation. I need to try them and see how that and their dictionary lookup work.
In my product, I started on the Richard Burton collection of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, because it was hard to do what I wanted with this. I think it is useful to note that there have been comments in other venues that this set of books is difficult to read because the words are often unfamiliar to people. So the dictionary aspect is a positive.
First of all a recent example of protectionism working. During the Asian economic downturn, the push internationally was for all the affected countries to sell of their patrimony cheap. And most did. Malaysia imposed capital controls. It is generally accepted that they recovered quicker than the other countries that accepted looting.
The Washington Concensus, which is a term used for the principles of globalization, is I think sort of a religious value. Most of the pro free trade posts have that sort of religious aspect to them. And appeals to academic economic science need to remember that as a "science", economics is not predictive. These people are not considered experts because of their demonstrated ability to predict the dot-com bust and the asian economic flu. These yoyo's did not make any such prediction. Thus we have had years of predictions that the economy will be much better in two quarters.
The protectionist side of the debate in these pages is IMO well-meant and often founded on personal observations of the devastation caused by my globalism. But this protectionist side needs an additional "idea" to make it work. That idea is essentially the a community of nations observing the common good. In that context two sovereign nations can cut trade deals that benefit both their peoples.
Globalism, although based syntactically on a universal word, is essentially pure reductionism in action. As such it cannot generate a common good concept or result. Those who favor protectionism need to realize the espistemological constraits they are arguing under and break out of the box.
I currently use another domain vendor. They have a newer policy of automatically charging your credit cards when the domain expires to renew it. The email I got when it was time to renew was incomprehensible as to which doman was expiring. I complained a bit.
It is possible that verisign is trying to deal with a real issue, that is, domains expiring undesireably, while making money on the deal, based on the competitior's reasoning for the credit card autodebit program. I do recall that ever once in a while Microsoft allows a domain to expire through incompetence, causing many people grief.
I use verio. I used to use verisign but was pretty disgusted with their since revamped web interface and the difficulty of having to deal with them by fax all the time. I changed my PO Box and to change it in my records was a big effort. I did not much like verisign's litigation with the commerence department either. When the time came to register another domain, I looked around for a cheaper non-verisign place and ended up at verio. Now they are on my shit list too, but not as high up as verisign.
Commonsense to me shows that trying to stop these programs a program at time is like try to hold back the sea. I am of the opinion that we are one day to two years out of an economic breakdown crisis. Some of the elites have started to figure this out and act on it. History shows that when the bankers, for instance, are in charge of crisis reorganization, as they intend to be, then these suspicious programs come into their own.
History also tell us that to meet this threat, given where we are now, it takes a positive cultural shift among at least a significant minority of the population. I find this to be a problem. Sort of a bootstrap problem.
Christopher someone, know for once being Superman, was paralyzed in a horse riding accident. He has since had a minor but confounding recovery. One speculation on this is the severed nervers heal somewhat, but by the time they heal, the muscles have all wasted away. Christopher kept up a muscle building and preservation program and eventually had the unexpected results. (He had really good health insurance.) I wonder if an application of this genetic treatment might be to help preserve muscles of recently paralyzed people, and speculatively, allowing a later partial recovery of function.
I would guess my public address gets a hundred spams a day. This would average out to about one every fifteen minutes. I am sitting at my computer all day. Suppose I had the mail client set so an incoming mail has the effect of distracting me, as by say a beep. The effect would be that I am always being distracted from my work. Experimentation shows that even noticing the email counter incrementing distracts me.
I use my inbox as my project list. Everytime I go to my inbox, I would have to delete spam to clean up the inbox, so I could mentally process the project list.
So to me it is worth the $30/year I pay spamcop to filter 99% of the spam out. Thus, I am someone whom spam is costing money.
Well, I confused on whether you were saying he was not democratic or not Democratic. Both would be inaccurate. As far as retailing slanders, you might look at his campaign site and provide details from his prolific writings for my edification.
