Yes, you're right. This one thing won't solve the problem on its own, it's probably about a 1% fuel savings. Neither will the next 1% idea someone proposes. Or the next 100 after that. So let's not do any of them.
Don't get me wrong, people who think we can solve the greenhouse gas problem by just changing their light bulbs and looking smug are kidding themselves: we'll need to make dozens or hundreds of radical changes in the structure of our society. But if you add up a bunch of big changes like this one, you really can reduce emissions significantly.
I suspect the European corner shop system is less energy-efficient than a supermarket. Large buildings cost less to heat, light, and refrigerate per customer, and because a large market is able to average out irregular customer behavior over a larger number of customers, I bet they need fewer employees per customer and throw out less expired food per customer, both of which mean huge indirect energy savings. Corner shops probably come out ahead in terms of vehicle fuel (for the same reasons mentioned in the article), but I bet the other factors add up to a net loss. Bigger is not always better, but it is often more efficient.
I totally agree that Americans make some sacrifices in the bread department, though we're getting pickier about our bread, and supermarkets have radically improved bakery sections over the past 20 years.
Some stores offer delivery after you pay at the register
Worst of both worlds, energy-wise: you burn gas driving to the store and back, and then the store's truck burns gas to deliver to you. This isn't having your cake and eating it too: this is having your cake and then throwing it away and getting another cake.
I contend that the number of robberies, embezzlements, etc. would be far greater if those crimes were not aggressively punished. And so would the number of airplanes lasered. Deterrents work, they're just not 100% effective.
(I will agree that the deterrent effect depends on the nature of the crime. It's less effective for crimes of passion and crimes of addiction, where the offender isn't thinking, and more effective for premeditated crimes like robbery and airplane-lasering.)
Deterrence works poorly on honest-to-god sociopaths. It does, however, work pretty well on morons and ordinary assholes, and fortunately for all of us, those are more of those. Another poster to this thread pointed out lots of examples where legal deterrence has actually worked for society at large (laws against smoking, child labor, statutory and violent rape, etc.)
I'm happy to settle for deterring a thousand assholes from shining lasers at planes, even if that has no effect on the five sociopaths. Sociopaths have better things to do anyway.
You're not going to like this, but here it is: multi-year sentences for being a douchebag are a *good* thing, because they protect our right to do fun stuff. If we take it as a given that high-powered lasers are a real danger to aircraft, the government has three possible solutions: 1) Laser-proof all aircraft, which is enormously expensive even if it's technically possible. And who pays for it? You do, either through taxes or airline ticket price increases. 2) Ban all sales of high-powered lasers to the public. No fun science experiments for you! 3) Throw the book at a couple of offenders to discourage people from being douchebags in this regard.
In practice, 1) isn't going to happen. By going with solution 3), we reduce the pressure to do 2), which protects your right to screw around with lasers and have safe, responsible science fun.
We punish a crime based on the foreseeable consequences of the crime, not on the simplicity of the act. This guy really could have crashed an airliner, killing hundreds. Pointing a laser at a plane is easy, but so is pulling a trigger.
I think a lot of people would count the first Falcon 9 launch as a failure: the uncontrolled roll was pretty serious.
But for a commercial launch company, IMO the only failure that matters is failure to complete a paying customer's mission. And by that measure, SpaceX is 4 for 5 (counting NASA and Orbcomm as separate customers), with #6 in progress and looking promising.
SpaceX has a pattern of having problems in test flights, and successfully completing paid missions. That's not failure: that's good project management.
But not any other part of the orbit? So it will continue in the same orbit as before, but then at the very far end witll suddenly take a quick detour to the new perturbed position, and then dart back to its old orbit?
Because that's what you have written, and it's clearly complete tosh.
