Cell phones did limits and usage based. Market forces ended up with unlimited plans and $10 plans available. I see no reason to think internet wouldn't be the same, provided government doesn't force a monopoly in the area.
You CAN buy 10 Mbps dedicated. It costs about $500 / month. The standard model for residential is that you load a page, using the bandwidth for one second, then your neighbor uses it for a second or two, etc. An hour later, you're watching TV and a different neighbor is using the bandwidth. Since you're sharing the bandwidth, you share the cost.
I have dedicated bandwidth that I don't share. I pay over $1,200 / month. You can do the same.
I had to think that through myself, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work. To power the alternator requires more power from the engine. More power means burning more fuel. So 2 lbs MORE hydrogen burned to make one pound.
If it's NOT powered by the engine, but instead uses energy you're trying to throw away, that could work. The only energy I can think of you'd want to throw away when be when you're braking . You'd connect it to the brakes, not the engine .
Still it would probably be more efficient to store the braking energy by compressing a gas or in a high speed flywheel, as in a toy friction car . It could theoretically work, though.
The alternator would be powered by the engine, right? The engine is powered by the hydrogen. So you'd be burning hydrogen to make hydrogen. Is that what you mean? If that's what you have in mind, it'll "work", you just have to burn two pounds of hydrogen to get the electricity to make one pound. I suppose it's an interesting, Rube Goldberg, way to get rid of hydrogen.
You can make the hydrogen, H2, much more energy dense and easier to handle by combining it with another element or two. Plants and animals are powered by a hydrogen based molecule of the type Cm(H2O)n, meaning two hydrogen molecules combined with one oxygen molecule, bound to some number of carbon molecules. Having the oxygen in there is a waste of space, so you could take that out and power a car with CnH2n.
CnH2n has seven times better mileage than H2, and is found in nature, so it doesn't have to be made via electrolysis or any other method. It burns well in an engine, but doesn't explode. The "n" in that formula stands for any of many different numbers that will work. For example, C8H18 is quite good. It makes for pretty efficient engines because it's 100 octane rating allows for a 10:1 compression ratio. In general, the CnH2n group is called "hydrocarbons". C8H18 is octane, a primary component of gasoline.
Sure that has something to do with it. Clinton took office while growth was strong and he's given credit for what he was handed. This even though growth slowed a lot over his eight years and his final two budget years, with his policies having been in place for a few years, were much worse than what Bush Sr. handed him.
On the other hand, Reagan and Obama both took over during poor economic conditions. Eight years of Reagan saw great improvement and people recognize that. Six years of Obama have had things go from bad to worse, and people can see that too. Eight years is a long time, and people see if things get better or get worse .
Just about. One of the two, Obama or Bush II, is the worst president since Harding or perhaps Filmore. By the numbers, things that can be objectively compared, Obama comes out significantly worse than Bush. It's mostly economic numbers that can be objectively compared. One thing about Bush is he really began to suck in the final year or two of his eight years. It wasn't until 2008 that economic growth dropped below 3%, and the country didn't go into recession until Obama took office (recession meaning negative growth). Seven of Bush's eight years weren't bad, looking at the objective numbers, and subjective approval ratings tell the same story.
In 2004, Bush's approval rating was 65%, Obama rated 45% at the same point in his presidency. Again that's 45% Obama, 65% Bush. Absolutely Bush was a below average president - nearly 80% of historians agree on that. For this month the October following re-election, only Nixon has a lower approval rating than Bush and Obama, who are tied for second worst.
So yeah, we've done a TERRIBLE job of picking the last two presidents. Their two predecessors, Clinton and Bush Sr., were average to slightly above average, by the numbers. Not great picks, but significantly better than these last two. (Compare approval average for all presidents 54%, Clinton average approval 55%, Bush Sr. average approval 60%).
Yes, definitely when your beloved government mama is blowing money left and right and someone points that out and tries to do something about it, the smart thing is to fire them.
Only if defaulting is okay. Paying a 10€ trillion debt with 1€ trillion worth of bills is defaulting. You'd also need chronic long term inflation of at least 14% to get there. That would be a problem.
> There is no point at which a "death spiral" occurs.
