Statistical noise ?, we are still talking about billions of dollars here. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if 4% of today's GDP is more than 22% of 1945's GDP (even after adjusting for inflation).
Yes, statistical noise. You can't look at the number of dollars spent as any sort of barometer because the US has a much larger economy and a lot more people now. Measuring it as a % of GDP really is the most rational way to measure.
Could this money have not been better spent ?
Friend, all government spending is primarily money down the rathole. This rathole happens to drive a noteworthy portion of US technological research, so you tell me. You have a different rathole in mind?
Sweden have been the nordic country with the HIGHEST immigration during the last 20 year.
Wow. Highest immigration of the nordic countries (at 0.95 per 1000). The US has a rate of 3.5 per 1000.
More than 10% of Swedens population, or about 1 million, is either an immigrant or have at least one immigrant parent.
So we are really not "100% lily-white". Pay a visit and see for yourself.
Not 100%, to be sure, but what then? 10% may be immigrants or children of immigrants, but how many of those are finns, danes, or norwegians (AKA "white europeans")? How about some relevant statistics, like what percentage are nordic/european and what percent are not?
The US population is 77% of european descent.
Iraq had stopped asking for USD...North Korea stopped trading in USD...Iran is on the way to do the same.
[melodrama] Oh dear, three of the most important trading partners of the US have gone to Euros! [/melodrama] Let me know when Canada, Mexico, Japan, and China want Euros. Right now they still seem to like dollars.
Can you imagine how much the US would hurt if people decided to abandon the Dollar and move into the Euro? All off the sudden the US would need to buy Euros in order to do foreign trade, which in turn would bring the Euro up higher and the USD down even more which in turn would mean higher prices at home, for EVERYTHING. Have a look next time you're shopping where your stuff is coming from and you will realize just how fucked up for the US that would be.
Yeah, but a move to the Euro as a baseline currency is about as likely as a move to the Ruble. Saying "if everything was priced in Euros" is like saying "if everything was priced in Blue Whale Skulls"-- it presupposes a highly unusual initial condition. The reason dollars are the de facto world currency right now is because the US is where other countries want to spend their money. If they got Euros for their [oil/textiles/widgets], they'd still have to convert to dollars in order to buy US products. Your scenario involving a plummeting dollar and surging Euro presupposes that not only will countries stop accepting dollars as payment, but that they will no longer buy anything that requires dollars for payment. So unless the EU suddenly becomes an economic giant and the US economy withers away to nothing, your scenario is just hot gas.
EMP's (such as those from nuclear weapons) can cause fairly dangerous inductive currents in metal objects. Electrical arcs through the air (lightning) cause very little EM radiation, which in turn causes negligible inductive currents. Notice how lightning causes just a little pop on an AM radio? That's the EMP from the lightning amplified and it's barely audible, much less dangerous.
Err...actually, I think we're arguing from the same position....I misread and thought your were implying that free H2 would be catalytic in perpetuity, rather than intermediately. My bad. Too much coffee this morning.
"Because molecular hydrogen freely moves up and mixes with stratospheric air, the result would be the creation of additional water..."
From the NASA page you linked:
O3 + X -> XO + O2 ( where X may be O, NO, OH, Br or Cl)
Note that it's "OH" and not "H". Your reaction (from the original post) "H + O3 -> OH + O2" is the problem. It assumes free H+ without a second H+, which is absurd because (as you say) H travels as H2 because it's more stable. Since the hydrogen arrives as H2, the reaction (as the Caltech report says) is the more logical one of "O3 + H2 -> O2 + H2O". The unstable third O in O3 isn't going to take only one H when it's got a second H that needs to be knocked loose.
OH + HO2 -> H2O + O2
H + HO2 -> H2 + O2
HO2? Where are you getting hydrogen dioxide(peroxide)? That's a far less stable molecule than O2 or even O3! Does the H2 floating up come with its own electric still?
Also, there aren't mentions of H2 reactions specifically, but rather lots of reactions involving H. Since monatomic hydrogen is rare, are they just assuming that its diatomic and ignoring that part of the equation for simplicity...?