I suppose you might nevertheless acknowledge that in the first quarter of the campaign season he raised money from more people than any of the other Democratic candidates. But I guess no one supports him. Oh, he qualified for federal matching funds a few days ago so I suppose any support he has is very narrow geographically.
The site www.larouchein2004.com is running Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) mod_perl/1.28 on Linux.
In terms of popular support as measured in the number of contributors of $200 or more, a commonly accepted measure, LaRouche is number 2 or 3 among the Democratic candidates. In the State of Washington, he is number 2. The $200 figure comes from how the FEC sets up reporting, and thus what is tracked.
In the first reporting quarter, he was number 1 in this measure.
Recall all the controversy about the pyschological effects of violent games. This is another study that show pyschological effects, and perhaps enduring effects, from games.
It *is* capitalism. I think what you fail to recognize is that there are several sorts of capitialism. Some capitialist actually make money by producing useful things. Others trade paper to make money. The paper is essentially state enforced property titles. But the property does not have to be *real*. The essential feature of the paper is that it has the right to a "return", even if the paper has no discernable connection to actual production.
Many people use the names productive capitialist and financial capitialist to make the distinction.
The sucking of wealth that the financial capitialist does to everyone, including the productive capitialist, tends to destroy the actual production process. Eventually, the productive process does not produce enough real wealth to support the parasites and the system crashes. Then the paper values fall back into some sort of conformity with reality. Rewash, if there is enough left to start over again.
It *is* capitalism. I think what you fail to recognize is that there are several sorts of capitialism. Some capitialist actually make money by producing useful things. Others trade paper to make money. The paper is essentially state enforced property titles. But the property does not have to be *real*. The essential feature of the paper is that it has the right to a "return", even if the paper has no descernable connection to actual production.
Many people use the names productive capitialist and financial capitialist to make the distinction.
The sucking of wealth that the financial capitialist does to everyone, including the productive capitialist, tends to destroy the actual production process. Eventually, the productive process does not produce enough real wealth to support the parasites and the system crashes. Then the paper values fall back into some sort of conformity with reality. Rewash, if there is enough left to start over again.
On green and brown, it was kind of a pun. Environmentalists are often called green. Brown was vaguely refering to a dead plant. I get to make puns.
On the time period to recover "invested" energy, I have read stuff but cannot cite. On the other hand, the post below this seems to figure the payback is three years, and that sounds about right for the photo cell itself, but I suspect it ignores the energy cost of the support structure. By support structure, I mean the physical supporting structure on which the photocells are attached and dedicated to that function. Still, if it is BS, an easy response is to cite the true number. Instead, this metric seems to be consistently ignored by solar energy advocates. But maybe you are right and Rush just got some bad drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a protectionist.
Aside from protectionism historical success in building the United States, and more recent examples, people who cite to the Economist often are simply embracing a dead system, for which protectionism is part of the solution.
The fundamental characteristic of the present economic system is speculation. We can validate this by looking at the the "real" economy outputs vs the extremely large speculative flows which dwarf real output. Since the speculative flows demand real wealth to validate their success (as at the gas pump in the United States, but not to say that currency is real), these speculators are parasites on the real economy. Eventually, the real economy, crippled by the outflow of wealth to the speculators, cannot support the speculative demands, and speculative bubbles burst, and as a side effect trash the real economy some more.
The present economy is characterized by such speculative bubbles in several areas, for instance, housing. The Fed trys to keep the bubbles going, but that just makes the inevitable bubble collapse worse. It seems likely that in this highly-leveraged speculative environment, if one bubbles goes, the remaining bubbles will also pop.
No one can say when the bubbles will burst, but maybe today, and so soon enough you will see that the hollowed out economy is not a myth, but an unavoidable reality.
Lately we have had consistent reports touting job creation. Suppose Labor reports 300,000 new jobs this month. A tenth of these are real jobs. The remainder comes out of a new computer model, with the input that the economy is improving. The model then assumes many new startup businesses are being created and the new businesses have hired a lot of people.
Slashdot readers as a group I think will have a healthy suspicion of computer models, particularly with garbage input.