Let's do some simple grade school math. The yield on government bonds, the cost of borrowing, has ranged from 2% to 15%. To make the math easy while being generous to your claim, let's predict 5% as a long term average. Let's say the debt is 20X GDP. 5% of that is 1 X GDP - everything the country produces goes to pay interest on debt.
When the entire GDP is spent on interest payments, nothing is left for the people to eat, get shelter, education, etc. Everybody's entire paycheck is sent to China and other creditors. That sounds like collapse to me. So we've established via grade school math that collapse occurs by the time you reach 20 X GDP. If you can pass 4th grade math, you can see there IS a point where it collapses. The only debatable question is exactly where that point is.
Those, like you, who advocate for big government spending say that the government needs to spend at least 10% - 30% of GDP on services and entitlements. That leaves 70% for interest payments, so debt can't be more than 14 X GDP. Hmm, people need to eat, and pay utilities, etc., so they'll need to keep half of their pay check. To leave people will half of their paycheck, that's a max of 7 X GDP for government debt. This is still basic arithmetic and we've seen that anything above 7 X GDP collapses. We could get a more specific number by doing advanced things like decimal division, but I think the point is clear - there absolutely is a point of collapse, and with the debt doubling every 8 - 10 years, it won't be long before we hit it.
> Post WW2, Britain had a 220% debt to GDP ratio. Post WW2, the US had a 121% debt to GDP ratio. Both countries were fine.
It's arguable whether the US is "fine", Obama says it's "definitely NOT fine", but you're confusing a one time event with a habit of chronic over spending. WWW2 was a one time event, like buying a house. What we have today is chronic, permanent overspending every single year - like a person who makes $5,000 / month and spends $7,000 / month every single month.
> Maybe this is why the TEA party people think it wouldn't be so bad to "default." Maybe they imagine it simply means not making interest payments > to China, the Social Security administration, and JP Morgan, and forget that it also means not paying for new Humvee tires or civil service salaries.
I think it's the opposite. Debt service on existing debt is mandatory spending - you pay your debts. That's very much part of the conservative ethic. On the other hand, there's a lot of spending that is not justified, in their eyes. Some are downright stupid - bridges to nowhere. Some are nothing but giveaways to donors - in just the last few months, THREE times executives have walked away from "green" companies financed by the taxpayer. The latest (ECOtality) took $99.8 million of our money and walked away. Others are well intentioned programs being run so poorly that they need a complete overhaul. We're spending twice as much on food stamps as eight years ago, and 20% - 40% of that is fraud. Some recipients of government aid claim they have a new baby every 2-3 months. How does that work?
From 1900 to 1940, government spending ranged between 6% - 20% of GDP, Today it's 39%. Does the government really need to be almost half of the country?
By reducing fraud and utter waste by just 50%, we could pay off the debt, which would free up $415 BILLION dollars, 14% of the federal budget, for tax relief and worthwhile projects while at the same time eliminating the massive weight we're saddling our children with.
* (Considering only _federal_ government spending, 1900-1940 it ranged 2% - 10% of GDP. Today it's 23%.)
> Except that it can be smart to borrow to pay off debt--if the rates on new new debt are lower than the rates of the old debt.
Yeah, "borrowing" to PAY OFF a higher interest debt isn't _really_ borrowing, it REDUCES your total liability. That's not what the government is doing. The government is borrowing (increasing debt) to pay INTEREST on debt. The more they borrow, the more interest there is. The more interest there is, the more they borrow to pay the interest. That's a vicious cycle spiraling to collapse.
> but there is no mechanism to ensure that it DOES do things efficiently.
Sure there is. Inefficient companies lose in the market to more efficient competitors. Unless of course the more inefficient company is much better in some other respect.
Strange, isn't it. So many people act (and vote) as if their kumbiya fantasy were reality. People act in their self interest, they buy stuff they want and do things they want to do. Ergo, government control of what people buy can never work. Yet, they keep trying. Today, they think the government can force you to buy overpriced health insurance instead of spending your money on what your family really needs, and that's going to work. Good luck with that. 50 years ago, they figured they could order you not to take a job, to let your house be foreclosed rather than work for less than $ridiculous_union_package. It keeps not working, because people take care of themselves and their families, but they keep trying it again, failing every time.
