You're talking about student loan debt. There's no debt with ISA - just an agreement to pay x% of your income for y years, and then you're free. If that's 20% for 10 years, and you're making $10k/year for all that time, then they get $2k * 10 years = $20k. If you're making $100k, then they $200k over the same 10 years.
The more you profit, the more they profit. And either way, in year 11 you're free of any further obligation.
Again *there is no loan* which means that *there is no interest*
You're thinking of existing student loans, where you incur a definite dollar-value debt, which must then be paid off, with interest - perhaps limited to x% of your income per year until such time as it's paid off, but if it takes you 80 years to pay it off, well then it sucks to be you.
That's not how ISA works. There is no loan. There is no principal to pay off. There's just you, getting a completely "free" education in exchange for paying X% of your future income for Y years after graduating. Can't find a decent job? Can only pay $10 per year toward your ISA obligation? It doesn't matter - you're still only on the hook for the same Y years you agreed to, and then you're free even if they only got a total of $100 from you.
>that's going to raise at least some flags with the telecom provider.
Why? I mean sure - they're going to know you're probably a robocall center, but what do they care? You're a nice tidy source of profits for them, they have no reason to shut you down. That's why there's pressure to try to pass a law requiring telephone companies to shut down robocall centers - because they have absolutely no economic incentive to do so.
Sorry, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know they should only be taken seriously when they prove that something is possible. They're entertainment, not science. The mirror shield episode was an excellent example of that - their failure was entirely due to incompetent implementation, rather than theoretical limitations. They had light-spots dancing all over that ship, while they should have all been focused on the same point - a computer-controlled solar concentrating array would have fried that boat like a bug under a magnifying glass - and a a sufficiently well-trained regiment of soldiers wouldn't have done much worse. Plus, as I recall they used flat mirrors, which is just another level of stupid.
Use a the right lens or concave mirror, and you can focus an image of virtually any desired size and distance (I'm unclear on exactly what the theoretical limitations are) - you just want to focus that image as small as possible at the desired distance.
Hmm, it seems like these are the relevant equations: 1/f = 1/do + 1/di , where: f = focal length, do = object distance, di = image distance and M = hi/ho = -di/do, where M = magnification, ho = height of the object, and hi = height of the image. With sun diameter = 696e6m at a distance of 150e9m
So it looks like you're stuck with a fixed magnification based on the relative distance to the object and the imaging plane (at least for a single-mirror configuration, it sounds like you may be able to get more impressive results with more complicated optics?). Put something 1000km away in orbit, with the sun 150e6km away, and you get a magnification of 6.7e-6, and the in-focus image of the sun would be 4.6 km across.
That's an in-focus image though - I'm not sure that's actually the plane of maximum light density. As a sanity check, the smallest possible image that could be created by kids burning wood at a distance of 10cm would be 0.5mm... that actually seems about right. (The Mythbusters boat in contrast, at a distance of 23m, could have focused that spot to about 10cm = 4" across. From 1km away, it would be 4.6m))
That's just the size of the image though - there's also the brightness to consider - and that depends purely on the size of the mirror. Use a 10km mirror, and the target area would be getting 4.7x more sun than at noon. Use a 100km mirror, and it would be receiving 472x. Of course there's a limit on how big you can make a mirror - the focal length determines the radius of curvature, and thus the maximum size, but you can get the same result with hundreds of smaller mirrors all focused on the same spot.
True, and that would be inconvenient. Most orbital services though could be delivered from high-altitude balloon instead - in many cases that would even be an improvement. And relatively unattractive extreme high orbits are unlikely to be affected, with the possible exception of geostationary. So as long as the cloud density is low enough for rockets to get through it, space will remain accessible. And you'd need many orders of magnitude more debris to exclude rockets that spend a few hours passing through, than to destroy satellites that remain in orbit until the timing synchronizes perfectly with some chunk of debris in an intersecting orbit.
Plus, LEO may clear relatively quickly - the smaller the debris, the faster air resistance deorbits is. Half the size means half the mass-to-area ratio, and thus twice the deceleration. The question would be how dense the "rain" from collisions in higher, otherwise stable orbits would be.
Besides, if orbit has been militarized to the point that a Kessler Syndrome scenario becomes a serious possibility, giving up civilian orbital benefits for a while to get rid of it might be a good trade. (non-military causes pretty much require a level of widespread carelessness that we're not seeing). Orbital weapons are kind of a nightmare scenario for people on the ground.
Poor snowflake, can't handle competing in the job market without the full unmitigated advantage of white privilege?
Seriously - the only place where white men are at a disadvantage is in companies whose current employee base is overwhelmingly white men, *and* who are hiring minorities as fast as possible to try to rectify that racist and sexist imbalance.