But maybe I do not know enough. Certainly, the fundies are a strategic threat to the United States, and a realized strategic threat at that. For instance, consider General Boykin. The lead article on my web site today, Memorial Day, has some new dirt on this fundie crusader. Now we can place him at the center of Iraq torture authorizations, which has caused perhaps the U.S.'s biggest foreign debacle in recent memory, and has been and will be highly damaging to the United States. But the torture authorizations came from higher up. Still, when Boykin spewed filthy nonsense in 2002 about the Arabs being Satan, he was protected and promoted. So perhaps the fundie networks you describe are involved in protecting Boykin. This would not surprise me. I just cannot directly reach fascist mass movement.
Where to start.
I think your use of rational is as a deductive argument. As had been demonstrated by deductive argument, with finite axioms, deductive arguments are not a path to truth.
As to using the term rational as a modifier on economic arguments, it makes me think of game theory. From where I sit, that is a severe criticism.
Looking broadly at your argument, it can never be economically justified to perform basic research. Nor can large infrastructure projects be implemented.
Looking specifically at your claims about human nature, it would seem to be fixed and a fit subject for despair. I much prefer Liebniz.
Problems with the supreme court are a little more fundamental. You might note that the Nazis had a rule of law. Some of the laws they kept secret, because they were so bad that even the "good" German would be outraged. We are so degenerate that we make equivalent laws public, and few protest. But it was a rule of law. Their law theory came largely from a guy named Carl Schmitt who later went to the United State and was moderately influencial. Some like Rinquist use arguments identical to Schmitt.
When you hear about some case that was decided on a "positive law" theory, you are hearing about something that is indistinguishable from Schmitt theories.
Put another way, there was a fascist architecture and there was fascist music, hmm, see my web site and look at the Wagner article someone submitted. And there was fascist law, justified by a fascist theory of law, and that theory now pretty well dominates the US Supreme Court. And that fits, because the laws we are getting are in prominent occasions fascist laws. You are probably thinking I am thinking about the Patriot act, but what I have most clearly in mind is a civil service reform recently done at the federal level.
The US is "administratively" fascist. What we are missing is a fascist mass movement. And it might be a left movement or a right movement. Then thing will really pop. The dynamics look like this: institutions continue to collapse, economic shocks dominate, people look for solutions and so new institutions come into existence. If there is not a vigorous positive alternative institution coming into being, then the fascist mass movement will take off instead. Do a reality check when oil hits seventy dollars a barrel.
My experience with vonage is that they have really pretty good customer service.
There is one exchange, a rural phone company, that I call and sometime have problems getting through.
Vonage voice quality is good for me, if I put their modem directly on my isp modem. The trick seems to be that they give priority to their traffic over your computer traffic. You could probably get the same effect behind a firewall, if the firewall was sophisticated and you could arrange to prioritize packets. Try openbsd.
I certainally like all the bells and whistles. But I keep a POTS too.
Notice though that their recommended setup puts your firewall in as a dchp client. If you are lucky enough to have static ips, then this might make you think a bit. The parent poster just hung it off the router so the modem quality of service attributes do not come into play. This in my experience reduces call quality sometimes, depending on the computer traffic.
Currently, in the state of Washington, shrink wrap software gets a sales tax, but custom does not. My old employee, TOM Software makes a complicated full-featured multi-user accounting package which pretty much requires a reseller to install it. The software is typically customized by the reseller for the end user client. TOM Software did not figure they were selling shrinkwrap, but started being taxed. They went to court, and they lost.
The court case was probably ten years ago. As I recall, they took it up to appeals court, so in this state, it is all very official. I have not read the court decision. If you are going to look it up, TOM Software was know as Northwest Source Group at the time.
