Star Tram can reduce launch costs to 0.004 of their previous amount.
0.004 is only a factor of 2.5 better than 0.01, hence, even with that hypothetical launch technology and the extremely optimistic assumptions I made above, space solar power would still be several times as expensive as ground based solar power.
As I've already said, a bird could fly through the rectenna beam without harm.
That's under ordinary operating conditions (and even then they are disruptive to electronics). It doesn't change the fact that you have a large collection of potential beam weapons in space.
No, I hadn't noticed. China is still largely an underdeveloped country with huge social and economic problems, widespread corruption, widespread human rights abuses, and horrendous working conditions. If the educational background of leaders are responsible for outcomes, that's the outcome you expect when engineers run a nation. An engineer may conclude that you are inefficient and redundant and that your desires are irrational, but a lawyer will defend your rights and a businessman will cater to your desires.
I do not want a lawyer to represent me. I do not want a manager to represent me. I want an engineer, a man (or woman) who solves problems, because we have a lot of problems that need solving.
You've never dealt with IT support staff, have you?
We get one chance to get back on top. We need a government that responds to us, one that works quickly and efficiently for the benefit of everyone.
No, what we need is a government that respects individual rights and liberties and otherwise stays out of people's hair. And imperfect as the US government may be at that, it is a lot better at those things than the "rational" governments of China or Europe.
The $10/50GB is intended to discourage you from going over the 300GB so that all their customers have a decent experience. Otherwise, a few high volume users cause them to lose lots of low volume users.
Geosynchronous optimistically are at least $10000/pound, LEO about half that. So let's assume for the sake of argument JAXA's one hundred fold reduction $50/pound. Solar panels are about 5W/pound; let's assume space based can be made much thinner and lighter at 50W/pound. 13MW generation capacity costs about $100 million (Nellis), so that's roughly $0.10/W. When you put that together, even with JAXA's assumptions of a 100 fold reduction in price, it still costs 10 times as much to move a solar panel into orbit than to manufacture it in the first place, for an expected gain of 2-4 in capacity. And that's not even counting maintenance costs. So even assuming JAXA's 100-fold decrease in launch costs and a tenfold increase in the power density of solar cells, we are still an order of magnitude away from even being in the ballpark.
And, you haven't answered other questions. How do you actually ensure that these space-based solar power plants aren't going to be used as weapons? What does beaming large amounts of additional solar energy do to earth's heat balance?
The pro-space-power discussion says "rocket launches will also need to be cut to a hundredth of the current cost". Hence, the approach is not cost effective even according to its proponents. And that discussion doesn't explain how a factor of 2-4 gain in efficiency offsets the launch and maintenance costs.
Finally, proponents still haven't explained who should actually get control over what is, in effect, a large collection of massive radiation-based weapons platforms orbiting earth. Why would we let any nation put that kind of device into orbit?
What you pay for is a service with no guarantees and a class of modem technology that is indicated by the nominal peak bandwidth; that's what your contract says. They put it in and then you can decide whether you want to keep it or not. If it's not fast enough for your needs, your choices are to live with it or cancel your contract.
How to deal with the ISP? If you're nice to them, maybe you can get them to upgrade. But there's probably not much they can do without spending a lot of money that they aren't going to recoup. Pretty much anything they could do is going to costs thousands of dollars. How are they going to recoup that from you? Or do you think they should do it for free? Maybe you can work something out with them (if it's a smaller company), but not if you start from the position that they are obliged to spend much more money on you than you ever are going to give them back.
Having been at the end of an at-times overloaded cable Internet connection, I think this is the right thing to do: cost to the company is roughly proportional to how much data you actually use, and excessive peak use degrades the experience for other customers. Data caps or usage-based pricing are the right way to go. The price for extra volume is a bit high for the data itself, but seems OK if their goal is to discourage very high usages. They might want to introduce on-peak and off-peak pricing, encouraging people to move large amounts of data during off-peak hours.