If they're predominantly white men and don't care (which is many) you still have a big advantage. And if they already have an equitable mix of races and genders - the only disadvantage you face is the fact that the minorities and women had to work a lot harder to get to the same point in their careers. And if you can't be bothered to work as hard as them, why should you expect to do as well?
The point is, with an ISA you've been loaned *nothing*. All they get is a percentage of your income - if they can't help you find a good job, they get x% of jack squat.
Of course, you could still run afoul of a crappy university that offers degrees in advanced slacking just to claim your income - but even they have incentive to at least get you good job placement so they get x% of a bigger number. Compare to modern scam universities like you mention, that get paid exactly the same amount no matter how little value they offer.
What exactly is the difference between an average student paying 20% of their income to an ISA, versus paying 20% of their income to a student debt?
Of course, it does mean that students that go into an above-average job pay more in total, while those below-average pay less, but even that is likely offset by the fact that you've got an experienced career-placement board doing everything they can to help you find a good job and negotiate as high a salary as possible, rather than just searching more or less aimlessly like so many graduates currently do. The increase in early-career salary is likely to continue boosting your salary for decades after the ISA has expired.
I think their idea was more like get paid 33k for 3 years, plus a 100k "loyalty bonus" at the end of that time, for a total of 200k, where they only have to pay the ISA on the 100k salary. Rather than being paid 66k/year for the same 200k total, but having to pay the ISA on the full amount. Lower the salary a bit so that the employee and employer split the ISA savings, and everybody wins. Except...
I really don't see such a thing catching on - firstly because the ISA agreement probably lasts at least 10+ years, so that's a *whole* lot of loyalty to get out from under it, all while not building social-security equity or being able to get a decent raise (which usually requires changing jobs). And secondly, after 9 years the company has a huge incentive to come up with some excuse to fire you or pressure you out rather than paying the loyalty bonus.
Why, exactly? Technology makes industry cheaper/more profitable, but there's not exactly much to automate in education to drive the cost down. Clerical overhead is about it, and that has never exactly been a a huge percentage of a college's operating expenses.
There's not much excuse for raising the price faster than inflation.
On the other hand, technology does allow *you* to lower the cost of your education substantially. Instead of taking real classes with feedback from professors and TAs, learn from the Khan academy and other free online courses (many of the big universities offer a wide selection of free online lectures), and then test out of the subject.
>Current student debt issuers would have the same incentive after all
Not even remotely. Get a degree and be totally unable to find a job, and you're expected to pay off your student loan just the same as if you were making $1M/year. The debt issuers would surely rather you got a job that let you pay them off in a timely fashion - but as you pointed out, their preferential treatment means they'll probably get paid eventually no matter what. They have nothing to gain if you get a great job versus a mediocre one, and very little to lose if you get a lousy one.
Also, they're not really in a position to actually help you get a good education, or a good job.
Contrast that to a university that gets say 10% of your paycheck for the next 10 years. Get a $20k job, they make $20k total. Get a $100k job, they get back $100k total. Fail to find a job, they get nothing. That's some potent incentive to make sure you're actually qualified for $100k job, and to use their resources and connections to help you actually get the job, and negotiate as high a salary as possible.
Especially valuable assistance for first generation college graduates, whose families are unlikely to have the connections or experience to effectively navigate the white-collar job market.
Indeed - there are many details to sort out. One possible compromise would be something like X% of your annual salary for the first Y years after graduation, per year of school. Graduate from a 4-year program, pay 4X%. Leave after 2 years, pay 2X%. Go on to a different graduate school - the Y-years counter doesn't start until you graduate from there.
Actually no - basic physics research gave us the knowledge that atomic weapons were possible - developing the weapons themselves took many more years and massively larger amounts of far more specialized and well-funded application-specific research.
Also, I'd say wiping out humanity would count as an "immeasurably (large) return". Not necessarily a *positive* one, but quite large.
You are talking orbital flak for the specific purpose of rendering an orbital shell unusable, which is an entirely different thing than shooting down a specific satellite. To destroy a satellite cleanly you want a relatively low payload weapon - something that's not going to send debris flying off at speeds anywhere near even a single km/s, and thus won't radically alter it's orbital trajectory. Leaving the debris cloud to slowly expand to fill a ring around the original satellite's orbit, restricted by the fact that every piece of debris must pass back through the point of explosion on every pass (neglecting aerobraking and gravitational pertubation)
But, sure, lets say you send up all that flak - there's really only two options: 1) you restrict it to a narrow range of altitudes, in which case if you get far enough above or below it and you're fine. Effective at taking out large groups of existing satellites, but not at general orbital denial.