Two things. First, the free market does things efficiently, including dumb things. Microsoft built the Surface efficiently - $390 per tablet. Government spent over $1,000 each buying them.
Secondly, there's dumb, and there's government dumb. A dumb corporation requires three people to do a job that one person could do. A government gets the same job done by creating a new agency which contracts with three companies at $320 million each, requires that it be done in Pascal, and prohibits any testing until the project is "complete", at which time it's six years after tube event that the project was created to handle.
I just saw one of our most efficient government agencies, one that wins efficiency awards, spend over $19,000 on a project I could do in two days. Funny thing is, I WORK for that agency, so it would have cost them almost nothing to have me do it.
$400 billion per year in interest payments is "essentially zero"? That number is actually almost manageable, the BIG problem is that it's snowballing.
You'll recall Obama has been saying that if he wasn't allowed to borrow more, the government would default - wouldn't be able to pay the interest due. We're borrowing to the interest on our borrowing. That's when you know you're fucked, when you're maxing out one credit card to pay the minimum payment on another card. That's essentially what the US government is doing. We're in a trap the we're borrowing more and more in order to make the payments on existing debt, so the debt and the interest just keeps getting bigger and bigger until 100% of our tax money goes to pppay interest, leaving no money for essential government services.
Looking at what has happened in other countries, the "you're fucked" point, the point at which you can't escape the death spiral, is about 100% of GDP - when a country owes as much as it generates. Eight years ago, our debt to GDP ratio was about 35%. In 2014, it should hit 70%. That tells us we are about six to eight years from becoming Greece.
The difference between Greece and though, is that Greece is small enough to be bailed out. Nobody has $5 trillion to bail the US out.
It seems to me that Wikipedia is more like a commune than a free market. Market based companies don't let competitors edit their "product" with no oversight.
Like all communes, they are victims of the delusion that all people will always work for the common good.
Free market capitalist systems recognize the fact that people want "stuff", and will act in their own interest, and arranges things such that acting in your own self-interest IS acting for the greater good. At the most basic level, the free market says: To get stuff, get money. To get money, build or do stuff for other people to buy.
Putting the two together: To get what you want, take care of other people's needs. That's the free market. "Everyone get together and work on a shared thing" is the commie way. It works only if a) there are no more than three people involved or b) the project is controlled at the top by a free market organization responsible to their customers (Red Hat) or a harsh dictator (Linus). If you exclude the free market it either fails (Soviet Union) or has a heartless dictator (Castro) or both (Cuba sucks, even with a dictator).
Agreed. I tend conservative myself, as in "don't tthrow the baby out with the bathwater", and I think this particular law needs to be reviewed. I would want to hear arguments pro and con before saying it should definitely be repealed , but it looks suspiciously like a bad law.
Ps - look up Draco, who Draconian refers to. That's a lot like calling Obama "Hitler". Obama is more like Elmo than he is Hitler, and that law, while it may be bad, is in no way Draconian.
The automobile franchise laws are from from the 1930s, when the Democrats ran Texas. It's an anti-General Motors, anti-Ford, anti-big business law, not an anti-Tesla law.
Sorry, you're simply mistaken. I've been on the board of directors of nonprofit and for profit corporations. For the profit company, we could, as I explained, do just about anything EXCEPT convert company assets to personal use.
For most for profit corporations, the Articles of Incorporation almost always say the purpose of the corporation is "any lawful purpose" because the board is supposed to abide by the articles. For a nonprofit, the articles are often more specific. So it's actually the nonprofit that's more limited.
If you're interested in actually knowing something about this stuff rather than spouting BS, I can post Articles for both for-profit and non-profit corporations I'm involved in so you can read them over and get a better understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones did limits and usage based.
Market forces ended up with unlimited plans and $10 plans available. I see no reason to think internet wouldn't be the same, provided government doesn't force a monopoly in the area.
You CAN buy 10 Mbps dedicated. It costs about $500 / month. The standard model for residential is that you load a page, using the bandwidth for one second, then your neighbor uses it for a second or two, etc. An hour later, you're watching TV and a different neighbor is using the bandwidth. Since you're sharing the bandwidth, you share the cost.
