Actually it's worse than that - lead is a particularly insidious poison: it not only reduces intelligence, it also reduces impulse control while increasing aggression. It's practically tailor-made to create criminals.
The Fair Tax Act (H.R. 25/S. 18) would apply a tax, once, at the point of purchase on all new goods and services for personal consumption. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to all family households of lawful U.S. residents as an advance rebate, or "prebate", of tax on purchases up to the poverty level
So it's a flat consumer sales tax (suggested to be introduced at 23%), with a monthly "tax rebate" check So that you get a net rebate until you reach "poverty level spending", at which point you pay net 0 tax, and begin paying net tax above that point.
Because $40k/yr is still chump change, barely middle class, and you're probably not investing much. What happens when you go beyond that - how does it treat the upper classes compared to the middle class? What happens when you make $300M per year? You're almost certainly investing the lion's share of your income rather than spending it - and you pay no tax whatsoever on that portion of your income - only on what you spend for personal consumption. And so you're spending a far smaller percentage of your income paying taxes. That makes it regressive - the rich pay a lower effective tax rate than the poor, facilitating wealth concentration.
I'll freely admit though that I like how your plan would work within the lower and middle classes - though it's worth mentioning that what you're describing is NOT what the Fair Tax proposes: You don't get a ~12K "prebate", you get a prebate on your first 12K of spending (or whatever the poverty level "spending allowance" for your household size is (~12k for someone single, and ~4k for each additional individual) - so $12K*30%tax rate, or $3.6k. And your spouse, child, feeble parent, etc. in your household only get you an additional $4k*0.3 = $1.2k each) You're receiving a net rebate until you hit the poverty line, at which point you pay 0% net tax, and for every dollar you spend beyond that you pay the full tax rate. At $40k you're paying [(40-12)*.3]/40 = 21% net tax rate. (http://waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/Americans_For_Fair_Taxation_10.pdf - see the prebate table on page 2, which is even less as it's showing the initial 23% rate)
Not even slightly. Nowhere did I say that the stock should belong to the government. It should belong to you, me, every citizen equally, and directly. We can't sell it, but we can vote it, and we collect any dividends paid. The government's only involvement is to enforce the initial contract: you want society to collectively grant you the artificial advantages and protection afforded by a corporation or other power-concentrating tool? Then you must purchase that right by giving all of society, individually, a perpetual ownership stake in it.
I'm generally opposed to the concentration of power on the grounds that outsized power is inevitably abused. Be that in governments or corporations - in fact I think one of the most worthy purposes of a democratic government should be to limit the concentration of power in other institutions.
The "fair tax" is a regressive tax though, taking a higher proportion of income from the poor than the rich, for the simple reason that the poor spend more of their money than the rich (who can afford to invest much of it instead). And as such, it is hardly what most people would consider "fair".
>People need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. Depriving them of that need is part of the current economic problem, and giving them free money does nothing to fix that.
I think you've missed something important. As you say, people need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. You can't deprive them of that need - it's inherent. All you can deprive them of is the additional motivation of the fear of starvation and homelessness.
And there's always work to be done - it's just that there's nobody willing to pay for much of it to get done. But if you have a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands, and a lot of work that needs doing that nobody is willing to pay for, but many will appreciate, then you have ample opportunity for people to do meaningful work that will be appreciated.
It's eminently feasible - We're currently producing X amount of real wealth (goods and services, not money) and distributing it among Y people without trouble. If technology changes so that far less labor is required to produce the same amount of wealth, that doesn't inherently change anything - you can still distribute the wealth in the exact same way without any physical problems.
If you're accustomed to thinking in terms of wealth in terms of money, payed in exchange for man-hours of labor, then if technology lets you produce 10x the real wealth per man-hour, then that hour is now worth 10x as much if it's paid in terms of value created. So, let everyone work 4 hours a week instead of 40 and get the same paycheck. The economy continues as it has, except everyone has a lot more free time on their hands to enjoy what they're buying.
Alternately you could pay one person 10x as much, and let the other 90% eat cake. That has a problem though, even if you can handle the riots to your satisfaction - because now there's only 1/10th as many people with money to spend on buying your goods, and odds are very good they're not going to buy10x as many things - in general, the more money people have, the more they invest. Say they buy 5x as much - now your factories only need to build half as many widgets, so you lay off half your workers. And so the number of people with money to spend halves, so you halve production again... And the whole time, the income of the investors is crumbling.
