What a load of bullshit. Academic publishing - at least in the hard science - is not a record of lack of accomplishments. Look at some of the Planck papers for fucks sake. As for government work - explain the Apollo program. Explain how the UK NHS achieves similar health outcomes to the US at a third of the cost. Reality doesn't stack up to your rhetoric.
Don't have a tenure position, won't ever have one because 'tenure' is not a thing in my country. Doesn't really need to be because we don't have crappy employment law in the first place. Nice attempt at an ad hominem there though.
Quick solution to that. Don't take "sociology of religion". I'm willing to bet your physics, maths and engineering professors don't dick around like that.
Except you, and the people publishing this article, have ignored any other contributing factors (like faculty being closer in age to their students for instance.) You jump straight to the conclusion that you like, which is a misanthropic view that everybody apart from yourself (and people you like) are lazy, no-good idiots who need to be booted in the arse constantly in order to do any work. Your problem is that this is simply not true. Human motivation is more complex than that, and people do not in the general case do better jobs if you constantly threaten them - regardless of how that might give you some kind of perverse satisfaction.
This seems fairly obvious. Younger faculty relate better to young students. But such a caveat doesn't fit well with a sensationalist press release/headline.
Its a pretty shitty aspect of western culture (don't know if other cultures experience it or not) that there is mass resentment of other people having any kind of job security. There is the notion that "other people" are all feckless, lazy slobs who must be whipped to work harder by constantly being threatened with redundancy and poverty.
The worse the economy gets, the stronger this feeling. Whip the Others harder, get the economy going. Leave me and people I know alone - we are hardworking families - kick those Others into working longer hours for lower wages; the fuckers are getting off too lightly. Problem is, this is just a feeling. Actual research into motivation finds that an environment of fear, or even promise of big rewards, does not generate productivity in anything other than menial tasks. Unsurprisingly, most people work better if they aren't constantly stressed.
Poor old NASA is doing the best they can with the SLS. They are suffering the consequences of the worst government pettiness I've seen outside Prime Minister's Questions, whilst at the same time being expected to produce the most powerful rocket ever to perform groundbreaking manned exploration of the solar system.
Yes, the SLS is never going to open up the whole solar system - but you get what you pay for, and if you want leadership in space it costs money. You might even have to (gasp) get multi-millionaires to pay a little more tax!
The coils turn on by reacting to the presence of the bolt. If the gun is constructed well enough, why can't a simple dumb timer be enough? Sensors seem overcomplicated
The ammunition looks fair large and heavy. Why not try using a smaller nail and getting higher muzzle velocities?
Just a quick note, aluminum isn't best stopping high energy protons. You want something of low average atomic mass - i.e. something with a lot of hydrogen in it. Polythene and water are your best choices. However, you would still need very thick amounts of these.
I've not done space radiation beyond undergraduate level, but from what I recall GCR energies overlap with the proton energy in the LHC. How is RAL supposed to provide do a tech demo then? Are they maybe approaching NASA at the point when their accelerator can't throw anything else at the test unit, and saying "help us put something in space so we can start working with real life space radiation"?
If it did, the developing world would not be so utterly screwed over by the developed world. Asymmetric power relations always become exploitative in trade, and the relation between a resource depleted Earth, and a massively resource rich solar system, is extremely asymmetric.
As for your utopian vision - you are proposing an extraordinary scenario (as opposed to me, proposing that essentially business as usual on a different scale) and have produced no proof it will come to pass. The burden of proof is indeed on you, as you are the one proposing something absurd. I am merely citing examples of real world economics and translating it to the new medium.
Your shocking arrogance and your ideological myopia are getting tiresome now, I'm done with you.
No your problem here is that you're seeing 'rich guys' and having a fit of the commies. There are exactly three entities that could make a serious attempt to exploit the resources of the solar system at this point: The European Union, The United States of America, and the Peoples' Republic of China. And they would damn near bankrupt themselves in the attempt. No rich guy, no cabal of rich guys, no army of rich guys is going to make this happen. Even Planetary Resources themselves acknowledge this.
The entire solar system? No - but doing so will be within the reach of the first people to develop off-world resources and manufacturing, so wealth will continue to leverage more wealth and the overwhelming majority of humanity will not get a look in.
In order to reach a position where you could be independent of Earth, you'd have to spend a very long time selling stuff to Earth. And by then why stop? In fact by then the barriers to entry would be reduced so much that system resource exploitation would be on the level of opening a factory. It is not possible to sidestep the middle of the process and somehow lay claim to everything above the atmosphere.
You don't need to be independent of Earth's resources to economically dominate it. If you have such resource/manufacturing capacity as is supposed, someone from Earth can send you whatever you need. This won't enrich Earth, because the trading relation will be so absurdly asymmetrical.