I have dedicated bandwidth that I don't share. I pay over $1,200 / month. You can do the same.
I had to think that through myself, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work.
To power the alternator requires more power from the engine. More power means burning more fuel. So 2 lbs MORE hydrogen burned to make one pound.
If it's NOT powered by the engine, but instead uses energy you're trying to throw away, that could work. The only energy I can think of you'd want to throw away when be when you're braking . You'd connect it to the brakes, not the engine .
Still it would probably be more efficient to store the braking energy by compressing a gas or in a high speed flywheel, as in a toy friction car . It could theoretically work, though.
Cool. I wondered if I was missing the point.
The alternator would be powered by the engine, right? The engine is powered by the hydrogen. So you'd be burning hydrogen to make hydrogen.
Is that what you mean? If that's what you have in mind, it'll "work", you just have to burn two pounds of hydrogen to get the electricity to make one pound.
I suppose it's an interesting, Rube Goldberg, way to get rid of hydrogen.
You can make the hydrogen, H2, much more energy dense and easier to handle by combining it with another element or two.
Plants and animals are powered by a hydrogen based molecule of the type Cm(H2O)n, meaning two hydrogen molecules combined with one oxygen molecule, bound to some number of carbon molecules. Having the oxygen in there is a waste of space, so you could take that out and power a car with CnH2n.
CnH2n has seven times better mileage than H2, and is found in nature, so it doesn't have to be made via electrolysis or any other method.
It burns well in an engine, but doesn't explode. The "n" in that formula stands for any of many different numbers that will work. For example,
C8H18 is quite good. It makes for pretty efficient engines because it's 100 octane rating allows for a 10:1 compression ratio. In general, the
CnH2n group is called "hydrocarbons". C8H18 is octane, a primary component of gasoline.
An electrolysis rig and $200 of electricity will get you $40 of hydrogen, yes.
Oil comes from dirt. What's the point?
Sure that has something to do with it. Clinton took office while growth was strong and he's given credit for what he was handed. This even though growth slowed a lot over his eight years and his final two budget years, with his policies having been in place for a few years, were much worse than what Bush Sr. handed him.
On the other hand, Reagan and Obama both took over during poor economic conditions. Eight years of Reagan saw great improvement and people recognize that. Six years of Obama have had things go from bad to worse, and people can see that too. Eight years is a long time, and people see if things get better or get worse .
Just about. One of the two, Obama or Bush II, is the worst president since Harding or perhaps Filmore. By the numbers, things that can be objectively
compared, Obama comes out significantly worse than Bush. It's mostly economic numbers that can be objectively compared.
One thing about Bush is he really began to suck in the final year or two of his eight years. It wasn't until 2008 that economic growth dropped below 3%,
and the country didn't go into recession until Obama took office (recession meaning negative growth). Seven of Bush's eight years weren't bad,
looking at the objective numbers, and subjective approval ratings tell the same story.
In 2004, Bush's approval rating was 65%, Obama rated 45% at the same point in his presidency. Again that's 45% Obama, 65% Bush.
Absolutely Bush was a below average president - nearly 80% of historians agree on that. For this month the October following re-election,
only Nixon has a lower approval rating than Bush and Obama, who are tied for second worst.
So yeah, we've done a TERRIBLE job of picking the last two presidents. Their two predecessors, Clinton and Bush Sr., were average to slightly above average,
by the numbers. Not great picks, but significantly better than these last two. (Compare approval average for all presidents 54%, Clinton average approval 55%, Bush Sr. average approval 60%).
That sounds like a law you just made up.
Let's try it out:
Brad, if you have any employees, please fire one of them.
Am I going to jail for saying that?
Yes, definitely when your beloved government mama is blowing money left and right and someone points that out and tries to do something about it, the smart thing is to fire them.
You are the problem.
> The US can inflate itself out of debt.
Only if defaulting is okay. Paying a 10€ trillion debt with 1€ trillion worth of bills is defaulting.
You'd also need chronic long term inflation of at least 14% to get there. That would be a problem.
> There is no point at which a "death spiral" occurs.
