Orion drive? Just so the unknowing reader understands what this is.. Orion drive is basically blowing up a long series of nuclear blasts behind your vehicle and "riding the wave" of particles and radiation.
Problem for this method of propulsion is obvious and not so obvious. Nuclear fission is pretty energetic, and if you boost the event with fusion you can get quite a bit of energy out of a small device. The problem here is channeling the energy to push you in the desired direction. To get the best push, you need to keep the detonation close, but because of the intense radiation released, you will need a lot of shielding to absorb this energy (to better capture the push) AND protect the crew. Radiation shielding is basically mass. Lead, water, uranium other heavy dense things are what you need for it. This will make your ship MASSIVE.... Needing a lot more fuel, needing more fuel to get all that mass and fuel moving....
Radiation kills, pretty much everything, if you expose living things to it long enough, and it's REALLY hard to shield a vessel from just the background radiation in space so you cannot just skip the shielding stuff and hope for the best..
Not even the Orion Drive System gets you to Alpha Centauri with a reasonably sized crew alive....Just not possible because of the size of the ship required to house enough fuel/supplies and shielding isn't possible to build. And who want's to go to AC anyway? Nothing of much interest there that we could possibly land on even temporally.
Sanders? For Pete's sake, that guy was a loony toon of the leftist socialist elitist masquerading as a common person. He was type cast by the same folks who gave us Stalin, Mau, and the Castro brothers. Any number of his policies where transparently just vote buying by making promises the country couldn't hope to afford.
Sanders only purpose was to get Hillary on the November ballot and keep her from having to lurch too far left by appearing to be the sane choice of the two. It was basically a ploy to keep from fracturing the democratic vote too much in the primary.
Plus, he lost to Hillary, who lost to the worst possible candidate I can imagine ever running.... Sanders is an example of just about anything, including being purchased lock stock and barrel by corporate interests.
Isn't capitalism grand! You stubble and you failed!
Intel isn't in any danger here. AMD may gain market share and Intel may make less money, but this isn't the beginning of the end of Intel. Not by a long shot. It may mean that AMD finds it easier to be competitive, but Intel will get it's manufacturing back on track eventually and recover.
It's going to take more than a couple of stumbles for Intel to fall to second place to AMD.
Build proper houses with modern plumbing, put in electricity and utilities and then provide jobs that pay a living wage. Why is that so hard for companies? This applies to places in the USA too. (Remember Flint)
I remember Flint.. But I don't think your "solutions" are any better than what's already been tried there.. In Flint, until recently, it was one party ruling the city, county and state governments and you mention companies? There aren't any in Flint anymore. They got run off.
I don't think you understand the difference between not being capable of something now, and not being capable of it ever. Did you think people were suggesting that we were capable of leaving the solar system today?
I'm claiming that the laws of physics as currently known preclude our leaving the solar system, ever... I'm not so naive to assume that the laws of physics are 100% understood, but I'm pretty confident that we have a pretty reasonable handle on the physics involved in rocket science. I am not aware of any possible technologies that fit within the current laws of physics, even conceptual ones, that allow us to leave this solar system. Thus, I claim we are stuck here for the duration.
So, do you have any physics theories we need to change or refine that might allow this? No? Ok, Call me if/when you do, but I don't expect to hear from you.
opioids are shit for long term pain. you just want your heroin fix.
That's BS...
My wife took opioids for almost a decade for pain on an as needed basis. They where the only thing that helped her. She was so afraid of being addicted to them is was sad because she'd avoid taking them way too long an suffer greatly waiting for the medication to work. Lucky for us the pain issue has been dealt with because I shudder to think how bad it would be today trying to get the medication...
I'm not saying that opioids are not dangerous, that some people don't have issues with them, but I am saying that they WORK for some people who are unable to take anything else and if you really are in chronic pain, they are not always addictive. Now prescribing them for a toothache is stupid, but chronic pain suffers and their doctors should have the option.