While its possible that er, Tom Murphy knows more than JAXA and their household name industy associates who are willing to put tens of billions of dollars into SPSs, I doubt it.
Instead of playing a game of "who do I believe", why don't you use your own head and figure it out for yourself? Figuring out the relative cost and benefits of space solar energy is elementary.
Furthermore, apart from the horrible cost/benefit tradeoffs for space solar, and the military risks, your web site points out yet another problem: energy balance. Ground-based solar doesn't change the overall energy balance much, since the solar radiation is coming in anyway and most gets absorbed whether you use it for energy or not. But space-based solar pumps large amounts of energy through the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't have come in, and then converts it all into heat on the ground.
Solar power satellites are obviously a bad idea: they may increase efficiency by a factor of up to maybe 2-4, but at a cost that is orders of magnitude higher. You're better off just covering more area on the ground.
And power satellites have serious security implications, allowing large amounts of power being focused anywhere in the world. In fact, the idea of space-based solar power is so obviously bad from an economic point of view that I suspect it really is just an attempt to get weapons into orbit.
ISPs don't guarantee average or minimum bandwidth for their consumer contracts. That's why they are so cheap. They are clear up-front about it. But even if you were temporarily confused about the issue and think you aren't getting what you want, you can always cancel the contract and get your Internet service elsewhere.
What you can't do is force the company to give you something that is ordinarily much more expensive, namely a guaranteed minimum bandwidth. If you want a guaranteed minimum bandwidth, you need to pay for one of their business plans (if they have them). They are usually several times as expensive as the consumer plans, and for good reason.
(Also: you made the choice of moving out to the boondocks. I really don't see why you think the world owes you cheap and fast Internet access. Access to utilities should be a big consideration when choosing a place to live.)
Giving third parties the right to do the same would result is the exact same mess.
There really isn't much of a difference. Windows machines usually come preinstalled with every driver they need. Whether it's Dell or Microsoft worrying about that really doesn't matter. And Apple, internally, has lots of driver and configuration variety as well, and like Dell, they just deal with it so you don't have to.
More importantly, both OSes have a huge number of different USB-based devices you can plug into them. The fact that Windows deals so much more poorly with that than OS X (or even Linux!) is bad Windows product design.
If the fiefdoms are bad, how does making each department into a separate company make it any better?
Because in the current situation, the decisions that each major fiefdom makes are binding for the rest of the company. The people working on the desktop can't say "the new IE sucks, we're going with Chrome", and Microsoft management is apparently incapable of calling the right shots. Breaking Microsoft up would force these different parts to compete on merit, not on the basis of power.
Apple now is they've lost their head designer and no one has really stepped in to replace him. I worry the design teams will argue, fracture, and turn into MS.
The comment above seems to suggest that revenue should come solely from individual taxpayers. If that were to be the case, then workers would demand far more in wages in order to maintain the current standard of living. I can't imagine that's what you are really suggesting.
What I'm suggesting is that it really doesn't matter that much: the distribution of tax burden between workers, prices, and shareholders is determined by markets; there is no other place the money can come from. You increase corporate income tax, and they'll have to either decrease wages or increase prices.
However, I would like to point out that corporations benefit from government services (roads, police, fire stations, etc.) just like individuals, so I think there is a valid argument that they should be subject to income taxes just like the rest of us.
Those are all local services, and are usually paid for through property taxes and user fees. How does that justify federal and state corporate taxes?
They do pay property tax, which pays to educate the workers they will need, so that's fair as well.
That's a pretty depressing view of humanity: minions educated to corporate specs. I view education as something I benefit from, both directly (increase my market value and hence my wealth) and indirectly (increase the competitiveness and reason of my fellow citizens).
