Usually, this is theft, fraud, and trespassing. When a 19 year old "entrepreneur" and computer geek does it, it's somehow OK? Kind of a double standard.
livable wages, not just minimum wage...if In-N-Out Burger can pay $10.00 per hour to a high schooler getting his first job, what is the excuse for McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King, etc... They could but they do not want too.
Profit margins for restaurants are usually around 3-4%. So, if they paid more, they'd probably just eliminate staff and automate more.
Ford understood this back in 1914, and he was far from a humanitarian:
Turnover for Ford factories was low, but few high schoolers are going to want to stay with McDonalds, so why should McDonalds invest money in them?
Ability for two non-professional incomes to afford the costs of a family, all expenses including money left over to invest and save for emergencies and retirement.
You have that: move to a cheaper community, get a smaller house, and put the money you save away.
And annual health costs of $18,365 - $24,965, ($8.83 â" 12.00 per hour) is NOT affordable for anyone earning minimum wage
Those numbers are for a family of four living in in a major urban area. So, basically you are saying that if you choose to move to a desirable urban area, you choose to have a family of four, and you didn't bother getting an education that let you earn more than minimum wage, somehow the rest of society should subsidize your choices? I don't think so. I'd love to live in L.A., but it makes no financial sense, so I live in a boring small town.
Furthermore, objectively, health care costs for a family of four should maybe be $1000/year, including illness and preventive care. All the rest of the money is spent because people like you want gold plated medical plans and then want others to pay for them.
To an entrepreneur, what's scary about it is that you make money by getting people to spend on the latest fad. And if you're an ex-Microsoft hack, like von Roekel, what's scary about it is that it doesn't put you on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill and doesn't funnel money to your old employer.
I really don't want government employees to "disrupt government" or to bring an "entrepreneurial mindset" or "innovation" to government. Entrepreneurs and their innovation carries enormous risks, and I don't want these people gambling with my tax dollars.
Of course, van Roekel doesn't even have entrepreneurial credentials anyway, he is a rich old MIcrosoft fogy, which means that he likely understands neither fiscal restraint nor the needs of IT in government.
Come next election, just remember who hired these jokers and put US government IT in the hands of Microsoft cronies.
That statement is completely wrong. Women can compete for 100% of the contracts. But there is a special contingent of 5% of the contracts set aside for which _only_ women compete. That's intended to help female owned businesses.
Yeah right - that worked out REAL WELL for the non-whites in the USA in the 1950s - right? Slavery was ended in 1865 and yet it wasn't until affirmative action was introduced under Kennedy in the 60s that real change began
Yes, but it has outlived its usefulness now. In the 1950's, the predominant factor for minorities being excluded from jobs was racism by employers. Today, the predominant factor are lower educational attainment, criminal records, etc. Those may or may not be caused by racism, but they are not caused by racism on the part of employers, and you can't fix them by forcing employers to do something. At this point, you should merely hold employers responsible for non-discrimination, for being race-blind.
Opposition to affirmative action on the part of whites is often presented as some kind of competition for limited jobs, but the vast majority of whites really doesn't care about that. The real problem with affirmative action is that it doesn't work and hurts the communities by failing to address their real problems, problems which occur long before minorities hit the job market.
Affirmative action == discrimination. The only business that government has here is to ensure that no-one is unfairly discriminated
Affirmative action was created to redress past discrimination. It was based on the theory that if some class of people had been kept out of some profession because of prejudice/racism, you needed to take active steps to increase their numbers until the proportions were reflective of the population.
That wasn't an entirely unreasonable proposition. The reason it doesn't are more subtle than the fact that it constitutes "discrimination". It doesn't work because the assumption that numbers in different professions should be reflective of the composition of the population is not valid. Only one quarter of CS degrees are awarded to women, and blacks are half as likely to receive bachelor degrees as whites. Whatever the reasons for that may be (preference or educational discrimination), you cannot address it with affirmative action at the point where people hit the job market.
The problem with affirmative action is not that it constitutes discrimination of inequality; we "discriminate" in this way all the time when we compensate classes of people for past harm done to them. The problem with affirmative action it is that it doesn't work; it fails to achieve the goals it is supposed to achieve.
Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible
That assumes that you carry all your fuel with you. There are plenty of other possibilities.
By the time you get to ~0.7c
What speed "you get to" has nothing to do with it, 1g acceleration is still 1g. In Earth's frame of reference, the acceleration contributes little to your reduction in travel time, but in the spacecraft's frame of reference, it does (through time dilation).