It's a vicious downward spiral that demonstrates the fundamental truth that jobs are created by consumers, not investors. The wealth of the top is sustained by the spending of the masses, any serious disruption of that can bring the entire house of cards falling down.
As for the masses being dependent on the few giving them money - why? Make them investors instead, up front. It's not like the few are inherently worthy of the wealth they lucked into - for the most part if they had been switched at birth it would be someone else sitting in their position now. They don't also don't generate any wealth themselves - investing only leverages wealth - the wealth is always ultimately created by the laborers - if your hard work made it possible for the company to amass enough wealth to automate away most the jobs, why shouldn't you own a share of that new equipment?
One mechanism I like to implement such a thing is to require that X% of the stock of all corporations or other such liability limiting/wealth concentrating legal tools always automatically and irrevocably belongs to the country's citizens, with control distributed equally, as just part of the cost of being able to hide behind legal fictions when shit hits the fan (it would also greatly discourage the use of shell corporations to dodge liability, as every shell would cost you another X% of asset dilution)
Firstly, The vast majority of UBI experiments have not shown any definite evidence of discouraging work, except among individuals who opt into training to improve future prospects, or start their own business.
Secondly, SIME/DIME were NOT UBI experiments in the sense generally discussed as such: From the overview of the Final Report: (https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/overview-final-report-seattle-denver-income-maintenance-experiment)
The cash transfer treatment tested in SIME/DIME, as in the previous income maintenance experiments, consisted of a series of negative income tax plans. A negative income tax is simply a cash transfer program in which there is (a) a maximum benefit (called the guarantee) for which a family is eligible if it has no other income and (b) a rate (called the benefit reduction or tax rate) at which the maximum benefit is reduced as other income rises.
So basically,they clawed back a substantial amount of every additional dollar recipients earned - to the tune of 50-80% if I'm reading correctly. That's not a UBI, that's just a welfare program with a slightly gentler benefit cliff, from which one would reasonably expect a reduced but still appreciable disincentive to work.
Generally UBI programs mean you receive some sort of regular social dividend payment regardless of your situation, and never lose it, except through normal taxes on other income, which are generally conceived to not completely neutralize the UBI until somewhere around the point where you're entering the middle class.
The difference is important for two related reasons: the extremity of the reduction in incentive to work (How hard would *you* bust your ass and take the sort of shit you're likely to get in a low-wage job, if an 80% benefit reduction meant you were effectively only getting paid $1.60/hour instead of $8 ($13/day instead of $64), as well as the strong incentive provided to hide income where possible, in order to maintain benefits earning while earning real money, but corrupting the experimental data in the process, since you're reporting less work than you're actually doing.
You make some decent points, but I feel compelled to call you out on this one:
>But more importantly if I say I want to be paid for you to listen to my music then that's my inherent right. You don't have a right to listen to it.
No. Absolutely false. Once you release your music so that anyone else can hear it, sharing that music becomes their inherent right - the right to share information predates even the existence of language.
The only thing that stops them is copyright law - a completely artificial legal monopoly granted to you, that artificially restricts their inherent rights to share information. That's granted as a social compromise designed to encourage the creation of more content, but you have absolutely no inherent right to expect it. The only inherent right you have is to either never create the music in the first place, or to never share it with anyone else.
>If the Fire Department didn't pay for the service they require then they don't deserve any better.
But they did - they paid for an unlimited data connection at the speeds needed. The ISP then failed to deliver, meaning they engaged in false advertising, and that's *their* fault, not the fire department's. If they want to sell throttled plans then they need to sell them *as* throttled plans - fraudulent marketing is NOT compatible with a healthy capitalist system.
*Life* is Russian roulette - and there's no such thing as a safe *anything*. All safety procedures exist only to lower the risks, not eliminate them.
If SpaceX can get 21 missions before a disaster, that's not actually that bad - NASA only managed 24 before the Challenger exploded, And another 88 before the Columbia followed suite.
Meanwhile, the actual launch statistics, the Falcon 9 has almost half as many missions under it's belt as the Shuttle (60 versus 135) and has had two explosions, on launch 19 which exploded a couple minutes into the flight, and launch 29, which exposed the carbon-fiber tank issues while still on the pad. Superficially less impressive, but they've also been experimenting with new hardware and software on almost every flight - a luxury afforded them by the use of unmanned rockets, and the Dragon emergency escape system should have handled both disasters without trouble had they been manned. Now that the F9 is mature and not receiving any more experimental updates, it's reasonable to expect that the reliability should become more predictable.
