And what would you call this proposed bill in Wyoming? It's an unapologetic subsidy to the coal industyr, because clearly the Wyoming government believes that the Wyoming coal industry will not be able to compete with renewables.
It is. And in a free market, this couldn't happen.
and if you leave them with the "free market", they are subject to profiteering
No, in a free market, competition keeps prices down. In fact, European countries have deregulated their electricity markets and simply give customers a choice between fossil fuel and renewable energy sources.
In the US today, electricity (public utility) is much *more* reliable, and affordable than Internet connectivity (private) is
That statement is wrong in many ways. Seriously, do some background research.
Unless you have the time and skill to generate your own utilities (water, electricity, telephone, internet) – and to home-school your children, then you NEED to have a governing power of some kind.
That "governing power" can be a simple private corporation or association. That means that the people making the decisions are the owners on the one hand, and the customers on the other.
When you open up governance to political processes and have the government grant monopolies, that is precisely when you get these problems, because then fossil fuel companies (or solar or whatever companies) will push through legislation by which they can enrich themselves.
Government run stuff is subject to voter interference, private stuff is only subject to rich white man interference.
Nonsense; rich white men can't afford to run private companies at a loss. What private companies do is primarily determined by customers, and that's far more democratic than voting.
If you transfer functions to government, they become subject to politics. So, public utilities may be forced to use coal, public schools may be forced to teach creationism, etc. You don't like that? Don't transfer these functions to the government.
So? We're not talking about "the whole C++ thing", we are simply talking about not gratuitously inventing new syntax so that the language feels familiar and is easier to learn. D and C# both retain much of the feel and syntax of C++ while having none of the problems you mention.
Nim breaks radically with existing syntax, and I don't see a good reason for it so far.
The CHIP is also nice in other ways: it's smaller, it comes with flash on-board and Linux pre-loaded, and when you power it from a USB hub, you get both networking and serial console support over the same connection.
Right now, I think the biggest limitation of the Raspberry Pi is probably its lack of USB 3 support; without that, it can't be used as a file server. Lack of OTG support also makes it harder to boot/configure the device.
For the next version of the Raspberry Pi, I'm hoping for USB C support, with high power mode, host mode, and device mode, as well as support for serial consoles and networking over USB.
My point is that the "$10 quadrillion" price isn't as silly as it may sound and represents real value. Right now, the world economy is about $200 trillion. It might take 100-200 years to use all that metal. $10 quadrillion corresponds to about an 11% annual growth rate in the economy in constant dollars over 100 years or 5% annual growth rate over 200 years (we're currently at about 4%).
I think injecting 10^20 kg of ready-to-use metal into the world economy could easily double or triple growth rates like that over the next century or two, which tells me that the valuation of the metal in terms of current prices actually yields a fairly reasonable estimate of its value to humanity, no matter what the nominal per ton price of metals may end up being.
Not really, because we don't have an industry outside the gravity well to turn raw iron into useful products like microchips, microwave transmitters, high precision optics, solar panels, rocket fuel, or many of the other things we need.
The asteroid metal would be mostly structural: you could build solid, large scale orbital structures out of it; mass for structural components is probably the biggest obstacle for moving into space. The other technology you mention is quite lightweight.
The total cost of building and launching this industry in space would be much more than all the probes we'd want to use for space exploration.
You're thinking like a government central planner. In any case, no that's not true, and I expect this kind of industry to take off within 50 years, and largely without government support.
It is. But you can't compare prices over time. If I tell you that steel will cost $300/ton in 50 years, you have no idea whether that represents more or less value than today. If you want to understand the value of something in terms of dollars, you can only do so in today's dollars.
When you've built all the bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc you need, using only 0.1% of the asteroid, the remaining 99.9% doesn't have much value anymore.
You're right that if the market for metals could be saturated, then the incremental value of an additional ton of metal would be next to zero. I don't think, however, that that is true: metals are so universally useful that the market for them will never saturate. If we could bring the entire mass of Pallas to earth, people would create vast engineering projects out of it. If we managed to get it into earth orbit, it would be the start of the creation massive orbital habitats and factories.
If we brought Pallas to earth, the price of metals could fall to near zero, or it might stay the same, we simply don't know; that's really an arbitrary choice of monetary policy.
Of course, those are rough arguments, and they are long term arguments too. In the short term, flooding the market with massive amounts of new metal would saturate it because the rest of the economy just isn't set up to utilize the metal.
Nevertheless, my point stands: utilizing the metal from Pallas would make us enormously more wealthy, and looking at it from the perspective of "it would flood the market and the prices would drop to near zero, so no gain" is just wrong.
The only objective notion of value is: what it sells for.