Yeah, I think they must be simplifying. I think H2 is is unstable enough to be treated as two H+ ions. Seems weird that they didn't just call it H2 and then double the other quantities to make it make sense, eh?
Put down the crack pipe, junior. H + O3 -> OH + O2? Try "3 H2 + 03 -> 3 H2O" instead. An OH- ion is not going to happen spontaneously when there's H around. A crazed OH- ion will grab the first H it finds and relax to form water. Given a "choice" between forming stable molecules (like H20) and unstable ones (O2, OH-), the more stable will win unless you "cheat" the system by pumping in extra energy. Think "entropy". Chemical reactions, left to their own devices, prefer to release energy. That's why you never never see your glass of water vanish in a spontaneous "2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2" reaction.
There are lots of other similar cycles you can come up with.
Yes, and they're all just as unlikely. Hydrogen as catalyst (pff!)? Why not hydrogen as an evil atom bent on raining caustic ions from the sky, as in "3 H2 + 2 O3 -> 6 OH-"? You can dream up all the fantasy chemistry you want, but there's more to chemical reactions than just making the number of atoms on each side balance.
I think my head will explode if I see one more illiterate nitwit typing "for all intensive purposes". Fifty times on the blackboard kid: for all intents and purposes. And 500 more times "I will not repeat a cliche if I don't understand it".
Wow!!! We shuld film his head explodiung!!!! I bet pepul would pay liek fiften bucks to watch that on paper view!
How much money would I need to defeat the army of lawyers Cisco could hire and how many years of litigation would drag on before the contract was thrown out? Whether it's illegal or not doesn't mean shit if you can't afford to defeat it.
Even an army of lawyers can't "drag on" a case that's based on a provision in an employment contract that is explicitly prohibited by federal law. There's no weaseling room when the NLRA and Norris-LaGuardia Act specifically prohibit such provisions. True, they could sue the bejesus out of you six ways from sunday for all sorts of other things, and those suits may well drag on forever; but there's one thing I can tell you: a suit against you for a)joining a union or b)organizing fellow workers will fail because federal law protects these activities. End of story.
I don't agree with it, but I believe that in the US, if there is no union established, this might actually be a problem.
What wouldn't be a problem would be if you quit and then told others to quit. But if you start telling other people to quit while you are an employee of the company, that might be a problem.
This is because of the (IMO flawed) idea that an employee is supposed to represent the interests of the company in any action related to it, and until you have actually quit, this applies to you.
What? There's no law that says an employee has to "represent the [best] interests of the company"! You can go to work every day and randomize the files in the file cabinet, hide the CFO's laptop, and call up the company's biggest clients and tell them that a competitor is a better bet. You know what the company can do? Fire you. Yes, that's about it. You know why? Because there's no law stating that you must be a "good" employee. Furthermore, whether you work there or not is totally irrelevant when it comes to talking other employees into quitting. You can organize workers from now until the cows come home and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it within the law. They can't even fire you for it! Well, they might, but they're not supposed to. Point is, the law is very clear about this. Companies don't own their employees, they only hire them.
Management realizes this and so freely puts such clauses in their contracts. I know because there was just such a clause in my contract when I started working at Cisco Systems.
When I got laid off I signed another contract for the severance package I received and it too had the exact same prohibition against enticing co-workers into quiting.
Whether they put those provisions in the contract or not, they're still illegal and unenforceable. They could make you sign a contract that says the CEO retains the right to behead you with a samurai sword if you don't touch your forehead to the ground when he walks by, but such a provision would be unenforceable because it's illegal. They could produce a signed paper after the CEO lops off a head, but the judge would toss it aside as an illegal contract and he'd still get charged with murder. You are not bound by illegal provisions in a contract, whether you signed it or not. This is basic contract law, man.
I *think* (don't quote me) that closest thing in heredity and spirit after all the various acquisitions and spinoffs and splits in AT&T since those days would be Lucent, but I'm not really sure.
Yeah, Bell Labs is still part of Lucent. Not sure exactly which part of AT&T Lucent came out of though, nor do I know who approved their stupid "brown ring of quality"-looking logo either...