As for the Falcon Heavy, my understanding is that they weren't aiming for a specific orbit, so much as the most impressive capability demonstration they could manage - they flew the very first prototype of the Falcon Heavy through some of the most intense radiation belts around our planet, and then spent everything they had left to get the most impressive trajectory they could manage - they had a rough trajectory planned, but no specific destination, and just poured on as much delta-V as they could manage.
And when we get to >We can't afford to be trapped on this badly degraded mudball any longer than necessary. I hate to break it to you - but barring some altogether new science fiction technology, we're probably trapped here forever. Even if we degrade this planet to a toxic cesspool nearly devoid of life there's still nowhere else to go that's even half as hospitable. And even if there were, there's no way to get any significant fraction of people off the planet. We'd need a fleet of 3,600 BFR's carrying 100 people each, all launching once a day, every day, just to keep up with the birth rate. Double that, and it would still take tens of thousands of years to evacuate the Earth.
Like it or not, we're stuck here for the duration and it behooves us to make the best of it. Space exploration, travel, and colonization offer wonderful long-term potential for our species - but it's a potential that's unlikely to ever matter to more than a tiny handful of people born on Earth. And anyone currently alive is probably going to be too old to participate by the time things start really picking up. (I do nurture a hope that there'll be some demand for old codgers willing to cut their meager remaining life expectancy in half in order to help lay the foundations for future space-based civilizations, but then I grew up on the romance of golden-age science fiction.)
Rocket fuel is usually just kerosene or methane - they have a pretty decent energy density, but not really that much greater than fat, though a couple times greater than sugar or protein.. Now, all the water in those astronauts is going to slow things down a bit, but dry 'em out and powder them first to aid efficient combustion, and they should work just fine.
Disaster fuels are a whole different pithos of problems - you don't care so much about energy density there as you do about instability - TNT and gunpowder, to name a few of the tamer kinds, are both several times less energy dense than butter, but they're chemically unstable and contain their own oxidizers in the mix, so you really just have to get the ball rolling and they take care of the rest. Including a pre-mixed oxidizer is key for a good disaster fuel - you really don't want available airflow to restrict your disaster to just a jet of flame - that's no disaster, just a good excuse for an impromptu marshmallow roasting party. Chemical instability is also important - an explosion is nice and all, but if you're expecting it it's not such a big deal, just make sure you're out of the way first. No, a proper disaster fuel needs to be likely to go off with no warning, preferably do to some minor agitation such as heating from a stray sunbeam reflected from someone's watch, or the vibrations of a mosquito landing on the same table. Heck, some of them will work so well you'll be doing good to get them out of the production facility before they explode. Now *that's* a disaster fuel.
I don't know that they have, but a couple considerations that occur to me:
- How do you get the foam off during launch? It has to be skin tight, at least at the ends, or it'll just act as a big chimney creating a draft that accelerates the warming. And if any of it gets snagged on the rocket, it'll introduce aerodynamic instabilities
- As the rocket takes off, that whole tower of foam will be melted, incinerated and/or blown apart by the rocket plume, which could create serious hazards and cleanup efforts (the fumes from burning foam are generally quite toxic, unlike those from kerosene or methane (aka rocket fuel) )
- Building a 23-storey hollow foam tower is a serious engineering challenge in its own right, and it's likely to get quite expensive to build a new one for every launch.
- It wouldn't have helped keep ice from forming on the tanks - the tanks are *inside* the rocket, and the ice is formed from liquid/vapor that is likewise inside the rocket - nothing outside the rocket will help with that.
Finally, to mangle an old saying about fishing nets - foam insulation is a bunch of holes glued together with plastic - it's not exactly super heavy stuff to begin with, and can even be made lighter than air while maintaining impressive strength (as in the case of many aerogels). It's primary job is to thoroughly prevent air circulation, and it need only be strong enough to support its own mass against the stresses of launch.
It was an old bridge (circa '67), with lots of other problems too - including the fact that traffic had quadrupled since it was designed. Engineers have been expressing concerns since the 90s. And witnesses say it was also struck by lightning just before collapsing. So it wasn't a simple matter of just corrosion-weakened cables.
