Here's a good example: I'm a democrat. It is my belief that anybody who chooses to vote Republican is woefully mis-informed (which is as bad, or worse, than uninformed). Therefore, by the rule that "uninformed people shouldn't vote," IMHO all Republicans should stay home.
That said, a better answer is: inform yourself, and then vote. Or don't; it's your choice. If you feel too uninformed to be comfortable making a decision, then skip those issues -- there's no penalty for not voting for some of the ballot measures. However, you'll probably have an opinion about some of the stuff on the ballot, so cast a vote on just those issues.
Oh, one last thing: you'll want to really evaluate what your values are and try to determine whether the party really represents your values. For example, I think it would be difficult for somebody to try to pass this administration/congress off as being "fiscally conservative." So if that's why you have Republican leanings, then I'd strongly recommend that you think twice about voting Republican. However, if you're socially conservative... well, I'd take a hard look at your party anyway. A number of Republican congresscritters have recently resigned in disgrace or are under investigation over ethical (Tom Delay, Bob Ney) and moral (Mark Foley) issues. According to Congresspedia, 15 Republican representatives are under federal investigation, vs. 4 Democrats. According to a Wikipedia article, there are 20 national-level elected officials under investigation or found guilty, vs. 6 Democrats.
the last ring she wore we "exchanged" for a set of earrings that was traded for bangles a few years later. With the diamond, she's mostly stuck.
Isn't that the point? "Diamonds are forever," is the old advertising slogan, I think.
A marriage ring is, supposedly, to symbolize constancy and permanence. In this use, I can see the appeal of a diamond for the representative of a "permanent bond".
Neither my wife nor I own any diamonds, yet, specifically because of the De Beers and their shady practices. However, as soon as man-made diamonds become an option, we'll (finally) buy her a traditional wedding ring.
The whole marriage thing is utterly symbolic and ritualistic, so to denigrate the Western tradition of wedding rings is to make fun of the clown's feet while ignoring the rest of the clown. Symbolism and ritual is an important feature of human social behavior, and it isn't going away for a long time. I welcome any blow to the De Beers cartel, and also the opportunity to participate in the symbolism without selling my soul.
"PROBABLE CAUSE - A reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime. The test the court...employs to determine whether probable cause existed for purposes of arrest is whether facts and circumstances within the officer's knowledge are sufficient to warrant a prudent person to believe a suspect has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime.
Maybe eight years ago. Now the government can arrest you, fly you to a different country, and hold you indefinitely. They aren't required to provide evidence of probable cause to any court, and you can't challenge it. The only "probable cause" they need to demonstrate is their word that they suspect that you're associated with terrorist activities, including, but not limited to, indirect financial transactions or other support. They don't need to have a warrant, or to prove probable cause.
I keep wondering when they'll start arguing that providing "moral support" is sufficient, and at what point (if any) the American people will decide that they've had enough, and whether or not it'll be soon enough.
Well, point me at a peer reviewed scientific study that shows that most killers aren't wracked with guilt. Come on. You said you had evidence.
He may not be able to provide a study that proves killers aren't wracked with guilt (any more than you can prove that they are), but there's considerable circumstantial evidence.
It is much more likely that the amount of guilt suffered by someone who is repeatedly committing the same offense is much less than "wracking guilt." It might be "mild guilt", or even "regret", but "wracked with guilt" just isn't probable.
Unless anyone else is having trouble with gmail, I'm tempted to just lay all of the blame at sourceforge.
Hear, hear. Considering all of the problems I've (personally) encountered with SourceForge (broken databases, unresponsive, utterly down) and how few problems I've seen with Google (as in, none), I'd be inclined to think the problem is on SourceForge's end. Google has a reputation for reliability and quality. SourceForge, on the other hand...
Your problem is viewing that the vote for the third party is throwing it away in the short term.
No, voting for a third party really is throwing your vote away. I, and a lot of people I know, voted for a third party candidate in 2000 in the hope of sending a message; after what happened, I won't do that again. I don't chide myself too much about it, because the 2000 election was stolen anyway, but still...
In the states, we have a first-past-the-post voting system -- possibly the worst voting system possible. In such a system, people are encouraged to vote for the lesser of two evils, which they do. Just listen to the rhetoric that comes out of the parties when elections come around and this becomes obvious.
