>But for some reason they refuse to do so leaving us subject to this never ending flow of spam phone calls. Ask yourself one question: aside from the scammers themselves, who profits from the phone-scam industry?
Also probably hardly any mice. With a population density that high the public health benefits from severely limiting the rodent population probably outweigh any benefit from having more lizards and birds.
And it's not limited to the South - just look at how many Americans still believe in trickle-down economics, despite several decades of counter-evidence.
As for your rednecks - even a stopped clock is right twice a day. There's really not much point in neutering males unless you want to limit that individuals aggression or marking. You'll never manage to neuter 100% of the strays, and males are not the limiting factor on reproduction. So long as there's even one fertile male in an area, most of the fertile females will end up pregnant. That's why most population-control programs specifically target females - they're the limiting factor, so every individual you spay reduces the rate at which the population can grow.
That's nice for a cat confronted with a friendly well-fed house dog. They're talking strays though. And stray dogs are predator/scavengers. A cat has a good fighting chance against a dog that wants to play. Not so much against a dog that wants to eat it. In that case it's primary defense is using its speed and agility to escape - if a hungry dog manages to close its jaws on a cat just once, that's probably the end of the cat. That cute head-shaking attack your dog does on its toys? That's an efficient spine-snapping maneuver evolved specifically for killing prey.
Which is why they're putting out a call for white-hat hackers. Not everybody is motivated primarily by money, but the combination of attacking government-grade security, helping to preserve democracy in the face of a move to electronic voting, and a chance to win a tidy sum as well, will likely interest a lot of ethical hackers.
Thing is, you only have to set up the mine once, and then can keep shipping back the valuable ores for a very long time. Add a factory to use the bulk materials like iron that aren't worth shipping back, and you can build more of both, so that your investment in equipment continues to multiply for centuries
It seems unlikely that Earth-based raw materials will ever be more commercially viable in space, even LEO, than asteroid-based ones, once asteroid production has become commonplace. The delta-V from the asteroid belt to LEO is approximately the same as from Earth's surface to LEO, and much more cost-effective propulsion can be used when you're not having to provide gravitational support forces and fight your way through an atmosphere. Especially if we're dealing with terrestrial supply limitations that drive up the price.
As for dropping resources from orbit - I agree that it might be a bit risky. But there's no particular reason to drop huge lumps - a few tons with some cheap ablative heat shielding paste would be relatively harmless to anything it didn't hit directly. Even a few hundred is probably no big deal. For reference, the Chelyabinsk meteor was ~12,000 tons, and probably would have been relatively harmless if it hadn't superheated and exploded in the atmosphere. Heck, it was relatively harmless anyway.
Or we could leave out the reentry entirely - a tumbling-cable space elevator could slow it down to ground-speed or lower, and you'd only have to deal with the energy from falling a few hundred miles straight down - nothing compared to orbital speeds. If we used the same gyro-sling to ship an equivalent tonnage offworld it wouldn't even consume much energy.
>Now when we have reached the heat death of the universe it will all be iron-56, but that is many trillions of years away.
That seems unlikely, as it would require all other lighter materials to have fallen into stars and been fused into Fe56 or heavier - a process that would probably completely choke off the fusion reactions long before everything was converted.
Spend enough energy and you can turn it into whatever you want though. The Mars-colonizing plans commonly expect to convert CO2 and water into methane and O2 using... a process whose name I can't remember.
>Iron is too reactive to occur in its native state,
Not for long (geologically speaking) - but it takes a long time for corrosion to reach the inside of a sizable lump of non-porous iron. Google states that the oldest iron artifacts date from 2000BC, so they've survived 4000 years without completely rusting away, and a meteor has a much lower surface-to-volume ratio (and thus rusting speed) than a knife.
Solar sails work just fine in orbit too - so long as they're in microgravity and don't have to support their weight or fight atmospheric drag they're good to go.
Of course, in planetary orbit you have to constantly change orientation to maintain orbital acceleration, which puts much greater demands on your attitude control system (gyroscopic, I would assume), and greatly reduces your average acceleration, since you can only accelerate for half of each orbit while moving away from the sun, and can only briefly reach peak acceleration during each orbit as you move directly away from the sun.
I think you underestimated rather severely: Escape velocity is sqrt(2) * orbital speed, so you're right that it's about 4.3km/s from geostationary orbit - but that only gets you away from Earth - you'd still be in basically the same orbit as Earth around the sun, and need even more delta-V to reach the asteroid belt.