But yes, if it was only over-engineered by 20% it would have collapsed decades ago.
It's been a lot of years since engineering school, but I seem to recall the recommended safety margins for most things were 100%-500%, so yes, a 20% weakening causing collapse would be a symptom of serious under-engineering.
However, Wikipedia says this bridge is 51 years old, and that engineers have been expressing concern over its safety since the early 90s, with numerous other static and dynamic weaknesses being uncovered over the years, due to both degredation, and weakness in available computer modeling in the 60s.
Apparently traffic has quadrupled since it was built as well, so it's probably been under a lot more stress than it was really designed for. And to top it all off, eye witnesses say it was struck by lightning just before the collapse - and I would imagine conducting that kind of amperage (~30kA typical) could heat a cable enough to weaken it considerably. You'd think good engineering would factor in lightning strikes on a tall bridge like this, and they probably did, but it was probably just one stress too many on an old bridge.
>Not being fit allows you to stay in space longer with less negative consequences.
I'm not sure that follows. It makes sense that the more (now mostly unused) muscle mass you have, the faster you'll lose it. But as you lose it you become less fit, and the rate of loss will presumably slow down,eventually reaching the levels of the originally unfit person you now resemble. So essentially being fit would buy you more time up front, and thus more total time, before your body degrades to the point that returning to Earth becomes dangerous.
Though, on the other hand it may depend on how they're defining fitness - if you take two people with the same muscle mass, but one person is significantly overweight, then it makes sense that the fat person's muscles will deteriorate more slowly, since they're getting more exercise moving their greater inertia around in microgravity.
Though I suppose there may be other, more subtle biological effects at work as well.
Depends on the fire, and the person trapped there.
Though it would certainly be nice to accompany it with an explicit "Hold your breath. This area is being temporarily de-oxygenated" warning. Should only take a few seconds of oxygen-free (or low) atmosphere to put out the fire, and several more to let the fuel cool below the flash point, especially if the incoming air is chilled. Most species should be able to hold their breath that long easily - and if not, or if someone keeps breathing anyway, humans at least can breathe for a minute or so in an oxygen-free environment without permanent damage, though they'll fall unconscious much faster than that.
That probably shouldn't take long - between radiant cooling, conduction into bulkheads, and convection into the deoxygenated air, there's lots of cooling going on. Plus, fire suppression probably kicks on quickly, so that the fire is still only consuming the surface and will cool quickly.
Plus there's the fact that just because things are burning, doesn't mean that they're hot enough to spontaneously combust - take away the point heat source of an open flame and the fuel itself is probably far too cool to reignite on it's own. You see that with campfires all the time - even a long burning log filled with glowing embers gets caught in a gust of wind that blows out the flames, and it won't reignite until you bring it close enough to other flames for the added heat to start igniting the vaporizing gasses again
Of course, as a quick-response fire suppression system, I would think flooding the area with nitrogen/co2/whatever to flush out the oxygen would be far more effective - you don't want to let a small fire burn long enough to use up the oxygen itself, a whole lot of damage could be done before it goes out. Though I suppose you might not want to risk sucking a gaseous fuel and oxygen mixture into the venting ducts.
>I wonder who got the idea that it was a nice approach at large...
I'm guessing it involved a lobbyist tied to the military-industrial complex. Sounds like a great way to subsidize those poor starving bomb makers when there aren't enough wars going on.
I mean seriously - what sort of bone head would think this was a good idea in general? Bombs (especially guided ones) are fracking expensive, and do a massive amount of damage at the point of impact. How many water-tanker planes could you dump for the cost of one bombing run? And you do want the forest to recover quickly afterwards, right?
And when you're investing, you're not spending a large chunk of your life for that money. Why should a supposedly democratic country have a tax system that explicitly encourages wealth concentration by taxing capitalists less than labor?
Is there something in the article that makes you assume there's an addition in there? My gut expectation would be that, like several other such laws around the country in various service industries such as table-waiting, that this would protect against being paid less than minimum wage. i.e. if $0.x/mile for a fare works out to less than minimum wage, they still have to pay at least minimum wage, but if it works out to more, then they just pay mileage.
