Yes, wouldn't it be nice if the DMCA had a sunset provision too? Personally, I think all new laws should have sunset provisions without some sort of actual constitutional amendment-like system to make them permanent. I also think they should need to be read in their entirety, on record in the house and senate before they get to vote on them every time.
Yeah, I remember going to a Ford dealership when I was shopping for a car way back. It was an almost surreal experience. There was such a huge disconnect between what I was looking for from the salespeople and how they acted. I remember a few things. One was when I commented on how high up the seat felt. I thought it was bizarre in a sedan. The salesman said something like "for that feeling of being up high, this is the best car in its class". The also told me that, for $300 more, the could stick mustang logos on the car. Just in every way, they managed to feel like the worst stereotype of the car salesman. Pretty much all of the other auto dealerships I went to made me feel like a car buyer, the Ford dealership just made me feel uncomfortable and dirty.
Well, let's say you have your car for 150,000 miles. At an average of 30 mph, that's 5000 hours of driving and at 30 mpg, that's also 5000 gallons of gas. We'll say $3.00 per gallon, so that's $15,000 of gas, and we'll say the car is an inexpensive model at $15,000, let's throw in another $5,000 for repairs, maintenance, inspections, registrations, excise taxes, car washes, etc. So, about $35,000 for 5000 hours of driving works out to $7 per hour (which, frankly, is on the extreme low end). So, comparing it to the 20 hours of the video game, the video came would have to cost $140+ for the car to be a better value.
Of course, all of this is using the ridiculous assumption that you can simply compare car hours to video game hours as an absolute measure of relative value. Still, it does help to actually do the math before you make such statements.
By my "vision for humanity" do you mean the way I think we should strive to be, or the way I see us now, or something else? Whichever way you mean it, I have no idea by what confusion of ideas you came up with an "economically, socially and technologically perpetually static society". Nothing I've said has suggest that. I'm just saying that, as a species, we're eventually going to be hit pretty hard when the finite resources we're using up are no longer around and we've wrecked the environment (not permanently, a few million years and it could be like we never existed, but in the short term, wrecked enough to kill most of us).
Also, what does whether humans have ever behaved differently have to do with it? 10,000 years ago, most of us did behave differently as we were mostly nomadic tribes. The notion that such tribes lived in some sort of special harmony with nature is ridiculous. If anything, modern humans are vastly more ecologically aware. We just haven't managed to convert that to being ecologically responsible. It also doesn't look like we're going to before the crunch hits.
It's worked so far: sometimes we screw up and then we fix it. The US has a cleaner environment now than any time since the start of the industrial revolution. Why all this fear and negativity?
You, my friend, are living in a magical fairyland. I don't think there's anything I can say or do to pull you out of it. I'd still like to say that it hasn't worked so far, virtually none of the screw ups have ever been fixed. The US does not have a cleaner environment now than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. Every step forward in one area is counterbalanced by two steps back in another. All the fear is because things can only keep getting worse for so long before horrible things happen to the whole human race (probably for later generations and not mine, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't care) . The negativity is because there are so many people like you who are either outright insane or just ignorant and you're so proud of it that you actually expend effort to actively fight attempts to improve our situation and exercise the most basic amount of caution.
Of course, you might have a good ability to challenge a ticket on it by looking to see if the sign change itself was legal (e.g. authorized) or if someone just switched it trying to get more people to stop and leave the intersection clear that they already should have been doing.
That right there addresses the crux of my point. To tell if something is illegal or not, the clear markings on the road and the laws as written don't necessarily apply. Or, at lease, the laws include the federal laws, the state laws, the town/county/parish laws, the minutes of whatever local body decided to put up the sign, the actual actions of whoever put up the sign, and all related case law. Even then you have no way of knowing how an eventual court case might turn out. Essentially, if they put thirty-three stop lines on the same light, spaced 30 meters apart, and the town council approved it, the same traffic light would legally cover all those intersections over an entire kilometer (and it's on a long downhill grade, you can see the light about a kilometer away).
The problem is, you're making an argument from common sense. You are not, I assume, a lawyer. For example, you say that of course you can take a right on red at any of those stop lines, but what are you basing that on? Aside from me mentioning that right turns on red at stop signs are legal in my state, what do you actually know about the laws in my state? The law might be phrased in such a way that it describes an intersection where you can take a right turn on red and a second stop line for the same red light doesn't fit that description, but at the same time, the law doesn't say you can't have multiple stop lines for the same light. If that's the case, then it's a valid legal interpretation that you can only take a right turn on red at the first stop line, but it's also a valid interpretation that the _intent_ of the law is to let you take a right on red at any of them, but that the original language was imprecise. Then it's up for a judge to decide. This does not work well with an autonomous driving program. The law is written in prose and it's full of holes that people are expected to fill with common sense. Computer programs are not great at interpreting prose, and they don't have common sense.
I'm not putting ambiguity in there because it suits me. The ambiguity is really there. Take this example:
The driver of a vehicle approaching a yield sign shall in obedience to such sign slow down to a speed reasonable for the existing conditions and, if required for safety to stop, shall stop at a clearly marked stop line, but if none, before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection, or, if none, then at the point nearest the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway before entering it. After slowing or stopping, the driver shall yield the right of way to any vehicle in the intersection or approaching on another roadway so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard during the time such driver is moving across or within the intersection or junction of roadways
"speed reasonable for the existing conditions", "if required for safety to stop" and "in the intersection or approaching on another roadway so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard" are not precise. For that matter, if there is no stop line or crosswalk, " the point nearest the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway before entering it" may not actually exist. Given reasonable parameters for the autonomous vehicles acceleration and the estimated speed, reaction time, and braking ability of vehicles that the autonomous vehicle can't even see, there do exist sections of road where, depending on conditions, there is no "speed reasonable for the existing conditions" and where it's "required for safety to stop" and where it's then not technically safe to start moving again and is illegal to make
The left turn by moving forward until the light changes is indeed the correct thing to do. It's also technically illegal most of the time. As for intersections on yellow/red lights. Tickets for people who entered an intersection on yellow and then the light turned red are almost always upheld in the end (when the police officer bothers to show up). Of course, even when they're not, the "offender" pays the court fees.