Price is indeed how we quantify value. But price is not a constant scale, so you have to decide what point in time you report something on. When you want to understand the value of something in units that you are familiar with, you need to use a scale that you understand, namely today's prices.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
Actually, large amounts of metal outside a gravity well is extremely valuable for space exploration, since launch costs right now are thousands of dollars per pound.
Furthermore, once outside a gravity well, it's fairly cheap to move stuff around. If we start mining asteroids for metal, we can move that metal back to earth orbit at almost no cost. We could even deorbit it, although that would really be a waste.
dumping that much extra iron into the economy would make the "value" close to zero
No, it would sharply reduce the price.
The value of that metal is given by what you can make from it, and that doesn't decrease (in fact, it increases).
The decrease in price actually corresponds to the increase in wealth of society; that is, the fact that you can buy something that used to be expensive for much less money makes you wealthier. And because you're wealthier, things then seem cheaper to you.
The entirety of the asteroid belt is just over 4% of the moon. There are very few large chunks by any sci-fi standard. Why anyone would go to the very far and dangerous belt, when you can just strip mine the moon
You would go there precisely because those bodies have almost no gravity; you can land on them and take off with almost no fuel. In fact, you can simply tow them into lunar or earth orbit with almost no fuel.
I'm not sure why you think the asteroid belt is "dangerous"; it's not the whirling mass of rocks that you see on SciFi.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises.
It is true that if you dumped all that metal on the market, its price would plummet. But that doesn't actually reduce the value of that metal.
Price and value are two different things. The value of that metal is described by the stuff that you can build from it: bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc. That value doesn't actually change by having more of the stuff available. To understand the value of something, you look at the price of it.
Price isn't a constant scale, and it changes over time. There are two different prices that are important here. To understand the value of that metal, looking at its current price is actually quite a good measure: that is how much better we would be off, in current dollars, if we got all that metal. The future price of that metal tells you its value on a different scale, the scale of a society where everybody is much richer because a dollar buys much more stuff.
So, if you want to understand the value of that metal, look at it in current prices. The difference between how much that metal would (hypothetically) cost under current prices and how much it will cost once it's available and prices have plummeted is a measure of how much richer the world has become by making all that metal available.
Nim sounds similar in its goals to D, another batch-compiled statically typed language with GC. The main difference is that Nim seems to innovate a lot syntactically. How do the languages compare otherwise?
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It is. And in a free market, this couldn't happen.
No, in a free market, competition keeps prices down. In fact, European countries have deregulated their electricity markets and simply give customers a choice between fossil fuel and renewable energy sources.
That statement is wrong in many ways. Seriously, do some background research.
Actually, I'm a minarchist.
No, I'm simply stating a fact: contracts define actions and consequences, and people behave accordingly.
Government is the enemy because it isn't bound by contracts but can instead take your property, your liberty, or your life with no recourse.
Of course, you, being a totalitarian, aren't bothered by that.
That "governing power" can be a simple private corporation or association. That means that the people making the decisions are the owners on the one hand, and the customers on the other.
When you open up governance to political processes and have the government grant monopolies, that is precisely when you get these problems, because then fossil fuel companies (or solar or whatever companies) will push through legislation by which they can enrich themselves.
That's not all: they are also heavily regulated even if there is some degree of private ownership.
What they are not is independent, private, for-profit companies, and that's the problem.
Nonsense; rich white men can't afford to run private companies at a loss. What private companies do is primarily determined by customers, and that's far more democratic than voting.
It seems like paid shills are posting under every renewable energy article about how renewables are cost competitive without subsidies.
If you transfer functions to government, they become subject to politics. So, public utilities may be forced to use coal, public schools may be forced to teach creationism, etc. You don't like that? Don't transfer these functions to the government.
Those would also be nice to have, but having USB-3/C would be a good start since it allows you to attach disks and gigabit ethernet.
So? We're not talking about "the whole C++ thing", we are simply talking about not gratuitously inventing new syntax so that the language feels familiar and is easier to learn. D and C# both retain much of the feel and syntax of C++ while having none of the problems you mention.
Nim breaks radically with existing syntax, and I don't see a good reason for it so far.
The CHIP is also nice in other ways: it's smaller, it comes with flash on-board and Linux pre-loaded, and when you power it from a USB hub, you get both networking and serial console support over the same connection.
Right now, I think the biggest limitation of the Raspberry Pi is probably its lack of USB 3 support; without that, it can't be used as a file server. Lack of OTG support also makes it harder to boot/configure the device.
For the next version of the Raspberry Pi, I'm hoping for USB C support, with high power mode, host mode, and device mode, as well as support for serial consoles and networking over USB.
So, that still leaves open the questions...