Not according to F.D.R., the president who helped establish a federal minimum wage in the first place:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
“By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
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Actually it's worse than that - lead is a particularly insidious poison: it not only reduces intelligence, it also reduces impulse control while increasing aggression. It's practically tailor-made to create criminals.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Fair Tax Act (H.R. 25/S. 18) would apply a tax, once, at the point of purchase on all new goods and services for personal consumption. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to all family households of lawful U.S. residents as an advance rebate, or "prebate", of tax on purchases up to the poverty level
So it's a flat consumer sales tax (suggested to be introduced at 23%), with a monthly "tax rebate" check So that you get a net rebate until you reach "poverty level spending", at which point you pay net 0 tax, and begin paying net tax above that point.
Because $40k/yr is still chump change, barely middle class, and you're probably not investing much. What happens when you go beyond that - how does it treat the upper classes compared to the middle class? What happens when you make $300M per year? You're almost certainly investing the lion's share of your income rather than spending it - and you pay no tax whatsoever on that portion of your income - only on what you spend for personal consumption. And so you're spending a far smaller percentage of your income paying taxes. That makes it regressive - the rich pay a lower effective tax rate than the poor, facilitating wealth concentration.
I'll freely admit though that I like how your plan would work within the lower and middle classes - though it's worth mentioning that what you're describing is NOT what the Fair Tax proposes: You don't get a ~12K "prebate", you get a prebate on your first 12K of spending (or whatever the poverty level "spending allowance" for your household size is (~12k for someone single, and ~4k for each additional individual) - so $12K*30%tax rate, or $3.6k. And your spouse, child, feeble parent, etc. in your household only get you an additional $4k*0.3 = $1.2k each) You're receiving a net rebate until you hit the poverty line, at which point you pay 0% net tax, and for every dollar you spend beyond that you pay the full tax rate. At $40k you're paying [(40-12)*.3]/40 = 21% net tax rate. (http://waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/Americans_For_Fair_Taxation_10.pdf - see the prebate table on page 2, which is even less as it's showing the initial 23% rate)
Not even slightly. Nowhere did I say that the stock should belong to the government. It should belong to you, me, every citizen equally, and directly. We can't sell it, but we can vote it, and we collect any dividends paid. The government's only involvement is to enforce the initial contract: you want society to collectively grant you the artificial advantages and protection afforded by a corporation or other power-concentrating tool? Then you must purchase that right by giving all of society, individually, a perpetual ownership stake in it.
I'm generally opposed to the concentration of power on the grounds that outsized power is inevitably abused. Be that in governments or corporations - in fact I think one of the most worthy purposes of a democratic government should be to limit the concentration of power in other institutions.
The "fair tax" is a regressive tax though, taking a higher proportion of income from the poor than the rich, for the simple reason that the poor spend more of their money than the rich (who can afford to invest much of it instead). And as such, it is hardly what most people would consider "fair".
>People need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. Depriving them of that need is part of the current economic problem, and giving them free money does nothing to fix that.
I think you've missed something important. As you say, people need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. You can't deprive them of that need - it's inherent. All you can deprive them of is the additional motivation of the fear of starvation and homelessness.
And there's always work to be done - it's just that there's nobody willing to pay for much of it to get done. But if you have a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands, and a lot of work that needs doing that nobody is willing to pay for, but many will appreciate, then you have ample opportunity for people to do meaningful work that will be appreciated.
It's eminently feasible - We're currently producing X amount of real wealth (goods and services, not money) and distributing it among Y people without trouble. If technology changes so that far less labor is required to produce the same amount of wealth, that doesn't inherently change anything - you can still distribute the wealth in the exact same way without any physical problems.
If you're accustomed to thinking in terms of wealth in terms of money, payed in exchange for man-hours of labor, then if technology lets you produce 10x the real wealth per man-hour, then that hour is now worth 10x as much if it's paid in terms of value created. So, let everyone work 4 hours a week instead of 40 and get the same paycheck. The economy continues as it has, except everyone has a lot more free time on their hands to enjoy what they're buying.
Alternately you could pay one person 10x as much, and let the other 90% eat cake. That has a problem though, even if you can handle the riots to your satisfaction - because now there's only 1/10th as many people with money to spend on buying your goods, and odds are very good they're not going to buy10x as many things - in general, the more money people have, the more they invest. Say they buy 5x as much - now your factories only need to build half as many widgets, so you lay off half your workers. And so the number of people with money to spend halves, so you halve production again... And the whole time, the income of the investors is crumbling.