I *think* that would be equivalent to the difference in solar escape velocities from each, so Earth's orbit (30km/s * sqrt(2)) - asteroid belt orbit (25km/s *sqrt(2)) =~ 7km/s. If somebody knows for sure, please chime in - I could use a simple, reliable formula for required delta-V between orbits.
Why ship fuel from a planet though? 16 Psyche may not have the right raw materials to produce fuel, but lots of neighboring asteroids do, and the delta-V required to move things from one belt asteroid to another is tiny.
Also, why would you ship iron back to Earth? We've got plenty of iron here already - scrapheaps full of the stuff rusting away. We might ship back various rare elements that have a high market value on Earth, and negligible utilitarian value in space, but bulk materials like iron and "concrete" for radiation shielding are far more valuable where they're at.
You're right that a (beanstalk) space elevator on Earth is probably magical - multi-walled carbon nanotubes are strong enough for the job, but just barely, with only enough excess strength for something like a 10% safety margin as I recall. And no responsible engineer would consider making even an ordinary elevator cable with less than a 10x safety factor, much less something that's liable to kill millions of people all over the world if it fails. And sadly, carbon nanotubes are quite possibly approaching the strength limits of physical materials - the strength of the C-C bond, combined with the fact that carbon is the smallest/lightest element capable of making four bonds per atom, makes it unlikely that we'll ever be able to develop a material with an order of magnitude greater tensile strength-to-weight ratio.
However, there's other kinds of space elevators - the tumbling cable/spinning wheel variety for example. They're not quite as elegant for getting to and from the surface - you still need to fly out of the atmosphere on a suborbital trajectory by other means - but they're FAR smaller, and easily within the strength limitations of existing materials. And they have uses far beyond getting to and from a planet's surface.
They have the *very* useful property of serving as a 100% efficient momentum batteries, with no primary moving parts, so that you can use the momentum captured from incoming payloads to launch outbound ones, with no extra delta-V needed except for fine-tuning trajectories. Set up a spinning cable in Earth orbit, and another around Mars, or in the asteroid belt, or..., and you can send payloads back and forth with negligible net energy consumption, provided that the mass-flow is the same in both directions. And if it's not - they're an *excellent* candidate for ion drives (or magnetic drives, in Earth orbit) - you can build up excess rotational momentum at your leisure, and then discharge it over the course of a few minutes as you sling a payload toward its destination. (Or alternately, leisurely dissipate excess momentum captured from incoming payloads)
Something less than the cost of synthesizing it yourself from local resources, I'd imagine. CHON are the most common elements in the universe after all - and while hydrogen has a pesky tendency to escape from low-mass bodies, enough gets bound into water, hydroxides, and various other compounds to be useful for a long time to come.
Try re-reading. I said the goal was not to make nominally competent *adults* into wards of the state. However, the state could reasonably be considered to have a responsibility to protect children from starvation, just as it strives to protect all citizens from most other forms of violence.
It also has a long-term interest in making sure all children are adequately fed, as childhood malnourishment leads to significantly lower IQ as an adult, which is a much more expensive problem to address.
To those ends, free school meals is an extremely cost effective and minimally invasive solution, with a well-proven track record around the world.
Just because you're not a ward of the state, doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want to your children - they're not your property, they're citizens in their own right.
>one of these problems should ever be solved by forcing some selective non-standard behaviour on the internet.
Who said they should? They could instead rely on *standard* behavior, and remove all the extra code required to cater to IE's incompatible-by-design idiosyncrasies. There's probably a mountain of it.
It sounds like they're talking about color-coded monochrome icons, which might actually be an improvement over arbitrarily colored ones. Maybe. I'll reserve judgement until I see at least some proper mockups, though I can't say I'm super hopeful.
They starve to death and cease being a problem? If a person has the means to survive and chooses a drug-addled death instead, I don't see how that's anyone else's business. These sorts of programs are generally conceived to alleviate the gross inequalities of capitalism and bad luck, not make unfortunate adults into wards of the state who are denied the right to exercise free will. And I would imagine that begging would become *far* less effective (and thus appealing) when everyone knows that you had plenty of money for food and shelter but chose to blow it all on other things instead.
There's also already a range of voluntary boarding homes available for people incapable of taking care of themselves - an honest one would automatically deduct food and housing expenses from your monthly stipend on the day it was deposited and leave the rest of your money alone, or dole it out as a daily or weekly allowance to avoid major shortage problems toward the end of the month.