BLACKOUT REPORT OMITS THE CAUSE WAS DEREGULATION. The U.S.-Canadian Task Force investigating the blackout on August 14, 2003, which left 50 million people in the dark, released its final report on April 5, detailing the chronology of the grid failure, but not the policies that created it. Much of the blame was placed on Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., which failed to adequately trim trees, setting off a chain of events that cascaded through much of the Midwest, eastern Canada, and New York. Tree trimming is one of the maintenance activities that has been curtailed nationally, thanks to cost-cutting deregulation. It is still not entirely clear why the problem spread.
That single-point transmission failure could have been isolated, were it not for the chaos that deregulation has introduced into the system as a whole. The Task Force found, for example, that the generating companies in the region do not produce enough reactive power to keep the grid stable. This is not power that is sold, but is needed to maintain the voltage and stability of the transmission system. But in today's world of competition, why should a company want to dedicate generating capacity to produce power they don't get paid for? While the report did state that the burden of long-distance power transmission, known as ``economy transfers'' did contribute to the lack of reactive power, they recommended nothing to deal with this problem. The transmission system was never intended for such transfers sent over the transmission lines so a company can buy cheaper power, even thousands of miles away, to make a profit.
In its defense, FirstEnergy said that power being shipped long-distance from southern Ohio through its wires to Ontario, Canada was one cause of the company's problems the day of the blackout, and that this was being glossed over. In response to the suggestion that if FirstEnergy had shed about 1,5000 MW of load by blacking out Cleveland to prevent the problem from spreading, the company's senior vice president responded that that may or may not have prevented the event, and ``We take exception to the idea that you should interrupt local customers in favor of long-distance transactions,'' apparently regardless of the consequences.
The remedy proposed by the Department of Energy and the Task Force is mandatory reliability standards, with government power to levy fines to punish violators. There is no way, however, to force companies to comply with standards--many would find it cheaper to pay the fines than follow the rules. Only reversing deregulation, so the organizing principle of the industry is the mandate to provide affordable, reliable electric power, rather than profit and greed, will change the deteriorating grid situation. [mgf]"
But it is useful to remember things like the Hundred Years war. That particular war was settled by the Treaty of Westphalia, which is where we get the codification of the modern nation state and freedom of conscience. Note that Ashcroft's fellow travelers are explicitly attacking the Treaty of Westphalia. The usual interpretation is that they want to do away with the nation state in favor of Empire, but I would not be surprised if the fundies would support this initiative based on the observation that it is an attack also on freedom of conscience.
The underlying cause of the blackout was speculation by energy pirates.
What happened is that in order to "wheel" power for speculation, reliability standards were ignored. The wires got hot and sagged too much.
Beyond that, the cause is ideological, with the especially Republican worship of the Free-Trade God and in particularly the dismantling of the FDR-era regulatory environment.
This report is as a result a simple white-wash. We need regulation of essential services. We need more power plants. But when your "friend" tells you to pay for new transmission facilities, they are in the pocket of energy pirates. A better solution is get rid of Cheney, put his friends in jail, and dump free-trade ideologies.
Seems to me, progress in fusion has been funding limited. There have been several "small" experiments that show a lot of promise, but commericialization would imply big boxes. The funding has always been just enough to make a not big enough box. The "wisdom" behind this is to explore scaling parameters in detail and to work on engineering issues.
Interestingly enough we could have built a net positive fusion reactor in the 1960's. The tech was zeta-pinch and it was a long tube. To get net positive, make the tube 2 klicks long.
And a last point, I observe a data set that says when we increase the energy-density available in our economic processes, then we get to transform the economy with new tech. Might be a meta-law of nature. Fusion reactors seem to fit the bill. So maybe think about more than your electric light switch.
I rather imagine at&t had been committing a crime in their false reassurances to the client. They probably bent over backwards to avoid a complaint to the state utilities and trade commission.
I have a little knowledge since I am trying to do something similar.
IMO, use of the Gutenberg name is a no-no. Further, they are using Project Gutenberg material.
On the Gutenberg name, the original Project specifies that if you distribute for money, do not use Project Gutenberg in your promotional material. Even given the disclaimers in Gutenberg II, I think Project Gutenberg would have a ligit complaint.