But if only rich people can afford to store value in gold anyway, why do the rest of us care if it's a good store of value or not? If you're storing value for a complete collapse, the best store of value is always going to be the things you're actually going to need, if you can store them. If I think that there's going to be a home heating oil crisis, I don't stock up on gold to buy home heating oil, I stock up on home heating oil. If I think there's going to be a crisis that makes it near impossible to buy food, I'm not going to stock up on gold to buy food, I'm just going to stock up on non-perishable food items.
On scrip and other exploitive "private money", I agree that it has never really gone away. Also agree somewhat on the disturbing money tracking trend.
As for bitcoin, a number of facets of the bitcoin system depend on the fairly predictable difficulty of cryptographic computer problems. As computing power increases, the actual amount of computing power available to everyone presumably increases at the same rate. Someone might develop some sort of amazing new computing technology that's a thousand times faster than what anyone else has for the same price, but only supervillains use super-advanced technology they've developed in crazy schemes to manipulate currency. Sane people get rich by selling the technology (well, then there's all those so called "quants" working for brokerages, but their "technology" isn't really good for anything except cynically manipulating markets). Hardness of problems in computer science is a difficult thing to prove, however. Until someone proves how hard they really are, most of the problems in cryptography are believed to be very hard, but not absolutely proven to be so. The crypotgraphic problems that prevent double spending and quick mining of bitcoins may some day fall to some sort of cryptoanalysis. To compare to the gold standard, it would be like someone suddenly finding an entire mountain of gold. In some cases, someone solving that sort of problem would render a lot of password and encryption systems virtually useless.
As for banks, they'll find any way they can to double or triple dip with fees, certainly. The fundamental model of banks though is still that people deposit money in them, then they loan out that money to earn interest. In a lot of ways, depositors are like investors in the bank. Banks these days clearly don't see their depositors that way, however.
Safeguarding the nations gold store certainly wouldn't be the largest expense the US government has. It's just that simply owning it would be an expense, so if the currency were backed only by gold, it would require a constant stream of money, backed by gold to keep it.
As for insiders, technically congresspersons and other politicians aren't considered insiders for the purposes of SEC rules. They just manage to get really amazing returns on their investments. They must just be really smart investors.
In the end, whatever it's backed by, currency is basically just something we made up. Sort of a shared dream like civilization, justice, truth and all that stuff. It works because the majority of us believe in it and go about our lives treating it as real. Government is another such thing we just made up to make civilization possible. Regulating money is one of the things it exists to do and is one of its proper functions and, at present, I don't think it would be better any other way. I do, however, think that the US government (and other governments) are doing a really, really terrible job at it and have been for a very long time. I would really like to see the people in charge actually doing their jobs for once, as a matter of fact.
As far as the competition in issuing money, I sort of see the point. The trouble is, the massive abuse of workers by companies paying in their own scrip back in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the continued practices of abuse of users of gift cards and all kinds of "point" systems right up to the current day leaves me a bit shy on the idea. We still do have barter of goods and services (with the attendant confusion on taxation of such) to fall back on, the problem is, whenever anyone tries to think up a good system to facilitate barter, they always end up right back at currency and the need for a central authority to back it. Bitcoin tries to use fundamental laws of math (unproven ones, of course, and many of us are actually hoping that they're not fundamental laws) as the central authority, but I don't quite think that system is going to make it in the long run.
As for full reserve banks, those exist now as part of some bank branches in the form of safety deposit boxes. If the banks can't loan out your savings, however, the only way they can stay in business is to charge you fees for holding your stuff for you (of course, banks currently can loan out more money than they have deposited with which is a bit disturbing).
The US does spend a lot on guarding its assets, but I don't think they'd spend less on guarding the rest of it if they also had to guard huge piles of gold, they would just spend extra on guarding the gold. Of course, since the US doesn't have all the money they're spending on the military at the moment, they're actually putting everything at risk. The lesson the US apparently didn't learn from the economic meltdown of the USSR is that the same think could happen to the US as well.
If the US decided to go back on the gold standard right now, it would have to either buy up a lot of gold, which would drive up the price even more, so it would be much better for the us to wait until it drops back down again if it were to do so (which it just isn't ever going to do unless some really fringe politicians manage to take over Congress), or it could start a massive gold mining program which would drive the price of gold way down. Anyway, a system backed with a fractional reserve of gold wouldn't be truly gold backed (the realities of which are why the US went off the gold standard in the first place). For bank fractional reserves (which are ridiculously low even if the federal reserve didn't itself only use a fractional reserve), the rest of the deposits are backed by debt to the bank and most of those debts are backed by collateral in the form of real assets like vehicles, land, etc. So a fractional reserve gold backed system would really be backed by other assets and would be pretty much the system the US has now (after all, the US does still have some gold) with a different official name.
For that situation though, it seems even better to stock up on other tangible goods like canned food. Sure, you might be able to buy them with gold afterwards, but who knows at what exchange rate. You can buy about 100 $0.50 cans of beans right now for the value of a gram of gold. If the economic disaster you posit actually happens, chances are pretty good that gram of gold, in hand, isn't going to buy you anywhere near as much food.