No, that's *your interpretation* of what I've written, and your interpretation is complete tosh. Of course the entire orbit changes, but it changes most on the side of the orbit opposite Mars. The current orbit only barely enters Mars's orbit, and comes nowhere near the Earth's: to make it cross Earth's orbit via encounter with Mars, you'd have to lower the far end of the ellipse from the Oort cloud down to Earth's orbit. That takes tens of km/s of velocity change. The maximum velocity change you can get from a gravitational encounter with Mars is about 0.3 km/s.
Mars's gravitational pull is the force I was talking about.
The effect you're describing is a "gravity assist" or "slingshot" maneuver. It certainly would change the comet's orbit, but there's a limit that depends on the mass of the planet and how close you get to it -- and thus on the planet's size. For Mars, this limit is pretty small.
3. I'm aware of the counterintuitive stuff you can do with orbital slingshots. However, the maximum amount of velocity change you can get from a gravity assist by Mars is around 330 m/s (Niehoff, J. Spacecraft, 1966). To bring the side of the orbit opposite Mars from the Oort cloud down to Earth's orbit, you'll need to dump tens of thousands of m/s of orbital speed.
Absolutely impossible. It encounters Mars when it's closest to the sun: a basic principle of orbital mechanics is that applying a force at a given location changes the object's position at the *opposite* side of the orbit. So encountering Mars just makes the furthest part of its orbit (which is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out beyond Pluto) a little closer or farther.
If the distance uncertainty is 650,000 miles, the odds of this comet hitting Mars are *at best* 1 in 300, possibly up to 1 in 100,000 (depending on the shape of the comet's uncertainty ellipse, which is not mentioned in TFA.)
I'm aware of those issues. But in the end, an antenna is just a metal rod. Changing its length is easy(*). And $50K for new transmitter hardware? That's chump change. Just run a couple extra local commercials during the evening news to pay for it.
(*) Provided the metal rod is a several-meter-long TV antenna. Replacing a hundred-meter-high AM radio antenna would be a lot more expensive.... so the AM radio stations should be prepared to bid high for their spectrum to avoid the cost of switching.
So, who exactly is going to bid on making part of the spectrum unlicensed and then pay to allocate it for nonexclusive use? Or does the current 2.4 & 5 GHz unlicensed spectra for WiFi/"whatever the hell anyone wants to use it for" count under one of those exemptions you list? None of them seem applicable to me.
My bad. My post was intended to emphasize the free-market side of my proposal, but I didn't mean to suggest that we should get rid of unlicensed spectra. Absolutely there should be "public parks". I'm arguing that anything that *is* licensed should be paid for by competitive auction. To continue your analogy, there shouldn't be *private* parks, held in perpetuity for free by people on a first-name basis with the planning department.
I've seen hams working first-hand in a disaster area (Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii in 1992, where *all* communication was cut off from the island.) They did help, but there weren't enough of them to make a significant difference, and the state and federal emergency services set up a big satellite-phone bank very quickly.
The disaster response ability of ham radio is a bit like an outboard boat. Sure, if there's ever a flood, I'll use my boat to help rescue people. But does that mean I should get free gas for my boat every day I go fishing?
Yes, everything could *potentially* become obsolete, but it won't happen very often. "Spectrum churn" will be very small, because anyone who buys new spectrum that was formerly used for something else will have to deal with interference from legacy systems -- so they'll bid low for that "polluted" spectrum. Meanwhile, the old licensee will be willing to pay a premium to avoid having to retool all their devices.
In short, spectrum will only change hands when the old licensee is *very* obsolete, and the new guy's tech is vastly more popular, profitable, and interference-tolerant.
Finally, your two examples both involve government emergency/safety spectrum, which I said should be reserved from bidding to avoid the problems you're talking about.
There are a huge, diverse range of highly motivated and rich bidders who would like some radio spectrum. There is zero chance that everyone will form a workable price-fixing coalition, and zero chance that one bidder will be able to outbid them all.
You say you're worried about a monopoly: well so am I. Worst-case scenario for my proposal, a very rich buyer gets a 10-year "monopoly" on a broad swath of spectrum, paying $billions to the federal government's coffers to do so (and lowering all our taxes as a result.) Compare that to today's system, where outdated service providers with good lobbyists can keep a monopoly on a broad swath of spectrum forever, for free.