Yeah, I know... I'm just being a jerk 'cuz people call opamps and logic gates "computer chips.":6 It's a good way to distinguish from potato for people who don't know silicon, but still...
heh, yeah. I've given up. I've tried explaining basic electronics and computer theory to my boss, but he's one of those guys who goes through the directories of our computer in the shop looking for files to delete (usually 1K-3K files!) in order to "free up memory 'cause this computer is SLOW!" It's a pentium-200 you fool! Hard disk isn't memory! 1K icon files are irrelevant! Buy a new computer! ARGH!
Actually, the effects of overheating of the testicles have been known for some time. Why do you think they hang down out of your body, relatively unprotected? So your body can control their temperature.
That's true. I read on the web somewhere about a guy who made himself an electric testicle warmer that he wears an hour or so a day to make himself sterile as a form of birth control. I think he used hot water rather than microwaves, but yeah, microwaves would do the same thing. Then again, just setting a hot laptop on your lap for an hour a day (microwaves or no) might do the trick too!
Everyone in the group will contribute their particular grievance until the sum, to a single individual, seems like overwhelming evidence of company management being incompetent, callous, petty, vindictive and just so damned malevolent.
Well, in reality, they're not that malevolent, anymore than villains in real life are that malevolent.
I quote:
"You suddenly find yourself working 50-60 hour weeks, put on call with no compensation..."
Demanding that employees do more work (25%-50% more!) with no compensation is malevolent. There's no "group storytelling" at work there. I've seen the herd mentality take over among admin people where I work, and it usually stems from stories of this sort: "he said, like, 'do this report by tomorrow' and like, he was really mean about it. Bosses here used to be nice." That's where you get problems-- when people confuse their own feelings with employer abuse. People taking the tone of a boss' comment personally when in reality he's just having a bad day? That's storytelling. Having your workload doubled without compensation? That's employer abuse.
I agree that any departure should be conducted in a businesslike manner with no attempts at "revenge" or such; but neither should people ignore the fact that management abuse is bad enough to make them angry.
Such a coordinated effort smells of a lawsuit from the company against the organizer(s) and possibly participants.
What are you, an idiot? Employees are human beings with free will. The company doesn't own them. The freedom to quit your job is fairly well established, and the freedom to tell others why you're quitting (and for them, in turn, to quit as well) is fairly obvious. Furthermore, you cannot file suit against an individual because they organized their coworkers to do something their employer didn't want. If they could, we wouldn't have unions anywhere now would we?
If I recall, in the 486, and possibly 386 days, didn't AMD manufacture over 20% of Intel's processors? I'm sure in the big picture it wasn't all that many, but how arbitrary is this 1 billion?
Well, according to the article: (boldface mine)
"...Intel has shipped its 1 billionth computer chip, according to figures compiled by semiconductor industry analyst firm Mercury Research and verified by Intel."
So yeah, I bet they're counting all kinds of chips they outsourced to others (like AMD). I wonder how many of those 1x10^9 chips actually came from Intel fabs?
But would a microcontroller be a "computer chip"? I'd classify it more as an "embedded device chip."
Heck, the term "computer chip" is so generic that a BCD converter or a DAC fits the definition (sneaks under the wire, barely). A microcontroller most certainly qualifies. Microcontrollers are usually simple CPUs with registers, instruction sets, etc. just like a big CPU. Moot point, though, because they're talking about Intel shipping its billionth x86 family chip.
And by the way, that's 100 watts going directly into your lap! By contrast, low end microwave ovens cook food with 600 watts. That warm, fuzzy feeling you're experiencing probably means you'll never be able to have children...
Crimony, how many times does it have to be said! Microwaves (and other RADIO freqs) do NOT cause cancer, sterilization, mutation, etc. Those are caused by IONIZING radiation, such as ultraviolet, gamma, and X-rays. Ionizing radiation lives at the OTHER END of the radiation band from radio/microwaves. Yes, microwaves can cause injury, but that injury is limited to THERMAL effects (i.e. cooking), and maybe burns from inductive electrical effects causing arcs from metal objects. Again, let it be said: radio towers don't cause cancer! RF from power lines doesn't cause leukemia! Microwaves won't make you sterile! Your cell phone did not give you brain cancer! It's radio for gods sake! It's not a "nookular bomb"!
