Really? Because contrary to current dogma, the bulk of human history has had "haves" and "have nots" - and the disparity between the two has been STAGGERING.
The fact is that neo-socialists (and people who derive political power from such positions - let's not forget the original mission of the AFL-CIO quoted in the OP) have as just an illusionary utopianist view of "what society should be" with as much rationale as do the Tea-Partiers.
The fact is that some people are capable, some aren't. Take a mythical cross-section community of the population, say 100 people, give them all $50,000. At the end of a year, there's going to be a bell curve of results. A small proportion are going to hold most of the money. The bulk middle of the population, the majority, will have more or less held onto theirs. A small proportion will have blown it all and have nothing. Witness: the bulk of lottery winners are eventually poorer than when they started. This is PROOF that simply throwing money at poor people is truly a stupid idea - it doesn't help.
You cannot legislate away people's inherently bad choices, and I would argue it's IMMORAL* to do so. The US has, in my view, a larger and more visible poor underclass because there are indeed fewer protections against peoples' bad decisions. I agree there is a need for a social safety net to help the unfortunate - that's what a society does. But ultimately, people need to face the consequences of their own bad choices or someone else will have to bear that cost.
Had a baby at 14? You're an idiot, and get to work in a crappy minimum-skill job forever. Fathered that baby? You NEED to be responsible for the financial well-being of that mother and child until the kids' 18, or the state should drag that value out of you in a workhouse or penal battalion. Committed a crime? You're a selfish idiot who gets to work in low-wage jobs because you've proven you don't have fundamental self control that most people are able to display.
I believe second-chances are earned; nobody's entitled to them.
*this will of course only make sense to people who treat every human equally; much is made of people 'dehumanizing' the poor, but in my experience there is an equal segment of the population who don't consider the wealthy worthy of any sort of moral consideration, solely because of their wealth.
"Surveys show drivers are interested in electric cars--and that they love them once they drive them. "
Yeah, except the real-world has considerations outside the scope a 30-second commercial or magazine ad, or that marketers are 'uncomfortable' to address (and we're not *quite* to the point of Idiocracy where we simply do what the market-wonks tell us we should): - range: most people seem to drive 20-30 miles to work, with commutes of approximately 20-45 minutes. Can I drive this (to AND from), plus run and get groceries, and maybe go out to a movie without being nervous about being UTTERLY out of power - where am I supposed to charge the stupid thing? The 'spin' notwithstanding, nobody has the time to dawdle while these recharge on 220v plugs, much less the 110v-overnight-option. - cost: contrary to popular belief, a lot of people can't afford a $30k car, particularly one that smells like it might need a new $10k battery pack after 100k miles.
7 billion is a ridiculously high number of people on this planet anyway.
I'd guess frankly (as much as this might make people squirm) that most of the deaths are going to come in the bottom 50%ile of people - the ones doing most of the breeding, btw, and who frankly contribute little or nothing to humanity. Oh no, Kolkata (Calcutta) only has TWO million people mostly living in squalor in 2050? Is that really a tragedy?
FWIW I'm not intending anything racist or classist about this - the fact is that I'd be PERFECTLY FINE if a 50% cull took place in the US and Europe as well. If it's me that's culled, and I know that the next generation gets to live in a world with 50% fewer people, I'd be fine with that too.
Sorry if this offends your "every life is a precious snowflake" sensibilities, but when there are too many snowflakes around here, we call a snowplow.
That is the 'percent complete' the IT folks who made the Obamacare site estimate that it was when it launched.
Some people, including Obama, say the site had 'bugs'. It didn't have bugs. It was not complete and had never been tested.
So at $600 Million and change, we got 30% of a website that is central for people getting the healthcare that the government mandates that they get.
Furthermore, part of the 60%-70% that is unfinished are the parts that pay the insurance companies.
Let that one sink in. The companies that will be shelling out money to pay your doctor at this very moment have no way to get any money from the website.
Here's another one:
Site launched with NO SECURITY. Not 'flawed' or 'incomplete' security, NONE. During senate hearings a white hat hacker was texted by a friend that 30 more vulnerabilties were found THAT DAY. I've used companies that, for a fee, will do a full security audit and in about a week recommend all the ways to close the holes. Nobody thought of doing that?