The most important problem from my point of view is that the traffic laws don't always actually make sense. Near my house, there's a T junction about 20 meters from a red light. At the intersection, there's a stop line. They used to have a "do not block intersection" sign back at the T junction so that traffic could still turn down the side street. They've replaced it with a "stop here on red" sign. The intent seems to be to create two stop lines for the same red light. The actual law is largely ambiguous on this. It definitely doesn't address this particular situation, but it doesn't say that the town, _can't_ do it. Most people just completely ignore the sign. I just do what I always did before and I don't block the intersection when there's a red light. No-one seems to be able to tell if they're actually required to stop there and, if they do stop, if they have to stop like they'd stop at a red light, or it they have to stop like they'd stop at a stop sign, also, since the turn there is a right turn, and a right turn on red is allowed at a stop light in my state, is a right turn on red allowed there since it's not actually at the light?
So, the problem is the law. It's not logically and consistently written like computer code, it's always open to interpretation. There are many situations where you legitimately can't tell you've broken the law until you've gone before a judge and they've decided. And then, there are many situations while driving where you either have to technically break the law or stop traffic for hours. Consider a left turn at a light where there isn't a separate left turn signal. If the traffic coming in the other direction is continuous, they have the right of way and you can't turn left unless you move to the middle of the intersection, wait for the light to change, then turn. This is illegal. It's what everyone does in that situation and, 9 times out of 10, a police officer watching you do this won't even care. But, consider the situation from a legal point of view. If it's a turning lane, you can't legally change lanes at the intersection to go straight. You can't legally turn left until there's an opening in traffic, which could literally be hours in some places and times, but you can't legally just sit there either, because that's blocking traffic. Aside from that one, there's the fact that you're legally required to stay in a lane unless you're changing lanes, but I've been on a lot of multi-lane roads where the lanes haven't been marked, either because they were faded completely, or because they'd been removed for repainting (months before the repainting in some cases). Legally speaking, all the cars should be grouping into one lane in the dead center of the twenty meter wide stretch of road. That's insane. What everyone actually does is illegally estimate where the lanes should be and travel in them side by side. Then there's yellow and red lights. There are intersections where you cannot avoid running a red light. For starters, you don't know how long the green light and yellow light will last before the red. The guidelines for most states for the length of the lights don't even seem to take the speed limit and the width of the intersection into account and the guidelines often aren't followed anyway. Which means that there are many intersections where, even if the light changes to yellow _after_ you've crossed the stop line, you can't make it all the way across before the red light unless you're speeding. Also, where the intersection actually ends and you're no longer bound by the light is poorly defined both in law and in physical reality. Most people consider themselves clear when they can no longer see the light, but obviously that's at a different point depending on where the light is mounted. Stop lines are another issue. You have to stop at the stop line, but the stop line isn't always in the right place for you to actually see if there are cars coming. Often, you have to stop at the stop line, then move forward (sometimes quite a large distance), then stop again or do a ro
The thing is though, at the moment it's not a good idea to use gold as a store of value because gold prices are experiencing a bubble right now. Sometime in the next few years they're going to drop down by half at the very least. Right now, gold is only a good store of value if you can manage to short it.
The act you mention defining lawful money was from after the Civil war when the US returned to the gold standard. What you're quoting was about requiring banks to recognize each others financial instruments and setting reserve levels. That capital T in your quoted sentence should be lower case and the period at the end should be a semicolon because you're not quoting a sentence, you're quoting a sentence fragment as a full sentence. That's also referred to as quoting out of context. The whole thing is:
"Every association organized under section 151 of this title shall at all times keep on hand not less than 25 per centum of its outstanding circulation, in gold or silver coin of the United States; and shall receive at par in the payment of debts the gold notes of every other such association which at the time of such payment is redeeming its circulating notes in gold coin of the United States, and shall be subject to all the provisions of title 62 of the Revised Statutes: Provided, that, in applying the same to associations organized for issuing gold notes, the terms ''lawful money'' and ''lawful money of the United States'' shall be construed to mean gold or silver coin of the United States; and the circulation of such associations shall not be within the limitation of circulation mentioned in title 62 of the Revised Statutes."
Note that there's only one period in the whole thing. That's just the way lawyers roll. Anyway, you'll not that, in context, it doesn't define what constitutes "lawful money" for the purposes of individual citizens redeeming their notes. Actually, it just seems to confuse the whole matter. Also, it doesn't define what it means by coin. "gold and silver coin of the United States" has no need to actually mean physical coins of gold or silver, it can be anything the US coins as gold and silver "coin", which can include things like treasury bonds and, in fact, dollar bills.
Anyway, with the reserve set at 25% (and that not necessarily in physical gold and silver) only a small percentage of people would actually be able to go the the bank and get gold. They certainly couldn't go to Fort Knox to do it. You should also note that the 5 dollar bill says "gold or lawful money", not "gold or silver", which would be shorter. In this day and age, anyone who has managed to avoid sending their life savings to a Nigerian prince should recognize that as weaselspeak for: "gold or whatever we deem to be lawful money, at our option".
Also, the value of the dollar was set equal to a certain weight of gold as you say. What you didn't say is that the weight of gold that the dollar was equal to could be arbitrarily changed by the government and was.
Just face it, the gold standard wasn't some paradise. It never really worked very well. There just wasn't enough gold, for one thing. And if you had piles of the stuff backing the paper currency, you had to spend money like crazy on security to protect it. Now, it's true that people whose savings were in gold in nations that have economically collapsed have managed to make out better than their fellow countrymen. But the same would be true if their money were in foreign investments, or other precious metals, sometimes in land (other times, the land may be seized by the government or by mob rule, but then again, they can do the same thing to the gold), or in valuable art, etc.