To fix the system the US uses, we need a better voting mechanism. Condorcet and Approval (2) are good candidates.
Another thing that would really help would be serious campaign finance reform. Corporations should not be allowed to lobby, or contribute, in any way. It wouldn't hurt to have independent media in the USA again, either.
As long as we have first-past-the-post voting, though, nothing is going to change. People will continue to vote against candidates they don't like, rather than for candidates that they do. Those who don't vote this way will continue to be marginalized.
Not that I don't want to take a trip to NEO, but I'm more excited about the opportunities for parabolic intercontinental travel. 2.5 hours for a trip, and you can come back down practically anywhere. Getting some zero-G out of would just be a side effect.
What bothers me is this attitude that our rights have diminished. They have not. They are inalienable rights, which means that they cannot be taken away.
Interesting.
I have a different take: there is no such thing as an "inalienable right." Every freedom you enjoy was paid for by the blood of activists, and if you do not constantly strive to protect those freedoms, somebody else will endeavor take them away.
Will they still be apologizing and calling you "sir" while they're dunking your head in a bucket of water to make you think you're drowning? That's not so bad, then.
Biodiesel is roughly the same properties with the added benefit of being sulphur-free, cleaner burning (it's a naturally "oxygenated" fuel), biodegradable and renewable.
You're right! Let me throw some of that into my ICE-powered laptop and fire it right up...
Note that the very first sentence of TFA is:
Within a few years, laptops and other energy-guzzling portable devices could run on long-lasting, easily recharged fuel cells based on a safe and practical new way of storing and releasing hydrogen.
not sure if I'm excited or not.. I want the Hobbit done by Peter Jackson
I'm not sure if I want The Hobbit to be produced by Peter Jackson. He did an incredible job on TLOR, and I wouldn't have wanted anybody else to direct those... but those were more adult books. The Hobbit is a much more light-hearted children's tale.
Didn't Bush reinstate plans to start putting Americans back on the moon shortly after he was elected?
No, that was his re-election bid, to tempt intellectuals who were sick of the pseudo-science crap coming out of the Whitehouse. Of course, you haven't heard anything about it since he was re-elected, because if God hadda wanted us to be on the moon, he wouldn't have made the homomoseshual anti-Americun baby-killer terrorists.
These are (mostly) all good technologies that we should be investing in. However:
Nuclear. (France already supplies 80% of its energy needs using nuclear power...
In the USA, we get 20% of our energy from nuclear power plants. Also, the USA consumes more energy than all of Europe, combined. In 2003, the USA consumed almost ten times the energy that France did. We'd have to build another 515 nuclear power plants to get up to 100% of our non-transportation needs. That would result in an annual production of 432600Kg, or 476.85 tons, of highly radioactive waste. We're nowhere near that. That said, nuclear is probably our most practical option.
Ethanol
Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it provides. But let's say your company has discovered a way of converting solar energy to biodiesel that's more efficient than using photovoltaics or heat engines, and you can produce enough to provide enough for an average US car for a year on only 5 acres (half what it currently takes). That would mean dedicating 50% of the USA land area to growing sugar cane. Just for our cars. Yow.
Solar
Wind Power
Geothermal
Hydropower
Photovoltaics may be OK if you live in Texas, but it isn't very practical in Seattle.
Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass together currently provide 2% of the electricity America consumes. Add hydroelectric to that, and you get close to 9%. This is non-transportation energy, if you're willing to discount the tiny fraction of electric-driven transportation used in the USA. The vast majority -- 75% -- is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Natural gas
Coal
The world has about 147 trillion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas reserves. The US alone consumes a bit over 22 trillion cubic feet per year -- that's about 623 billion m^3 per year, about 20% of our total electricity consumption. If it were providing 100% of our electricity, then that's about 3 trillion m^3 per year. If we, somehow, were able to get our hands on all of the world's natural gas, that'd last us about 50 years. Assuming that, when we run out of oil, we don't start using natural gas for cars, and that our current electricity consumption doesn't change. More practically, if we assume everybody else starts using natural gas and the consumption percentages don't change (we consume about 23% of the world's electricity), then it'll last us about 12 years.