Maybe your perspective would change if you thought of corporations not as these gigantic amorphous and anonymous entities, but something you might found yourself. Think about how this might work. You get together with a bunch of friends, borrow some money from family to buy equipment, and start a web consulting business. You pay property tax for your office (directly or as part of rent), plenty of licensing and other fees, sales tax when you shop and eat during work days, and income tax on the salaries you pay yourself. Now you make some profit, and pay corporate income tax on it. With the rest, you pay dividends to your investors (which are also taxed as income), and you want to replace some failing equipment (that you may end up paying sales tax on). What exactly did the corporate tax on your profits achieve? You can invest less, and your investors end up getting effectively taxed at a much higher rate than regular income.
OK, you may not have intended the criticism, but the G*P did.
"Vacation days" is likely not a good explanation for low passport ownership. Americans work a lot every year, but Australians and Japanese work even more. And work is a choice for Americans: most Americans could take unpaid days off and still make more money than their counterparts in Europe.
Probably the reason lots of Americans don't have passports is because they don't need to travel abroad. From personal experience, I can tell you that you'll have a more authentic and higher quality experience seeing art on loan from the Louvre, dining at a Japanese restaurant, and then seeing Chinese opera with your friends, all in New York or San Francisco, than traveling to Beijing, Tokyo, and Paris. Foreign destinations have increasingly devolved into unpleasant tourist traps, while the US has become very cosmopolitan.
The great depression and then WW2 caused a massive debt -- I suggest you look up the Debt to GDP ratio in the USA just after WW2. The debt was "fixed" before the generation that created it stopped paying income tax.
Yes: after the rest of the world exploded and burned down, the US had decades of fast growth and near monopolies in foreign markets. Now we're in a world where we're competing with countries full of young, healthy people willing to work for much less than we are and with the infrastructure to allow them to succeed.
If you never allow long term debt you cripple yourself from ever being able to do big important things. The vast majority could not buy a house if they were not allowed to go into debt to buy one.
Yes, all those cases have two things in common: (1) they have a collateral, and (2) they have an expected return on the asset you buy that's larger than what you pay for it. But we are mostly borrowing to fight wars we don't need to fight and to give people gold-plated retirement, disability, and medical plans. That kind of debt leads to no returns and has no collateral.
Where government investment and borrowing makes sense is in areas where there is positive return that can't be captured by private companies, and that means areas like research, STEM education, health care for the young, and some forms of infrastructure. But those areas need so little money compared to the others that we wouldn't need to borrow for them if we didn't waste so much money for those other things.
No, but the legal system ultimately picks which of multiple competing scientific opinions to believe, as well as resolving what the meaning of terms used in legislation is.
They can tell us a fruit is actually a vegetable but that doesn't change the facts.
The facts are that the legislators who wrote the original law likely considered a tomato a vegetable, hence that is the meaning that should prevail in a legal context. That doesn't change the botanical definition of what a fruit is. The fact that you and other self-styled scientists don't understand this distinction only emphasizes how important it is to have people other than you make decisions.
How much climate change will cost American children down the road is an open question (according to the IPCC reports, not too much). Maybe Europe will suffer more, maybe Pacific island nations will disappear, but those are not primarily costs to the US.
But how much our health care, retirement, and other benefits will cost our children down the road is much easier to quantify. If you're talking about robbing from future generations, talk about that first.
The moment it is opened to others it will turn into the same mess that Windows has.
The Windows mess has little to do with hardware variability, and everything with poor design and poor implementation. And that's a result of how Microsoft is a bunch of competing internal fiefdoms, all of which are looking out for their own best interest, rather than a great user experience (a Microsoft breakup would have been the best thing that could have happened to them).
Technically, Apple could easily release OS X for PCs, and simply require PC makers to make compatible hardware with no (or only approved) drivers. PC makers would fall all over themselves to comply. The reason Apple doesn't do that is because it would destroy the mystique that they have and erode the obscene profit margins on their hardware.
Apple is what it is: pretty design, a lot of marketing b.s., decent engineering, a hand-picked choice of other people's best technologies, and obscene profit margins on products sold to yuppies. Opening Apple up would destroy both the mystique and the profit margins.