The issue is the mass of "fuel" required as we are limited to ejecting mass to accelerate. You need enough to get the vessel out of the solar system and up to speed with enough left over to stop and descend into the gravity well of the solar system you are visiting. Then add the mass for the return fuel if you don't want a one way trip... Even for a really small craft and really high impulse from your fuel's mass, the mass required is huge.
The basic problem here is rocket science... Eject mass one way to push you the other.
The issue is mass and how fast can you accelerate it as you push it out the back. Right now, Ion rockets are about as efficient as we can get, but they "burn" fuel that is hard to find (xenon gas) and pretty expensive to obtain because it's limited concentrations on earth. Finding billions of tons of this stuff would be impossible from known sources and it's going to take billions of tons of this to get any kind of reasonably sized vessel any place we'd want to go with current technology.
We need something else, some other kind of propulsion technology that doesn't depend on ejecting mass to push the vessel forward. When you have something, call me. Until then, none of what you propose will matter because the transit times will be too long or the fuel requirements too massive.
Have we found possibly habitable planets with 30 light years?
First off, we don't have the ability to go 1/2 C. If E=MC**2, and the only "drive" method we have in space is the equal and opposite reaction kind (where we emit mass one direction to go the other) then a couple of things are true. It's going to take a huge vessel to carry even a small crew that far and the energy required to sustain the crew is going to be massive. It's going to take a MASSIVE amount of fuel/mass to get up to speed and get slowed down when you arrive, and if you intend to return, it's going to be more than double that, meaning the vessel is going to be downright huge. Remember, we live in a huge gravity well that we have to climb out of, both on earth and in the solar system and that takes a LOT of fuel...
Second off, if we don't find a way to get around this drive method, using the acceleration of mass one way to go another, it's going to make the attempt to leave the solar system doomed to fail. Ship sizes will be too big and transit times too long and the effects of weightlessness and radiation will kill any complex life forms aboard long before getting anyplace interesting. Even microbes will face extinction unless the shielding is absolutely massive, which brings more weight and more fuel required.
You see, it's a catch 22 kind of thing. Once you start adding up weights, even with really aggressive high impulse assumptions from your fuel mass, things start getting so big and massive that it just becomes too large to be possible... Then you have the transit time restrictions of a few decades and it starts to look even less possible because that just multiplies your fuel requirement by orders of magnitude. No way we could assemble a vessel this size, provision it within a reasonable time and keep it working long enough to get to someplace interesting, much less get back.
The ONLY way out of this is to invent some kind of drive that's not based on accelerating a mass and ejecting it one way to go the other. I know of no theory, no physics, no engineering of any such propulsion system. THIS is the problem we need to solve, or we are STUCK here. So far, there are no theories from physics that indicate this is possible. So put your physics hat on and get cracking, until you come up with a whole now physical model of the universe, one that allows for a drive system that doesn't need to eject mass to push something along in space, Until then, I'm right, we are stuck here.
it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet...
Not true. We will likely find life on exoplanets soon. We just need some improvements in spectroscopy so that we get detect molecular oxygen in their atmospheres as they occlude their mother star. That is a sure sign of life. Other than photosynthesis, there is no other plausible explanation for high levels of O2.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in May 2020, and can do atmospheric spectroscopy. We may get our first sign of exolife shortly after.
Ah, such grand assumptions, so little time..
What you may find is organic compounds, which only proves that conditions similar to what we know can host life exists, not that actual life does. So you see methane in the atmosphere, that doesn't mean life exists only that there is carbon there.
I think we assume that life is somehow easy, just find the right ingredients and you must have a cake.. I don't think we fully understand how unique earth may actually be or what the full recipe for life actually was. And just like throwing all the ingredients into an oven is unlikely to produce a cake, just verifying all the ingredients are there doesn't mean life is. Earth is *really* unique among the known planets in all sorts of very important ways. The magnetic field, our water content, length of our day/year, the tilt of our rotation axis, how circular our orbit around the sun is, the moon and it's size and orbit... These things are *very* important parts of the recipe and many are unique to our planet.