Let's do some simple grade school math. The yield on government bonds, the cost of borrowing, has ranged from 2% to 15%.
To make the math easy while being generous to your claim, let's predict 5% as a long term average. Let's say the debt is 20X GDP.
5% of that is 1 X GDP - everything the country produces goes to pay interest on debt.
When the entire GDP is spent on interest payments, nothing is left for the people to eat, get shelter, education, etc.
Everybody's entire paycheck is sent to China and other creditors. That sounds like collapse to me.
So we've established via grade school math that collapse occurs by the time you reach 20 X GDP. If you can pass
4th grade math, you can see there IS a point where it collapses. The only debatable question is exactly where
that point is.
Those, like you, who advocate for big government spending say that the government needs to spend at least 10% - 30% of GDP
on services and entitlements. That leaves 70% for interest payments, so debt can't be more than 14 X GDP.
Hmm, people need to eat, and pay utilities, etc., so they'll need to keep half of their pay check. To leave people will
half of their paycheck, that's a max of 7 X GDP for government debt. This is still basic arithmetic and we've seen that
anything above 7 X GDP collapses. We could get a more specific number by doing advanced things like decimal division,
but I think the point is clear - there absolutely is a point of collapse, and with the debt doubling every 8 - 10 years, it
won't be long before we hit it.
> Post WW2, Britain had a 220% debt to GDP ratio. Post WW2, the US had a 121% debt to GDP ratio. Both countries were fine.
It's arguable whether the US is "fine", Obama says it's "definitely NOT fine", but you're confusing a one time event with a habit of chronic over spending. WWW2 was a one time event, like buying a house. What we have today is chronic, permanent overspending every single year - like a person
who makes $5,000 / month and spends $7,000 / month every single month.
> Maybe this is why the TEA party people think it wouldn't be so bad to "default." Maybe they imagine it simply means not making interest payments
> to China, the Social Security administration, and JP Morgan, and forget that it also means not paying for new Humvee tires or civil service salaries.
I think it's the opposite. Debt service on existing debt is mandatory spending - you pay your debts. That's very much part of the conservative ethic.
On the other hand, there's a lot of spending that is not justified, in their eyes. Some are downright stupid - bridges to nowhere. Some are nothing
but giveaways to donors - in just the last few months, THREE times executives have walked away from "green" companies financed by the
taxpayer. The latest (ECOtality) took $99.8 million of our money and walked away. Others are well intentioned programs being run so poorly that they need a complete overhaul. We're spending twice as much on food stamps as eight years ago, and 20% - 40% of that is fraud. Some recipients of
government aid claim they have a new baby every 2-3 months. How does that work?
From 1900 to 1940, government spending ranged between 6% - 20% of GDP, Today it's 39%.
Does the government really need to be almost half of the country?
By reducing fraud and utter waste by just 50%, we could pay off the debt, which would free up $415 BILLION dollars,
14% of the federal budget, for tax relief and worthwhile projects while at the same time eliminating the massive weight
we're saddling our children with.
* (Considering only _federal_ government spending, 1900-1940 it ranged 2% - 10% of GDP. Today it's 23%.)
> Except that it can be smart to borrow to pay off debt--if the rates on new new debt are lower than the rates of the old debt.
Yeah, "borrowing" to PAY OFF a higher interest debt isn't _really_ borrowing, it REDUCES your total liability.
That's not what the government is doing. The government is borrowing (increasing debt) to pay INTEREST on debt.
The more they borrow, the more interest there is. The more interest there is, the more they borrow to pay the interest.
That's a vicious cycle spiraling to collapse.
> but there is no mechanism to ensure that it DOES do things efficiently.
Sure there is. Inefficient companies lose in the market to more efficient competitors.
Unless of course the more inefficient company is much better in some other respect.
Strange, isn't it. So many people act (and vote) as if their kumbiya fantasy were reality. People act in their self interest, they buy stuff they want and do things they want to do. Ergo, government control of what people buy can never work. Yet, they keep trying. Today, they think the government can force you to buy overpriced health insurance instead of spending your money on what your family really needs, and that's going to work. Good luck with that. 50 years ago, they figured they could order you not to take a job, to let your house be foreclosed rather than work for less than $ridiculous_union_package. It keeps not working, because people take care of themselves and their families, but they keep trying it again, failing every time.