Let's take RC toys as an example. I want to sell RC toys, so I and my fellow RC manufacturers add $5 to the price of every device we sell for frequency licensing. Wild-ass guess, suppose that's 20 million devices a year in the U.S. We bid $100 million for the 72-73 Mhz band, which is the one we've always used for model aircraft.
We, and a bunch of other people with similar cash reserves, are going up against Google, who tries to buy up ALL THE BANDWIDTH! -- everything from 0 to 10 Ghz. God only knows what they're going to do with it. If they want it all, they're going to have to pay $100 million per MHz -- $300 billion for the whole shebang. Google's rich, but they're not that rich: they'll realize they can make more money by letting us have our little 1 Mhz band and bidding in bulk for cheaper parts of the spectrum.
What if they *do* decide to spend enough cash to buy us out? We've got lots of options, but the best is to improve our tech. Current RC systems use an 80-year-old, very bandwidth-inefficient protocol. We can either make do with fewer RC channels, or redesign our receivers to make better use of a smaller slice of spectrum. That ain't cheap, but the end result is more efficient utilization of a precious resource.
My family was involved in one of the biggest communications cutoff disasters I've ever heard of: Hurricane Iniki hit my island in Hawaii in 1992. Damn near every telephone pole on the island was destroyed, *nobody* had phone service, and it's not like you could drive to somewhere that had a phone.
The hams sounded the trumpets and "came to the rescue". I heard of... oh, a whole two or three people who got messages to friends and family on the mainland through ham radio. Meanwhile, within a couple of days the state emergency services and FEMA set up satellite phone booths in most major towns, which everyone used for the next few weeks until service was restored.
Ham radio is a fun hobby, but its public safety value is highly overrated. Especially since there are far fewer hams now than in '92.
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Yes, you're right. This one thing won't solve the problem on its own, it's probably about a 1% fuel savings. Neither will the next 1% idea someone proposes. Or the next 100 after that. So let's not do any of them.
Don't get me wrong, people who think we can solve the greenhouse gas problem by just changing their light bulbs and looking smug are kidding themselves: we'll need to make dozens or hundreds of radical changes in the structure of our society. But if you add up a bunch of big changes like this one, you really can reduce emissions significantly.
I suspect the European corner shop system is less energy-efficient than a supermarket. Large buildings cost less to heat, light, and refrigerate per customer, and because a large market is able to average out irregular customer behavior over a larger number of customers, I bet they need fewer employees per customer and throw out less expired food per customer, both of which mean huge indirect energy savings. Corner shops probably come out ahead in terms of vehicle fuel (for the same reasons mentioned in the article), but I bet the other factors add up to a net loss. Bigger is not always better, but it is often more efficient.
I totally agree that Americans make some sacrifices in the bread department, though we're getting pickier about our bread, and supermarkets have radically improved bakery sections over the past 20 years.
Some stores offer delivery after you pay at the register
Worst of both worlds, energy-wise: you burn gas driving to the store and back, and then the store's truck burns gas to deliver to you. This isn't having your cake and eating it too: this is having your cake and then throwing it away and getting another cake.
$1 billion "dollars" "worth" of bitcoins now circulate
Fixed that for ya.
I contend that the number of robberies, embezzlements, etc. would be far greater if those crimes were not aggressively punished. And so would the number of airplanes lasered. Deterrents work, they're just not 100% effective.
(I will agree that the deterrent effect depends on the nature of the crime. It's less effective for crimes of passion and crimes of addiction, where the offender isn't thinking, and more effective for premeditated crimes like robbery and airplane-lasering.)
Deterrence works poorly on honest-to-god sociopaths. It does, however, work pretty well on morons and ordinary assholes, and fortunately for all of us, those are more of those. Another poster to this thread pointed out lots of examples where legal deterrence has actually worked for society at large (laws against smoking, child labor, statutory and violent rape, etc.)