Obama claims he had no idea. No idea. The site that carries the future of his only important work as president is completely non-functional and he had no idea? Never thought to try it? Ask "Does it work?"? The contractors who built it were very open in saying it was not done, they said everyone knew it was not done, but Obama is shocked, SHOCKED, that it 'has bugs'?
Seriously folks, this is the guy you want leading our military? Our economy?
You Democrats are ****ing idiots.
(note, not my comment, but I couldn't have said it better. Thanks Armand.)
The 'weak federal, strong corp' model in my example is the US where - notwithstanding genuine concerns about the growth of federal power - it's still relatively weak.
The strong state micromanaging what size bananas can be sold, my model would be the EU.
FWIW, at reaching my mid 40's, I now recognize that I simply don't have enough lifetime left to waste on nostalgia.
If you add the time-commitment of the: - stack of books I want to read - computer games I want to play - movies I want to see....and add that to my current age, it EASILY exceeds my allotted three-score-and-some, even were I to sleep nothing more than 3 hours a night and have no gainful employment.
I rarely give a book more than 5 chapters, or a movie more than a half hour. If I don't actively enjoy it (or at least see promise/value in the writing, acting, what-have-you) I tend to drop it and move on. Life's too short to be bored, or waste it watching Twilight.
PS: I am willing to spend some of those precious minutes on a naked Natalie Portman, please add me to the subscription.
So, our choices are apparently either: - an overbearing nanny state in which the government makes all the decisions, or - a weak state in which the corporations make all the decisions.
Great. That really illustrates why frustrated people turn to Caesarism, and faith in a single strong personality given despotic powers to "fix the mess".
Unfortunately, while you might get lucky and ACTUALLY get a Gaius Marius or someone genuinely interested in the general well-being of the people and nation, *rarely* is that ever sustainable to whomever inherits (earns/steals/etc) that power next....(Marius himself - in pursuit of very-much-needed reforms - could arguably be blamed for turning the Republic into the Empire)
I admit, I was an inveterate Pythonite in my high school and college years, when it was still a cliquey-cool thing that not everyone knew about. I can - with too little prompting - recite great swathes of any Python film or most of the TV episodes, I watched them so many times.
So I was delighted when I had the opportunity and the cash to go see their live show in Minneapolis, I think it was in the later 80s.
Hm. Sad might be too strong a word. Poignant?
Here were some men and women who'd really pushed the boundaries of comedy and done some amazing things - sure, some were misses (and I dare you to watch through the Monty Python complete ouevre without recognizing that a few really sucked), but many were hits and some were downright brilliant. And now? nearly 20 years later? Rehashing the SAME tired old bits again and again like cymbal-clapping monkeys, hoping to be thrown some small change.
I'm current in the midst of Palin's first diaries, and already by the mid 1970s, Michael is complaining that their traveling show is nothing but a re-hash of their brightest moments. How prescient is that?
And now for something completely...the same?
Watching people endlessly ape Rocky Horror is one thing; it's frozen forever in celluloid. Every replay of it HAS to be the same. But with humans, that's kind of sad. Like the tired old uncle at Thanksgiving dinner that had a funny joke once, but he tells the same one every year. People grant him a perfunctory laugh, but nobody really means it. One wonders if even he believes it's genuine or is this all some sort of comedy - if not actually comical - ritual?
Uncle, PLEASE tell some other story to make us laugh. At least try.
If you don't have one, or dare no longer risk not getting a chuckle, maybe let someone else tell theirs?
The goal of a lottery (as in any gambling, really) is to make money for the person running the lottery.
So let's say in a given game 49% of the funds go to "the winner", and 51% go to "the house".
The likelihood of deviating from this average result is the MOST at the first ticket, reducing asymptotically toward zero the more tickets you buy. The more times you play, the closer your final return will be to this average (up to the point where you are the only one playing, buying ALL the tickets).
Thus the biggest chance to randomly come out 'ahead' of the average while still playing at least once is with a single ticket.
I'm sure the waves of nerd-statisticians will come out of the woodwork to prove I'm completely wrong.
I'm absolutely serious - I've bought precisely ONE lottery ticket my whole life (knowing statistically that my likelihood of winning is the maximum at that point*). So I'm not really a "lottery player".