Pah, thats why you have a printer that can take envelopes;-)
heh. Damn straight! I sometimes receive holiday cards from relatives where the address is written in stupid, loopy, hardly-legible cursive (is that an L or an E?). The US Postal Service may have the best OCR software money can produce, but you just know there's some poor schmuck whose job it is to try to decipher the addresses that the machine chokes on. When I get these unreadable handwritten cards, I often wonder if the writer actually thought their cursive was readable (bad), or they just didn't think at all (worse).
I wonder if they're seeing a drop in cursive writing in Russia? Probably not as much, since the Cyrillic alphabet is too unwieldy to block-print. And if you think our cursive is hard to read, try learning to read handwritten Cyrillic script. Argh! It often looks like a bunch of lowercase M's, U's, and E's strung together. Cyrillic is a perfect example of why linguists should NOT be allowed to develop alphabets.
Saying that higher teacher's salaries are not sufficient to produce better teachers may well be true...however, higher teacher's salaries may well be necessary to produce better teachers.
You're using the wrong word. Salaries don't produce teachers, they attract them. If you actually read what his post, he said that higher salaries will indeed attract better teachers, but it will do nothing to make the mediocre teachers we have any better.
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More to the point, what EU products? The US may not export like (say) China does, but by the same token the EU does so even less.
Yes, statistical noise. You can't look at the number of dollars spent as any sort of barometer because the US has a much larger economy and a lot more people now. Measuring it as a % of GDP really is the most rational way to measure.
Could this money have not been better spent ?
Friend, all government spending is primarily money down the rathole. This rathole happens to drive a noteworthy portion of US technological research, so you tell me. You have a different rathole in mind?
Wow. Highest immigration of the nordic countries (at 0.95 per 1000). The US has a rate of 3.5 per 1000.
More than 10% of Swedens population, or about 1 million, is either an immigrant or have at least one immigrant parent.
So we are really not "100% lily-white". Pay a visit and see for yourself.
Not 100%, to be sure, but what then? 10% may be immigrants or children of immigrants, but how many of those are finns, danes, or norwegians (AKA "white europeans")? How about some relevant statistics, like what percentage are nordic/european and what percent are not?
The US population is 77% of european descent.
[melodrama]
Oh dear, three of the most important trading partners of the US have gone to Euros!
[/melodrama]
Let me know when Canada, Mexico, Japan, and China want Euros. Right now they still seem to like dollars.
Can you imagine how much the US would hurt if people decided to abandon the Dollar and move into the Euro? All off the sudden the US would need to buy Euros in order to do foreign trade, which in turn would bring the Euro up higher and the USD down even more which in turn would mean higher prices at home, for EVERYTHING. Have a look next time you're shopping where your stuff is coming from and you will realize just how fucked up for the US that would be.
Yeah, but a move to the Euro as a baseline currency is about as likely as a move to the Ruble. Saying "if everything was priced in Euros" is like saying "if everything was priced in Blue Whale Skulls"-- it presupposes a highly unusual initial condition. The reason dollars are the de facto world currency right now is because the US is where other countries want to spend their money. If they got Euros for their [oil/textiles/widgets], they'd still have to convert to dollars in order to buy US products. Your scenario involving a plummeting dollar and surging Euro presupposes that not only will countries stop accepting dollars as payment, but that they will no longer buy anything that requires dollars for payment. So unless the EU suddenly becomes an economic giant and the US economy withers away to nothing, your scenario is just hot gas.
EMP's (such as those from nuclear weapons) can cause fairly dangerous inductive currents in metal objects. Electrical arcs through the air (lightning) cause very little EM radiation, which in turn causes negligible inductive currents. Notice how lightning causes just a little pop on an AM radio? That's the EMP from the lightning amplified and it's barely audible, much less dangerous.
Err...actually, I think we're arguing from the same position....I misread and thought your were implying that free H2 would be catalytic in perpetuity, rather than intermediately. My bad. Too much coffee this morning.