It's a vicious downward spiral that demonstrates the fundamental truth that jobs are created by consumers, not investors. The wealth of the top is sustained by the spending of the masses, any serious disruption of that can bring the entire house of cards falling down.
As for the masses being dependent on the few giving them money - why? Make them investors instead, up front. It's not like the few are inherently worthy of the wealth they lucked into - for the most part if they had been switched at birth it would be someone else sitting in their position now. They don't also don't generate any wealth themselves - investing only leverages wealth - the wealth is always ultimately created by the laborers - if your hard work made it possible for the company to amass enough wealth to automate away most the jobs, why shouldn't you own a share of that new equipment?
One mechanism I like to implement such a thing is to require that X% of the stock of all corporations or other such liability limiting/wealth concentrating legal tools always automatically and irrevocably belongs to the country's citizens, with control distributed equally, as just part of the cost of being able to hide behind legal fictions when shit hits the fan (it would also greatly discourage the use of shell corporations to dodge liability, as every shell would cost you another X% of asset dilution)
Firstly, The vast majority of UBI experiments have not shown any definite evidence of discouraging work, except among individuals who opt into training to improve future prospects, or start their own business.
Secondly, SIME/DIME were NOT UBI experiments in the sense generally discussed as such:
From the overview of the Final Report: (https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/overview-final-report-seattle-denver-income-maintenance-experiment)
The cash transfer treatment tested in SIME/DIME, as in the previous income maintenance experiments, consisted of a series of negative income tax plans. A negative income tax is simply a cash transfer program in which there is (a) a maximum benefit (called the guarantee) for which a family is eligible if it has no other income and (b) a rate (called the benefit reduction or tax rate) at which the maximum benefit is reduced as other income rises.
So basically,they clawed back a substantial amount of every additional dollar recipients earned - to the tune of 50-80% if I'm reading correctly. That's not a UBI, that's just a welfare program with a slightly gentler benefit cliff, from which one would reasonably expect a reduced but still appreciable disincentive to work.
Generally UBI programs mean you receive some sort of regular social dividend payment regardless of your situation, and never lose it, except through normal taxes on other income, which are generally conceived to not completely neutralize the UBI until somewhere around the point where you're entering the middle class.
The difference is important for two related reasons: the extremity of the reduction in incentive to work (How hard would *you* bust your ass and take the sort of shit you're likely to get in a low-wage job, if an 80% benefit reduction meant you were effectively only getting paid $1.60/hour instead of $8 ($13/day instead of $64), as well as the strong incentive provided to hide income where possible, in order to maintain benefits earning while earning real money, but corrupting the experimental data in the process, since you're reporting less work than you're actually doing.
You make some decent points, but I feel compelled to call you out on this one:
>But more importantly if I say I want to be paid for you to listen to my music then that's my inherent right. You don't have a right to listen to it.
No. Absolutely false. Once you release your music so that anyone else can hear it, sharing that music becomes their inherent right - the right to share information predates even the existence of language.
The only thing that stops them is copyright law - a completely artificial legal monopoly granted to you, that artificially restricts their inherent rights to share information. That's granted as a social compromise designed to encourage the creation of more content, but you have absolutely no inherent right to expect it. The only inherent right you have is to either never create the music in the first place, or to never share it with anyone else.
>If the Fire Department didn't pay for the service they require then they don't deserve any better.
But they did - they paid for an unlimited data connection at the speeds needed. The ISP then failed to deliver, meaning they engaged in false advertising, and that's *their* fault, not the fire department's. If they want to sell throttled plans then they need to sell them *as* throttled plans - fraudulent marketing is NOT compatible with a healthy capitalist system.
*Life* is Russian roulette - and there's no such thing as a safe *anything*. All safety procedures exist only to lower the risks, not eliminate them.
If SpaceX can get 21 missions before a disaster, that's not actually that bad - NASA only managed 24 before the Challenger exploded, And another 88 before the Columbia followed suite.
Meanwhile, the actual launch statistics, the Falcon 9 has almost half as many missions under it's belt as the Shuttle (60 versus 135) and has had two explosions, on launch 19 which exploded a couple minutes into the flight, and launch 29, which exposed the carbon-fiber tank issues while still on the pad. Superficially less impressive, but they've also been experimenting with new hardware and software on almost every flight - a luxury afforded them by the use of unmanned rockets, and the Dragon emergency escape system should have handled both disasters without trouble had they been manned. Now that the F9 is mature and not receiving any more experimental updates, it's reasonable to expect that the reliability should become more predictable.