The point is, there's nothing special about gold. The gold standard has been de facto defunct in the US for about a century since shortly after it went back on it. There's nothing magical or special about gold that makes it the king of metals, or the only proper basis for currency. It's just a shiny, relatively rare, heavy metal that some people fetishize unduly. I would like a giant pile of gold coins to swim around in like Scrooge McDuck as much as the next guy, but I think it's silly to base a system of economics on it. When you consider that a high estimate of all the gold the human race has ever produced (and most of which has probably been lost by now) doesn't even equal a quarter of the world GDP even at the current hyperinflated gold prices, how could you even consider a gold standard?
I'm going to stick with the idea that respecting people as human beings is the way to go. If people don't want to be described as religious because they're not, then it's rude to still call them religious. Arguing over some semantic point that an empty set of gods believed in is still a set of gods believed in is ridiculous. Sure, you can say that someone who has no hobbies actually has hobbies because they have zero hobbies and zero is still a number. It's basically meaningless. The insistence that atheism is a religion usually seems to be done by religious people who want to belittle atheists. Since it's generally done as some sort of attack, atheists generally are especially sensitive to it. So, if you insist on it, you're just being rude.
Still depends a lot on where the trade routes actually are and turnaround times, etc. But, as you say, it's just like any other commodity. Which, to my understanding means no special intrinsic value which makes it a magic one true currency.
I'm very nearly the least xenophobic person I know. Personally I think nations should have open border policies and make it easy for anyone who wants to become a citizen to become one. I'm also a realist when it comes to how rationally nations behave in crisis situations.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that any scenario that makes a major difference in the habitability of large parts of Canada is going to make a major difference in the US as well, and a lot of the difference will be bad for people.
In the end, it doesn't seem like it's worth debating. Too many people are dead set on the idea that it's all going to be roses no matter what we do to the environment. The clear evidence that we're using up most of our resources faster than they can recover doesn't mean a thing. Most days I just feel like shutting my mouth and letting the world fall apart since it's going to whether I speak out or not.
I can remember a few times I miraculously saved people's data from 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks that were chewed up by dogs and otherwise mangled by a simple transplant to another disk and maybe some minor surgery on the disk (cutting out around a puncture from a dog's tooth with an exacto knife so that the disk could spin). In a lot of cases, even if the disk itself was punctured, most or all of the data was readable. That said, anyone intentionally putting holes in floppy disks was obviously deranged.
I've seriously considering telling my family that I want my epitaph to read: "Let it be known that, although he was bent, spindled and mutilated, he did not fold!"
I had the shielding in the concept, but I didn't describe it well enough. Essentially you dig a circular trench and the sloped outer wall is what you mount the track on. You make a ceiling for the trench and pack soil on that. The shielding is actually why I like the trench and train track approach to the crater approach. If you use a circular trench, you just have to cover the trench, if you use a crater, you have to either cover the whole crater, or build up an inner wall so you can make a ceiling over the track area. Also, I prefer the track to the central pivot. For one thing, if you want the central pivot, you really do need to cover the whole area (or build a large heavy overhang around the edge at least). For another, for safety you'll want a track around the outside anyway even with the central pivot otherwise the arm needs to be be super strong to stop the modules from drooping when it's not spinning (the track needs to be strong as well, of course, and designed so that the train can just hang on it when not moving. Finally, you don't have to balance the track-based system on either side, you can start with just one car, and you can build up a habitat one car at a time with all cars connected to each other.
I've actually put more thought into this than is healthy. Descending rings as you suggest are a good idea for increasing capacity, you could even have bridges between the rings. I also looked at concentric rings. If you have a starting ring at 224 meters, and you have about 30 meters to the next ring, you can get in five rings before you hit 344 meters at which point the linear speed required for 1 G is 209 kph (don't remember why but I selected 210 kph as a max safe speed). At that point, you have 2.16 km of track. I imagined a triple standard width train car at 9 meters wide and about double height at 9 meters high, with a length of 26 meters (based on the length of an extra-long train car). With three internal stories, it would have about 700 square meters of floor space (not counting space taken by walls, doors, partitions, infrastructure, and ladders/stairs/elevators. That would be plenty for 10 inhabitants per car, and a 3 ring high, 5 ring wide colony could have about 1000 cars on the tracks for 10,000 inhabitants.
Whether any of this would ever be necessary is a currently unanswered question. It may turn out that bone loss and other health problems, while high in microgravity, are negligible in 1/6th of a G. Or that strapping 5 times your mass in weights to yourself is sufficient simulation of 1 G (wouldn't want to run into a wall or drop a few meters on the moon carrying 475 kg of weights though since the inertia would be the same even if the weight is 1/6th) that you don't need any sort of centrifugal simulation.
It would be really nice if the governments actually involved in manned spaceflight would actually get their act together and land some people on Mars or the Moon for an extended stay so we can actually answer the physiological questions and find out what we'd actually need for colonization. As in the article, at the moment, it seems like all they do is talk about what might be needed and study the issue for a while, then cancel whatever program they have going to actually get there, then start over again.
So, to answer a question with paraphrasing of the question:
If the USD was backed by gold, and the government needed to pay back a loan, would the creditor be able to claim gold rather than the currency? Who would be responsible for appraising the total value of the gold?
The same essential answers apply. When US dollars were backed by gold, there wasn't exactly a counter at Fort Knox you could walk up to with some cash and walk away with a gold bar. Also, I never said that the currency is backed by land, I said it's backed by every asset of the government and its people, which includes land, but includes the people and their labor and everything that a country is. That even includes the gold.
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Are you from the US? If so, you do realize that you just said that, at least for the presidency, the US doesn't have "real democratic election[s]".