Seems to me we simply don't know enough yet to decide how likely life is or isn't, we don't fully understand the role of all this stuff in life, if it's a necessary part or just a unique thing we have.... Looking closer at possible habitable planets outside our solar system is a good idea, but I don't see how isolating spectral lines gives you more than telling you the ingredients may be there. Which isn't going to really prove life is there but could eliminate places it cannot be.
Doesn't seem likely. Mars was the best option and it's not panning out. Europa is about the only other option but that's a slim chance. Given we are not leaving the solar system, ever, it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet... We are marooned here for the duration of our survival, which will be either until we destroy ourselves, or the Sun takes care of it as it expands and fries earth to a crisp before the end of 5 billion more years.
You're just a ray of sunshine aren't you?;-)
Ah, you have an issue with this? Makes you depressed to know the 2nd law of thermodynamics condemns all you survey to heat death? It's truth, sorry you don't like it.
Did you know that the human species will go on after you die?
Physics... We are stuck here or Einstein was wrong... No way biological life survives an trip to another star. It takes too long at physically possible speeds.
I hope I'm alive when we discover life on another plant - even if it's just microbes.
Doesn't seem likely. Mars was the best option and it's not panning out. Europa is about the only other option but that's a slim chance. Given we are not leaving the solar system, ever, it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet... We are marooned here for the duration of our survival, which will be either until we destroy ourselves, or the Sun takes care of it as it expands and fries earth to a crisp before the end of 5 billion more years.
That cap on surge pricing will limit supply during periods of high demand, but hey to the liberal politician's mind this is a win as it shows he cares about the little guy...
Problem is in this case, the little guy is driving the car as well as riding in the backseat. And all they really accomplished is to inconvenience the riders by making them wait longer for service while limiting what drivers can collect during peak load.
What would have been better is to require a service that can *notify* riders of fair increases and periods of high demand as much in advance as possible so they didn't get surprised by the huge jumps or knew that if they only wait another 2 hours prices may decline. In fact, this would help both supply and demand, by notifying drivers too. Make it the service mandatory and free to all though the company's application and let users schedule their return trip and possible times with fairs being locked in when the trip is booked, not when the trip is completed.
Freedom of speech is a Western cultural concept that goes much farther than the government.
I'm not going to disagree with the cultural concept, but I was pointing out the legal constructs in play. The first amendment basically is saying that each person is allowed to decide for themselves what is right and is free to express their opinion and their reasons for believing what they believe. The government may not (and indeed, couldn't if it tried) control this freedom. Both Reddit and the author have the same rights here, the government may not get involved. Reddit is free to remove posts as they see fit and authors are free to publish (at their own expense) as they see fit, legally.
Now if you wish to make a moral judgment about what should happen here based on your belief in "freedom of speech" then have at it. If you don't like Reddit's policy or actions, feel free to put up your own site with different policies. Up to you. However, Reddit is free to do with their site what they wish to do and are not legally constrained by the 1st Amendment in any way to leave posts up, any more than a religious discussion board is required to leave the antitheists' posts where they can be seen if they choose to erase them.
Why is it a good idea for the government to protect free speech and allow petitions for redress of grievances, but it's not a good idea for reddit?
Why shouldn't reddit follow the good idea that the constitution laid down for government?
The question I'm dealing with is what is legal for Reddit to do. You want to ask if it's right or not. The two questions are not the same. The constitution only addresses what is legal, each individual must decide for themselves what's right. Given it's up to you and me to decide if it was right or wrong and we are free to decide differently, I see no point in debating the moral or ethical. It is legal for non-government entities to censor speech in any way they choose so Reddit is on legal ground if they choose to take down the posts. Debating anything more, is pointless.
sales of Ronald Reagan masks near the border are up 1000%.
Darn it, Roland Reagan is crossing the border 10,000 times a day now? That's really busy for a guy who doesn't vote democrat from the shady rest cemetery...
Personally, if somebody said that to me and I was ticked, the first thing I'd do would be hire a lawyer to send a strongly worded letter that says nothing but "Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but take it up with my lawyer you fools" back that pretty much guarantees they have to get a lawyer involved to make sure I'm not threatening to sue them...