2) the shrapnel isn't dense enough to cause frequent impacts with satellites. There are 238x10^15 cubic kilometers of space within the orbit of the moon. Put a billion tonnes of chaff into lower orbit than that, and the average density will be 4ug per cubic kilometer - or one smallish grain of sand per 2000 cubic kilometers. And for reference there's currently well under 50,000 tonnes of equipment in orbit (5000 satellites, the biggest of which are several tonnes, but most of which are small, plus 417 tonnes of ISS), which would be a grain of sand per 40,000,000 cubic kilometers
Satellites might need to start including armor plating and/or aerogel impact absorber as a standard feature to withstand the occasional impact, and the expected maintenance-free operating life might be shortened notably, but it wouldn't be a show-stopper.
And then there's the $10M question:
Why would a space power capable enough to comprehensively flak the entire orbital sphere, wish to do so? To deny a larger space power their advantage? If they're exploiting their advantage so ruthlessly that someone else is willing to shoot off their own foot to stop them, then maybe hitting the reset button and taking a hiatus for a few generations to reflect on what went wrong would be a good thing.
Are you sure about that minimum spot size? I'm not that well versed in optics, and not quite sure how to phrase the question to get google to offer a relevant answer. Most discussions seem to only consider point sources. It's an important detail for a lot of orbital technologies though, so I'd love to get a better handle on it if you can point me at anything useful.
Assuming you are right, there's still more than the total spot size to consider. There's the brightness distribution. Pretty much anyone who has ever burned things with a magnifying lens or mirror knows that you get both a large relatively dim spot, and a small, intensely bright spot. If I build a 10km diameter, tunably-concave space mirror, it'll be reflecting up to 82GW onto the surface, depending on it's alignment, and assuming the same atmospheric losses. Most of that may be diffuse, but if it can concentrate just 1% of that power onto a 1 hectare (2.5 acre) area, that'll be getting 8x the normal solar dosage - If it could deliver it to 1/10th that area, that'd be getting 82x.
So what determines peak light concentration from a concave mirror? It naively seems like you could concentrate a pretty large percentage of the total power through the focal point.
Sure - and India hasn't made any motions in that direction. Being able to destroy orbital resources from the ground is, if anything, a great way to *discourage* the further militarization of space by the US, China, Russia, etc. All of whom have been heavily militarizing it for decades with GPS, spy satellites, etc.
Think of it a little differently - Kessler Syndrome itself "turns off" the militarization of orbit - a physics enforced global armistice on orbital military hardware that lasts for generations, barring active cleanup efforts. Whether we "turn it on again" afterwards - that's up to us.
I suspect It would be extremely difficult to achieve in any meaningful way though - explosions and collisions aren't going to dramatically alter orbital energies, except downwards. So while you would develop "shells" of debris that would soon destroy any satellites within them, the orbits above those shells would remain clear. And the density of debris would have to be truly enormous to prevent launches getting through it to access higher orbits (albeit at greater risk and expense), while such a dense shell would deorbit much faster due to inter-debris collisions.
I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature. It's not like you're nuking cities or releasing deadly plagues - there's no survival-threatening fallout from destroying satellites, just a physics-enforced omni-lateral armistice on military (and any other) satellites if debris gets to be a big enough problem.
It also serves as discouragement against the nations such as the US that have already militarized orbit (spy satellites, GPS), and are quite possibly secretly weaponizing it. The more people who can knock out your military hardware, the less valuable it is.
What does destroying satellites actually accomplish? You could take out GPS or communications satellites - that would be a nuisance, cause a bit of economic distress, and reduce the enemies battlefield efficiency a bit, but isn't *that* devastating or strategically valuable, and is unlikely to be something anyone would do unless surface hostilities had already begun. It also lets you take out orbital military hardware like spy satellites and weapons platforms - which are the real threat.
>Oh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris. Well, it's not really that hard - so long as you hit the satellite head-on so that none of the debris gets accelerated faster in its orbit, then ANY path the debris takes will put it on an orbit that plunges deeper into the Earth's atmosphere. And, if the missile was going either sub-orbital or counter-orbital, then it won't create any stable debris either.
Now is that the case? I have no idea. But at worst, it's still not nearly as reckless as putting military resources in space in the first place, so that other countries are required to develop the ability to remove them in order to be able to defend themselves.
Which makes it different from capitalism how exactly? I suppose the U.S. mostly only murders the citizens of other countries, I suppose that's some small comfort.
Domestically we mostly stick with mass-incarceration instead, though we are also quite fond of poisoning our citizens while denying them affordable health care.
There'll always be a fringe of idiots. Sometimes they'll even be a modest percentage. And you'll never convince them of anything they don't want to believe, so don't waste your time trying.