Yes, wouldn't it be nice if the DMCA had a sunset provision too? Personally, I think all new laws should have sunset provisions without some sort of actual constitutional amendment-like system to make them permanent. I also think they should need to be read in their entirety, on record in the house and senate before they get to vote on them every time.
Actually, there's also a notion of copyright existing on characters as well as trademark existing on them.
Yeah, I remember going to a Ford dealership when I was shopping for a car way back. It was an almost surreal experience. There was such a huge disconnect between what I was looking for from the salespeople and how they acted. I remember a few things. One was when I commented on how high up the seat felt. I thought it was bizarre in a sedan. The salesman said something like "for that feeling of being up high, this is the best car in its class". The also told me that, for $300 more, the could stick mustang logos on the car. Just in every way, they managed to feel like the worst stereotype of the car salesman. Pretty much all of the other auto dealerships I went to made me feel like a car buyer, the Ford dealership just made me feel uncomfortable and dirty.
Well, let's say you have your car for 150,000 miles. At an average of 30 mph, that's 5000 hours of driving and at 30 mpg, that's also 5000 gallons of gas. We'll say $3.00 per gallon, so that's $15,000 of gas, and we'll say the car is an inexpensive model at $15,000, let's throw in another $5,000 for repairs, maintenance, inspections, registrations, excise taxes, car washes, etc. So, about $35,000 for 5000 hours of driving works out to $7 per hour (which, frankly, is on the extreme low end). So, comparing it to the 20 hours of the video game, the video came would have to cost $140+ for the car to be a better value.
Of course, all of this is using the ridiculous assumption that you can simply compare car hours to video game hours as an absolute measure of relative value. Still, it does help to actually do the math before you make such statements.
By my "vision for humanity" do you mean the way I think we should strive to be, or the way I see us now, or something else? Whichever way you mean it, I have no idea by what confusion of ideas you came up with an "economically, socially and technologically perpetually static society". Nothing I've said has suggest that. I'm just saying that, as a species, we're eventually going to be hit pretty hard when the finite resources we're using up are no longer around and we've wrecked the environment (not permanently, a few million years and it could be like we never existed, but in the short term, wrecked enough to kill most of us).
Also, what does whether humans have ever behaved differently have to do with it? 10,000 years ago, most of us did behave differently as we were mostly nomadic tribes. The notion that such tribes lived in some sort of special harmony with nature is ridiculous. If anything, modern humans are vastly more ecologically aware. We just haven't managed to convert that to being ecologically responsible. It also doesn't look like we're going to before the crunch hits.
It's worked so far: sometimes we screw up and then we fix it. The US has a cleaner environment now than any time since the start of the industrial revolution. Why all this fear and negativity?
You, my friend, are living in a magical fairyland. I don't think there's anything I can say or do to pull you out of it. I'd still like to say that it hasn't worked so far, virtually none of the screw ups have ever been fixed. The US does not have a cleaner environment now than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. Every step forward in one area is counterbalanced by two steps back in another. All the fear is because things can only keep getting worse for so long before horrible things happen to the whole human race (probably for later generations and not mine, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't care) . The negativity is because there are so many people like you who are either outright insane or just ignorant and you're so proud of it that you actually expend effort to actively fight attempts to improve our situation and exercise the most basic amount of caution.
Of course, you might have a good ability to challenge a ticket on it by looking to see if the sign change itself was legal (e.g. authorized) or if someone just switched it trying to get more people to stop and leave the intersection clear that they already should have been doing.
That right there addresses the crux of my point. To tell if something is illegal or not, the clear markings on the road and the laws as written don't necessarily apply. Or, at lease, the laws include the federal laws, the state laws, the town/county/parish laws, the minutes of whatever local body decided to put up the sign, the actual actions of whoever put up the sign, and all related case law. Even then you have no way of knowing how an eventual court case might turn out. Essentially, if they put thirty-three stop lines on the same light, spaced 30 meters apart, and the town council approved it, the same traffic light would legally cover all those intersections over an entire kilometer (and it's on a long downhill grade, you can see the light about a kilometer away).
The problem is, you're making an argument from common sense. You are not, I assume, a lawyer. For example, you say that of course you can take a right on red at any of those stop lines, but what are you basing that on? Aside from me mentioning that right turns on red at stop signs are legal in my state, what do you actually know about the laws in my state? The law might be phrased in such a way that it describes an intersection where you can take a right turn on red and a second stop line for the same red light doesn't fit that description, but at the same time, the law doesn't say you can't have multiple stop lines for the same light. If that's the case, then it's a valid legal interpretation that you can only take a right turn on red at the first stop line, but it's also a valid interpretation that the _intent_ of the law is to let you take a right on red at any of them, but that the original language was imprecise. Then it's up for a judge to decide. This does not work well with an autonomous driving program. The law is written in prose and it's full of holes that people are expected to fill with common sense. Computer programs are not great at interpreting prose, and they don't have common sense.
I'm not putting ambiguity in there because it suits me. The ambiguity is really there. Take this example:
"speed reasonable for the existing conditions", "if required for safety to stop" and "in the intersection or approaching on another roadway so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard" are not precise. For that matter, if there is no stop line or crosswalk, " the point nearest the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway before entering it" may not actually exist. Given reasonable parameters for the autonomous vehicles acceleration and the estimated speed, reaction time, and braking ability of vehicles that the autonomous vehicle can't even see, there do exist sections of road where, depending on conditions, there is no "speed reasonable for the existing conditions" and where it's "required for safety to stop" and where it's then not technically safe to start moving again and is illegal to make
The left turn by moving forward until the light changes is indeed the correct thing to do. It's also technically illegal most of the time.