However, there are energetically much cheaper ways of getting the same effective "time dilation" effect.
The only kind of speech was stand up in front of a group of people and start talking.
Actually, anonymous speech since the invention of the printing press used anonymous pamphleteering as one of its primary means. And, yes, not only was it anonymous, it was ruled constitutionally protected, time and again. That means that Congress could not make any law to prohibit it.
The people who have caused political change have done so by being intentionally not anonymous.
MLK was a figurehead for the civil rights movement, and that is another important function in such a movement, but he was only the tip of a very large movement of people, many of whom wanted to remain anonymous and not be identified with the movement. The civil rights movement would have never happened if everybody who supported it had to go on record by name as a supporter.
It's a shame it has to be that way, but having a bunch of anonymous people typing comments on internet forums isn't going to change the world.
That's how change often starts: people exploring ideas safely in discussion forums, people participating in public demonstrations where they remain an anonymous part of a crowd, people becoming aware of ideas through anonymous speech, and then later deciding to take a political stance. Anonymity is an integral part of such a movement.
Anonymous speech has been held up time and again as a fundamental, constitutionally protected free speech right in the US. Whether you see it in the first amendment doesn't matter, the SCOTUS definitely does, and they actually count.
What other religion says "blessed are the meek, the poor, those in mourning"?
A blessing is a "favor or gift bestowed by God". So, you are saying that submissiveness, weariness, poverty, suffering, and sorrow are a gift from God. Yes, indeed, that is one of the many perverse and absurd things taught by Christianity. Some of those absurd ideas may well be unique to Christianity.
"I was a Christian for more than 30 years, Sunday school, confirmation and all that." Paradoxically, that may have been part of why you never experienced God.
No, the reason I never experienced God is because he doesn't exist. And if he did exist, he'd be a jerk based on his actions documented in the Old Testament and the actions of his followers.
I know (in meatspace) a couple of die-hard athiests, one of whom claims to be Catholic but doen't believe in God, the other a man brought up in a very religious family in Kentucky who wound up in prison for murder (decades ago, he had a ten year sentence). Pat Robertson and his ilk have converted so many Christian to athiesm that Richard Dawkins should be jealous....
Seems par for the course: Christianity fails to instill morality in children, it fails to instill morality in adults, and its followers can't even agree what it means. Whether you end up being a good person or not depends on lots of things, just not religion.
Absolute bullshit. When my arthritis acts up I'd be an idiot not to take some naproxin or aspirin. Someone who is suicidal would be an idiot not to take the SSRI their doctor had prescribed.
Are you so dense that you couldn't figure out that I was referring to recreational drugs?
Poor blind man that you are, you refuse to believe that colors exist. What Jesus taught works. The "turn the other cheek"?
Oh, de-escalation works, as do a lot of other things in the Bible. That's because Christianity has liberally plagiarized from other religions. You don't need to believe in Christianity in order to get the benefits of moral behavior, and Christianity deserves no credit for beliefs, concepts, or rules that have been around for thousands of years before it even came into existence.
I've been to the zoo and seen the elephant. Arguing with your assertion that elephants don't exist is an excersize in futility. The only way to resolve the dispute is for you to go to the zoo.
I was a Christian for more than 30 years, Sunday school, confirmation and all that. I left the church when I actually understood the Bible and Christian history, and the fact that Christianity sometimes preaches something good and right does not make up for all the bad things it is responsible for, or for its fundamentally irrational and immoral theology.
Well, I'm sure you've heard the expression "there are no athiests in foxholes." But "glorifying suffering" doesn't mean one should seek to suffer, rather that knowing God makes suffering a whole lot easier -- and face it, everyone suffers sometimes.
Taking drugs also makes suffering easier, that doesn't mean it's a good thing. Religion is like a drug, giving people morally and psychologically false solutions to real problems. Having "God forgive your transgression" is a crutch to make you feel better, instead facing the harm you caused other people when you wronged them. Having "God love you" is a crutch when you can't get love from other people.
Thise who become violent are NOT close to God. I'm not sure about Islam, but making others suffer is the antithesis of what Christ taught.
Christ taught a lot of contradictory things, including some violence. But as for God, just look at the Bible: God committed and ordered mass murder, genocide, war, and even if God changes his mind, according to the Bible, those were his acts. Yes, indeed, violent mass murderers are "close to God" and their actions pleased God, regardless of whether you think that Christ changed the rules when he appeared on the scene.
What constitutes unconstitutional is relatively narrowly defined. Tenenbaum violated laws that have been on the books, in one shape or form, for centuries and are expressly blessed by the constitution.