So, you would hate getting lawyers involved? Well, I hate having to deal with your PR tripe, so now we both have something to hate.
I think a lot of people need a crash course on what the 1st amendment (or any right recognized by the constitution) means and doesn't mean and what legal "rights" they protect and from whom..
The US Constitution is pretty clear that it is designed to describe how government works (specifically the federal government) and the bill of rights is designed to tell the government what it may NOT do, what rights the government may not limit.
The important thing to realize is the 1st Amendment only says the government may not infringe your right to speak what you like, publish what you choose or practice your religion. So if Reddit wishes to take your posts down, they may, as they are not the government. Now if Reddit was government owned or the government was ordering Reddit to remove or censor posts, THEN there would be an issue.
Hurting an economy is better then killing civilization.
Really? Why don't you think about what a ruined economy would actually cost in lives and freedom...
If you are serious about this, I suggest you learn Chinese because they are going to take over if you wreak our economy and we cannot afford to defend ourselves. Get ready for communism and all the bad things that implies...
Personally, I figure it's better for everybody overall to just keep burring fossil fuels, keeping our freedom, while investing in R&D to replace CO2 emitters and deal with the environmental consequences as they arise. Fusion anybody?
The problem with healthcare IS government intervention and the removal of "free market" forces though the advent of insurance. We have too much government involvement in healthcare, not to little, too much insurance and not enough individual skin in the game so market pricing could work. You just don't realize this because the ideological changes that have caused us to accept government involvement in healthcare date back to WWII so you've never experienced how it should be. Healthcare's problems are driven by political forces which run counter to market forces, so there are issues BECAUSE of the governments meddling.
The housing crash was also CAUSED by government intervention in the subprime mortgage market, creating a glut of worthless mortgage paper by forcing the industry to grant mortgages to people unable to pay for them. The issue was foreseen and warnings where ignored for political reasons and we all paid the price for not paying attention to those who where rightly saying that the rules where unsustainable. Had the lending rules not REQUIRED the issuance of this subprime paper, we wouldn't have had the crash when the market hiccup toppled the house of cards built on the sub-prime paper. It was totally the governments fault.
I'm not totally happy with the free market, but as I've shown above, government involvement is NOT a good idea 99 times out of 100. Laws need to be enforced, to be sure, fraud and collusion rooted out and dealt with, but any further involvement by government is almost always going to have unintended consequences that break more things that needn't be broken than it fixes. Specifically price controls are NEVER a good long term idea and break the free market.
Collusion is illegal already so we don't need anything new here. Fraud is also illegal. If these companies colluded or engaged in fraud, the law enforcement part of government needs to engage and deal with it.
We don't need anything new here though.... And I'm arguing that apart from enforcing current law to keep it fair, we don't want to do anything to disrupt the free market because the net result of government intervention isn't good for anybody.
Auto repair shops are rife with fraudulent practices that are hard to prove, but this isn't universally true of all auto shops. Many are honest brokers and are trying to serve their customers needs. If you think your shop is ripping you off tell them so and if they don't deal with your issue find another or do the work yourself. The free market has a way of fixing this kind of thing... If the fraud is exceptionally bad and provable, complain to the police and BBB or file suit in small claims. Just rest assured that fraudsters will eventually be dealt with in the marketplace.
Aren't you forgetting that a "free market" is predicated on a symmetry of information between buyer and seller ?
No it's not... Free markets are predicated on being "free" and "markets" and not forcing prices on anybody. Buyers must be free to choose products they are willing to buy at a given price and sellers must be free to sell the products they wish to provide for the price they can get buyers to pay. It's only a free market when both buyers and sellers are free to choose. Free markets are predicated on choice begin free, which doesn't always mean information is shared..
Slashdot Mirror
Orion drive? Just so the unknowing reader understands what this is.. Orion drive is basically blowing up a long series of nuclear blasts behind your vehicle and "riding the wave" of particles and radiation.