As for intersections on yellow/red lights. Tickets for people who entered an intersection on yellow and then the light turned red are almost always upheld in the end (when the police officer bothers to show up). Of course, even when they're not, the "offender" pays the court fees.
That doesn't seem to be the case in practice. Not for police officers/red-light cameras or judges when these cases go to court.
But if only rich people can afford to store value in gold anyway, why do the rest of us care if it's a good store of value or not? If you're storing value for a complete collapse, the best store of value is always going to be the things you're actually going to need, if you can store them. If I think that there's going to be a home heating oil crisis, I don't stock up on gold to buy home heating oil, I stock up on home heating oil. If I think there's going to be a crisis that makes it near impossible to buy food, I'm not going to stock up on gold to buy food, I'm just going to stock up on non-perishable food items.
On scrip and other exploitive "private money", I agree that it has never really gone away. Also agree somewhat on the disturbing money tracking trend.
As for bitcoin, a number of facets of the bitcoin system depend on the fairly predictable difficulty of cryptographic computer problems. As computing power increases, the actual amount of computing power available to everyone presumably increases at the same rate. Someone might develop some sort of amazing new computing technology that's a thousand times faster than what anyone else has for the same price, but only supervillains use super-advanced technology they've developed in crazy schemes to manipulate currency. Sane people get rich by selling the technology (well, then there's all those so called "quants" working for brokerages, but their "technology" isn't really good for anything except cynically manipulating markets). Hardness of problems in computer science is a difficult thing to prove, however. Until someone proves how hard they really are, most of the problems in cryptography are believed to be very hard, but not absolutely proven to be so. The crypotgraphic problems that prevent double spending and quick mining of bitcoins may some day fall to some sort of cryptoanalysis. To compare to the gold standard, it would be like someone suddenly finding an entire mountain of gold. In some cases, someone solving that sort of problem would render a lot of password and encryption systems virtually useless.
As for banks, they'll find any way they can to double or triple dip with fees, certainly. The fundamental model of banks though is still that people deposit money in them, then they loan out that money to earn interest. In a lot of ways, depositors are like investors in the bank. Banks these days clearly don't see their depositors that way, however.
Safeguarding the nations gold store certainly wouldn't be the largest expense the US government has. It's just that simply owning it would be an expense, so if the currency were backed only by gold, it would require a constant stream of money, backed by gold to keep it.
As for insiders, technically congresspersons and other politicians aren't considered insiders for the purposes of SEC rules. They just manage to get really amazing returns on their investments. They must just be really smart investors.
In the end, whatever it's backed by, currency is basically just something we made up. Sort of a shared dream like civilization, justice, truth and all that stuff. It works because the majority of us believe in it and go about our lives treating it as real. Government is another such thing we just made up to make civilization possible. Regulating money is one of the things it exists to do and is one of its proper functions and, at present, I don't think it would be better any other way. I do, however, think that the US government (and other governments) are doing a really, really terrible job at it and have been for a very long time. I would really like to see the people in charge actually doing their jobs for once, as a matter of fact.
As far as the competition in issuing money, I sort of see the point. The trouble is, the massive abuse of workers by companies paying in their own scrip back in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the continued practices of abuse of users of gift cards and all kinds of "point" systems right up to the current day leaves me a bit shy on the idea. We still do have barter of goods and services (with the attendant confusion on taxation of such) to fall back on, the problem is, whenever anyone tries to think up a good system to facilitate barter, they always end up right back at currency and the need for a central authority to back it. Bitcoin tries to use fundamental laws of math (unproven ones, of course, and many of us are actually hoping that they're not fundamental laws) as the central authority, but I don't quite think that system is going to make it in the long run.
As for full reserve banks, those exist now as part of some bank branches in the form of safety deposit boxes. If the banks can't loan out your savings, however, the only way they can stay in business is to charge you fees for holding your stuff for you (of course, banks currently can loan out more money than they have deposited with which is a bit disturbing).
The US does spend a lot on guarding its assets, but I don't think they'd spend less on guarding the rest of it if they also had to guard huge piles of gold, they would just spend extra on guarding the gold. Of course, since the US doesn't have all the money they're spending on the military at the moment, they're actually putting everything at risk. The lesson the US apparently didn't learn from the economic meltdown of the USSR is that the same think could happen to the US as well.
If the US decided to go back on the gold standard right now, it would have to either buy up a lot of gold, which would drive up the price even more, so it would be much better for the us to wait until it drops back down again if it were to do so (which it just isn't ever going to do unless some really fringe politicians manage to take over Congress), or it could start a massive gold mining program which would drive the price of gold way down. Anyway, a system backed with a fractional reserve of gold wouldn't be truly gold backed (the realities of which are why the US went off the gold standard in the first place). For bank fractional reserves (which are ridiculously low even if the federal reserve didn't itself only use a fractional reserve), the rest of the deposits are backed by debt to the bank and most of those debts are backed by collateral in the form of real assets like vehicles, land, etc. So a fractional reserve gold backed system would really be backed by other assets and would be pretty much the system the US has now (after all, the US does still have some gold) with a different official name.
For that situation though, it seems even better to stock up on other tangible goods like canned food. Sure, you might be able to buy them with gold afterwards, but who knows at what exchange rate. You can buy about 100 $0.50 cans of beans right now for the value of a gram of gold. If the economic disaster you posit actually happens, chances are pretty good that gram of gold, in hand, isn't going to buy you anywhere near as much food.