Meanwhile, we currently have elections, electronic and paper, that are often so badly managed that stealing an election would be relatively straightforward - and most people seem to believe we don't have a serious problem. So apparently the mediocre masses don't actually have a problem so long as they think they understand how it works.
That said - absolutely, paper is the way to go, as a backup/audit mechanism at the very least. Though I do see a few ways electronic systems could improve the process:
Paper ballot validation - paper ballots can analyzed to immediately identify any problems before it gets submitted, while the voter is still there to correct it. and/or Paper ballot preparation - fill out the ballot electronically, with all the benefits of eliminating the possibility of improperly filled ballots, assistance for the vision-impaired, pretty candidate pictures for the illiterate and name-recalling impaired,etc,etc,etc. And then you print a paper ballot and double-check it to make sure what was printed is actually what you wanted. Strictly optional, and security isn't a huge problem so long as people are strongly reminded to double-check their ballot.
Automated tallying via *very* minimalist, easily auditable machines. Ideally as a cross check for manual voting, but it also makes things like instant-runnoff voting *much* simpler to implement, breaking the stranglehold of a two-party system. And while IRV doesn't necessarily pick the "best" candidate, but it does have the prominent feature of being very easy for people to understand - You count everybody's first-choice pick just like usual, then eliminate the biggest loser, and re-count the ballots of everybody who voted for them based on their next choice.
Hmm, a bit of a tangent, but I just thought of an electronically-assisted manual counting process for "normal" or IR voting that would still call for human validation at every stage of the process, but be potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times faster than counting by hand.
0) Record votes on punch cards - the first column gets the ID of your favorite candidate, the second column the ID of your second-favorite, etc. (possibly using more than one column per pick-level, depending on how many candidates there are)
1) Feed the punch cards into an automated sorter that groups the cards according to their first pick, so you get separate stacks of the ballots that voted for each candidate. 2) Take manageable chunks of each candidate's stack, square them up nicely, and hold them up to the light to verify that every ballot does in fact have the same first-pick hole punched., allowing one person to easily verify the proper sorting of hundreds of ballots per minute 3) Count and record the votes for each candidate - since they're already grouped by candidate you don't have to actually look at the individual ballots, just count them, which is much faster - either by hand, or using a simple card-counting machine that's nigh impossible to "hack" since you can use the same machine to count the ballots for all candidates, and it has no way to tell who the ballots are for. (You'd still need to guard against physical sabotage that would allow someone in the room (or spying remotely) to tell it to "count high" or "count low" on the fly)
For normal voting, you're done
For Instant-runoff voting
5) Take all the biggest-loser's ballots, and feed them through the sorting machine again, sorting by the second pick this time. 6) Validate that all the second-choice picks in each new stack are the same. 7) Count and record the second-pick votes.
Be careful to keep the first-choice ballots for a candidate separated from the second-choice ballots for them (and from third and later choices, as those begin to accumulate), as you can only quickly ver
Robots operating in a complex natural environment are going to be a lot more useful with a real-time human operator, than they are under the control of a feeble AI (and there's no evidence that non-feeble AIs are anywhere in the near future). And that means you have to have people living and working out there, without a half-hour or more of unavoidable speed-of-light lag.
Maybe it's just a small team of body-hopping telepresence "cyborgs" that handle the problems, with an army of autonomous robots at their command for the day-to-day operations. But they need to be out there where they can deal with problems in real time, rather than having a mine or assembly line be down for months at a time because of a mysterious malfunction the AI can't repair.
And once we have the technology to let people live out there, and the infrastructure for routinely transporting large amounts of materials back and forth cost-effectively, then it's only a matter of time before people immigrate there to start new societies without the restrictions imposed by the old one. We are a species of explorers, we thrived and conquered our world because some of us always dream of a better world over the horizon, and go out to build it. We are at our best, and our worst, on the frontier. Building new societies from the rich resources of a location too far away for old governments to care about us much.
Space is going to be bleak, especially early on, so it will probably only be the most desperate of dreamers who lead the charge. But with nigh-unlimited resources and the promise of not having any nearby neighbors for generations, at least, there will still be some tiny percentage of people willing to try to build their personal vision of utopia, even if they have to carve an ecosystem out of dead rock to do it. 0.1% maybe? That's still 7 million people, enough for a hundred small island nations, augmented by as many robots as they can afford to buy or build. Indentured servitude helped the poor migrate to the early American colonies - I'm sure similar opportunities will be available in space, at least in some of the colonies.
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You're talking about student loan debt. There's no debt with ISA - just an agreement to pay x% of your income for y years, and then you're free. If that's 20% for 10 years, and you're making $10k/year for all that time, then they get $2k * 10 years = $20k. If you're making $100k, then they $200k over the same 10 years.