For kids - free meals at school is an extremely effective solution once they reach school age. Infants and toddlers are a trickier problem, but one that can fairly effectively be attacked from the opposite end of the age spectrum by making free birth control available to everyone - in my experience most junkies don't actually want kids, they just can't be bothered to avoid them. So, free IUDs or implants for women, and free Vasogel or similar for men (once it's approved) - you don't want to use something that they can easily mess up, nor anything permanent that they might choose to avoid. That also has the added benefit of largely preventing children from being born with drug-related problems.
There was a brief window in which it could have changed - but unless a large percentage of institutions made the switch, you would still need to train every new employee. "Everyone" learns MS Office in school. If they went to college they probably learned how to do more advanced things... also in MS Office. If they worked somewhere else they probably also learned how to do more domain-specific tasks...in MSOffice.
That's the problem with someone having a near-monopoly in a common tool - everyone gets used to being lazy and only learning program-specific processes rather than general procedures, and anyone who chooses to depart the captive ecosystem has to be willing to shoulder the burden of reeducating their employees.
That's where the term oligopoly comes in - a small handful of companies that control a market and conspire to reap the benefits of a monopoly.
As for the problem - I agree. Most regulations are required, in principle, as they are enacted as a direct response to abuses that already existed at the time. Sadly, when the companies being regulated can legally buy off the regulators (it's not a bribery if you call it lobbying and campaign contributions, right?) the regulations do tend to be sculpted to be as lax as possible, while also being as expensive as possible for small competitors to comply with.
I don't really see a solution, but simply repealing the regulations generally seems like a very bad idea, as it simply gives the green light to go back to committing whatever malfeasance demanded the regulation in the first place. It would probably help quite a bit if executives and stockholders were held personally responsible for the malfeasance of their company - but that seems extremely unlikely to happen any time soon.
I think you may be redefining terms - what you describe as the distinction between a free market and a fair market sounds an awful lot like the distinction between an unregulated market and a free market.
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>But for some reason they refuse to do so leaving us subject to this never ending flow of spam phone calls.
Ask yourself one question: aside from the scammers themselves, who profits from the phone-scam industry?
There's only more heat to be extracted if there exists some method to extract it - and at 1 atom per cubic light year fusion is not possible.
Also probably hardly any mice. With a population density that high the public health benefits from severely limiting the rodent population probably outweigh any benefit from having more lizards and birds.
And it's not limited to the South - just look at how many Americans still believe in trickle-down economics, despite several decades of counter-evidence.
As for your rednecks - even a stopped clock is right twice a day. There's really not much point in neutering males unless you want to limit that individuals aggression or marking. You'll never manage to neuter 100% of the strays, and males are not the limiting factor on reproduction. So long as there's even one fertile male in an area, most of the fertile females will end up pregnant. That's why most population-control programs specifically target females - they're the limiting factor, so every individual you spay reduces the rate at which the population can grow.
That's nice for a cat confronted with a friendly well-fed house dog. They're talking strays though. And stray dogs are predator/scavengers. A cat has a good fighting chance against a dog that wants to play. Not so much against a dog that wants to eat it. In that case it's primary defense is using its speed and agility to escape - if a hungry dog manages to close its jaws on a cat just once, that's probably the end of the cat. That cute head-shaking attack your dog does on its toys? That's an efficient spine-snapping maneuver evolved specifically for killing prey.
Seems like a waste for gold though. Better to use it as an anti-corrosion coating on sewer pipes - play to one of its few strengths.
Which is why they're putting out a call for white-hat hackers. Not everybody is motivated primarily by money, but the combination of attacking government-grade security, helping to preserve democracy in the face of a move to electronic voting, and a chance to win a tidy sum as well, will likely interest a lot of ethical hackers.
Thing is, you only have to set up the mine once, and then can keep shipping back the valuable ores for a very long time. Add a factory to use the bulk materials like iron that aren't worth shipping back, and you can build more of both, so that your investment in equipment continues to multiply for centuries
It seems unlikely that Earth-based raw materials will ever be more commercially viable in space, even LEO, than asteroid-based ones, once asteroid production has become commonplace. The delta-V from the asteroid belt to LEO is approximately the same as from Earth's surface to LEO, and much more cost-effective propulsion can be used when you're not having to provide gravitational support forces and fight your way through an atmosphere. Especially if we're dealing with terrestrial supply limitations that drive up the price.