Arguably, this constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment", so it certainly can be a constitutional question.
Plenty of people suffer worse without breaking any laws. People are losing their homes because of a combination of a loss of income as they lost their jobs and their mortgages being too high.
They aren't losing "their home", they have to move out of a home that they never owned and should have never signed a contract for. They are lucky that they aren't being held responsible for paying back their mortgage, because now the tax payer and other mortgage payers are paying for their stupidity.
Others are going to suffer the same fate as Tenenbaum not because they did anything wrong, but because the cancer they've contracted that their insurance won't fully cover will result in a seven digit debt.
The majority of Americans are doing plenty of things wrong that cause cancer: they are overweight, they eat a bad diet, they don't exercise enough, they don't get enough fiber, they don't protect themselves from UV, and they don't get regular checkups.
Furthermore, there are no cancer treatments for which seven figure costs are anything other than a personal luxury: such large amounts of money are unlikely to increase your survival significantly. Typical cancer treatment costs are about $10k-40k for prostate and breast cancer.
It's so much easier to whine about how "unfair" everything is, and expect seven judges to agree with you and strike something down as "unconstitutional" because it violates the "It's so unfair,
Well, you seem to have your own set of issues about which you like to whine. So one man's whining is another man's political and legal issue.
And attitudes like yours are the reason our debt is spiraling out of control.
Really, ah, so thats why JAXA stated launch costs would have to be a hundredth of what they are for SPSs to be economical. And golly gosh, look, here's Star Tram to do just that.
Well, and as I showed with my numbers, I don't see how JAXA's claims work out. Given the cost of existing solar technologies, you need more like a factor of 1000x in reduction of launch costs (plus a lot of favorable assumptions) to make it competitive even if you disregard other costs. With higher maintenance and replacement costs, I don't think it's competitive with ground-based solar even if launches were free.
I mean have you any idea what the Star Tram actually is? Is the silk road to space, the highway to the heavens, its as cheap as it is possible to get within the known laws of physics, it even beats out space elevators if they are possible. Its bifrost, its the stairway to the stars. Solar power satellites? That's the tip of the iceberg, the lowest of the low hanging fruit.
I think cheap space launch technologies are great for all sorts of purposes, but using space-based solar power to advocate low cost launch capabilities is a dead end.
They have all the usage data, day after day, week after week. From an enterprise or utility level standpoint, they have ALL of the necessary infrastructure to implement rate control at the consumer site (DOCSIS v. whatever) and give everyone on a saturated segment equal or proportional reduced bandwidth, such that at least basic service levels would be available at 100% functionality.
I really don't want them to implement that kind of fine-grained control over my usage, in particular when something as simple as volume pricing gets the job done. I think in order to smooth out peak usage, they should have peak and off-peak pricing.
Nobody sees the point of LED light bulbs in their home if the power is going to get pulled anyway. On the other hand, if you were restricted for the same period of time, you might actually find it worthwhile to invest in a new A/C that was double the efficiency of the old unit and put in a few LED lights. I know that people as a society are too stupid to figure these things out, but the experts should be able to see all of this pretty clearly and come up with smarter solutions.
Ah, yes, the marvels of central planning by experts. That has worked so well.
As a slight over simplification, consider the following. Imagine that the fiber optic backhaul for an area was only using 20 frequencies of light, each at a rate of 1 MB/s, so the site had 20 MB/s of bandwidth. Two years later, a new transceiver comes out that can use 40 frequencies at 5 MB/s each. Laying lines and building site infrastructure was 100x the cost of the new transceiver board. For essentially 1% additional cost, they have upgraded by 10x their bandwidth.
Yes, bandwidth gets cheaper over time, but that's besides the point. At any given point in time, bandwidth is primarily limited by compute power: you want to move twice as many bits per second to existing customers, you mainly need twice as much CPU power, and that costs about twice as much in new hardware (if you don't have unused CPU sitting idle).
It's pretty bloody refreshing that you have a group that has a set of social values, that are getting together to logically discuss a way that they and their families can access the useful but wild'n'wooly Internet in a way that fits with their precepts, doctrines, and social values.......and doesn't make even a whisper about controlling OTHER PEOPLES' access.
That's only because they are a small minority in the US. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have political power, and they use it in the way all ultra-orthodox religions use power when they get it.
I can't figure out what your horse in the race is. Space based power is so obviously a bad idea given current launch costs that you must have some angle. Do you work in the space industry? Do you work for a company that wants subsidies? Or are you so enamored with the Star Tram system that you hope you can manipulate people into funding it this way? Come on, come clean.