The more you profit, the more they profit. And either way, in year 11 you're free of any further obligation.
Again *there is no loan* which means that *there is no interest*
You're thinking of existing student loans, where you incur a definite dollar-value debt, which must then be paid off, with interest - perhaps limited to x% of your income per year until such time as it's paid off, but if it takes you 80 years to pay it off, well then it sucks to be you.
That's not how ISA works. There is no loan. There is no principal to pay off. There's just you, getting a completely "free" education in exchange for paying X% of your future income for Y years after graduating. Can't find a decent job? Can only pay $10 per year toward your ISA obligation? It doesn't matter - you're still only on the hook for the same Y years you agreed to, and then you're free even if they only got a total of $100 from you.
>that's going to raise at least some flags with the telecom provider.
Why? I mean sure - they're going to know you're probably a robocall center, but what do they care? You're a nice tidy source of profits for them, they have no reason to shut you down. That's why there's pressure to try to pass a law requiring telephone companies to shut down robocall centers - because they have absolutely no economic incentive to do so.
Sorry, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know they should only be taken seriously when they prove that something is possible. They're entertainment, not science. The mirror shield episode was an excellent example of that - their failure was entirely due to incompetent implementation, rather than theoretical limitations. They had light-spots dancing all over that ship, while they should have all been focused on the same point - a computer-controlled solar concentrating array would have fried that boat like a bug under a magnifying glass - and a a sufficiently well-trained regiment of soldiers wouldn't have done much worse. Plus, as I recall they used flat mirrors, which is just another level of stupid.
Use a the right lens or concave mirror, and you can focus an image of virtually any desired size and distance (I'm unclear on exactly what the theoretical limitations are) - you just want to focus that image as small as possible at the desired distance.
Hmm, it seems like these are the relevant equations:
1/f = 1/do + 1/di , where: f = focal length, do = object distance, di = image distance
and M = hi/ho = -di/do, where M = magnification, ho = height of the object, and hi = height of the image.
With sun diameter = 696e6m at a distance of 150e9m
So it looks like you're stuck with a fixed magnification based on the relative distance to the object and the imaging plane (at least for a single-mirror configuration, it sounds like you may be able to get more impressive results with more complicated optics?). Put something 1000km away in orbit, with the sun 150e6km away, and you get a magnification of 6.7e-6, and the in-focus image of the sun would be 4.6 km across.
That's an in-focus image though - I'm not sure that's actually the plane of maximum light density. As a sanity check, the smallest possible image that could be created by kids burning wood at a distance of 10cm would be 0.5mm... that actually seems about right. (The Mythbusters boat in contrast, at a distance of 23m, could have focused that spot to about 10cm = 4" across. From 1km away, it would be 4.6m))
That's just the size of the image though - there's also the brightness to consider - and that depends purely on the size of the mirror. Use a 10km mirror, and the target area would be getting 4.7x more sun than at noon. Use a 100km mirror, and it would be receiving 472x. Of course there's a limit on how big you can make a mirror - the focal length determines the radius of curvature, and thus the maximum size, but you can get the same result with hundreds of smaller mirrors all focused on the same spot.
I'm inclined to agree - so get rid of state-backed loans.
Now, how is some enterprising lower-class kid with deadbeat parents and who hasn't yet developed a credit rating of heir own supposed to get a loan?
True, and that would be inconvenient. Most orbital services though could be delivered from high-altitude balloon instead - in many cases that would even be an improvement. And relatively unattractive extreme high orbits are unlikely to be affected, with the possible exception of geostationary. So as long as the cloud density is low enough for rockets to get through it, space will remain accessible. And you'd need many orders of magnitude more debris to exclude rockets that spend a few hours passing through, than to destroy satellites that remain in orbit until the timing synchronizes perfectly with some chunk of debris in an intersecting orbit.
Plus, LEO may clear relatively quickly - the smaller the debris, the faster air resistance deorbits is. Half the size means half the mass-to-area ratio, and thus twice the deceleration. The question would be how dense the "rain" from collisions in higher, otherwise stable orbits would be.
Besides, if orbit has been militarized to the point that a Kessler Syndrome scenario becomes a serious possibility, giving up civilian orbital benefits for a while to get rid of it might be a good trade. (non-military causes pretty much require a level of widespread carelessness that we're not seeing). Orbital weapons are kind of a nightmare scenario for people on the ground.
Poor snowflake, can't handle competing in the job market without the full unmitigated advantage of white privilege?
Seriously - the only place where white men are at a disadvantage is in companies whose current employee base is overwhelmingly white men, *and* who are hiring minorities as fast as possible to try to rectify that racist and sexist imbalance.