On the material, it is obvious that some Gutenberg 2 material comes from the Project Gutenberg archives. So I do not know what used no content from Project Gutenberg means, quoting from their web site. But I do the same thing at Fircrest Bookstore. My understanding is the Project Gutenberg wants 20% of my profits, and I would suppose Gutenberg 2 would honor that request, although it may not be enforceable.
Note that Fictionwise also sells PDFs of among other things, Project Gutenberg material. My little site is a reaction to the poor quality of some of the material there. I am experimenting with micropay systems and the possibility of doing machine generated "good" html, with live links to the footnotes and between the texts.
I think in the end people might want to evaluate both on price and how good the presentation is, assuming the legals are okay.
Project Gutenberg is free, but ascii text is not very nice. Fictionwise is relatively expensive, almost $4 each for Project Gutenberg material I am interested in, and the formatting is bad. Gutenberg 2 at $8.95 a year is really inexpensive, and the formatting is better than Fictionwise, but not quite perfect. All in all, I would consider the formatting acceptable. My little site has a sort of arbitrary $.25 micropay fee, but the html is a little better in layout and I use links extensively. My site will probably never be commercially successful, give the good enough aspects of Gutenberg 2.
The innovation of Gutenberg 2, IMO, is the emphasis of the read aloud capability of the format. This fits in well with their literacy orientation. I need to try them and see how that and their dictionary lookup work.
In my product, I started on the Richard Burton collection of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, because it was hard to do what I wanted with this. I think it is useful to note that there have been comments in other venues that this set of books is difficult to read because the words are often unfamiliar to people. So the dictionary aspect is a positive.
I'm a protectionist. But not a flag waver.
First of all a recent example of protectionism working. During the Asian economic downturn, the push internationally was for all the affected countries to sell of their patrimony cheap. And most did. Malaysia imposed capital controls. It is generally accepted that they recovered quicker than the other countries that accepted looting.
The Washington Concensus, which is a term used for the principles of globalization, is I think sort of a religious value. Most of the pro free trade posts have that sort of religious aspect to them. And appeals to academic economic science need to remember that as a "science", economics is not predictive. These people are not considered experts because of their demonstrated ability to predict the dot-com bust and the asian economic flu. These yoyo's did not make any such prediction. Thus we have had years of predictions that the economy will be much better in two quarters.
The protectionist side of the debate in these pages is IMO well-meant and often founded on personal observations of the devastation caused by my globalism. But this protectionist side needs an additional "idea" to make it work. That idea is essentially the a community of nations observing the common good. In that context two sovereign nations can cut trade deals that benefit both their peoples.
Globalism, although based syntactically on a universal word, is essentially pure reductionism in action. As such it cannot generate a common good concept or result. Those who favor protectionism need to realize the espistemological constraits they are arguing under and break out of the box.
Walmart
I currently use another domain vendor. They have a newer policy of automatically charging your credit cards when the domain expires to renew it. The email I got when it was time to renew was incomprehensible as to which doman was expiring. I complained a bit.
It is possible that verisign is trying to deal with a real issue, that is, domains expiring undesireably, while making money on the deal, based on the competitior's reasoning for the credit card autodebit program. I do recall that ever once in a while Microsoft allows a domain to expire through incompetence, causing many people grief.
I use verio. I used to use verisign but was pretty disgusted with their since revamped web interface and the difficulty of having to deal with them by fax all the time. I changed my PO Box and to change it in my records was a big effort. I did not much like verisign's litigation with the commerence department either. When the time came to register another domain, I looked around for a cheaper non-verisign place and ended up at verio. Now they are on my shit list too, but not as high up as verisign.
Commonsense to me shows that trying to stop these programs a program at time is like try to hold back the sea. I am of the opinion that we are one day to two years out of an economic breakdown crisis. Some of the elites have started to figure this out and act on it. History shows that when the bankers, for instance, are in charge of crisis reorganization, as they intend to be, then these suspicious programs come into their own.