I have to say at this stage I genuninely have no idea what you're talking about.
I gave you numbers that showed that even at hundredfold reduction in launch costs and a tenfold reduction in solar cell weights, space power is still more than 10x as expensive as ground-based solar power. That means that space-based power is still not cost-effective even at a 250 fold reduction in launch costs.
You really must have a horse in this race. What matters is $/W, and that is all that matters
Yes, that's all that matters. And JAXA's and your $/W figures don't work out given current technologies, they are obviously still 1-2 orders of magnitude off.
You really must have a horse in this race.
Only as a tax payer, who doesn't want to see his taxes wasted on another stupid and expensive government-funded "alternative" energy system.
Now either put up some real numbers justifying your $/W figures or shut up.
To be competitive, the satellite needs to be around $1-2 million per installed megawatt. Given it weighs in the region of 1500 to 1900 tons, launch costs must be 90%+ of its $21 billion pricetag. Reducing these to a trivial sum means, as JAXA have said, it becomes competitive, and until we have further information, I'm prepared to take it that JAXA knows whereof they speak.
You just cite a bunch of meaningless numbers without actually doing the calculation. What matters is: increase of efficiency of space over ground, kg/W and $/kg launch costs. I did give those numbers, and even under a hypothetical 100x reduction in launch costs, space based solar still isn't nearly competitive. And those calculations are just lower bounds on the cost of space-based systems: you need to account for R&D costs for getting launch costs down, plus maintenance and replacement.
For the time being, space based solar is not competitive. Investing in developing launch vehicles for the purpose of space-based solar energy generation is not competitive.
I have no doubt that in a century or two, space based solar might be competitive if we find some other reason to achieve drastic reductions in launch costs, but that is just not relevant to political or economic decisions right now. The right thing to do right now is to deploy ground-based solar power, with existing technology.
I've already answered the weaponisation question elsewhere in the thread,
No, you have not. The arguments you provide merely suggest that under normal operations, the system will not cause harm. That doesn't mean that the system is not weaponizable. It can certainly disrupt electronics, and probably cause other effects as well.
That nice red square right there is the amount of surface area that would be receiving twice as much energy as usual
That's not an answer, just hand-waving. Ground-based solar is much safer from a heat-balance point of view (even there, we need to worry about albedo); for space-based solar, you must do the calculation, including expected growth rates. Imagine that red square doubling every few decades, and things look rather different.
Slashdot Mirror
As I was saying:
Apparently, you are unable to read further than a single sentence.
Usually, this is theft, fraud, and trespassing. When a 19 year old "entrepreneur" and computer geek does it, it's somehow OK? Kind of a double standard.
Profit margins for restaurants are usually around 3-4%. So, if they paid more, they'd probably just eliminate staff and automate more.
Turnover for Ford factories was low, but few high schoolers are going to want to stay with McDonalds, so why should McDonalds invest money in them?
You have that: move to a cheaper community, get a smaller house, and put the money you save away.
Those numbers are for a family of four living in in a major urban area. So, basically you are saying that if you choose to move to a desirable urban area, you choose to have a family of four, and you didn't bother getting an education that let you earn more than minimum wage, somehow the rest of society should subsidize your choices? I don't think so. I'd love to live in L.A., but it makes no financial sense, so I live in a boring small town.
Furthermore, objectively, health care costs for a family of four should maybe be $1000/year, including illness and preventive care. All the rest of the money is spent because people like you want gold plated medical plans and then want others to pay for them.
To an entrepreneur, what's scary about it is that you make money by getting people to spend on the latest fad. And if you're an ex-Microsoft hack, like von Roekel, what's scary about it is that it doesn't put you on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill and doesn't funnel money to your old employer.
I really don't want government employees to "disrupt government" or to bring an "entrepreneurial mindset" or "innovation" to government. Entrepreneurs and their innovation carries enormous risks, and I don't want these people gambling with my tax dollars.
Of course, van Roekel doesn't even have entrepreneurial credentials anyway, he is a rich old MIcrosoft fogy, which means that he likely understands neither fiscal restraint nor the needs of IT in government.
Come next election, just remember who hired these jokers and put US government IT in the hands of Microsoft cronies.
That statement is completely wrong. Women can compete for 100% of the contracts. But there is a special contingent of 5% of the contracts set aside for which _only_ women compete. That's intended to help female owned businesses.