The most important problem from my point of view is that the traffic laws don't always actually make sense. Near my house, there's a T junction about 20 meters from a red light. At the intersection, there's a stop line. They used to have a "do not block intersection" sign back at the T junction so that traffic could still turn down the side street. They've replaced it with a "stop here on red" sign. The intent seems to be to create two stop lines for the same red light. The actual law is largely ambiguous on this. It definitely doesn't address this particular situation, but it doesn't say that the town, _can't_ do it. Most people just completely ignore the sign. I just do what I always did before and I don't block the intersection when there's a red light. No-one seems to be able to tell if they're actually required to stop there and, if they do stop, if they have to stop like they'd stop at a red light, or it they have to stop like they'd stop at a stop sign, also, since the turn there is a right turn, and a right turn on red is allowed at a stop light in my state, is a right turn on red allowed there since it's not actually at the light?
So, the problem is the law. It's not logically and consistently written like computer code, it's always open to interpretation. There are many situations where you legitimately can't tell you've broken the law until you've gone before a judge and they've decided. And then, there are many situations while driving where you either have to technically break the law or stop traffic for hours. Consider a left turn at a light where there isn't a separate left turn signal. If the traffic coming in the other direction is continuous, they have the right of way and you can't turn left unless you move to the middle of the intersection, wait for the light to change, then turn. This is illegal. It's what everyone does in that situation and, 9 times out of 10, a police officer watching you do this won't even care. But, consider the situation from a legal point of view. If it's a turning lane, you can't legally change lanes at the intersection to go straight. You can't legally turn left until there's an opening in traffic, which could literally be hours in some places and times, but you can't legally just sit there either, because that's blocking traffic. Aside from that one, there's the fact that you're legally required to stay in a lane unless you're changing lanes, but I've been on a lot of multi-lane roads where the lanes haven't been marked, either because they were faded completely, or because they'd been removed for repainting (months before the repainting in some cases). Legally speaking, all the cars should be grouping into one lane in the dead center of the twenty meter wide stretch of road. That's insane. What everyone actually does is illegally estimate where the lanes should be and travel in them side by side. Then there's yellow and red lights. There are intersections where you cannot avoid running a red light. For starters, you don't know how long the green light and yellow light will last before the red. The guidelines for most states for the length of the lights don't even seem to take the speed limit and the width of the intersection into account and the guidelines often aren't followed anyway. Which means that there are many intersections where, even if the light changes to yellow _after_ you've crossed the stop line, you can't make it all the way across before the red light unless you're speeding. Also, where the intersection actually ends and you're no longer bound by the light is poorly defined both in law and in physical reality. Most people consider themselves clear when they can no longer see the light, but obviously that's at a different point depending on where the light is mounted. Stop lines are another issue. You have to stop at the stop line, but the stop line isn't always in the right place for you to actually see if there are cars coming. Often, you have to stop at the stop line, then move forward (sometimes quite a large distance), then stop again or do a ro
More like 64 feet high (for a 747). Nowhere near 80,000 feet, I'll grant you.
The thing is though, at the moment it's not a good idea to use gold as a store of value because gold prices are experiencing a bubble right now. Sometime in the next few years they're going to drop down by half at the very least. Right now, gold is only a good store of value if you can manage to short it.
The act you mention defining lawful money was from after the Civil war when the US returned to the gold standard. What you're quoting was about requiring banks to recognize each others financial instruments and setting reserve levels. That capital T in your quoted sentence should be lower case and the period at the end should be a semicolon because you're not quoting a sentence, you're quoting a sentence fragment as a full sentence. That's also referred to as quoting out of context. The whole thing is:
"Every association organized under section 151 of this title shall at all times keep on hand not less than 25 per centum of its outstanding circulation, in gold or silver coin of the United States; and shall receive at par in the payment of debts the gold notes of every other such association which at the time of such payment is redeeming its circulating notes in gold coin of the United States, and shall be subject to all the provisions of title 62 of the Revised Statutes: Provided, that, in applying the same to associations organized for issuing gold notes, the terms ''lawful money'' and ''lawful money of the United States'' shall be construed to mean gold or silver coin of the United States; and the circulation of such associations shall not be within the limitation of circulation mentioned in title 62 of the Revised Statutes."
Note that there's only one period in the whole thing. That's just the way lawyers roll. Anyway, you'll not that, in context, it doesn't define what constitutes "lawful money" for the purposes of individual citizens redeeming their notes. Actually, it just seems to confuse the whole matter. Also, it doesn't define what it means by coin. "gold and silver coin of the United States" has no need to actually mean physical coins of gold or silver, it can be anything the US coins as gold and silver "coin", which can include things like treasury bonds and, in fact, dollar bills.
Anyway, with the reserve set at 25% (and that not necessarily in physical gold and silver) only a small percentage of people would actually be able to go the the bank and get gold. They certainly couldn't go to Fort Knox to do it. You should also note that the 5 dollar bill says "gold or lawful money", not "gold or silver", which would be shorter. In this day and age, anyone who has managed to avoid sending their life savings to a Nigerian prince should recognize that as weaselspeak for: "gold or whatever we deem to be lawful money, at our option".
Also, the value of the dollar was set equal to a certain weight of gold as you say. What you didn't say is that the weight of gold that the dollar was equal to could be arbitrarily changed by the government and was.
Just face it, the gold standard wasn't some paradise. It never really worked very well. There just wasn't enough gold, for one thing. And if you had piles of the stuff backing the paper currency, you had to spend money like crazy on security to protect it. Now, it's true that people whose savings were in gold in nations that have economically collapsed have managed to make out better than their fellow countrymen. But the same would be true if their money were in foreign investments, or other precious metals, sometimes in land (other times, the land may be seized by the government or by mob rule, but then again, they can do the same thing to the gold), or in valuable art, etc.