If they're predominantly white men and don't care (which is many) you still have a big advantage. And if they already have an equitable mix of races and genders - the only disadvantage you face is the fact that the minorities and women had to work a lot harder to get to the same point in their careers. And if you can't be bothered to work as hard as them, why should you expect to do as well?
The point is, with an ISA you've been loaned *nothing*. All they get is a percentage of your income - if they can't help you find a good job, they get x% of jack squat.
Of course, you could still run afoul of a crappy university that offers degrees in advanced slacking just to claim your income - but even they have incentive to at least get you good job placement so they get x% of a bigger number. Compare to modern scam universities like you mention, that get paid exactly the same amount no matter how little value they offer.
What exactly is the difference between an average student paying 20% of their income to an ISA, versus paying 20% of their income to a student debt?
Of course, it does mean that students that go into an above-average job pay more in total, while those below-average pay less, but even that is likely offset by the fact that you've got an experienced career-placement board doing everything they can to help you find a good job and negotiate as high a salary as possible, rather than just searching more or less aimlessly like so many graduates currently do. The increase in early-career salary is likely to continue boosting your salary for decades after the ISA has expired.
I think their idea was more like get paid 33k for 3 years, plus a 100k "loyalty bonus" at the end of that time, for a total of 200k, where they only have to pay the ISA on the 100k salary. Rather than being paid 66k/year for the same 200k total, but having to pay the ISA on the full amount. Lower the salary a bit so that the employee and employer split the ISA savings, and everybody wins. Except...
I really don't see such a thing catching on - firstly because the ISA agreement probably lasts at least 10+ years, so that's a *whole* lot of loyalty to get out from under it, all while not building social-security equity or being able to get a decent raise (which usually requires changing jobs). And secondly, after 9 years the company has a huge incentive to come up with some excuse to fire you or pressure you out rather than paying the loyalty bonus.
>Technology should have made education cheaper...
Why, exactly? Technology makes industry cheaper/more profitable, but there's not exactly much to automate in education to drive the cost down. Clerical overhead is about it, and that has never exactly been a a huge percentage of a college's operating expenses.
There's not much excuse for raising the price faster than inflation.
On the other hand, technology does allow *you* to lower the cost of your education substantially. Instead of taking real classes with feedback from professors and TAs, learn from the Khan academy and other free online courses (many of the big universities offer a wide selection of free online lectures), and then test out of the subject.
>Current student debt issuers would have the same incentive after all
Not even remotely. Get a degree and be totally unable to find a job, and you're expected to pay off your student loan just the same as if you were making $1M/year. The debt issuers would surely rather you got a job that let you pay them off in a timely fashion - but as you pointed out, their preferential treatment means they'll probably get paid eventually no matter what. They have nothing to gain if you get a great job versus a mediocre one, and very little to lose if you get a lousy one.
Also, they're not really in a position to actually help you get a good education, or a good job.
Contrast that to a university that gets say 10% of your paycheck for the next 10 years. Get a $20k job, they make $20k total. Get a $100k job, they get back $100k total. Fail to find a job, they get nothing. That's some potent incentive to make sure you're actually qualified for $100k job, and to use their resources and connections to help you actually get the job, and negotiate as high a salary as possible.
Especially valuable assistance for first generation college graduates, whose families are unlikely to have the connections or experience to effectively navigate the white-collar job market.
Indeed - there are many details to sort out. One possible compromise would be something like X% of your annual salary for the first Y years after graduation, per year of school. Graduate from a 4-year program, pay 4X%. Leave after 2 years, pay 2X%. Go on to a different graduate school - the Y-years counter doesn't start until you graduate from there.
Actually no - basic physics research gave us the knowledge that atomic weapons were possible - developing the weapons themselves took many more years and massively larger amounts of far more specialized and well-funded application-specific research.
Also, I'd say wiping out humanity would count as an "immeasurably (large) return". Not necessarily a *positive* one, but quite large.
You mean so that the lower classes can't afford an education?
You are talking orbital flak for the specific purpose of rendering an orbital shell unusable, which is an entirely different thing than shooting down a specific satellite. To destroy a satellite cleanly you want a relatively low payload weapon - something that's not going to send debris flying off at speeds anywhere near even a single km/s, and thus won't radically alter it's orbital trajectory. Leaving the debris cloud to slowly expand to fill a ring around the original satellite's orbit, restricted by the fact that every piece of debris must pass back through the point of explosion on every pass (neglecting aerobraking and gravitational pertubation)
But, sure, lets say you send up all that flak - there's really only two options:
1) you restrict it to a narrow range of altitudes, in which case if you get far enough above or below it and you're fine. Effective at taking out large groups of existing satellites, but not at general orbital denial.