History also tell us that to meet this threat, given where we are now, it takes a positive cultural shift among at least a significant minority of the population. I find this to be a problem. Sort of a bootstrap problem.
Christopher someone, know for once being Superman, was paralyzed in a horse riding accident. He has since had a minor but confounding recovery. One speculation on this is the severed nervers heal somewhat, but by the time they heal, the muscles have all wasted away. Christopher kept up a muscle building and preservation program and eventually had the unexpected results. (He had really good health insurance.) I wonder if an application of this genetic treatment might be to help preserve muscles of recently paralyzed people, and speculatively, allowing a later partial recovery of function.
I would guess my public address gets a hundred spams a day. This would average out to about one every fifteen minutes. I am sitting at my computer all day. Suppose I had the mail client set so an incoming mail has the effect of distracting me, as by say a beep. The effect would be that I am always being distracted from my work. Experimentation shows that even noticing the email counter incrementing distracts me.
I use my inbox as my project list. Everytime I go to my inbox, I would have to delete spam to clean up the inbox, so I could mentally process the project list.
So to me it is worth the $30/year I pay spamcop to filter 99% of the spam out. Thus, I am someone whom spam is costing money.
Well, I confused on whether you were saying he was not democratic or not Democratic. Both would be inaccurate. As far as retailing slanders, you might look at his campaign site and provide details from his prolific writings for my edification.
I suppose you might nevertheless acknowledge that in the first quarter of the campaign season he raised money from more people than any of the other Democratic candidates. But I guess no one supports him. Oh, he qualified for federal matching funds a few days ago so I suppose any support he has is very narrow geographically.
The site www.larouchein2004.com is running Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) mod_perl/1.28 on Linux.
In terms of popular support as measured in the number of contributors of $200 or more, a commonly accepted measure, LaRouche is number 2 or 3 among the Democratic candidates. In the State of Washington, he is number 2. The $200 figure comes from how the FEC sets up reporting, and thus what is tracked.
In the first reporting quarter, he was number 1 in this measure.
Recall all the controversy about the pyschological effects of violent games. This is another study that show pyschological effects, and perhaps enduring effects, from games.
It *is* capitalism. I think what you fail to recognize is that there are several sorts of capitialism. Some capitialist actually make money by producing useful things. Others trade paper to make money. The paper is essentially state enforced property titles. But the property does not have to be *real*. The essential feature of the paper is that it has the right to a "return", even if the paper has no discernable connection to actual production.
Many people use the names productive capitialist and financial capitialist to make the distinction.
The sucking of wealth that the financial capitialist does to everyone, including the productive capitialist, tends to destroy the actual production process. Eventually, the productive process does not produce enough real wealth to support the parasites and the system crashes. Then the paper values fall back into some sort of conformity with reality. Rewash, if there is enough left to start over again.
It *is* capitalism. I think what you fail to recognize is that there are several sorts of capitialism. Some capitialist actually make money by producing useful things. Others trade paper to make money. The paper is essentially state enforced property titles. But the property does not have to be *real*. The essential feature of the paper is that it has the right to a "return", even if the paper has no descernable connection to actual production.
Many people use the names productive capitialist and financial capitialist to make the distinction.
The sucking of wealth that the financial capitialist does to everyone, including the productive capitialist, tends to destroy the actual production process. Eventually, the productive process does not produce enough real wealth to support the parasites and the system crashes. Then the paper values fall back into some sort of conformity with reality. Rewash, if there is enough left to start over again.
On green and brown, it was kind of a pun. Environmentalists are often called green. Brown was vaguely refering to a dead plant. I get to make puns.
On the time period to recover "invested" energy, I have read stuff but cannot cite. On the other hand, the post below this seems to figure the payback is three years, and that sounds about right for the photo cell itself, but I suspect it ignores the energy cost of the support structure. By support structure, I mean the physical supporting structure on which the photocells are attached and dedicated to that function. Still, if it is BS, an easy response is to cite the true number. Instead, this metric seems to be consistently ignored by solar energy advocates. But maybe you are right and Rush just got some bad drugs.