<sarcasm>Yeah, you're right. Obviously, you have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Americans are just stupid. The fact that they have fewer passports proves it! And everybody knows they know nothing about the all-so-important history of various European fiefdoms!</sarcasm>
If you look at actual statistics instead of waving your hands wildly, you'll find that American adults are, on average, very well educated compared to other industrialized nations (the US is generally in the middle in the PISA studies, but widespread college education improves the picture further for adults).
And what's perhaps more important, the intellectual and political elite in the US is huge and extremely sharp, and that's what ultimately matters, not whether some old Australian tourist can locate Papua New Guinea on the map.
I still don't get what you're trying to say. Your own figures show that the US forest coverage has declined by 2,000,000 Km2 since pre-industrial times. So the forest has been a net carbon source, not a sink.
It's a lot more complicated than that. American forests were already managed by American Indians when Westerners arrived, including by burning and other means. Management of American forests by Westerners has been entirely different because forests are being used for different purposes (wood, paper, landscape barriers, and "natural" forest).
I'm not saying that I know definitively how this all works out in the balance (although I suspect the US comes out far better). I'm just saying that someone needs to do the math, and that using current and historical emissions from fossil fuels alone is not sufficient.
No. Most of that paper and wood is either burned after use or goes into landfill, where bacterial decay turns it into methane, then eventualy to CO2.
No, obviously not, otherwise landfills would just disappear to nothing over time (or at least to the non-biodegradable plastics), but they don't. In fact, lignin largely doesn't biodegrade in current landfills, and cellulose only biodegrades partially.
If you wanted full biodegradation to occur, you need to build landfills differently. Of course, if low atmospheric CO2 is your goal, the question is why you would want to. Conversely, we can probably construct landfills such that essentially nothing biodegrades and the carbon is removed from the atmosphere for a long time.
totalitarianism: there are no states in the US trying to control what science can be taught in schools, right? Or try to be different in the US, like being openly gay, leftish or green.
You compare centuries of monarchy, communism, fascism, and military dictatorships in Europe with Texas school boards democratically electing people who add things to the curriculum you don't like? You obviously have no idea what terms like totalitarianism, feudalism, imperialism, and discrimination even mean.
I won't even bother responding to the rest of your ridiculous drivel; it mostly just shows that you know nothing about history, economics, or politics.
Good points, but US forests were likely growing for much of the past few centuries, because they were not in equilibrium. These days, forests in the US are used extensively for making paper and wood (as opposed to heating), which does result in carbon capture. As for losing forest, Europe is worse: it lost about 8,000,000 km2 of its original forest cover, most of which turned into carbon in the atmosphere.
Yup, but the GP posting was reflective of European arrogance and sarcasm wherever it may have come from, and in terms of the other points I mentioned, most of the rest of the world was just as bad.
It was wrong for any company to market HSPA+ as 4G. But with HSPA+, Android phones offered substantially faster speeds than the iPhone 4. Furthermore, those companies didn't try to do that overseas in markets with actual 4G deployments and where the distinction actually matters.
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0.004 is only a factor of 2.5 better than 0.01, hence, even with that hypothetical launch technology and the extremely optimistic assumptions I made above, space solar power would still be several times as expensive as ground based solar power.
That's under ordinary operating conditions (and even then they are disruptive to electronics). It doesn't change the fact that you have a large collection of potential beam weapons in space.
No, I hadn't noticed. China is still largely an underdeveloped country with huge social and economic problems, widespread corruption, widespread human rights abuses, and horrendous working conditions. If the educational background of leaders are responsible for outcomes, that's the outcome you expect when engineers run a nation. An engineer may conclude that you are inefficient and redundant and that your desires are irrational, but a lawyer will defend your rights and a businessman will cater to your desires.
You've never dealt with IT support staff, have you?
No, what we need is a government that respects individual rights and liberties and otherwise stays out of people's hair. And imperfect as the US government may be at that, it is a lot better at those things than the "rational" governments of China or Europe.