But I'd cheerfully buy SETI lottery tickets - one-third of the gross goes to a the pot-winner, 2/3 goes to SETI funding. Hell, it's better return-odds than many Kickstarters.
I mean, I don't really understand why SourceForge is behind this, but hey, I definitely support the effort:
Pauly Shore Keanu Reeves Sarah Jessica Parker Stallone and Schwarzeneggar, of course, but they're almost too old to be worth the effort. Same for Madonna....
Aside from that off-the-cuff list, there's a host of really bad female and male actors that are hot, so I'd say give them a pass.
It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race. In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.
"In the United States, the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity#United_States)\
Did you REALLY think there would be another answer?
Point taken, but as far as I can tell, nobody has any plausible theories for the cyclic "surges" in CO2/temp that have been happening at periodic intervals, either.
Lacking that, and noting that the next "pulse" is overdue, it could plausibly be noted that increased (particulates, human dung, soot, whatever) as a result of human activity actually HELD OFF cyclic change until the 'pressure' (whatever that means in this context) finally is forcing it now.
I find it interesting that while scientists insist that we continue to pursue "pure research", there was a subtle shift in the 19th and early 20th centuries: before that, scientists were, functionally, hobbyists. That is, they pursued their interests either with the support of a wealthy friend (who generally had a vague interest in the subject, and/or found it socially advantageous to be seen to be a 'supporter' of scientist X) or at their own expense.
Because some governments saw a direct value into things like atomic research - and be absolutely clear, THAT was their motivation for funding such projects, not some high-minded devotion to 'pure research' - now it seems that scientists almost INSIST that research "should" be done on the public largesse.
I find that mind-shift curious and not entirely satisfactory.
Yes, to pry more secrets out of subatomic particles, we'll need to have bigger and bigger colliders. And to have the ability to drive from the US to Europe, we'd have to make a really expensive big bridge. Both could bring some sort of undefined benefit, but I'm not sure either is any more intrinsically justifiable (or silly) than the other.
Certainly in an era where governments are having trouble paying the bills, one would have to look carefully at such a project and say "well yeah, we *can* build it but not today". That, or accept that some of their spending priorities are out of whack and fix them FIRST, arguably a harder task than prying out deeper subatomic secrets.
I note that global climate seems to be going through a startlingly fast, almost uniquely fast change. (Well, ok, there are similar almost-vertical pulses of warming about every 120-140kY.)
The sun seems to be going through a startling, unobserved mixture of activity.
Generally, when one startling random happenstance occurs in close proximity to another, it's not unreasonable to wonder if they're connected.
One might point out that our understanding of solar cycles comes from direct observation of approximately only 250-some years.
Observation of a system can only observe periodicity of 0.5N, and suggest confirmation 0.33N; that is you only get a HINT that something is periodic after you see it twice, and really only a strong suggestion of periodicity after the third observation. Turning that around, then, the longest periodic cycles within our 4.5-billion-old Sun that we could have directly observed is not much more than 80 years. (Granted, one can make some inferred solar observations on a longer scale based on tree ring data, etc.)
That's an amazingly short time, given the scale of our sun's span. We don't really know all that much about it.
Agreed. As a farmer by descent (family's occupation, not mine) that number seems unreasonably high.
Even if that yield is accurate, my next concern would be the sustainability - the amount of nitrogen you'd have to add to the soil to sustain that would be incredible but I guess runoff's not an issue if everything's being held in a closed system.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Because contrary to current dogma, the bulk of human history has had "haves" and "have nots" - and the disparity between the two has been STAGGERING.
The fact is that neo-socialists (and people who derive political power from such positions - let's not forget the original mission of the AFL-CIO quoted in the OP) have as just an illusionary utopianist view of "what society should be" with as much rationale as do the Tea-Partiers.
The fact is that some people are capable, some aren't.
Take a mythical cross-section community of the population, say 100 people, give them all $50,000.
At the end of a year, there's going to be a bell curve of results.
A small proportion are going to hold most of the money.
The bulk middle of the population, the majority, will have more or less held onto theirs.
A small proportion will have blown it all and have nothing.