Coal is much more difficult to calculate. Coal comes in four different types, of differing energy yield and difficulty of extraction. Coal is comparatively energy expensive to harvest. But ignoring that: there is about 1 trillion tons of accessible coal, and the US uses about 1 billion tons per year, providing around 50% of our electricity needs. If we got our hands on all of the coal and it were providing 100% of our electricity, we'd have about 500 years worth of coal. If we got 23% of the coal, we'd have about 115 years.
So, adding it up, the world can provide about 130 years worth of coal and gas to the USA, at today's useage. We can stretch that by using renewable resources, but keep in mind that this useage is non-transportation. In 1990, 35% of the US's total energy use was in the transportation sector, and that's going to come almost entirely from fossil fuels.
Note that I'm not saying that we have 130 years until we run out of coal and natural gas; I'm saying that if that were all that we were using, that's how long we'd have after the oil runs out. Considering that about 75% of our current energy consumption comes from fossil fuels, that does
The city with the population of 100,000 who can have tons upon tons of food delivered to them on a single train
What's powering the train? How is the food getting from the train station to your grocery store? Or, or you going to walk down to central station to pick up your groceries, along with everybody else in the city?
The 1,000 texas ranchers, each of which have no neighbors within a mile of their homes?
The 1,000 Texas ranchers only need to each plant a garden, and they have food. Or, by your logic, all they have to do is walk to the nearest train station.
To boot, major population areas will sustain the majority of growth, leaving sparsley populated areas still sparsely populated. Realization of the down-side of peak oil will have long hit, we will have seen poverty strike hard due to a crash in the international economy, etc., etc.
I submit that these are two contradictory proposals. Urban concentrations will be the hardest hit by a severe oil shortage. No oil, for urban areas, means no heating and no food. If you live in a rural area, you'll have more easy access to farm produce and the possibility of heating your house with wood. If you live in the city, you're screwed. There'll be no oil to get the food from the countryside to you, and there are very, very few apartments in the US that come with a stove, much less having access to wood or coal with which to stoke it. Furthermore, without oil, factory farming will take a big hit, so the per-capita food production will drastically fall. More of the population will have to turn their attention to the manual labor of producing food.
I expect that when we run out of oil, unless we've developed a good replacement in time, you'll see a mass migration to rural areas.
Everything should be done in base 2 (binary). For a "shorthand notation" we can use base 16 (hex)
Base 2 is practical for computers, because of how we currently build computer chips. Neither binary nor hexadecimal are particularly practical for humans. In fact, base-2 isn't even the best base for computers; 'e' (2.7...) is the optimal base, and 3 is closer to 'e' than 2. Ternary computers would be more information-dense and more efficient than binary computers.
To continue the devil's advocacy, hex isn't much better than decimal for practicality. 16 is divisible by 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. That's three practical divisors, compared to duodecimals four. The only thing you gain in base 16 is division by 8, but you still lose division by 3, which is a more practical divisor.
Metric on the other hand was regected out of misguided nationalism, and because people tend to refuse to acknowledge a good thing when they see it.
Har. I have to jump in here.
First, a caveat: I like metric. All things considered, I think it is a shame that the US doesn't participate.
Now, as the devil's advocate:
Metric is base-10, which is not the best base for us to use in our counting system. You could argue that metric is fairly arbitrary, and that there's a good reason why measurements in the English system are rarely divided into 10 even sub-units: 10 just isn't a very practical number for dividing into smaller units. 10 is only divisible by four numbers: 1, 2, 5, and 10. Of those, the only practical divisions are 2 and 5. So if you have a meter, and you want to divide it evenly into equal-sized decimeters, you have two choices: 5 2-decimeters, or 2 5-decimeters. Beyond that, you have to start getting into fractions. This isn't very useful, especially when you consider how common divisions by three are.
A better base would be duodecimal. 12 is equally divisible by six numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 -- of those, the practical ones are 2, 3, 4, and 6 -- twice as many divisors as base 10. You lose divisions by 5, but 5 is arguably a less common divisor than 3, so in addition to the added number of divisors, duodecimal swaps a less common divisor for a more common one. In fact, some of the English measurement system is already duodecimal (eg, 12 inches in a foot, one dozen = 12, one gross = 12*12), as is some our system of measuring time (there are 12 hours on an analog clock, and smaller units are vigesimal) -- all because it is practical to maximize the number of divisors in your units. Vigesimal -- base 60 -- has even more divisors than 12, but there are too many "numbers" in a vigesimal system to be practical for everyday, human use.