2) the shrapnel isn't dense enough to cause frequent impacts with satellites. There are 238x10^15 cubic kilometers of space within the orbit of the moon. Put a billion tonnes of chaff into lower orbit than that, and the average density will be 4ug per cubic kilometer - or one smallish grain of sand per 2000 cubic kilometers. And for reference there's currently well under 50,000 tonnes of equipment in orbit (5000 satellites, the biggest of which are several tonnes, but most of which are small, plus 417 tonnes of ISS), which would be a grain of sand per 40,000,000 cubic kilometers
Satellites might need to start including armor plating and/or aerogel impact absorber as a standard feature to withstand the occasional impact, and the expected maintenance-free operating life might be shortened notably, but it wouldn't be a show-stopper.
And then there's the $10M question:
Why would a space power capable enough to comprehensively flak the entire orbital sphere, wish to do so? To deny a larger space power their advantage? If they're exploiting their advantage so ruthlessly that someone else is willing to shoot off their own foot to stop them, then maybe hitting the reset button and taking a hiatus for a few generations to reflect on what went wrong would be a good thing.
Are you sure about that minimum spot size? I'm not that well versed in optics, and not quite sure how to phrase the question to get google to offer a relevant answer. Most discussions seem to only consider point sources. It's an important detail for a lot of orbital technologies though, so I'd love to get a better handle on it if you can point me at anything useful.
Assuming you are right, there's still more than the total spot size to consider. There's the brightness distribution. Pretty much anyone who has ever burned things with a magnifying lens or mirror knows that you get both a large relatively dim spot, and a small, intensely bright spot. If I build a 10km diameter, tunably-concave space mirror, it'll be reflecting up to 82GW onto the surface, depending on it's alignment, and assuming the same atmospheric losses. Most of that may be diffuse, but if it can concentrate just 1% of that power onto a 1 hectare (2.5 acre) area, that'll be getting 8x the normal solar dosage - If it could deliver it to 1/10th that area, that'd be getting 82x.
So what determines peak light concentration from a concave mirror? It naively seems like you could concentrate a pretty large percentage of the total power through the focal point.
Sure - and India hasn't made any motions in that direction. Being able to destroy orbital resources from the ground is, if anything, a great way to *discourage* the further militarization of space by the US, China, Russia, etc. All of whom have been heavily militarizing it for decades with GPS, spy satellites, etc.
Think of it a little differently - Kessler Syndrome itself "turns off" the militarization of orbit - a physics enforced global armistice on orbital military hardware that lasts for generations, barring active cleanup efforts. Whether we "turn it on again" afterwards - that's up to us.
I suspect It would be extremely difficult to achieve in any meaningful way though - explosions and collisions aren't going to dramatically alter orbital energies, except downwards. So while you would develop "shells" of debris that would soon destroy any satellites within them, the orbits above those shells would remain clear. And the density of debris would have to be truly enormous to prevent launches getting through it to access higher orbits (albeit at greater risk and expense), while such a dense shell would deorbit much faster due to inter-debris collisions.
I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature. It's not like you're nuking cities or releasing deadly plagues - there's no survival-threatening fallout from destroying satellites, just a physics-enforced omni-lateral armistice on military (and any other) satellites if debris gets to be a big enough problem.
It also serves as discouragement against the nations such as the US that have already militarized orbit (spy satellites, GPS), and are quite possibly secretly weaponizing it. The more people who can knock out your military hardware, the less valuable it is.
What does destroying satellites actually accomplish? You could take out GPS or communications satellites - that would be a nuisance, cause a bit of economic distress, and reduce the enemies battlefield efficiency a bit, but isn't *that* devastating or strategically valuable, and is unlikely to be something anyone would do unless surface hostilities had already begun. It also lets you take out orbital military hardware like spy satellites and weapons platforms - which are the real threat.
>Oh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris.
Well, it's not really that hard - so long as you hit the satellite head-on so that none of the debris gets accelerated faster in its orbit, then ANY path the debris takes will put it on an orbit that plunges deeper into the Earth's atmosphere. And, if the missile was going either sub-orbital or counter-orbital, then it won't create any stable debris either.
Now is that the case? I have no idea. But at worst, it's still not nearly as reckless as putting military resources in space in the first place, so that other countries are required to develop the ability to remove them in order to be able to defend themselves.
Absolutely a good start, but a reasonable restitution to his victims would seem to be called for as well. Maybe 50-100% of what he extorted.
Which makes it different from capitalism how exactly? I suppose the U.S. mostly only murders the citizens of other countries, I suppose that's some small comfort.
Domestically we mostly stick with mass-incarceration instead, though we are also quite fond of poisoning our citizens while denying them affordable health care.