Problem for this method of propulsion is obvious and not so obvious. Nuclear fission is pretty energetic, and if you boost the event with fusion you can get quite a bit of energy out of a small device. The problem here is channeling the energy to push you in the desired direction. To get the best push, you need to keep the detonation close, but because of the intense radiation released, you will need a lot of shielding to absorb this energy (to better capture the push) AND protect the crew. Radiation shielding is basically mass. Lead, water, uranium other heavy dense things are what you need for it. This will make your ship MASSIVE.... Needing a lot more fuel, needing more fuel to get all that mass and fuel moving....
Radiation kills, pretty much everything, if you expose living things to it long enough, and it's REALLY hard to shield a vessel from just the background radiation in space so you cannot just skip the shielding stuff and hope for the best..
Not even the Orion Drive System gets you to Alpha Centauri with a reasonably sized crew alive....Just not possible because of the size of the ship required to house enough fuel/supplies and shielding isn't possible to build. And who want's to go to AC anyway? Nothing of much interest there that we could possibly land on even temporally.
Sanders? For Pete's sake, that guy was a loony toon of the leftist socialist elitist masquerading as a common person. He was type cast by the same folks who gave us Stalin, Mau, and the Castro brothers. Any number of his policies where transparently just vote buying by making promises the country couldn't hope to afford.
Sanders only purpose was to get Hillary on the November ballot and keep her from having to lurch too far left by appearing to be the sane choice of the two. It was basically a ploy to keep from fracturing the democratic vote too much in the primary.
Plus, he lost to Hillary, who lost to the worst possible candidate I can imagine ever running.... Sanders is an example of just about anything, including being purchased lock stock and barrel by corporate interests.
Isn't capitalism grand! You stubble and you failed!
Intel isn't in any danger here. AMD may gain market share and Intel may make less money, but this isn't the beginning of the end of Intel. Not by a long shot. It may mean that AMD finds it easier to be competitive, but Intel will get it's manufacturing back on track eventually and recover.
It's going to take more than a couple of stumbles for Intel to fall to second place to AMD.
Build proper houses with modern plumbing, put in electricity and utilities and then provide jobs that pay a living wage. Why is that so hard for companies? This applies to places in the USA too. (Remember Flint)
I remember Flint.. But I don't think your "solutions" are any better than what's already been tried there.. In Flint, until recently, it was one party ruling the city, county and state governments and you mention companies? There aren't any in Flint anymore. They got run off.
When you have something, call me.
I don't think you understand the difference between not being capable of something now, and not being capable of it ever. Did you think people were suggesting that we were capable of leaving the solar system today?
I'm claiming that the laws of physics as currently known preclude our leaving the solar system, ever... I'm not so naive to assume that the laws of physics are 100% understood, but I'm pretty confident that we have a pretty reasonable handle on the physics involved in rocket science. I am not aware of any possible technologies that fit within the current laws of physics, even conceptual ones, that allow us to leave this solar system. Thus, I claim we are stuck here for the duration.
So, do you have any physics theories we need to change or refine that might allow this? No? Ok, Call me if/when you do, but I don't expect to hear from you.
opioids are shit for long term pain. you just want your heroin fix.
That's BS...
My wife took opioids for almost a decade for pain on an as needed basis. They where the only thing that helped her. She was so afraid of being addicted to them is was sad because she'd avoid taking them way too long an suffer greatly waiting for the medication to work. Lucky for us the pain issue has been dealt with because I shudder to think how bad it would be today trying to get the medication...
I'm not saying that opioids are not dangerous, that some people don't have issues with them, but I am saying that they WORK for some people who are unable to take anything else and if you really are in chronic pain, they are not always addictive. Now prescribing them for a toothache is stupid, but chronic pain suffers and their doctors should have the option.
Still not possible...
The issue is the mass of "fuel" required as we are limited to ejecting mass to accelerate. You need enough to get the vessel out of the solar system and up to speed with enough left over to stop and descend into the gravity well of the solar system you are visiting. Then add the mass for the return fuel if you don't want a one way trip... Even for a really small craft and really high impulse from your fuel's mass, the mass required is huge.