It can be argued that it would be better to throw out our base-10 system (and metric along with it) and convert wholly to duodecimal. Base 10 is an arbitrary base; sure, you can count up to 10 using all of your fingers and thumbs, but you can count to 12 on one hand, and up to 144 on two hands. (Use your thumb as the placeholder, and use the segments of your fingers as the counter). There's nothing magical about 10. If you accept that 10 is about the right magnitude, then 12 is about ideal as a numeric base for humans.
How is this Interest's fault? Doesn't any investment do the same thing?
Sort of. Mind you, I'm not the best person to explain this, because I don't think I fully grok it, but I'll give it a go. Investment is different from Interest in significant ways; some of the ones I can think of are that:
There is no fixed return on investment. In fact, there is no guarantee that there will even be a return on the investment.
The recipient of the investment may pay a portion of profits to the investor, but beyond that, there's no additional, incremental cost to the investment.
Investment is often directly related to production, rather than consumption. Interest is often directly related to consumption.
In any case, as I said, Interest isn't the only contributing factor, just the most significant contributor.
The only lesson capitalism seems to offer is that under a capitalist system, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
That's not the fault of Capitalism as it is the fault of Interest. Interest is how money makes money without doing any work -- it is the basis for the trueism "it takes money to make money", and it is the principal means by which the divide between the rich and the poor is widened.
Doing away with Interest wouldn't entirely eliminate the problems you describe, but it would certainly reduce them dramatically. It will also never happen, since (a) it would require radical change in our economics, (b) it creates far too much wealth and power for the entities who run the world, (c) far too few people really understand Interest's role in economics, and those that do are largely the ones benefitting from it.
There's a joke about economists:
The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.
The Second Law of Economists: They're both wrong.
so caveat lector. However, one economist that I, personally, think had some interesting ideas on this was Silvio Gesell, who's solution to the problem of Interest was Freigeld.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a good example: I'm a democrat. It is my belief that anybody who chooses to vote Republican is woefully mis-informed (which is as bad, or worse, than uninformed). Therefore, by the rule that "uninformed people shouldn't vote," IMHO all Republicans should stay home.
That said, a better answer is: inform yourself, and then vote. Or don't; it's your choice. If you feel too uninformed to be comfortable making a decision, then skip those issues -- there's no penalty for not voting for some of the ballot measures. However, you'll probably have an opinion about some of the stuff on the ballot, so cast a vote on just those issues.
Oh, one last thing: you'll want to really evaluate what your values are and try to determine whether the party really represents your values. For example, I think it would be difficult for somebody to try to pass this administration/congress off as being "fiscally conservative." So if that's why you have Republican leanings, then I'd strongly recommend that you think twice about voting Republican. However, if you're socially conservative... well, I'd take a hard look at your party anyway. A number of Republican congresscritters have recently resigned in disgrace or are under investigation over ethical (Tom Delay, Bob Ney) and moral (Mark Foley) issues. According to Congresspedia, 15 Republican representatives are under federal investigation, vs. 4 Democrats. According to a Wikipedia article, there are 20 national-level elected officials under investigation or found guilty, vs. 6 Democrats.
--- SER
A marriage ring is, supposedly, to symbolize constancy and permanence. In this use, I can see the appeal of a diamond for the representative of a "permanent bond".
Neither my wife nor I own any diamonds, yet, specifically because of the De Beers and their shady practices. However, as soon as man-made diamonds become an option, we'll (finally) buy her a traditional wedding ring.
The whole marriage thing is utterly symbolic and ritualistic, so to denigrate the Western tradition of wedding rings is to make fun of the clown's feet while ignoring the rest of the clown. Symbolism and ritual is an important feature of human social behavior, and it isn't going away for a long time. I welcome any blow to the De Beers cartel, and also the opportunity to participate in the symbolism without selling my soul.
--- SER
Maybe eight years ago. Now the government can arrest you, fly you to a different country, and hold you indefinitely. They aren't required to provide evidence of probable cause to any court, and you can't challenge it. The only "probable cause" they need to demonstrate is their word that they suspect that you're associated with terrorist activities, including, but not limited to, indirect financial transactions or other support. They don't need to have a warrant, or to prove probable cause.