What benefits does Nim derive from being syntactically different from C++?
And how does it functionally improve on D?
Unless there is a strong reason to deviate from it, I would like a new language to be as similar to C++ as possible.
No, sorry, it's not.
It requires exploration, mining, transport, and smelting; that's where most of the cost is.
Weight is only a concern in space due to launch costs. If you already have the metal in space, iron is an excellent material.
My point is that the "$10 quadrillion" price isn't as silly as it may sound and represents real value. Right now, the world economy is about $200 trillion. It might take 100-200 years to use all that metal. $10 quadrillion corresponds to about an 11% annual growth rate in the economy in constant dollars over 100 years or 5% annual growth rate over 200 years (we're currently at about 4%).
I think injecting 10^20 kg of ready-to-use metal into the world economy could easily double or triple growth rates like that over the next century or two, which tells me that the valuation of the metal in terms of current prices actually yields a fairly reasonable estimate of its value to humanity, no matter what the nominal per ton price of metals may end up being.
The asteroid metal would be mostly structural: you could build solid, large scale orbital structures out of it; mass for structural components is probably the biggest obstacle for moving into space. The other technology you mention is quite lightweight.
You're thinking like a government central planner. In any case, no that's not true, and I expect this kind of industry to take off within 50 years, and largely without government support.
It is. But you can't compare prices over time. If I tell you that steel will cost $300/ton in 50 years, you have no idea whether that represents more or less value than today. If you want to understand the value of something in terms of dollars, you can only do so in today's dollars.
You're right that if the market for metals could be saturated, then the incremental value of an additional ton of metal would be next to zero. I don't think, however, that that is true: metals are so universally useful that the market for them will never saturate. If we could bring the entire mass of Pallas to earth, people would create vast engineering projects out of it. If we managed to get it into earth orbit, it would be the start of the creation massive orbital habitats and factories.
If we brought Pallas to earth, the price of metals could fall to near zero, or it might stay the same, we simply don't know; that's really an arbitrary choice of monetary policy.
Of course, those are rough arguments, and they are long term arguments too. In the short term, flooding the market with massive amounts of new metal would saturate it because the rest of the economy just isn't set up to utilize the metal.
Nevertheless, my point stands: utilizing the metal from Pallas would make us enormously more wealthy, and looking at it from the perspective of "it would flood the market and the prices would drop to near zero, so no gain" is just wrong.
Price is indeed how we quantify value. But price is not a constant scale, so you have to decide what point in time you report something on. When you want to understand the value of something in units that you are familiar with, you need to use a scale that you understand, namely today's prices.
Actually, large amounts of metal outside a gravity well is extremely valuable for space exploration, since launch costs right now are thousands of dollars per pound.
Furthermore, once outside a gravity well, it's fairly cheap to move stuff around. If we start mining asteroids for metal, we can move that metal back to earth orbit at almost no cost. We could even deorbit it, although that would really be a waste.
No, it would sharply reduce the price.
The value of that metal is given by what you can make from it, and that doesn't decrease (in fact, it increases).
The decrease in price actually corresponds to the increase in wealth of society; that is, the fact that you can buy something that used to be expensive for much less money makes you wealthier. And because you're wealthier, things then seem cheaper to you.
You would go there precisely because those bodies have almost no gravity; you can land on them and take off with almost no fuel. In fact, you can simply tow them into lunar or earth orbit with almost no fuel.
I'm not sure why you think the asteroid belt is "dangerous"; it's not the whirling mass of rocks that you see on SciFi.
It is true that if you dumped all that metal on the market, its price would plummet. But that doesn't actually reduce the value of that metal.
Price and value are two different things. The value of that metal is described by the stuff that you can build from it: bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc. That value doesn't actually change by having more of the stuff available. To understand the value of something, you look at the price of it.
Price isn't a constant scale, and it changes over time. There are two different prices that are important here. To understand the value of that metal, looking at its current price is actually quite a good measure: that is how much better we would be off, in current dollars, if we got all that metal. The future price of that metal tells you its value on a different scale, the scale of a society where everybody is much richer because a dollar buys much more stuff.
So, if you want to understand the value of that metal, look at it in current prices. The difference between how much that metal would (hypothetically) cost under current prices and how much it will cost once it's available and prices have plummeted is a measure of how much richer the world has become by making all that metal available.
Nim sounds similar in its goals to D, another batch-compiled statically typed language with GC. The main difference is that Nim seems to innovate a lot syntactically. How do the languages compare otherwise?
While he has made some mistakes and might benefit from a bit of feedback and moderation, Trump's tweets generally have worked for him pretty well.
It's the left that is digging their hole on social media right now with their over-the-top outrage, fear mongering, and name calling.