"Because molecular hydrogen freely moves up and mixes with stratospheric air, the result would be the creation of additional water..."
From the NASA page you linked:
O3 + X -> XO + O2 ( where X may be O, NO, OH, Br or Cl)
Note that it's "OH" and not "H". Your reaction (from the original post) "H + O3 -> OH + O2" is the problem. It assumes free H+ without a second H+, which is absurd because (as you say) H travels as H2 because it's more stable. Since the hydrogen arrives as H2, the reaction (as the Caltech report says) is the more logical one of "O3 + H2 -> O2 + H2O". The unstable third O in O3 isn't going to take only one H when it's got a second H that needs to be knocked loose.
OH + HO2 -> H2O + O2
H + HO2 -> H2 + O2
HO2? Where are you getting hydrogen dioxide(peroxide)? That's a far less stable molecule than O2 or even O3! Does the H2 floating up come with its own electric still?
Yeah, I think they must be simplifying. I think H2 is is unstable enough to be treated as two H+ ions. Seems weird that they didn't just call it H2 and then double the other quantities to make it make sense, eh?
Ummm....no, no it doesn't.
H + O3 -> OH + O2
O3 + OH -> 2O2 + H
The net result is 2O3 -> 2O2.
Put down the crack pipe, junior. H + O3 -> OH + O2? Try "3 H2 + 03 -> 3 H2O" instead. An OH- ion is not going to happen spontaneously when there's H around. A crazed OH- ion will grab the first H it finds and relax to form water. Given a "choice" between forming stable molecules (like H20) and unstable ones (O2, OH-), the more stable will win unless you "cheat" the system by pumping in extra energy. Think "entropy". Chemical reactions, left to their own devices, prefer to release energy. That's why you never never see your glass of water vanish in a spontaneous "2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2" reaction.
There are lots of other similar cycles you can come up with.
Yes, and they're all just as unlikely. Hydrogen as catalyst (pff!)? Why not hydrogen as an evil atom bent on raining caustic ions from the sky, as in "3 H2 + 2 O3 -> 6 OH-"? You can dream up all the fantasy chemistry you want, but there's more to chemical reactions than just making the number of atoms on each side balance.
Wow!!! We shuld film his head explodiung!!!! I bet pepul would pay liek fiften bucks to watch that on paper view!
Even an army of lawyers can't "drag on" a case that's based on a provision in an employment contract that is explicitly prohibited by federal law. There's no weaseling room when the NLRA and Norris-LaGuardia Act specifically prohibit such provisions. True, they could sue the bejesus out of you six ways from sunday for all sorts of other things, and those suits may well drag on forever; but there's one thing I can tell you: a suit against you for a)joining a union or b)organizing fellow workers will fail because federal law protects these activities. End of story.
What? There's no law that says an employee has to "represent the [best] interests of the company"! You can go to work every day and randomize the files in the file cabinet, hide the CFO's laptop, and call up the company's biggest clients and tell them that a competitor is a better bet. You know what the company can do? Fire you. Yes, that's about it. You know why? Because there's no law stating that you must be a "good" employee. Furthermore, whether you work there or not is totally irrelevant when it comes to talking other employees into quitting. You can organize workers from now until the cows come home and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it within the law. They can't even fire you for it! Well, they might, but they're not supposed to. Point is, the law is very clear about this. Companies don't own their employees, they only hire them.
Whether they put those provisions in the contract or not, they're still illegal and unenforceable. They could make you sign a contract that says the CEO retains the right to behead you with a samurai sword if you don't touch your forehead to the ground when he walks by, but such a provision would be unenforceable because it's illegal. They could produce a signed paper after the CEO lops off a head, but the judge would toss it aside as an illegal contract and he'd still get charged with murder. You are not bound by illegal provisions in a contract, whether you signed it or not. This is basic contract law, man.
Yeah, Bell Labs is still part of Lucent. Not sure exactly which part of AT&T Lucent came out of though, nor do I know who approved their stupid "brown ring of quality"-looking logo either...
heh, yeah. I've given up. I've tried explaining basic electronics and computer theory to my boss, but he's one of those guys who goes through the directories of our computer in the shop looking for files to delete (usually 1K-3K files!) in order to "free up memory 'cause this computer is SLOW!" It's a pentium-200 you fool! Hard disk isn't memory! 1K icon files are irrelevant! Buy a new computer! ARGH!