As for dropping resources from orbit - I agree that it might be a bit risky. But there's no particular reason to drop huge lumps - a few tons with some cheap ablative heat shielding paste would be relatively harmless to anything it didn't hit directly. Even a few hundred is probably no big deal. For reference, the Chelyabinsk meteor was ~12,000 tons, and probably would have been relatively harmless if it hadn't superheated and exploded in the atmosphere. Heck, it was relatively harmless anyway.
Or we could leave out the reentry entirely - a tumbling-cable space elevator could slow it down to ground-speed or lower, and you'd only have to deal with the energy from falling a few hundred miles straight down - nothing compared to orbital speeds. If we used the same gyro-sling to ship an equivalent tonnage offworld it wouldn't even consume much energy.
>Now when we have reached the heat death of the universe it will all be iron-56, but that is many trillions of years away.
That seems unlikely, as it would require all other lighter materials to have fallen into stars and been fused into Fe56 or heavier - a process that would probably completely choke off the fusion reactions long before everything was converted.
Spend enough energy and you can turn it into whatever you want though. The Mars-colonizing plans commonly expect to convert CO2 and water into methane and O2 using... a process whose name I can't remember.
>Iron is too reactive to occur in its native state,
Not for long (geologically speaking) - but it takes a long time for corrosion to reach the inside of a sizable lump of non-porous iron. Google states that the oldest iron artifacts date from 2000BC, so they've survived 4000 years without completely rusting away, and a meteor has a much lower surface-to-volume ratio (and thus rusting speed) than a knife.
Solar sails work just fine in orbit too - so long as they're in microgravity and don't have to support their weight or fight atmospheric drag they're good to go.
Of course, in planetary orbit you have to constantly change orientation to maintain orbital acceleration, which puts much greater demands on your attitude control system (gyroscopic, I would assume), and greatly reduces your average acceleration, since you can only accelerate for half of each orbit while moving away from the sun, and can only briefly reach peak acceleration during each orbit as you move directly away from the sun.
I think you underestimated rather severely: Escape velocity is sqrt(2) * orbital speed, so you're right that it's about 4.3km/s from geostationary orbit - but that only gets you away from Earth - you'd still be in basically the same orbit as Earth around the sun, and need even more delta-V to reach the asteroid belt.
I *think* that would be equivalent to the difference in solar escape velocities from each, so Earth's orbit (30km/s * sqrt(2)) - asteroid belt orbit (25km/s *sqrt(2)) =~ 7km/s. If somebody knows for sure, please chime in - I could use a simple, reliable formula for required delta-V between orbits.
Why ship fuel from a planet though? 16 Psyche may not have the right raw materials to produce fuel, but lots of neighboring asteroids do, and the delta-V required to move things from one belt asteroid to another is tiny.
Also, why would you ship iron back to Earth? We've got plenty of iron here already - scrapheaps full of the stuff rusting away. We might ship back various rare elements that have a high market value on Earth, and negligible utilitarian value in space, but bulk materials like iron and "concrete" for radiation shielding are far more valuable where they're at.
You're right that a (beanstalk) space elevator on Earth is probably magical - multi-walled carbon nanotubes are strong enough for the job, but just barely, with only enough excess strength for something like a 10% safety margin as I recall. And no responsible engineer would consider making even an ordinary elevator cable with less than a 10x safety factor, much less something that's liable to kill millions of people all over the world if it fails. And sadly, carbon nanotubes are quite possibly approaching the strength limits of physical materials - the strength of the C-C bond, combined with the fact that carbon is the smallest/lightest element capable of making four bonds per atom, makes it unlikely that we'll ever be able to develop a material with an order of magnitude greater tensile strength-to-weight ratio.
However, there's other kinds of space elevators - the tumbling cable/spinning wheel variety for example. They're not quite as elegant for getting to and from the surface - you still need to fly out of the atmosphere on a suborbital trajectory by other means - but they're FAR smaller, and easily within the strength limitations of existing materials. And they have uses far beyond getting to and from a planet's surface.