Guys wearing $1000 watches get about as much respect from me as guys wearing $1000 earrings.
The $10/50GB is intended to discourage you from going over the 300GB so that all their customers have a decent experience. Otherwise, a few high volume users cause them to lose lots of low volume users.
Geosynchronous optimistically are at least $10000/pound, LEO about half that. So let's assume for the sake of argument JAXA's one hundred fold reduction $50/pound. Solar panels are about 5W/pound; let's assume space based can be made much thinner and lighter at 50W/pound. 13MW generation capacity costs about $100 million (Nellis), so that's roughly $0.10/W. When you put that together, even with JAXA's assumptions of a 100 fold reduction in price, it still costs 10 times as much to move a solar panel into orbit than to manufacture it in the first place, for an expected gain of 2-4 in capacity. And that's not even counting maintenance costs. So even assuming JAXA's 100-fold decrease in launch costs and a tenfold increase in the power density of solar cells, we are still an order of magnitude away from even being in the ballpark.
And, you haven't answered other questions. How do you actually ensure that these space-based solar power plants aren't going to be used as weapons? What does beaming large amounts of additional solar energy do to earth's heat balance?
The pro-space-power discussion says "rocket launches will also need to be cut to a hundredth of the current cost". Hence, the approach is not cost effective even according to its proponents. And that discussion doesn't explain how a factor of 2-4 gain in efficiency offsets the launch and maintenance costs.
Finally, proponents still haven't explained who should actually get control over what is, in effect, a large collection of massive radiation-based weapons platforms orbiting earth. Why would we let any nation put that kind of device into orbit?
What you pay for is a service with no guarantees and a class of modem technology that is indicated by the nominal peak bandwidth; that's what your contract says. They put it in and then you can decide whether you want to keep it or not. If it's not fast enough for your needs, your choices are to live with it or cancel your contract.
How to deal with the ISP? If you're nice to them, maybe you can get them to upgrade. But there's probably not much they can do without spending a lot of money that they aren't going to recoup. Pretty much anything they could do is going to costs thousands of dollars. How are they going to recoup that from you? Or do you think they should do it for free? Maybe you can work something out with them (if it's a smaller company), but not if you start from the position that they are obliged to spend much more money on you than you ever are going to give them back.
Having been at the end of an at-times overloaded cable Internet connection, I think this is the right thing to do: cost to the company is roughly proportional to how much data you actually use, and excessive peak use degrades the experience for other customers. Data caps or usage-based pricing are the right way to go. The price for extra volume is a bit high for the data itself, but seems OK if their goal is to discourage very high usages. They might want to introduce on-peak and off-peak pricing, encouraging people to move large amounts of data during off-peak hours.
Instead of playing a game of "who do I believe", why don't you use your own head and figure it out for yourself? Figuring out the relative cost and benefits of space solar energy is elementary.
Furthermore, apart from the horrible cost/benefit tradeoffs for space solar, and the military risks, your web site points out yet another problem: energy balance. Ground-based solar doesn't change the overall energy balance much, since the solar radiation is coming in anyway and most gets absorbed whether you use it for energy or not. But space-based solar pumps large amounts of energy through the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't have come in, and then converts it all into heat on the ground.
Solar power satellites are obviously a bad idea: they may increase efficiency by a factor of up to maybe 2-4, but at a cost that is orders of magnitude higher. You're better off just covering more area on the ground.
And power satellites have serious security implications, allowing large amounts of power being focused anywhere in the world. In fact, the idea of space-based solar power is so obviously bad from an economic point of view that I suspect it really is just an attempt to get weapons into orbit.
ISPs don't guarantee average or minimum bandwidth for their consumer contracts. That's why they are so cheap. They are clear up-front about it. But even if you were temporarily confused about the issue and think you aren't getting what you want, you can always cancel the contract and get your Internet service elsewhere.
What you can't do is force the company to give you something that is ordinarily much more expensive, namely a guaranteed minimum bandwidth. If you want a guaranteed minimum bandwidth, you need to pay for one of their business plans (if they have them). They are usually several times as expensive as the consumer plans, and for good reason.