Witness: the bulk of lottery winners are eventually poorer than when they started. This is PROOF that simply throwing money at poor people is truly a stupid idea - it doesn't help.
You cannot legislate away people's inherently bad choices, and I would argue it's IMMORAL* to do so. The US has, in my view, a larger and more visible poor underclass because there are indeed fewer protections against peoples' bad decisions. I agree there is a need for a social safety net to help the unfortunate - that's what a society does. But ultimately, people need to face the consequences of their own bad choices or someone else will have to bear that cost.
Had a baby at 14? You're an idiot, and get to work in a crappy minimum-skill job forever. Fathered that baby? You NEED to be responsible for the financial well-being of that mother and child until the kids' 18, or the state should drag that value out of you in a workhouse or penal battalion. Committed a crime? You're a selfish idiot who gets to work in low-wage jobs because you've proven you don't have fundamental self control that most people are able to display.
I believe second-chances are earned; nobody's entitled to them.
*this will of course only make sense to people who treat every human equally; much is made of people 'dehumanizing' the poor, but in my experience there is an equal segment of the population who don't consider the wealthy worthy of any sort of moral consideration, solely because of their wealth.
"Surveys show drivers are interested in electric cars--and that they love them once they drive them. "
Yeah, except the real-world has considerations outside the scope a 30-second commercial or magazine ad, or that marketers are 'uncomfortable' to address (and we're not *quite* to the point of Idiocracy where we simply do what the market-wonks tell us we should):
- range: most people seem to drive 20-30 miles to work, with commutes of approximately 20-45 minutes. Can I drive this (to AND from), plus run and get groceries, and maybe go out to a movie without being nervous about being UTTERLY out of power
- where am I supposed to charge the stupid thing? The 'spin' notwithstanding, nobody has the time to dawdle while these recharge on 220v plugs, much less the 110v-overnight-option.
- cost: contrary to popular belief, a lot of people can't afford a $30k car, particularly one that smells like it might need a new $10k battery pack after 100k miles.
Mark me -1, callous, but ....where's the problem?
7 billion is a ridiculously high number of people on this planet anyway.
I'd guess frankly (as much as this might make people squirm) that most of the deaths are going to come in the bottom 50%ile of people - the ones doing most of the breeding, btw, and who frankly contribute little or nothing to humanity. Oh no, Kolkata (Calcutta) only has TWO million people mostly living in squalor in 2050? Is that really a tragedy?
FWIW I'm not intending anything racist or classist about this - the fact is that I'd be PERFECTLY FINE if a 50% cull took place in the US and Europe as well. If it's me that's culled, and I know that the next generation gets to live in a world with 50% fewer people, I'd be fine with that too.
Sorry if this offends your "every life is a precious snowflake" sensibilities, but when there are too many snowflakes around here, we call a snowplow.
That is the 'percent complete' the IT folks who made the Obamacare site estimate that it was when it launched.
Some people, including Obama, say the site had 'bugs'. It didn't have bugs. It was not complete and had never been tested.
So at $600 Million and change, we got 30% of a website that is central for people getting the healthcare that the government mandates that they get.
Furthermore, part of the 60%-70% that is unfinished are the parts that pay the insurance companies.
Let that one sink in. The companies that will be shelling out money to pay your doctor at this very moment have no way to get any money from the website.
Here's another one:
Site launched with NO SECURITY. Not 'flawed' or 'incomplete' security, NONE. During senate hearings a white hat hacker was texted by a friend that 30 more vulnerabilties were found THAT DAY. I've used companies that, for a fee, will do a full security audit and in about a week recommend all the ways to close the holes. Nobody thought of doing that?
Obama claims he had no idea. No idea. The site that carries the future of his only important work as president is completely non-functional and he had no idea? Never thought to try it? Ask "Does it work?"? The contractors who built it were very open in saying it was not done, they said everyone knew it was not done, but Obama is shocked, SHOCKED, that it 'has bugs'?
Seriously folks, this is the guy you want leading our military? Our economy?
You Democrats are ****ing idiots.
(note, not my comment, but I couldn't have said it better. Thanks Armand.)
The 'weak federal, strong corp' model in my example is the US where - notwithstanding genuine concerns about the growth of federal power - it's still relatively weak.