As for the Falcon Heavy, my understanding is that they weren't aiming for a specific orbit, so much as the most impressive capability demonstration they could manage - they flew the very first prototype of the Falcon Heavy through some of the most intense radiation belts around our planet, and then spent everything they had left to get the most impressive trajectory they could manage - they had a rough trajectory planned, but no specific destination, and just poured on as much delta-V as they could manage.
And when we get to
>We can't afford to be trapped on this badly degraded mudball any longer than necessary.
I hate to break it to you - but barring some altogether new science fiction technology, we're probably trapped here forever. Even if we degrade this planet to a toxic cesspool nearly devoid of life there's still nowhere else to go that's even half as hospitable. And even if there were, there's no way to get any significant fraction of people off the planet. We'd need a fleet of 3,600 BFR's carrying 100 people each, all launching once a day, every day, just to keep up with the birth rate. Double that, and it would still take tens of thousands of years to evacuate the Earth.
Like it or not, we're stuck here for the duration and it behooves us to make the best of it. Space exploration, travel, and colonization offer wonderful long-term potential for our species - but it's a potential that's unlikely to ever matter to more than a tiny handful of people born on Earth. And anyone currently alive is probably going to be too old to participate by the time things start really picking up. (I do nurture a hope that there'll be some demand for old codgers willing to cut their meager remaining life expectancy in half in order to help lay the foundations for future space-based civilizations, but then I grew up on the romance of golden-age science fiction.)
Rocket fuel is usually just kerosene or methane - they have a pretty decent energy density, but not really that much greater than fat, though a couple times greater than sugar or protein.. Now, all the water in those astronauts is going to slow things down a bit, but dry 'em out and powder them first to aid efficient combustion, and they should work just fine.
Disaster fuels are a whole different pithos of problems - you don't care so much about energy density there as you do about instability - TNT and gunpowder, to name a few of the tamer kinds, are both several times less energy dense than butter, but they're chemically unstable and contain their own oxidizers in the mix, so you really just have to get the ball rolling and they take care of the rest. Including a pre-mixed oxidizer is key for a good disaster fuel - you really don't want available airflow to restrict your disaster to just a jet of flame - that's no disaster, just a good excuse for an impromptu marshmallow roasting party. Chemical instability is also important - an explosion is nice and all, but if you're expecting it it's not such a big deal, just make sure you're out of the way first. No, a proper disaster fuel needs to be likely to go off with no warning, preferably do to some minor agitation such as heating from a stray sunbeam reflected from someone's watch, or the vibrations of a mosquito landing on the same table. Heck, some of them will work so well you'll be doing good to get them out of the production facility before they explode. Now *that's* a disaster fuel.
I don't know that they have, but a couple considerations that occur to me:
- How do you get the foam off during launch? It has to be skin tight, at least at the ends, or it'll just act as a big chimney creating a draft that accelerates the warming. And if any of it gets snagged on the rocket, it'll introduce aerodynamic instabilities
- As the rocket takes off, that whole tower of foam will be melted, incinerated and/or blown apart by the rocket plume, which could create serious hazards and cleanup efforts (the fumes from burning foam are generally quite toxic, unlike those from kerosene or methane (aka rocket fuel) )
- Building a 23-storey hollow foam tower is a serious engineering challenge in its own right, and it's likely to get quite expensive to build a new one for every launch.
- It wouldn't have helped keep ice from forming on the tanks - the tanks are *inside* the rocket, and the ice is formed from liquid/vapor that is likewise inside the rocket - nothing outside the rocket will help with that.
Finally, to mangle an old saying about fishing nets - foam insulation is a bunch of holes glued together with plastic - it's not exactly super heavy stuff to begin with, and can even be made lighter than air while maintaining impressive strength (as in the case of many aerogels). It's primary job is to thoroughly prevent air circulation, and it need only be strong enough to support its own mass against the stresses of launch.
Or football. ....wait. I think I just reinforced their point.
It was an old bridge (circa '67), with lots of other problems too - including the fact that traffic had quadrupled since it was designed. Engineers have been expressing concerns since the 90s. And witnesses say it was also struck by lightning just before collapsing. So it wasn't a simple matter of just corrosion-weakened cables.