Yes, but it has outlived its usefulness now. In the 1950's, the predominant factor for minorities being excluded from jobs was racism by employers. Today, the predominant factor are lower educational attainment, criminal records, etc. Those may or may not be caused by racism, but they are not caused by racism on the part of employers, and you can't fix them by forcing employers to do something. At this point, you should merely hold employers responsible for non-discrimination, for being race-blind.
Opposition to affirmative action on the part of whites is often presented as some kind of competition for limited jobs, but the vast majority of whites really doesn't care about that. The real problem with affirmative action is that it doesn't work and hurts the communities by failing to address their real problems, problems which occur long before minorities hit the job market.
Affirmative action was created to redress past discrimination. It was based on the theory that if some class of people had been kept out of some profession because of prejudice/racism, you needed to take active steps to increase their numbers until the proportions were reflective of the population.
That wasn't an entirely unreasonable proposition. The reason it doesn't are more subtle than the fact that it constitutes "discrimination". It doesn't work because the assumption that numbers in different professions should be reflective of the composition of the population is not valid. Only one quarter of CS degrees are awarded to women, and blacks are half as likely to receive bachelor degrees as whites. Whatever the reasons for that may be (preference or educational discrimination), you cannot address it with affirmative action at the point where people hit the job market.
The problem with affirmative action is not that it constitutes discrimination of inequality; we "discriminate" in this way all the time when we compensate classes of people for past harm done to them. The problem with affirmative action it is that it doesn't work; it fails to achieve the goals it is supposed to achieve.
That assumes that you carry all your fuel with you. There are plenty of other possibilities.
What speed "you get to" has nothing to do with it, 1g acceleration is still 1g. In Earth's frame of reference, the acceleration contributes little to your reduction in travel time, but in the spacecraft's frame of reference, it does (through time dilation).
However, there are energetically much cheaper ways of getting the same effective "time dilation" effect.
Fingerprints, iris patterns, and retinal patterns are essentially bar codes already.
Actually, anonymous speech since the invention of the printing press used anonymous pamphleteering as one of its primary means. And, yes, not only was it anonymous, it was ruled constitutionally protected, time and again. That means that Congress could not make any law to prohibit it.
MLK was a figurehead for the civil rights movement, and that is another important function in such a movement, but he was only the tip of a very large movement of people, many of whom wanted to remain anonymous and not be identified with the movement. The civil rights movement would have never happened if everybody who supported it had to go on record by name as a supporter.
That's how change often starts: people exploring ideas safely in discussion forums, people participating in public demonstrations where they remain an anonymous part of a crowd, people becoming aware of ideas through anonymous speech, and then later deciding to take a political stance. Anonymity is an integral part of such a movement.
Anonymous speech has been held up time and again as a fundamental, constitutionally protected free speech right in the US. Whether you see it in the first amendment doesn't matter, the SCOTUS definitely does, and they actually count.
Scientist A: "Hey, we can move bubbles with lasers."
Scientist B: "That's pretty boring. But robotics is hot. Maybe we can get press coverage if we call the 'bubbles' 'robots'."
A blessing is a "favor or gift bestowed by God". So, you are saying that submissiveness, weariness, poverty, suffering, and sorrow are a gift from God. Yes, indeed, that is one of the many perverse and absurd things taught by Christianity. Some of those absurd ideas may well be unique to Christianity.
No, the reason I never experienced God is because he doesn't exist. And if he did exist, he'd be a jerk based on his actions documented in the Old Testament and the actions of his followers.
Seems par for the course: Christianity fails to instill morality in children, it fails to instill morality in adults, and its followers can't even agree what it means. Whether you end up being a good person or not depends on lots of things, just not religion.
Are you so dense that you couldn't figure out that I was referring to recreational drugs?
Oh, de-escalation works, as do a lot of other things in the Bible. That's because Christianity has liberally plagiarized from other religions. You don't need to believe in Christianity in order to get the benefits of moral behavior, and Christianity deserves no credit for beliefs, concepts, or rules that have been around for thousands of years before it even came into existence.
I was a Christian for more than 30 years, Sunday school, confirmation and all that. I left the church when I actually understood the Bible and Christian history, and the fact that Christianity sometimes preaches something good and right does not make up for all the bad things it is responsible for, or for its fundamentally irrational and immoral theology.
Taking drugs also makes suffering easier, that doesn't mean it's a good thing. Religion is like a drug, giving people morally and psychologically false solutions to real problems. Having "God forgive your transgression" is a crutch to make you feel better, instead facing the harm you caused other people when you wronged them. Having "God love you" is a crutch when you can't get love from other people.