They have the *very* useful property of serving as a 100% efficient momentum batteries, with no primary moving parts, so that you can use the momentum captured from incoming payloads to launch outbound ones, with no extra delta-V needed except for fine-tuning trajectories. Set up a spinning cable in Earth orbit, and another around Mars, or in the asteroid belt, or..., and you can send payloads back and forth with negligible net energy consumption, provided that the mass-flow is the same in both directions. And if it's not - they're an *excellent* candidate for ion drives (or magnetic drives, in Earth orbit) - you can build up excess rotational momentum at your leisure, and then discharge it over the course of a few minutes as you sling a payload toward its destination. (Or alternately, leisurely dissipate excess momentum captured from incoming payloads)
Something less than the cost of synthesizing it yourself from local resources, I'd imagine. CHON are the most common elements in the universe after all - and while hydrogen has a pesky tendency to escape from low-mass bodies, enough gets bound into water, hydroxides, and various other compounds to be useful for a long time to come.
Try re-reading. I said the goal was not to make nominally competent *adults* into wards of the state. However, the state could reasonably be considered to have a responsibility to protect children from starvation, just as it strives to protect all citizens from most other forms of violence.
It also has a long-term interest in making sure all children are adequately fed, as childhood malnourishment leads to significantly lower IQ as an adult, which is a much more expensive problem to address.
To those ends, free school meals is an extremely cost effective and minimally invasive solution, with a well-proven track record around the world.
Just because you're not a ward of the state, doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want to your children - they're not your property, they're citizens in their own right.
>one of these problems should ever be solved by forcing some selective non-standard behaviour on the internet.
Who said they should? They could instead rely on *standard* behavior, and remove all the extra code required to cater to IE's incompatible-by-design idiosyncrasies. There's probably a mountain of it.
It sounds like they're talking about color-coded monochrome icons, which might actually be an improvement over arbitrarily colored ones. Maybe. I'll reserve judgement until I see at least some proper mockups, though I can't say I'm super hopeful.
They starve to death and cease being a problem? If a person has the means to survive and chooses a drug-addled death instead, I don't see how that's anyone else's business. These sorts of programs are generally conceived to alleviate the gross inequalities of capitalism and bad luck, not make unfortunate adults into wards of the state who are denied the right to exercise free will. And I would imagine that begging would become *far* less effective (and thus appealing) when everyone knows that you had plenty of money for food and shelter but chose to blow it all on other things instead.
There's also already a range of voluntary boarding homes available for people incapable of taking care of themselves - an honest one would automatically deduct food and housing expenses from your monthly stipend on the day it was deposited and leave the rest of your money alone, or dole it out as a daily or weekly allowance to avoid major shortage problems toward the end of the month.
For kids - free meals at school is an extremely effective solution once they reach school age. Infants and toddlers are a trickier problem, but one that can fairly effectively be attacked from the opposite end of the age spectrum by making free birth control available to everyone - in my experience most junkies don't actually want kids, they just can't be bothered to avoid them. So, free IUDs or implants for women, and free Vasogel or similar for men (once it's approved) - you don't want to use something that they can easily mess up, nor anything permanent that they might choose to avoid. That also has the added benefit of largely preventing children from being born with drug-related problems.
Yep. Behold the power of institutional inertia.
There was a brief window in which it could have changed - but unless a large percentage of institutions made the switch, you would still need to train every new employee. "Everyone" learns MS Office in school. If they went to college they probably learned how to do more advanced things... also in MS Office. If they worked somewhere else they probably also learned how to do more domain-specific tasks...in MSOffice.
That's the problem with someone having a near-monopoly in a common tool - everyone gets used to being lazy and only learning program-specific processes rather than general procedures, and anyone who chooses to depart the captive ecosystem has to be willing to shoulder the burden of reeducating their employees.
PDF is intentionally designed to work only for non-modifiable documents (and simple forms)
Man, I didn't even realize Hillary was running in the 90s!
Network neutrality has a much older pedigree than any one particular bill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's where the term oligopoly comes in - a small handful of companies that control a market and conspire to reap the benefits of a monopoly.
As for the problem - I agree. Most regulations are required, in principle, as they are enacted as a direct response to abuses that already existed at the time. Sadly, when the companies being regulated can legally buy off the regulators (it's not a bribery if you call it lobbying and campaign contributions, right?) the regulations do tend to be sculpted to be as lax as possible, while also being as expensive as possible for small competitors to comply with.
I don't really see a solution, but simply repealing the regulations generally seems like a very bad idea, as it simply gives the green light to go back to committing whatever malfeasance demanded the regulation in the first place. It would probably help quite a bit if executives and stockholders were held personally responsible for the malfeasance of their company - but that seems extremely unlikely to happen any time soon.
I think you may be redefining terms - what you describe as the distinction between a free market and a fair market sounds an awful lot like the distinction between an unregulated market and a free market.