(Also: you made the choice of moving out to the boondocks. I really don't see why you think the world owes you cheap and fast Internet access. Access to utilities should be a big consideration when choosing a place to live.)
There really isn't much of a difference. Windows machines usually come preinstalled with every driver they need. Whether it's Dell or Microsoft worrying about that really doesn't matter. And Apple, internally, has lots of driver and configuration variety as well, and like Dell, they just deal with it so you don't have to.
More importantly, both OSes have a huge number of different USB-based devices you can plug into them. The fact that Windows deals so much more poorly with that than OS X (or even Linux!) is bad Windows product design.
Because in the current situation, the decisions that each major fiefdom makes are binding for the rest of the company. The people working on the desktop can't say "the new IE sucks, we're going with Chrome", and Microsoft management is apparently incapable of calling the right shots. Breaking Microsoft up would force these different parts to compete on merit, not on the basis of power.
I don't like Apple, so I won't shed any tears.
What I'm suggesting is that it really doesn't matter that much: the distribution of tax burden between workers, prices, and shareholders is determined by markets; there is no other place the money can come from. You increase corporate income tax, and they'll have to either decrease wages or increase prices.
Those are all local services, and are usually paid for through property taxes and user fees. How does that justify federal and state corporate taxes?
That's a pretty depressing view of humanity: minions educated to corporate specs. I view education as something I benefit from, both directly (increase my market value and hence my wealth) and indirectly (increase the competitiveness and reason of my fellow citizens).
Maybe your perspective would change if you thought of corporations not as these gigantic amorphous and anonymous entities, but something you might found yourself. Think about how this might work. You get together with a bunch of friends, borrow some money from family to buy equipment, and start a web consulting business. You pay property tax for your office (directly or as part of rent), plenty of licensing and other fees, sales tax when you shop and eat during work days, and income tax on the salaries you pay yourself. Now you make some profit, and pay corporate income tax on it. With the rest, you pay dividends to your investors (which are also taxed as income), and you want to replace some failing equipment (that you may end up paying sales tax on). What exactly did the corporate tax on your profits achieve? You can invest less, and your investors end up getting effectively taxed at a much higher rate than regular income.
OK, you may not have intended the criticism, but the G*P did.
"Vacation days" is likely not a good explanation for low passport ownership. Americans work a lot every year, but Australians and Japanese work even more. And work is a choice for Americans: most Americans could take unpaid days off and still make more money than their counterparts in Europe.
Probably the reason lots of Americans don't have passports is because they don't need to travel abroad. From personal experience, I can tell you that you'll have a more authentic and higher quality experience seeing art on loan from the Louvre, dining at a Japanese restaurant, and then seeing Chinese opera with your friends, all in New York or San Francisco, than traveling to Beijing, Tokyo, and Paris. Foreign destinations have increasingly devolved into unpleasant tourist traps, while the US has become very cosmopolitan.
Yes: after the rest of the world exploded and burned down, the US had decades of fast growth and near monopolies in foreign markets. Now we're in a world where we're competing with countries full of young, healthy people willing to work for much less than we are and with the infrastructure to allow them to succeed.
Yes, all those cases have two things in common: (1) they have a collateral, and (2) they have an expected return on the asset you buy that's larger than what you pay for it. But we are mostly borrowing to fight wars we don't need to fight and to give people gold-plated retirement, disability, and medical plans. That kind of debt leads to no returns and has no collateral.
Where government investment and borrowing makes sense is in areas where there is positive return that can't be captured by private companies, and that means areas like research, STEM education, health care for the young, and some forms of infrastructure. But those areas need so little money compared to the others that we wouldn't need to borrow for them if we didn't waste so much money for those other things.
No, but the legal system ultimately picks which of multiple competing scientific opinions to believe, as well as resolving what the meaning of terms used in legislation is.