The basic problem here is rocket science... Eject mass one way to push you the other.
The issue is mass and how fast can you accelerate it as you push it out the back. Right now, Ion rockets are about as efficient as we can get, but they "burn" fuel that is hard to find (xenon gas) and pretty expensive to obtain because it's limited concentrations on earth. Finding billions of tons of this stuff would be impossible from known sources and it's going to take billions of tons of this to get any kind of reasonably sized vessel any place we'd want to go with current technology.
We need something else, some other kind of propulsion technology that doesn't depend on ejecting mass to push the vessel forward. When you have something, call me. Until then, none of what you propose will matter because the transit times will be too long or the fuel requirements too massive.
Have we found possibly habitable planets with 30 light years?
First off, we don't have the ability to go 1/2 C. If E=MC**2, and the only "drive" method we have in space is the equal and opposite reaction kind (where we emit mass one direction to go the other) then a couple of things are true. It's going to take a huge vessel to carry even a small crew that far and the energy required to sustain the crew is going to be massive. It's going to take a MASSIVE amount of fuel/mass to get up to speed and get slowed down when you arrive, and if you intend to return, it's going to be more than double that, meaning the vessel is going to be downright huge. Remember, we live in a huge gravity well that we have to climb out of, both on earth and in the solar system and that takes a LOT of fuel...
Second off, if we don't find a way to get around this drive method, using the acceleration of mass one way to go another, it's going to make the attempt to leave the solar system doomed to fail. Ship sizes will be too big and transit times too long and the effects of weightlessness and radiation will kill any complex life forms aboard long before getting anyplace interesting. Even microbes will face extinction unless the shielding is absolutely massive, which brings more weight and more fuel required.
You see, it's a catch 22 kind of thing. Once you start adding up weights, even with really aggressive high impulse assumptions from your fuel mass, things start getting so big and massive that it just becomes too large to be possible... Then you have the transit time restrictions of a few decades and it starts to look even less possible because that just multiplies your fuel requirement by orders of magnitude. No way we could assemble a vessel this size, provision it within a reasonable time and keep it working long enough to get to someplace interesting, much less get back.
The ONLY way out of this is to invent some kind of drive that's not based on accelerating a mass and ejecting it one way to go the other. I know of no theory, no physics, no engineering of any such propulsion system. THIS is the problem we need to solve, or we are STUCK here. So far, there are no theories from physics that indicate this is possible. So put your physics hat on and get cracking, until you come up with a whole now physical model of the universe, one that allows for a drive system that doesn't need to eject mass to push something along in space, Until then, I'm right, we are stuck here.
it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet...
Not true. We will likely find life on exoplanets soon. We just need some improvements in spectroscopy so that we get detect molecular oxygen in their atmospheres as they occlude their mother star. That is a sure sign of life. Other than photosynthesis, there is no other plausible explanation for high levels of O2.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in May 2020, and can do atmospheric spectroscopy. We may get our first sign of exolife shortly after.
Ah, such grand assumptions, so little time..
What you may find is organic compounds, which only proves that conditions similar to what we know can host life exists, not that actual life does. So you see methane in the atmosphere, that doesn't mean life exists only that there is carbon there.
I think we assume that life is somehow easy, just find the right ingredients and you must have a cake.. I don't think we fully understand how unique earth may actually be or what the full recipe for life actually was. And just like throwing all the ingredients into an oven is unlikely to produce a cake, just verifying all the ingredients are there doesn't mean life is. Earth is *really* unique among the known planets in all sorts of very important ways. The magnetic field, our water content, length of our day/year, the tilt of our rotation axis, how circular our orbit around the sun is, the moon and it's size and orbit... These things are *very* important parts of the recipe and many are unique to our planet.