I keep wondering when they'll start arguing that providing "moral support" is sufficient, and at what point (if any) the American people will decide that they've had enough, and whether or not it'll be soon enough.
--- SER
"The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 38 percent of all murderers were on probation, parole, pretrial release, or in some other criminal justice status at the time of the murder." It is likely that many of these repeat offenders had also committed murder in the past. Inner city gang violence, often resulting in murders, is almost certainly often committed by the repeat offenders (and there is more strong circumstantial evidence to back this up).
It is much more likely that the amount of guilt suffered by someone who is repeatedly committing the same offense is much less than "wracking guilt." It might be "mild guilt", or even "regret", but "wracked with guilt" just isn't probable.
--- SER
You, sir, are a bona fide masochist.
--- SER
--- SER
In the states, we have a first-past-the-post voting system -- possibly the worst voting system possible. In such a system, people are encouraged to vote for the lesser of two evils, which they do. Just listen to the rhetoric that comes out of the parties when elections come around and this becomes obvious.
To fix the system the US uses, we need a better voting mechanism. Condorcet and Approval (2) are good candidates.
Another thing that would really help would be serious campaign finance reform. Corporations should not be allowed to lobby, or contribute, in any way. It wouldn't hurt to have independent media in the USA again, either.
As long as we have first-past-the-post voting, though, nothing is going to change. People will continue to vote against candidates they don't like, rather than for candidates that they do. Those who don't vote this way will continue to be marginalized.
--- SER
--- SER
Interesting.
I have a different take: there is no such thing as an "inalienable right." Every freedom you enjoy was paid for by the blood of activists, and if you do not constantly strive to protect those freedoms, somebody else will endeavor take them away.
--- SER
Will they still be apologizing and calling you "sir" while they're dunking your head in a bucket of water to make you think you're drowning? That's not so bad, then.
--- SER
Note that the very first sentence of TFA is:
--- SER--- SER
--- SER
No, that was his re-election bid, to tempt intellectuals who were sick of the pseudo-science crap coming out of the Whitehouse. Of course, you haven't heard anything about it since he was re-elected, because if God hadda wanted us to be on the moon, he wouldn't have made the homomoseshual anti-Americun baby-killer terrorists.
--- SER
In the USA, we get 20% of our energy from nuclear power plants. Also, the USA consumes more energy than all of Europe, combined. In 2003, the USA consumed almost ten times the energy that France did. We'd have to build another 515 nuclear power plants to get up to 100% of our non-transportation needs. That would result in an annual production of 432600Kg, or 476.85 tons, of highly radioactive waste. We're nowhere near that. That said, nuclear is probably our most practical option.
Ethanol takes more energy to produce than it provides. But let's say your company has discovered a way of converting solar energy to biodiesel that's more efficient than using photovoltaics or heat engines, and you can produce enough to provide enough for an average US car for a year on only 5 acres (half what it currently takes). That would mean dedicating 50% of the USA land area to growing sugar cane. Just for our cars. Yow.
Photovoltaics may be OK if you live in Texas, but it isn't very practical in Seattle.
Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass together currently provide 2% of the electricity America consumes. Add hydroelectric to that, and you get close to 9%. This is non-transportation energy, if you're willing to discount the tiny fraction of electric-driven transportation used in the USA. The vast majority -- 75% -- is generated by burning fossil fuels.
The world has about 147 trillion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas reserves. The US alone consumes a bit over 22 trillion cubic feet per year -- that's about 623 billion m^3 per year, about 20% of our total electricity consumption. If it were providing 100% of our electricity, then that's about 3 trillion m^3 per year. If we, somehow, were able to get our hands on all of the world's natural gas, that'd last us about 50 years. Assuming that, when we run out of oil, we don't start using natural gas for cars, and that our current electricity consumption doesn't change. More practically, if we assume everybody else starts using natural gas and the consumption percentages don't change (we consume about 23% of the world's electricity), then it'll last us about 12 years.
Coal is much more difficult to calculate. Coal comes in four different types, of differing energy yield and difficulty of extraction. Coal is comparatively energy expensive to harvest. But ignoring that: there is about 1 trillion tons of accessible coal, and the US uses about 1 billion tons per year, providing around 50% of our electricity needs. If we got our hands on all of the coal and it were providing 100% of our electricity, we'd have about 500 years worth of coal. If we got 23% of the coal, we'd have about 115 years.