The point is, there's nothing special about gold. The gold standard has been de facto defunct in the US for about a century since shortly after it went back on it. There's nothing magical or special about gold that makes it the king of metals, or the only proper basis for currency. It's just a shiny, relatively rare, heavy metal that some people fetishize unduly. I would like a giant pile of gold coins to swim around in like Scrooge McDuck as much as the next guy, but I think it's silly to base a system of economics on it. When you consider that a high estimate of all the gold the human race has ever produced (and most of which has probably been lost by now) doesn't even equal a quarter of the world GDP even at the current hyperinflated gold prices, how could you even consider a gold standard?
I'm going to stick with the idea that respecting people as human beings is the way to go. If people don't want to be described as religious because they're not, then it's rude to still call them religious. Arguing over some semantic point that an empty set of gods believed in is still a set of gods believed in is ridiculous. Sure, you can say that someone who has no hobbies actually has hobbies because they have zero hobbies and zero is still a number. It's basically meaningless. The insistence that atheism is a religion usually seems to be done by religious people who want to belittle atheists. Since it's generally done as some sort of attack, atheists generally are especially sensitive to it. So, if you insist on it, you're just being rude.
Still depends a lot on where the trade routes actually are and turnaround times, etc. But, as you say, it's just like any other commodity. Which, to my understanding means no special intrinsic value which makes it a magic one true currency.
I'm very nearly the least xenophobic person I know. Personally I think nations should have open border policies and make it easy for anyone who wants to become a citizen to become one. I'm also a realist when it comes to how rationally nations behave in crisis situations.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that any scenario that makes a major difference in the habitability of large parts of Canada is going to make a major difference in the US as well, and a lot of the difference will be bad for people.
In the end, it doesn't seem like it's worth debating. Too many people are dead set on the idea that it's all going to be roses no matter what we do to the environment. The clear evidence that we're using up most of our resources faster than they can recover doesn't mean a thing. Most days I just feel like shutting my mouth and letting the world fall apart since it's going to whether I speak out or not.
I always assumed that was a feature of the species. Although, if that were the case, it would be a little odd to need to mention it when naming her.
I can remember a few times I miraculously saved people's data from 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks that were chewed up by dogs and otherwise mangled by a simple transplant to another disk and maybe some minor surgery on the disk (cutting out around a puncture from a dog's tooth with an exacto knife so that the disk could spin). In a lot of cases, even if the disk itself was punctured, most or all of the data was readable. That said, anyone intentionally putting holes in floppy disks was obviously deranged.
I've seriously considering telling my family that I want my epitaph to read: "Let it be known that, although he was bent, spindled and mutilated, he did not fold!"
I had the shielding in the concept, but I didn't describe it well enough. Essentially you dig a circular trench and the sloped outer wall is what you mount the track on. You make a ceiling for the trench and pack soil on that. The shielding is actually why I like the trench and train track approach to the crater approach. If you use a circular trench, you just have to cover the trench, if you use a crater, you have to either cover the whole crater, or build up an inner wall so you can make a ceiling over the track area. Also, I prefer the track to the central pivot. For one thing, if you want the central pivot, you really do need to cover the whole area (or build a large heavy overhang around the edge at least). For another, for safety you'll want a track around the outside anyway even with the central pivot otherwise the arm needs to be be super strong to stop the modules from drooping when it's not spinning (the track needs to be strong as well, of course, and designed so that the train can just hang on it when not moving. Finally, you don't have to balance the track-based system on either side, you can start with just one car, and you can build up a habitat one car at a time with all cars connected to each other.
I've actually put more thought into this than is healthy. Descending rings as you suggest are a good idea for increasing capacity, you could even have bridges between the rings. I also looked at concentric rings. If you have a starting ring at 224 meters, and you have about 30 meters to the next ring, you can get in five rings before you hit 344 meters at which point the linear speed required for 1 G is 209 kph (don't remember why but I selected 210 kph as a max safe speed). At that point, you have 2.16 km of track. I imagined a triple standard width train car at 9 meters wide and about double height at 9 meters high, with a length of 26 meters (based on the length of an extra-long train car). With three internal stories, it would have about 700 square meters of floor space (not counting space taken by walls, doors, partitions, infrastructure, and ladders/stairs/elevators. That would be plenty for 10 inhabitants per car, and a 3 ring high, 5 ring wide colony could have about 1000 cars on the tracks for 10,000 inhabitants.
Whether any of this would ever be necessary is a currently unanswered question. It may turn out that bone loss and other health problems, while high in microgravity, are negligible in 1/6th of a G. Or that strapping 5 times your mass in weights to yourself is sufficient simulation of 1 G (wouldn't want to run into a wall or drop a few meters on the moon carrying 475 kg of weights though since the inertia would be the same even if the weight is 1/6th) that you don't need any sort of centrifugal simulation.
It would be really nice if the governments actually involved in manned spaceflight would actually get their act together and land some people on Mars or the Moon for an extended stay so we can actually answer the physiological questions and find out what we'd actually need for colonization. As in the article, at the moment, it seems like all they do is talk about what might be needed and study the issue for a while, then cancel whatever program they have going to actually get there, then start over again.
So, to answer a question with paraphrasing of the question:
If the USD was backed by gold, and the government needed to pay back a loan, would the creditor be able to claim gold rather than the currency? Who would be responsible for appraising the total value of the gold?
The same essential answers apply. When US dollars were backed by gold, there wasn't exactly a counter at Fort Knox you could walk up to with some cash and walk away with a gold bar. Also, I never said that the currency is backed by land, I said it's backed by every asset of the government and its people, which includes land, but includes the people and their labor and everything that a country is. That even includes the gold.
Bleh. "your" to "you're". Can't believe I did that.