Seems to me we simply don't know enough yet to decide how likely life is or isn't, we don't fully understand the role of all this stuff in life, if it's a necessary part or just a unique thing we have.... Looking closer at possible habitable planets outside our solar system is a good idea, but I don't see how isolating spectral lines gives you more than telling you the ingredients may be there. Which isn't going to really prove life is there but could eliminate places it cannot be.
Doesn't seem likely. Mars was the best option and it's not panning out. Europa is about the only other option but that's a slim chance. Given we are not leaving the solar system, ever, it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet... We are marooned here for the duration of our survival, which will be either until we destroy ourselves, or the Sun takes care of it as it expands and fries earth to a crisp before the end of 5 billion more years.
You're just a ray of sunshine aren't you? ;-)
Ah, you have an issue with this? Makes you depressed to know the 2nd law of thermodynamics condemns all you survey to heat death? It's truth, sorry you don't like it.
Survey? How exactly? Dial them up on the radio? Look at them though a telescope?
Given we are not leaving the solar system, ever
Did you know that the human species will go on after you die?
Physics... We are stuck here or Einstein was wrong... No way biological life survives an trip to another star. It takes too long at physically possible speeds.
I hope I'm alive when we discover life on another plant - even if it's just microbes.
Doesn't seem likely. Mars was the best option and it's not panning out. Europa is about the only other option but that's a slim chance. Given we are not leaving the solar system, ever, it doesn't seem likely ANYBODY will discover life on another planet... We are marooned here for the duration of our survival, which will be either until we destroy ourselves, or the Sun takes care of it as it expands and fries earth to a crisp before the end of 5 billion more years.
That cap on surge pricing will limit supply during periods of high demand, but hey to the liberal politician's mind this is a win as it shows he cares about the little guy...
Problem is in this case, the little guy is driving the car as well as riding in the backseat. And all they really accomplished is to inconvenience the riders by making them wait longer for service while limiting what drivers can collect during peak load.
What would have been better is to require a service that can *notify* riders of fair increases and periods of high demand as much in advance as possible so they didn't get surprised by the huge jumps or knew that if they only wait another 2 hours prices may decline. In fact, this would help both supply and demand, by notifying drivers too. Make it the service mandatory and free to all though the company's application and let users schedule their return trip and possible times with fairs being locked in when the trip is booked, not when the trip is completed.
Freedom of speech is a Western cultural concept that goes much farther than the government.
I'm not going to disagree with the cultural concept, but I was pointing out the legal constructs in play. The first amendment basically is saying that each person is allowed to decide for themselves what is right and is free to express their opinion and their reasons for believing what they believe. The government may not (and indeed, couldn't if it tried) control this freedom. Both Reddit and the author have the same rights here, the government may not get involved. Reddit is free to remove posts as they see fit and authors are free to publish (at their own expense) as they see fit, legally.
Now if you wish to make a moral judgment about what should happen here based on your belief in "freedom of speech" then have at it. If you don't like Reddit's policy or actions, feel free to put up your own site with different policies. Up to you. However, Reddit is free to do with their site what they wish to do and are not legally constrained by the 1st Amendment in any way to leave posts up, any more than a religious discussion board is required to leave the antitheists' posts where they can be seen if they choose to erase them.
Who forgot to turn of automatic windows updates again???
Why is it a good idea for the government to protect free speech and allow petitions for redress of grievances, but it's not a good idea for reddit?
Why shouldn't reddit follow the good idea that the constitution laid down for government?
The question I'm dealing with is what is legal for Reddit to do. You want to ask if it's right or not. The two questions are not the same. The constitution only addresses what is legal, each individual must decide for themselves what's right. Given it's up to you and me to decide if it was right or wrong and we are free to decide differently, I see no point in debating the moral or ethical. It is legal for non-government entities to censor speech in any way they choose so Reddit is on legal ground if they choose to take down the posts. Debating anything more, is pointless.
sales of Ronald Reagan masks near the border are up 1000%.
Darn it, Roland Reagan is crossing the border 10,000 times a day now? That's really busy for a guy who doesn't vote democrat from the shady rest cemetery...