The facts are that the legislators who wrote the original law likely considered a tomato a vegetable, hence that is the meaning that should prevail in a legal context. That doesn't change the botanical definition of what a fruit is. The fact that you and other self-styled scientists don't understand this distinction only emphasizes how important it is to have people other than you make decisions.
How much climate change will cost American children down the road is an open question (according to the IPCC reports, not too much). Maybe Europe will suffer more, maybe Pacific island nations will disappear, but those are not primarily costs to the US.
But how much our health care, retirement, and other benefits will cost our children down the road is much easier to quantify. If you're talking about robbing from future generations, talk about that first.
The Windows mess has little to do with hardware variability, and everything with poor design and poor implementation. And that's a result of how Microsoft is a bunch of competing internal fiefdoms, all of which are looking out for their own best interest, rather than a great user experience (a Microsoft breakup would have been the best thing that could have happened to them).
Technically, Apple could easily release OS X for PCs, and simply require PC makers to make compatible hardware with no (or only approved) drivers. PC makers would fall all over themselves to comply. The reason Apple doesn't do that is because it would destroy the mystique that they have and erode the obscene profit margins on their hardware.
Apple is what it is: pretty design, a lot of marketing b.s., decent engineering, a hand-picked choice of other people's best technologies, and obscene profit margins on products sold to yuppies. Opening Apple up would destroy both the mystique and the profit margins.
<sarcasm>Yeah, you're right. Obviously, you have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Americans are just stupid. The fact that they have fewer passports proves it! And everybody knows they know nothing about the all-so-important history of various European fiefdoms!</sarcasm>
If you look at actual statistics instead of waving your hands wildly, you'll find that American adults are, on average, very well educated compared to other industrialized nations (the US is generally in the middle in the PISA studies, but widespread college education improves the picture further for adults).
And what's perhaps more important, the intellectual and political elite in the US is huge and extremely sharp, and that's what ultimately matters, not whether some old Australian tourist can locate Papua New Guinea on the map.
It's a lot more complicated than that. American forests were already managed by American Indians when Westerners arrived, including by burning and other means. Management of American forests by Westerners has been entirely different because forests are being used for different purposes (wood, paper, landscape barriers, and "natural" forest).
I'm not saying that I know definitively how this all works out in the balance (although I suspect the US comes out far better). I'm just saying that someone needs to do the math, and that using current and historical emissions from fossil fuels alone is not sufficient.
No, obviously not, otherwise landfills would just disappear to nothing over time (or at least to the non-biodegradable plastics), but they don't. In fact, lignin largely doesn't biodegrade in current landfills, and cellulose only biodegrades partially.
If you wanted full biodegradation to occur, you need to build landfills differently. Of course, if low atmospheric CO2 is your goal, the question is why you would want to. Conversely, we can probably construct landfills such that essentially nothing biodegrades and the carbon is removed from the atmosphere for a long time.
You compare centuries of monarchy, communism, fascism, and military dictatorships in Europe with Texas school boards democratically electing people who add things to the curriculum you don't like? You obviously have no idea what terms like totalitarianism, feudalism, imperialism, and discrimination even mean.
I won't even bother responding to the rest of your ridiculous drivel; it mostly just shows that you know nothing about history, economics, or politics.
Good points, but US forests were likely growing for much of the past few centuries, because they were not in equilibrium. These days, forests in the US are used extensively for making paper and wood (as opposed to heating), which does result in carbon capture. As for losing forest, Europe is worse: it lost about 8,000,000 km2 of its original forest cover, most of which turned into carbon in the atmosphere.
Yup, but the GP posting was reflective of European arrogance and sarcasm wherever it may have come from, and in terms of the other points I mentioned, most of the rest of the world was just as bad.
It was wrong for any company to market HSPA+ as 4G. But with HSPA+, Android phones offered substantially faster speeds than the iPhone 4. Furthermore, those companies didn't try to do that overseas in markets with actual 4G deployments and where the distinction actually matters.