That's true. I read on the web somewhere about a guy who made himself an electric testicle warmer that he wears an hour or so a day to make himself sterile as a form of birth control. I think he used hot water rather than microwaves, but yeah, microwaves would do the same thing. Then again, just setting a hot laptop on your lap for an hour a day (microwaves or no) might do the trick too!
They were outlawed by the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932, and they're still illegal. No employer can force you to stay out of a union.
I quote:
"You suddenly find yourself working 50-60 hour weeks, put on call with no compensation..."
Demanding that employees do more work (25%-50% more!) with no compensation is malevolent. There's no "group storytelling" at work there. I've seen the herd mentality take over among admin people where I work, and it usually stems from stories of this sort: "he said, like, 'do this report by tomorrow' and like, he was really mean about it. Bosses here used to be nice." That's where you get problems-- when people confuse their own feelings with employer abuse. People taking the tone of a boss' comment personally when in reality he's just having a bad day? That's storytelling. Having your workload doubled without compensation? That's employer abuse.
I agree that any departure should be conducted in a businesslike manner with no attempts at "revenge" or such; but neither should people ignore the fact that management abuse is bad enough to make them angry.
What are you, an idiot? Employees are human beings with free will. The company doesn't own them. The freedom to quit your job is fairly well established, and the freedom to tell others why you're quitting (and for them, in turn, to quit as well) is fairly obvious. Furthermore, you cannot file suit against an individual because they organized their coworkers to do something their employer didn't want. If they could, we wouldn't have unions anywhere now would we?
Well, according to the article: (boldface mine)
"...Intel has shipped its 1 billionth computer chip, according to figures compiled by semiconductor industry analyst firm Mercury Research and verified by Intel."
So yeah, I bet they're counting all kinds of chips they outsourced to others (like AMD). I wonder how many of those 1x10^9 chips actually came from Intel fabs?
Heck, the term "computer chip" is so generic that a BCD converter or a DAC fits the definition (sneaks under the wire, barely). A microcontroller most certainly qualifies. Microcontrollers are usually simple CPUs with registers, instruction sets, etc. just like a big CPU. Moot point, though, because they're talking about Intel shipping its billionth x86 family chip.
Crimony, how many times does it have to be said! Microwaves (and other RADIO freqs) do NOT cause cancer, sterilization, mutation, etc. Those are caused by IONIZING radiation, such as ultraviolet, gamma, and X-rays. Ionizing radiation lives at the OTHER END of the radiation band from radio/microwaves. Yes, microwaves can cause injury, but that injury is limited to THERMAL effects (i.e. cooking), and maybe burns from inductive electrical effects causing arcs from metal objects. Again, let it be said: radio towers don't cause cancer! RF from power lines doesn't cause leukemia! Microwaves won't make you sterile! Your cell phone did not give you brain cancer! It's radio for gods sake! It's not a "nookular bomb"!
heh. Damn straight! I sometimes receive holiday cards from relatives where the address is written in stupid, loopy, hardly-legible cursive (is that an L or an E?). The US Postal Service may have the best OCR software money can produce, but you just know there's some poor schmuck whose job it is to try to decipher the addresses that the machine chokes on. When I get these unreadable handwritten cards, I often wonder if the writer actually thought their cursive was readable (bad), or they just didn't think at all (worse).
I wonder if they're seeing a drop in cursive writing in Russia? Probably not as much, since the Cyrillic alphabet is too unwieldy to block-print. And if you think our cursive is hard to read, try learning to read handwritten Cyrillic script. Argh! It often looks like a bunch of lowercase M's, U's, and E's strung together. Cyrillic is a perfect example of why linguists should NOT be allowed to develop alphabets.
You're using the wrong word. Salaries don't produce teachers, they attract them. If you actually read what his post, he said that higher salaries will indeed attract better teachers, but it will do nothing to make the mediocre teachers we have any better.