Personally, if somebody said that to me and I was ticked, the first thing I'd do would be hire a lawyer to send a strongly worded letter that says nothing but "Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but take it up with my lawyer you fools" back that pretty much guarantees they have to get a lawyer involved to make sure I'm not threatening to sue them...
So, you would hate getting lawyers involved? Well, I hate having to deal with your PR tripe, so now we both have something to hate.
Ah, yes.. Triggered are we?
I think a lot of people need a crash course on what the 1st amendment (or any right recognized by the constitution) means and doesn't mean and what legal "rights" they protect and from whom..
The US Constitution is pretty clear that it is designed to describe how government works (specifically the federal government) and the bill of rights is designed to tell the government what it may NOT do, what rights the government may not limit.
The important thing to realize is the 1st Amendment only says the government may not infringe your right to speak what you like, publish what you choose or practice your religion. So if Reddit wishes to take your posts down, they may, as they are not the government. Now if Reddit was government owned or the government was ordering Reddit to remove or censor posts, THEN there would be an issue.
Hurting an economy is better then killing civilization.
Really? Why don't you think about what a ruined economy would actually cost in lives and freedom...
If you are serious about this, I suggest you learn Chinese because they are going to take over if you wreak our economy and we cannot afford to defend ourselves. Get ready for communism and all the bad things that implies...
Personally, I figure it's better for everybody overall to just keep burring fossil fuels, keeping our freedom, while investing in R&D to replace CO2 emitters and deal with the environmental consequences as they arise. Fusion anybody?
The problem with healthcare IS government intervention and the removal of "free market" forces though the advent of insurance. We have too much government involvement in healthcare, not to little, too much insurance and not enough individual skin in the game so market pricing could work. You just don't realize this because the ideological changes that have caused us to accept government involvement in healthcare date back to WWII so you've never experienced how it should be. Healthcare's problems are driven by political forces which run counter to market forces, so there are issues BECAUSE of the governments meddling.
The housing crash was also CAUSED by government intervention in the subprime mortgage market, creating a glut of worthless mortgage paper by forcing the industry to grant mortgages to people unable to pay for them. The issue was foreseen and warnings where ignored for political reasons and we all paid the price for not paying attention to those who where rightly saying that the rules where unsustainable. Had the lending rules not REQUIRED the issuance of this subprime paper, we wouldn't have had the crash when the market hiccup toppled the house of cards built on the sub-prime paper. It was totally the governments fault.
I'm not totally happy with the free market, but as I've shown above, government involvement is NOT a good idea 99 times out of 100. Laws need to be enforced, to be sure, fraud and collusion rooted out and dealt with, but any further involvement by government is almost always going to have unintended consequences that break more things that needn't be broken than it fixes. Specifically price controls are NEVER a good long term idea and break the free market.
Collusion is illegal already so we don't need anything new here. Fraud is also illegal. If these companies colluded or engaged in fraud, the law enforcement part of government needs to engage and deal with it.
We don't need anything new here though.... And I'm arguing that apart from enforcing current law to keep it fair, we don't want to do anything to disrupt the free market because the net result of government intervention isn't good for anybody.
Auto repair shops are rife with fraudulent practices that are hard to prove, but this isn't universally true of all auto shops. Many are honest brokers and are trying to serve their customers needs. If you think your shop is ripping you off tell them so and if they don't deal with your issue find another or do the work yourself. The free market has a way of fixing this kind of thing... If the fraud is exceptionally bad and provable, complain to the police and BBB or file suit in small claims. Just rest assured that fraudsters will eventually be dealt with in the marketplace.
... free market ... free market's
Aren't you forgetting that a "free market" is predicated on a symmetry of information between buyer and seller ?
No it's not... Free markets are predicated on being "free" and "markets" and not forcing prices on anybody. Buyers must be free to choose products they are willing to buy at a given price and sellers must be free to sell the products they wish to provide for the price they can get buyers to pay. It's only a free market when both buyers and sellers are free to choose. Free markets are predicated on choice begin free, which doesn't always mean information is shared..