But yes, if it was only over-engineered by 20% it would have collapsed decades ago.
It's been a lot of years since engineering school, but I seem to recall the recommended safety margins for most things were 100%-500%, so yes, a 20% weakening causing collapse would be a symptom of serious under-engineering.
However, Wikipedia says this bridge is 51 years old, and that engineers have been expressing concern over its safety since the early 90s, with numerous other static and dynamic weaknesses being uncovered over the years, due to both degredation, and weakness in available computer modeling in the 60s.
Apparently traffic has quadrupled since it was built as well, so it's probably been under a lot more stress than it was really designed for. And to top it all off, eye witnesses say it was struck by lightning just before the collapse - and I would imagine conducting that kind of amperage (~30kA typical) could heat a cable enough to weaken it considerably. You'd think good engineering would factor in lightning strikes on a tall bridge like this, and they probably did, but it was probably just one stress too many on an old bridge.
>Not being fit allows you to stay in space longer with less negative consequences.
I'm not sure that follows. It makes sense that the more (now mostly unused) muscle mass you have, the faster you'll lose it. But as you lose it you become less fit, and the rate of loss will presumably slow down,eventually reaching the levels of the originally unfit person you now resemble. So essentially being fit would buy you more time up front, and thus more total time, before your body degrades to the point that returning to Earth becomes dangerous.
Though, on the other hand it may depend on how they're defining fitness - if you take two people with the same muscle mass, but one person is significantly overweight, then it makes sense that the fat person's muscles will deteriorate more slowly, since they're getting more exercise moving their greater inertia around in microgravity.
Though I suppose there may be other, more subtle biological effects at work as well.
Depends on the fire, and the person trapped there.
Though it would certainly be nice to accompany it with an explicit "Hold your breath. This area is being temporarily de-oxygenated" warning. Should only take a few seconds of oxygen-free (or low) atmosphere to put out the fire, and several more to let the fuel cool below the flash point, especially if the incoming air is chilled. Most species should be able to hold their breath that long easily - and if not, or if someone keeps breathing anyway, humans at least can breathe for a minute or so in an oxygen-free environment without permanent damage, though they'll fall unconscious much faster than that.
That probably shouldn't take long - between radiant cooling, conduction into bulkheads, and convection into the deoxygenated air, there's lots of cooling going on. Plus, fire suppression probably kicks on quickly, so that the fire is still only consuming the surface and will cool quickly.
Plus there's the fact that just because things are burning, doesn't mean that they're hot enough to spontaneously combust - take away the point heat source of an open flame and the fuel itself is probably far too cool to reignite on it's own. You see that with campfires all the time - even a long burning log filled with glowing embers gets caught in a gust of wind that blows out the flames, and it won't reignite until you bring it close enough to other flames for the added heat to start igniting the vaporizing gasses again
Of course, as a quick-response fire suppression system, I would think flooding the area with nitrogen/co2/whatever to flush out the oxygen would be far more effective - you don't want to let a small fire burn long enough to use up the oxygen itself, a whole lot of damage could be done before it goes out. Though I suppose you might not want to risk sucking a gaseous fuel and oxygen mixture into the venting ducts.
>I wonder who got the idea that it was a nice approach at large...
I'm guessing it involved a lobbyist tied to the military-industrial complex. Sounds like a great way to subsidize those poor starving bomb makers when there aren't enough wars going on.
I mean seriously - what sort of bone head would think this was a good idea in general? Bombs (especially guided ones) are fracking expensive, and do a massive amount of damage at the point of impact. How many water-tanker planes could you dump for the cost of one bombing run? And you do want the forest to recover quickly afterwards, right?
Sure. You also need to have labor. So why should capital get preferential treatment?
And when you're investing, you're not spending a large chunk of your life for that money. Why should a supposedly democratic country have a tax system that explicitly encourages wealth concentration by taxing capitalists less than labor?
Is there something in the article that makes you assume there's an addition in there? My gut expectation would be that, like several other such laws around the country in various service industries such as table-waiting, that this would protect against being paid less than minimum wage. i.e. if $0.x/mile for a fare works out to less than minimum wage, they still have to pay at least minimum wage, but if it works out to more, then they just pay mileage.
Not according to F.D.R., the president who helped establish a federal minimum wage in the first place:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
“By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
The better question might be - why are you expecting to get paid when working for a Russian pseudonym?