So, adding it up, the world can provide about 130 years worth of coal and gas to the USA, at today's useage. We can stretch that by using renewable resources, but keep in mind that this useage is non-transportation. In 1990, 35% of the US's total energy use was in the transportation sector, and that's going to come almost entirely from fossil fuels.
Note that I'm not saying that we have 130 years until we run out of coal and natural gas; I'm saying that if that were all that we were using, that's how long we'd have after the oil runs out. Considering that about 75% of our current energy consumption comes from fossil fuels, that does
--- SER
--- SER
I expect that when we run out of oil, unless we've developed a good replacement in time, you'll see a mass migration to rural areas.
--- SER
I had been saying "evenly divisible", but it was getting redundant. I should have known somebody would pick that nit.
--- SER
Base 2 is practical for computers, because of how we currently build computer chips. Neither binary nor hexadecimal are particularly practical for humans. In fact, base-2 isn't even the best base for computers; 'e' (2.7...) is the optimal base, and 3 is closer to 'e' than 2. Ternary computers would be more information-dense and more efficient than binary computers.
To continue the devil's advocacy, hex isn't much better than decimal for practicality. 16 is divisible by 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. That's three practical divisors, compared to duodecimals four. The only thing you gain in base 16 is division by 8, but you still lose division by 3, which is a more practical divisor.
--- SER
First, a caveat: I like metric. All things considered, I think it is a shame that the US doesn't participate.
Now, as the devil's advocate:
Metric is base-10, which is not the best base for us to use in our counting system. You could argue that metric is fairly arbitrary, and that there's a good reason why measurements in the English system are rarely divided into 10 even sub-units: 10 just isn't a very practical number for dividing into smaller units. 10 is only divisible by four numbers: 1, 2, 5, and 10. Of those, the only practical divisions are 2 and 5. So if you have a meter, and you want to divide it evenly into equal-sized decimeters, you have two choices: 5 2-decimeters, or 2 5-decimeters. Beyond that, you have to start getting into fractions. This isn't very useful, especially when you consider how common divisions by three are.
A better base would be duodecimal. 12 is equally divisible by six numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 -- of those, the practical ones are 2, 3, 4, and 6 -- twice as many divisors as base 10. You lose divisions by 5, but 5 is arguably a less common divisor than 3, so in addition to the added number of divisors, duodecimal swaps a less common divisor for a more common one. In fact, some of the English measurement system is already duodecimal (eg, 12 inches in a foot, one dozen = 12, one gross = 12*12), as is some our system of measuring time (there are 12 hours on an analog clock, and smaller units are vigesimal) -- all because it is practical to maximize the number of divisors in your units. Vigesimal -- base 60 -- has even more divisors than 12, but there are too many "numbers" in a vigesimal system to be practical for everyday, human use.
It can be argued that it would be better to throw out our base-10 system (and metric along with it) and convert wholly to duodecimal. Base 10 is an arbitrary base; sure, you can count up to 10 using all of your fingers and thumbs, but you can count to 12 on one hand, and up to 144 on two hands. (Use your thumb as the placeholder, and use the segments of your fingers as the counter). There's nothing magical about 10. If you accept that 10 is about the right magnitude, then 12 is about ideal as a numeric base for humans.
--- SER
- There is no fixed return on investment. In fact, there is no guarantee that there will even be a return on the investment.
- The recipient of the investment may pay a portion of profits to the investor, but beyond that, there's no additional, incremental cost to the investment.
- Investment is often directly related to production, rather than consumption. Interest is often directly related to consumption.
In any case, as I said, Interest isn't the only contributing factor, just the most significant contributor.--- SER
Doing away with Interest wouldn't entirely eliminate the problems you describe, but it would certainly reduce them dramatically. It will also never happen, since (a) it would require radical change in our economics, (b) it creates far too much wealth and power for the entities who run the world, (c) far too few people really understand Interest's role in economics, and those that do are largely the ones benefitting from it.
There's a joke about economists:
so caveat lector. However, one economist that I, personally, think had some interesting ideas on this was Silvio Gesell, who's solution to the problem of Interest was Freigeld.--- SER
Too late. It has already been done.
--- SER