To err is human. To screw up 100,000 things per second requires root.
Two things. First, the free market does things efficiently, including dumb things. Microsoft built the Surface efficiently - $390 per tablet. Government spent over $1,000 each buying them.
Secondly, there's dumb, and there's government dumb.
A dumb corporation requires three people to do a job that one person could do. A government gets the same job done by creating a new agency which contracts with three companies at $320 million each, requires that it be done in Pascal, and prohibits any testing until the project is "complete", at which time it's six years after tube event that the project was created to handle.
I just saw one of our most efficient government agencies, one that wins efficiency awards, spend over $19,000 on a project I could do in two days. Funny thing is, I WORK for that agency, so it would have cost them almost nothing to have me do it.
$400 billion per year in interest payments is "essentially zero"? That number is actually almost manageable, the BIG problem is that it's snowballing.
You'll recall Obama has been saying that if he wasn't allowed to borrow more, the government would default - wouldn't be able to pay the interest due. We're borrowing to the interest on our borrowing. That's when you know you're fucked, when you're maxing out one credit card to pay the minimum payment on another card. That's essentially what the US government is doing. We're in a trap the we're borrowing more and more in order to make the payments on existing debt, so the debt and the interest just keeps getting bigger and bigger until 100% of our tax money goes to pppay interest, leaving no money for essential government services.
Looking at what has happened in other countries, the "you're fucked" point, the point at which you can't escape the death spiral, is about 100% of GDP - when a country owes as much as it generates. Eight years ago, our debt to GDP ratio was about 35%. In 2014, it should hit 70%. That tells us we are about six to eight years from becoming Greece.
The difference between Greece and though, is that Greece is small enough to be bailed out. Nobody has $5 trillion to bail the US out.
It seems to me that Wikipedia is more like a commune than a free market. Market based companies don't let competitors edit their "product" with no oversight.
Like all communes, they are victims of the delusion that all people will always work for the common good.
Free market capitalist systems recognize the fact that people want "stuff", and will act in their own interest, and arranges things such that acting in your own self-interest IS acting for the greater good. At the most basic level, the free market says:
To get stuff, get money.
To get money, build or do stuff for other people to buy.
Putting the two together:
To get what you want, take care of other people's needs.
That's the free market. "Everyone get together and work on a shared thing" is the commie way. It works only if a) there are no more than three people involved or b) the project is controlled at the top by a free market organization responsible to their customers (Red Hat) or a harsh dictator (Linus). If you exclude the free market it either fails (Soviet Union) or has a heartless dictator (Castro) or both (Cuba sucks, even with a dictator).
Agreed. I tend conservative myself, as in "don't tthrow the baby out with the bathwater", and I think this particular law needs to be reviewed. I would want to hear arguments pro and con before saying it should definitely be repealed , but it looks suspiciously like a bad law.
Ps - look up Draco, who Draconian refers to.
That's a lot like calling Obama "Hitler".
Obama is more like Elmo than he is Hitler, and that law, while it may be bad, is in no way Draconian.
It occurs to me that Pelosi has the skills and equipment to be a crack whore.
The automobile franchise laws are from from the 1930s, when the Democrats ran Texas.
It's an anti-General Motors, anti-Ford, anti-big business law, not an anti-Tesla law.
> Can I buy one just to drive it through the doors of their capitol and park it on top of the assholes who passed all these laws
These laws were passed in the 1930s, so no. Those assholes are dead.
Sorry, you're simply mistaken. I've been on the board of directors of nonprofit and for profit corporations. For the profit company, we could, as I explained, do just about anything EXCEPT convert company assets to personal use.
For most for profit corporations, the Articles of Incorporation almost always say the purpose of the corporation is "any lawful purpose" because the board is supposed to abide by the articles. For a nonprofit, the articles are often more specific. So it's actually the nonprofit that's more limited.
If you're interested in actually knowing something about this stuff rather than spouting BS, I can post Articles for both for-profit and non-profit corporations I'm involved in so you can read them over and get a better understanding.