I'm happy to settle for deterring a thousand assholes from shining lasers at planes, even if that has no effect on the five sociopaths. Sociopaths have better things to do anyway.
We are tossing a 19 year old kid into the system for 2 and 1/2 years over shining a light.
We regularly sentence people to life in prison for just bending their trigger fingers.
You're not going to like this, but here it is: multi-year sentences for being a douchebag are a *good* thing, because they protect our right to do fun stuff. If we take it as a given that high-powered lasers are a real danger to aircraft, the government has three possible solutions:
1) Laser-proof all aircraft, which is enormously expensive even if it's technically possible. And who pays for it? You do, either through taxes or airline ticket price increases.
2) Ban all sales of high-powered lasers to the public. No fun science experiments for you!
3) Throw the book at a couple of offenders to discourage people from being douchebags in this regard.
In practice, 1) isn't going to happen. By going with solution 3), we reduce the pressure to do 2), which protects your right to screw around with lasers and have safe, responsible science fun.
We punish a crime based on the foreseeable consequences of the crime, not on the simplicity of the act. This guy really could have crashed an airliner, killing hundreds. Pointing a laser at a plane is easy, but so is pulling a trigger.
I think a lot of people would count the first Falcon 9 launch as a failure: the uncontrolled roll was pretty serious.
But for a commercial launch company, IMO the only failure that matters is failure to complete a paying customer's mission. And by that measure, SpaceX is 4 for 5 (counting NASA and Orbcomm as separate customers), with #6 in progress and looking promising.
SpaceX has a pattern of having problems in test flights, and successfully completing paid missions. That's not failure: that's good project management.
You need to work on your funny-to-wordcount ratio.
No, that's *your interpretation* of what I've written, and your interpretation is complete tosh. Of course the entire orbit changes, but it changes most on the side of the orbit opposite Mars. The current orbit only barely enters Mars's orbit, and comes nowhere near the Earth's: to make it cross Earth's orbit via encounter with Mars, you'd have to lower the far end of the ellipse from the Oort cloud down to Earth's orbit. That takes tens of km/s of velocity change. The maximum velocity change you can get from a gravitational encounter with Mars is about 0.3 km/s.
Mars's gravitational pull is the force I was talking about.
The effect you're describing is a "gravity assist" or "slingshot" maneuver. It certainly would change the comet's orbit, but there's a limit that depends on the mass of the planet and how close you get to it -- and thus on the planet's size. For Mars, this limit is pretty small.
2. What I say is true. Go play this game a while and get back to me.
https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/
3. I'm aware of the counterintuitive stuff you can do with orbital slingshots. However, the maximum amount of velocity change you can get from a gravity assist by Mars is around 330 m/s (Niehoff, J. Spacecraft, 1966). To bring the side of the orbit opposite Mars from the Oort cloud down to Earth's orbit, you'll need to dump tens of thousands of m/s of orbital speed.
http://www.gravityassist.com/IAF3-2/Ref.%203-140.pdf
Oh, and the bowling pins are a mile away from each other.
Absolutely impossible. It encounters Mars when it's closest to the sun: a basic principle of orbital mechanics is that applying a force at a given location changes the object's position at the *opposite* side of the orbit. So encountering Mars just makes the furthest part of its orbit (which is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out beyond Pluto) a little closer or farther.
No. Try knocking over pins with a "bowling ball" the size of a red blood cell.
If the distance uncertainty is 650,000 miles, the odds of this comet hitting Mars are *at best* 1 in 300, possibly up to 1 in 100,000 (depending on the shape of the comet's uncertainty ellipse, which is not mentioned in TFA.)
This sounds great. Sounds like something I should pay for, just like I pay for airbags, seat belts, and whatnot.
I'm aware of those issues. But in the end, an antenna is just a metal rod. Changing its length is easy(*). And $50K for new transmitter hardware? That's chump change. Just run a couple extra local commercials during the evening news to pay for it.