The strong state micromanaging what size bananas can be sold, my model would be the EU.
Both suck.
FWIW, at reaching my mid 40's, I now recognize that I simply don't have enough lifetime left to waste on nostalgia.
If you add the time-commitment of the: ....and add that to my current age, it EASILY exceeds my allotted three-score-and-some, even were I to sleep nothing more than 3 hours a night and have no gainful employment.
- stack of books I want to read
- computer games I want to play
- movies I want to see
I rarely give a book more than 5 chapters, or a movie more than a half hour. If I don't actively enjoy it (or at least see promise/value in the writing, acting, what-have-you) I tend to drop it and move on. Life's too short to be bored, or waste it watching Twilight.
PS: I am willing to spend some of those precious minutes on a naked Natalie Portman, please add me to the subscription.
You're absolutely right; museums have a perfect right to exist.
Sad that the Monty Python show is one.
Damn straight.
My first thought was "I can get paid for that?"
But then I realized, I prefer the purity of it as an avocation: I don't do it for $, I do it for the sheer enjoyment.
There is a difference between "can't" and "won't".
It may be the "right thing" to pay their taxes, but let's face it, they're just walking in Steve's tax-evading footsteps.
You know, the lease-a-new-car-every-6-months-so-he-never-has-to-get-license-plates Steve Jobs?
Or the "park in the handicap zones when you want to because you're big shit Steve Jobs" and the cops are unlikely to hassle you?
http://www.policymic.com/articles/7868/apple-icheat-how-the-world-s-biggest-company-also-became-the-most-unethical
So, our choices are apparently either:
- an overbearing nanny state in which the government makes all the decisions, or
- a weak state in which the corporations make all the decisions.
Great. That really illustrates why frustrated people turn to Caesarism, and faith in a single strong personality given despotic powers to "fix the mess".
Unfortunately, while you might get lucky and ACTUALLY get a Gaius Marius or someone genuinely interested in the general well-being of the people and nation, *rarely* is that ever sustainable to whomever inherits (earns/steals/etc) that power next....(Marius himself - in pursuit of very-much-needed reforms - could arguably be blamed for turning the Republic into the Empire)
I admit, I was an inveterate Pythonite in my high school and college years, when it was still a cliquey-cool thing that not everyone knew about. I can - with too little prompting - recite great swathes of any Python film or most of the TV episodes, I watched them so many times.
So I was delighted when I had the opportunity and the cash to go see their live show in Minneapolis, I think it was in the later 80s.
Hm. Sad might be too strong a word. Poignant?
Here were some men and women who'd really pushed the boundaries of comedy and done some amazing things - sure, some were misses (and I dare you to watch through the Monty Python complete ouevre without recognizing that a few really sucked), but many were hits and some were downright brilliant. And now? nearly 20 years later? Rehashing the SAME tired old bits again and again like cymbal-clapping monkeys, hoping to be thrown some small change.
I'm current in the midst of Palin's first diaries, and already by the mid 1970s, Michael is complaining that their traveling show is nothing but a re-hash of their brightest moments. How prescient is that?
And now for something completely...the same?
Watching people endlessly ape Rocky Horror is one thing; it's frozen forever in celluloid. Every replay of it HAS to be the same. But with humans, that's kind of sad. Like the tired old uncle at Thanksgiving dinner that had a funny joke once, but he tells the same one every year. People grant him a perfunctory laugh, but nobody really means it. One wonders if even he believes it's genuine or is this all some sort of comedy - if not actually comical - ritual?
Uncle, PLEASE tell some other story to make us laugh. At least try.
If you don't have one, or dare no longer risk not getting a chuckle, maybe let someone else tell theirs?
The goal of a lottery (as in any gambling, really) is to make money for the person running the lottery.
So let's say in a given game 49% of the funds go to "the winner", and 51% go to "the house".
The likelihood of deviating from this average result is the MOST at the first ticket, reducing asymptotically toward zero the more tickets you buy. The more times you play, the closer your final return will be to this average (up to the point where you are the only one playing, buying ALL the tickets).
Thus the biggest chance to randomly come out 'ahead' of the average while still playing at least once is with a single ticket.
I'm sure the waves of nerd-statisticians will come out of the woodwork to prove I'm completely wrong.