Try applying some of that understanding to economics next time, eh.
I'm trying to keep my responses civil, but its hard whilst you keep trying to imply I'm stupid just because I'm questioning your conclusions. I do understand the issues at hand, you could do with paying more attention to what I understand.
You have completely missed the point. The utility of having H2/O2 in space is not that it yields energy, but that it yields reaction mass. Energy is a lot easier to come by, especially if you are willing to operate nuclear reactors in space.
You won't achieve a post scarcity society (if such a thing is even possible...) with rich guys holding all the resource wealth. Such people have demonstrated a willingness and an ability to ensure that the rest of us see very little of the profits they make - despite the fact said profits often exploit public resources. You haven't addressed the fundamental issue - you hand over the solar system to those selected primarily by their capacity for greed and then you think they will just hand over these resources? No, they will demand trade. If space manufacturing achieves what you think it can, what can Earth possible have to offer? We would become the Somalia of the solar system. Trickle down hasn't failed because of lack of resources, it fails because the rich are simply too good at hoarding the wealth - and when they and their puppets in government try to prop up dwindling consumer spending power with credit, they cause a crisis.
I do understand the scales involved. I'm an astronomer. Understanding things on a really big scale is kind of my job.
What will us poor Earthlings trade for all this bounty? We won't have anything we could possibly offer to an off-world society, with comparable industrial capabilities but with incredibly larger energy reserves. Please not, that "trickle down" economics has failed every single time it has been tried on Earth.
This idea that if we let the greediest amongst us (not the most talented; being talented per se doesn't make you rich, you have to be specifically talented at making money and motivated to do it) do as they will, it will somehow benefit the rest of us is a discredited idea. I can't believe people are still proposing it, post-2008.
Even though you are sarcastic here, I agree on both points. The 'right' to land is extremely dubious, and some countries have tax regimes that represent this (i.e. in order to hold land, you have to essentially rent it from everybody else, via their government.)
And inheritance? Tax it heavily. Most people agree with this position - that money should be earned, not simply inherited.
There seems to be an attitude amongst certain people that space resources should belong to those rich enough to grab them. There hasn't yet been a serious discussion of paying for this exploitation of nature, and I suspect that is because many of the people involved have a libertarian agenda, and see space as an opportunity to escape any form of public restraint on their activities, and construct their Randian utopia off world.
Given the immense resources of the solar system compared to those found on Earth, this is a recipe for immense, cruel and unfair inequality. Those of us Earthbound, who have motivations other than money and so are not billionaires, will be plunged into poverty by extraterrestrial energy magnates whose obscene resource wealth will make the Saudi royal family look positively frugal.
Quite timely then that someone appears to be making a movie on this theme:)
Unless its in the wallet on your own computer, how do you know its not fiat money? When your bitcoins are with Mt. Gox, how can you verify that they haven't been shuffled off somewhere else?
If I understand Mt. Gox's website correctly, they do hold your BitCoins in their own wallets, and they can be transferred to the client upon request. If true, this raises the question of whether they actually hold a full reserve of the BitCoins they claim to.
If I understand reserve currencies, then they may be something BitCoin is actually useful for, specifically because it isn't attached to a single country and can self regulate (sort of).
But why would ordinary people want to hold the reserve currency? I live in the UK, and my country holds reserves of dollars and euros, like every other country. My personal stash of dollars and euros is a handful of notes in a draw that I couldn't be bothered to get changed back into pounds.
Surely having your Bitcoins held by a third party (especially one that, going on this story, might not be entirely honest about its internal workings) defeats the point of a 'decentralised' currency? How is being at the mercy of these clowns any different from being at the mercy of your governments central bank?
Well, one difference is that you can vote for the government that controls your central bank. With this lots its just caveat emptor
One of the ways the Nazis considered sterilising Jews and other undesirables was to use a concealed X-ray machine. This was later abandoned when they decided to go for mass murder instead.
Whilst some people enjoy car ownership itself, most people have a car purely because they need one to get to where they want to go. An autonomous car society would essentially make taxis so dirt cheap they would overlap in cost with car ownership itself. Imagine a society where, for an amount of cash similar to your petrol/maintenance/car tax budget, you can but "car hours" or "car miles" that entitle you to summon a car with your phone via an app and go a certain time/distance in it whenever you want.
You no longer need a garage (if you already have one, congratulations your house just got another room in it), if you have 2 people in what was previously a one car household, you can both drive somewhere at the same time. You can drive somewhere and walk back, or walk somewhere and drive back.
Car nuts will still go nuts for their cars. People who see cars as merely a means to an end will probably give up ownership.