(*) Provided the metal rod is a several-meter-long TV antenna. Replacing a hundred-meter-high AM radio antenna would be a lot more expensive.... so the AM radio stations should be prepared to bid high for their spectrum to avoid the cost of switching.
My bad. My post was intended to emphasize the free-market side of my proposal, but I didn't mean to suggest that we should get rid of unlicensed spectra. Absolutely there should be "public parks". I'm arguing that anything that *is* licensed should be paid for by competitive auction. To continue your analogy, there shouldn't be *private* parks, held in perpetuity for free by people on a first-name basis with the planning department.
I've seen hams working first-hand in a disaster area (Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii in 1992, where *all* communication was cut off from the island.) They did help, but there weren't enough of them to make a significant difference, and the state and federal emergency services set up a big satellite-phone bank very quickly.
The disaster response ability of ham radio is a bit like an outboard boat. Sure, if there's ever a flood, I'll use my boat to help rescue people. But does that mean I should get free gas for my boat every day I go fishing?
Yes, everything could *potentially* become obsolete, but it won't happen very often. "Spectrum churn" will be very small, because anyone who buys new spectrum that was formerly used for something else will have to deal with interference from legacy systems -- so they'll bid low for that "polluted" spectrum. Meanwhile, the old licensee will be willing to pay a premium to avoid having to retool all their devices.
In short, spectrum will only change hands when the old licensee is *very* obsolete, and the new guy's tech is vastly more popular, profitable, and interference-tolerant.
Finally, your two examples both involve government emergency/safety spectrum, which I said should be reserved from bidding to avoid the problems you're talking about.
There are a huge, diverse range of highly motivated and rich bidders who would like some radio spectrum. There is zero chance that everyone will form a workable price-fixing coalition, and zero chance that one bidder will be able to outbid them all.
You say you're worried about a monopoly: well so am I. Worst-case scenario for my proposal, a very rich buyer gets a 10-year "monopoly" on a broad swath of spectrum, paying $billions to the federal government's coffers to do so (and lowering all our taxes as a result.) Compare that to today's system, where outdated service providers with good lobbyists can keep a monopoly on a broad swath of spectrum forever, for free.
Let's take RC toys as an example. I want to sell RC toys, so I and my fellow RC manufacturers add $5 to the price of every device we sell for frequency licensing. Wild-ass guess, suppose that's 20 million devices a year in the U.S. We bid $100 million for the 72-73 Mhz band, which is the one we've always used for model aircraft.
We, and a bunch of other people with similar cash reserves, are going up against Google, who tries to buy up ALL THE BANDWIDTH! -- everything from 0 to 10 Ghz. God only knows what they're going to do with it. If they want it all, they're going to have to pay $100 million per MHz -- $300 billion for the whole shebang. Google's rich, but they're not that rich: they'll realize they can make more money by letting us have our little 1 Mhz band and bidding in bulk for cheaper parts of the spectrum.
What if they *do* decide to spend enough cash to buy us out? We've got lots of options, but the best is to improve our tech. Current RC systems use an 80-year-old, very bandwidth-inefficient protocol. We can either make do with fewer RC channels, or redesign our receivers to make better use of a smaller slice of spectrum. That ain't cheap, but the end result is more efficient utilization of a precious resource.
My family was involved in one of the biggest communications cutoff disasters I've ever heard of: Hurricane Iniki hit my island in Hawaii in 1992. Damn near every telephone pole on the island was destroyed, *nobody* had phone service, and it's not like you could drive to somewhere that had a phone.
The hams sounded the trumpets and "came to the rescue". I heard of ... oh, a whole two or three people who got messages to friends and family on the mainland through ham radio. Meanwhile, within a couple of days the state emergency services and FEMA set up satellite phone booths in most major towns, which everyone used for the next few weeks until service was restored.
Ham radio is a fun hobby, but its public safety value is highly overrated. Especially since there are far fewer hams now than in '92.