There'll always be a fringe of idiots. Sometimes they'll even be a modest percentage. And you'll never convince them of anything they don't want to believe, so don't waste your time trying.
Meanwhile, we currently have elections, electronic and paper, that are often so badly managed that stealing an election would be relatively straightforward - and most people seem to believe we don't have a serious problem. So apparently the mediocre masses don't actually have a problem so long as they think they understand how it works.
That said - absolutely, paper is the way to go, as a backup/audit mechanism at the very least. Though I do see a few ways electronic systems could improve the process:
Paper ballot validation - paper ballots can analyzed to immediately identify any problems before it gets submitted, while the voter is still there to correct it. and/or
Paper ballot preparation - fill out the ballot electronically, with all the benefits of eliminating the possibility of improperly filled ballots, assistance for the vision-impaired, pretty candidate pictures for the illiterate and name-recalling impaired,etc,etc,etc. And then you print a paper ballot and double-check it to make sure what was printed is actually what you wanted. Strictly optional, and security isn't a huge problem so long as people are strongly reminded to double-check their ballot.
Automated tallying via *very* minimalist, easily auditable machines. Ideally as a cross check for manual voting, but it also makes things like instant-runnoff voting *much* simpler to implement, breaking the stranglehold of a two-party system. And while IRV doesn't necessarily pick the "best" candidate, but it does have the prominent feature of being very easy for people to understand - You count everybody's first-choice pick just like usual, then eliminate the biggest loser, and re-count the ballots of everybody who voted for them based on their next choice.
Hmm, a bit of a tangent, but I just thought of an electronically-assisted manual counting process for "normal" or IR voting that would still call for human validation at every stage of the process, but be potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times faster than counting by hand.
0) Record votes on punch cards - the first column gets the ID of your favorite candidate, the second column the ID of your second-favorite, etc. (possibly using more than one column per pick-level, depending on how many candidates there are)
1) Feed the punch cards into an automated sorter that groups the cards according to their first pick, so you get separate stacks of the ballots that voted for each candidate.
2) Take manageable chunks of each candidate's stack, square them up nicely, and hold them up to the light to verify that every ballot does in fact have the same first-pick hole punched., allowing one person to easily verify the proper sorting of hundreds of ballots per minute
3) Count and record the votes for each candidate - since they're already grouped by candidate you don't have to actually look at the individual ballots, just count them, which is much faster - either by hand, or using a simple card-counting machine that's nigh impossible to "hack" since you can use the same machine to count the ballots for all candidates, and it has no way to tell who the ballots are for. (You'd still need to guard against physical sabotage that would allow someone in the room (or spying remotely) to tell it to "count high" or "count low" on the fly)
For normal voting, you're done
For Instant-runoff voting
5) Take all the biggest-loser's ballots, and feed them through the sorting machine again, sorting by the second pick this time.
6) Validate that all the second-choice picks in each new stack are the same.
7) Count and record the second-pick votes.
Be careful to keep the first-choice ballots for a candidate separated from the second-choice ballots for them (and from third and later choices, as those begin to accumulate), as you can only quickly ver
Where are you that the ID is free? I've never seen a DMV that offered such a thing, and $20 will easily feed an adult for a week.
Robots operating in a complex natural environment are going to be a lot more useful with a real-time human operator, than they are under the control of a feeble AI (and there's no evidence that non-feeble AIs are anywhere in the near future). And that means you have to have people living and working out there, without a half-hour or more of unavoidable speed-of-light lag.
Maybe it's just a small team of body-hopping telepresence "cyborgs" that handle the problems, with an army of autonomous robots at their command for the day-to-day operations. But they need to be out there where they can deal with problems in real time, rather than having a mine or assembly line be down for months at a time because of a mysterious malfunction the AI can't repair.
And once we have the technology to let people live out there, and the infrastructure for routinely transporting large amounts of materials back and forth cost-effectively, then it's only a matter of time before people immigrate there to start new societies without the restrictions imposed by the old one. We are a species of explorers, we thrived and conquered our world because some of us always dream of a better world over the horizon, and go out to build it. We are at our best, and our worst, on the frontier. Building new societies from the rich resources of a location too far away for old governments to care about us much.
Space is going to be bleak, especially early on, so it will probably only be the most desperate of dreamers who lead the charge. But with nigh-unlimited resources and the promise of not having any nearby neighbors for generations, at least, there will still be some tiny percentage of people willing to try to build their personal vision of utopia, even if they have to carve an ecosystem out of dead rock to do it. 0.1% maybe? That's still 7 million people, enough for a hundred small island nations, augmented by as many robots as they can afford to buy or build. Indentured servitude helped the poor migrate to the early American colonies - I'm sure similar opportunities will be available in space, at least in some of the colonies.