Why not just a SETI lottery?
I'm absolutely serious - I've bought precisely ONE lottery ticket my whole life (knowing statistically that my likelihood of winning is the maximum at that point*). So I'm not really a "lottery player".
But I'd cheerfully buy SETI lottery tickets - one-third of the gross goes to a the pot-winner, 2/3 goes to SETI funding. Hell, it's better return-odds than many Kickstarters.
*I didn't win.
"Political violence doesn't work to actually implement social change."
Gavril Princip begs to differ.
"No, no, really.
This time I'm SURE we're right on."
-Scientists*
*ie activists posing as scientists. Real science is a matter of hypothesis and testing, not public proclamations and "demands for action".
I mean, I don't really understand why SourceForge is behind this, but hey, I definitely support the effort:
Pauly Shore
Keanu Reeves
Sarah Jessica Parker
Stallone and Schwarzeneggar, of course, but they're almost too old to be worth the effort. Same for Madonna....
Aside from that off-the-cuff list, there's a host of really bad female and male actors that are hot, so I'd say give them a pass.
Well, it's true that if you smoke Mary Jane you will eventually die. Absolutely certain.
It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race.
In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.
"In the United States, the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity#United_States)\
Did you REALLY think there would be another answer?
Point taken, but as far as I can tell, nobody has any plausible theories for the cyclic "surges" in CO2/temp that have been happening at periodic intervals, either.
Lacking that, and noting that the next "pulse" is overdue, it could plausibly be noted that increased (particulates, human dung, soot, whatever) as a result of human activity actually HELD OFF cyclic change until the 'pressure' (whatever that means in this context) finally is forcing it now.
SARS - 8000 people dead!
The latest 'possible' pandemic - 150 people dead!
I think more people are probably killed by frisbees.
I find it interesting that while scientists insist that we continue to pursue "pure research", there was a subtle shift in the 19th and early 20th centuries: before that, scientists were, functionally, hobbyists. That is, they pursued their interests either with the support of a wealthy friend (who generally had a vague interest in the subject, and/or found it socially advantageous to be seen to be a 'supporter' of scientist X) or at their own expense.
Because some governments saw a direct value into things like atomic research - and be absolutely clear, THAT was their motivation for funding such projects, not some high-minded devotion to 'pure research' - now it seems that scientists almost INSIST that research "should" be done on the public largesse.
I find that mind-shift curious and not entirely satisfactory.
Yes, to pry more secrets out of subatomic particles, we'll need to have bigger and bigger colliders. And to have the ability to drive from the US to Europe, we'd have to make a really expensive big bridge. Both could bring some sort of undefined benefit, but I'm not sure either is any more intrinsically justifiable (or silly) than the other.
Certainly in an era where governments are having trouble paying the bills, one would have to look carefully at such a project and say "well yeah, we *can* build it but not today". That, or accept that some of their spending priorities are out of whack and fix them FIRST, arguably a harder task than prying out deeper subatomic secrets.
I note that global climate seems to be going through a startlingly fast, almost uniquely fast change. (Well, ok, there are similar almost-vertical pulses of warming about every 120-140kY.)
The sun seems to be going through a startling, unobserved mixture of activity.
Generally, when one startling random happenstance occurs in close proximity to another, it's not unreasonable to wonder if they're connected.
One might point out that our understanding of solar cycles comes from direct observation of approximately only 250-some years.
Observation of a system can only observe periodicity of 0.5N, and suggest confirmation 0.33N; that is you only get a HINT that something is periodic after you see it twice, and really only a strong suggestion of periodicity after the third observation. Turning that around, then, the longest periodic cycles within our 4.5-billion-old Sun that we could have directly observed is not much more than 80 years. (Granted, one can make some inferred solar observations on a longer scale based on tree ring data, etc.)
That's an amazingly short time, given the scale of our sun's span. We don't really know all that much about it.
Agreed. As a farmer by descent (family's occupation, not mine) that number seems unreasonably high.
Even if that yield is accurate, my next concern would be the sustainability - the amount of nitrogen you'd have to add to the soil to sustain that would be incredible but I guess runoff's not an issue if everything's being held in a closed system.
Just seems very "something for nothing" to me.