Why even own a car then? Own X hours of car time per week, and you just get a (cleaned for you) vehicle from the same pool as the taxis whenever you text for one. Then you can convert your garage into a spare bedroom/man cave.
Slashdot Mirror
What a load of bullshit. Academic publishing - at least in the hard science - is not a record of lack of accomplishments. Look at some of the Planck papers for fucks sake. As for government work - explain the Apollo program. Explain how the UK NHS achieves similar health outcomes to the US at a third of the cost. Reality doesn't stack up to your rhetoric.
Don't have a tenure position, won't ever have one because 'tenure' is not a thing in my country. Doesn't really need to be because we don't have crappy employment law in the first place. Nice attempt at an ad hominem there though.
Quick solution to that. Don't take "sociology of religion". I'm willing to bet your physics, maths and engineering professors don't dick around like that.
Except you, and the people publishing this article, have ignored any other contributing factors (like faculty being closer in age to their students for instance.) You jump straight to the conclusion that you like, which is a misanthropic view that everybody apart from yourself (and people you like) are lazy, no-good idiots who need to be booted in the arse constantly in order to do any work. Your problem is that this is simply not true. Human motivation is more complex than that, and people do not in the general case do better jobs if you constantly threaten them - regardless of how that might give you some kind of perverse satisfaction.
This seems fairly obvious. Younger faculty relate better to young students. But such a caveat doesn't fit well with a sensationalist press release/headline.
Its a pretty shitty aspect of western culture (don't know if other cultures experience it or not) that there is mass resentment of other people having any kind of job security. There is the notion that "other people" are all feckless, lazy slobs who must be whipped to work harder by constantly being threatened with redundancy and poverty.
The worse the economy gets, the stronger this feeling. Whip the Others harder, get the economy going. Leave me and people I know alone - we are hardworking families - kick those Others into working longer hours for lower wages; the fuckers are getting off too lightly. Problem is, this is just a feeling. Actual research into motivation finds that an environment of fear, or even promise of big rewards, does not generate productivity in anything other than menial tasks. Unsurprisingly, most people work better if they aren't constantly stressed.
Poor old NASA is doing the best they can with the SLS. They are suffering the consequences of the worst government pettiness I've seen outside Prime Minister's Questions, whilst at the same time being expected to produce the most powerful rocket ever to perform groundbreaking manned exploration of the solar system.
Yes, the SLS is never going to open up the whole solar system - but you get what you pay for, and if you want leadership in space it costs money. You might even have to (gasp) get multi-millionaires to pay a little more tax!
The coils turn on by reacting to the presence of the bolt. If the gun is constructed well enough, why can't a simple dumb timer be enough? Sensors seem overcomplicated
The ammunition looks fair large and heavy. Why not try using a smaller nail and getting higher muzzle velocities?
A reference to Hydrogen Sonata or a happy accident?
Just a quick note, aluminum isn't best stopping high energy protons. You want something of low average atomic mass - i.e. something with a lot of hydrogen in it. Polythene and water are your best choices. However, you would still need very thick amounts of these.
I've not done space radiation beyond undergraduate level, but from what I recall GCR energies overlap with the proton energy in the LHC. How is RAL supposed to provide do a tech demo then? Are they maybe approaching NASA at the point when their accelerator can't throw anything else at the test unit, and saying "help us put something in space so we can start working with real life space radiation"?
Your idea simply DOES. NOT. WORK
If it did, the developing world would not be so utterly screwed over by the developed world. Asymmetric power relations always become exploitative in trade, and the relation between a resource depleted Earth, and a massively resource rich solar system, is extremely asymmetric.
As for your utopian vision - you are proposing an extraordinary scenario (as opposed to me, proposing that essentially business as usual on a different scale) and have produced no proof it will come to pass. The burden of proof is indeed on you, as you are the one proposing something absurd. I am merely citing examples of real world economics and translating it to the new medium.
Your shocking arrogance and your ideological myopia are getting tiresome now, I'm done with you.
The entire solar system? No - but doing so will be within the reach of the first people to develop off-world resources and manufacturing, so wealth will continue to leverage more wealth and the overwhelming majority of humanity will not get a look in.
You don't need to be independent of Earth's resources to economically dominate it. If you have such resource/manufacturing capacity as is supposed, someone from Earth can send you whatever you need. This won't enrich Earth, because the trading relation will be so absurdly asymmetrical.
I'm trying to keep my responses civil, but its hard whilst you keep trying to imply I'm stupid just because I'm questioning your conclusions. I do understand the issues at hand, you could do with paying more attention to what I understand.