Christ taught a lot of contradictory things, including some violence. But as for God, just look at the Bible: God committed and ordered mass murder, genocide, war, and even if God changes his mind, according to the Bible, those were his acts. Yes, indeed, violent mass murderers are "close to God" and their actions pleased God, regardless of whether you think that Christ changed the rules when he appeared on the scene.
Arguably, this constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment", so it certainly can be a constitutional question.
They aren't losing "their home", they have to move out of a home that they never owned and should have never signed a contract for. They are lucky that they aren't being held responsible for paying back their mortgage, because now the tax payer and other mortgage payers are paying for their stupidity.
The majority of Americans are doing plenty of things wrong that cause cancer: they are overweight, they eat a bad diet, they don't exercise enough, they don't get enough fiber, they don't protect themselves from UV, and they don't get regular checkups.
Furthermore, there are no cancer treatments for which seven figure costs are anything other than a personal luxury: such large amounts of money are unlikely to increase your survival significantly. Typical cancer treatment costs are about $10k-40k for prostate and breast cancer.
Well, you seem to have your own set of issues about which you like to whine. So one man's whining is another man's political and legal issue.
And attitudes like yours are the reason our debt is spiraling out of control.
Well, and as I showed with my numbers, I don't see how JAXA's claims work out. Given the cost of existing solar technologies, you need more like a factor of 1000x in reduction of launch costs (plus a lot of favorable assumptions) to make it competitive even if you disregard other costs. With higher maintenance and replacement costs, I don't think it's competitive with ground-based solar even if launches were free.
I think cheap space launch technologies are great for all sorts of purposes, but using space-based solar power to advocate low cost launch capabilities is a dead end.
I really don't want them to implement that kind of fine-grained control over my usage, in particular when something as simple as volume pricing gets the job done. I think in order to smooth out peak usage, they should have peak and off-peak pricing.
Ah, yes, the marvels of central planning by experts. That has worked so well.
Yes, bandwidth gets cheaper over time, but that's besides the point. At any given point in time, bandwidth is primarily limited by compute power: you want to move twice as many bits per second to existing customers, you mainly need twice as much CPU power, and that costs about twice as much in new hardware (if you don't have unused CPU sitting idle).
Why do you need to meet in a football stadium to figure out that watching too much pornography on the Internet might be bad for your marriage?
That's only because they are a small minority in the US. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have political power, and they use it in the way all ultra-orthodox religions use power when they get it.
I can't figure out what your horse in the race is. Space based power is so obviously a bad idea given current launch costs that you must have some angle. Do you work in the space industry? Do you work for a company that wants subsidies? Or are you so enamored with the Star Tram system that you hope you can manipulate people into funding it this way? Come on, come clean.
I gave you numbers that showed that even at hundredfold reduction in launch costs and a tenfold reduction in solar cell weights, space power is still more than 10x as expensive as ground-based solar power. That means that space-based power is still not cost-effective even at a 250 fold reduction in launch costs.
Yes, that's all that matters. And JAXA's and your $/W figures don't work out given current technologies, they are obviously still 1-2 orders of magnitude off.
Only as a tax payer, who doesn't want to see his taxes wasted on another stupid and expensive government-funded "alternative" energy system.
Now either put up some real numbers justifying your $/W figures or shut up.
You just cite a bunch of meaningless numbers without actually doing the calculation. What matters is: increase of efficiency of space over ground, kg/W and $/kg launch costs. I did give those numbers, and even under a hypothetical 100x reduction in launch costs, space based solar still isn't nearly competitive. And those calculations are just lower bounds on the cost of space-based systems: you need to account for R&D costs for getting launch costs down, plus maintenance and replacement.
For the time being, space based solar is not competitive. Investing in developing launch vehicles for the purpose of space-based solar energy generation is not competitive.
I have no doubt that in a century or two, space based solar might be competitive if we find some other reason to achieve drastic reductions in launch costs, but that is just not relevant to political or economic decisions right now. The right thing to do right now is to deploy ground-based solar power, with existing technology.
No, you have not. The arguments you provide merely suggest that under normal operations, the system will not cause harm. That doesn't mean that the system is not weaponizable. It can certainly disrupt electronics, and probably cause other effects as well.
That's not an answer, just hand-waving. Ground-based solar is much safer from a heat-balance point of view (even there, we need to worry about albedo); for space-based solar, you must do the calculation, including expected growth rates. Imagine that red square doubling every few decades, and things look rather different.