You have completely missed the point. The utility of having H2/O2 in space is not that it yields energy, but that it yields reaction mass. Energy is a lot easier to come by, especially if you are willing to operate nuclear reactors in space.
You won't achieve a post scarcity society (if such a thing is even possible...) with rich guys holding all the resource wealth. Such people have demonstrated a willingness and an ability to ensure that the rest of us see very little of the profits they make - despite the fact said profits often exploit public resources. You haven't addressed the fundamental issue - you hand over the solar system to those selected primarily by their capacity for greed and then you think they will just hand over these resources? No, they will demand trade. If space manufacturing achieves what you think it can, what can Earth possible have to offer? We would become the Somalia of the solar system. Trickle down hasn't failed because of lack of resources, it fails because the rich are simply too good at hoarding the wealth - and when they and their puppets in government try to prop up dwindling consumer spending power with credit, they cause a crisis.
I do understand the scales involved. I'm an astronomer. Understanding things on a really big scale is kind of my job.
You assume private ownership of land to start with, and then end up calling it a conclusion. Sloppy, circular thinking at its worst.
What will us poor Earthlings trade for all this bounty? We won't have anything we could possibly offer to an off-world society, with comparable industrial capabilities but with incredibly larger energy reserves. Please not, that "trickle down" economics has failed every single time it has been tried on Earth.
This idea that if we let the greediest amongst us (not the most talented; being talented per se doesn't make you rich, you have to be specifically talented at making money and motivated to do it) do as they will, it will somehow benefit the rest of us is a discredited idea. I can't believe people are still proposing it, post-2008.
Even though you are sarcastic here, I agree on both points. The 'right' to land is extremely dubious, and some countries have tax regimes that represent this (i.e. in order to hold land, you have to essentially rent it from everybody else, via their government.)
And inheritance? Tax it heavily. Most people agree with this position - that money should be earned, not simply inherited.
There seems to be an attitude amongst certain people that space resources should belong to those rich enough to grab them. There hasn't yet been a serious discussion of paying for this exploitation of nature, and I suspect that is because many of the people involved have a libertarian agenda, and see space as an opportunity to escape any form of public restraint on their activities, and construct their Randian utopia off world.
Given the immense resources of the solar system compared to those found on Earth, this is a recipe for immense, cruel and unfair inequality. Those of us Earthbound, who have motivations other than money and so are not billionaires, will be plunged into poverty by extraterrestrial energy magnates whose obscene resource wealth will make the Saudi royal family look positively frugal.
Quite timely then that someone appears to be making a movie on this theme :)
Unless its in the wallet on your own computer, how do you know its not fiat money? When your bitcoins are with Mt. Gox, how can you verify that they haven't been shuffled off somewhere else?
If I understand Mt. Gox's website correctly, they do hold your BitCoins in their own wallets, and they can be transferred to the client upon request. If true, this raises the question of whether they actually hold a full reserve of the BitCoins they claim to.
If I understand reserve currencies, then they may be something BitCoin is actually useful for, specifically because it isn't attached to a single country and can self regulate (sort of).
But why would ordinary people want to hold the reserve currency? I live in the UK, and my country holds reserves of dollars and euros, like every other country. My personal stash of dollars and euros is a handful of notes in a draw that I couldn't be bothered to get changed back into pounds.
Surely having your Bitcoins held by a third party (especially one that, going on this story, might not be entirely honest about its internal workings) defeats the point of a 'decentralised' currency? How is being at the mercy of these clowns any different from being at the mercy of your governments central bank?
Well, one difference is that you can vote for the government that controls your central bank. With this lots its just caveat emptor
One of the ways the Nazis considered sterilising Jews and other undesirables was to use a concealed X-ray machine. This was later abandoned when they decided to go for mass murder instead.
People won't need to be forced, I don't think.
Whilst some people enjoy car ownership itself, most people have a car purely because they need one to get to where they want to go. An autonomous car society would essentially make taxis so dirt cheap they would overlap in cost with car ownership itself. Imagine a society where, for an amount of cash similar to your petrol/maintenance/car tax budget, you can but "car hours" or "car miles" that entitle you to summon a car with your phone via an app and go a certain time/distance in it whenever you want.
You no longer need a garage (if you already have one, congratulations your house just got another room in it), if you have 2 people in what was previously a one car household, you can both drive somewhere at the same time. You can drive somewhere and walk back, or walk somewhere and drive back.
Car nuts will still go nuts for their cars. People who see cars as merely a means to an end will probably give up ownership.
Why even own a car then? Own X hours of car time per week, and you just get a (cleaned for you) vehicle from the same pool as the taxis whenever you text for one. Then you can convert your garage into a spare bedroom/man cave.