Unlike the maze of bullshit that is the US financial system, the Chinese appear to be engaging in actual beneficial capitalism. Instead of subsidizing banks and petro-warfare, their government subsidizes the manufacture of distributed, individual-scale, liberating technologies that are mostly produced for export, benefiting consumers in the US and around the world. Look at what the Chinese produce: affordable solar energy, small-scale agricultural equipment, bicycles. Compare that to what the US produces: large-scale strip-mining equipment, large-scale industrial-farming equipment, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. When US consumers inevitably use imported individual-scale technologies to escape our own system of corporate-dominated, crony-capitalist citizenship-slavery, the banks and corporations at the center of the US control grid lose their grip and send an army of lobbyists to DC in order to draft favorable legislation and bail-outs in an attempt to maintain their coercive, dominant position.
And I'm not just being hyperbolic. The American consumer needs to wake up and realize that it is literally a control grid, maintained through government-sanctioned force and fraud. Banks and the FED, through derivative contracts and control of the mortgage and municipal bond markets, use a maze of 600 trillion dollars worth of fraudulent debt to herd Americans into city/slums where they can be fleeced of all capital and resources by coercive corporate monopolies maintained through regulatory arbitrage. From there, it's into permanent wage-slavery, prisons or the military where economic dependence is used as the excuse to liquidate human and civil rights. Corporations, banks and bureaucrats profit every step of the way.
This is the reason we see, for example in the Senate's proposed currency tariff bill, instead of flat-rate, across-the-board tariffs that address actual currency manipulation while respecting free trade, targeted tariffs designed to protect individual companies proportional to their ability to fleece American consumers. The current design of tariffs according to the US ruling elite, instead of protecting Americans from unfair trade as intended, is to protect US corporations by leading American consumers to slaughter either in the figurative economic sense or, when that fails, in the literal "perpetrating false-flag terror and sending them to die in some fraudulent war" sense.
Frankly the Chinese should complain that our trillion-dollar subsidies of petro-warfare is hurting sales of their solar panels.
Putting more humans in space IS the benefit. It is not a means to some scientific end. It IS the end. If you think doing 100 unmanned missions is the best way to get more humans into space on a larger scale, by all means, I'm listening.
How is it a benefit? We've demonstrated that we can put hundreds of humans in space, if we wanted. That's not the problem. The problem is keeping them there. Because they would be totally dependent up on supplies from Earth. In order to keep them in space, they need more than just an endless string of manned missions to every corner of the solar system. They need some reason to stay in space. And they need to be able to self-sufficiently obtain the resources to do so.
So, if science fiction has taught me anything, the first thing a self-sufficient space family needs is a robot helper, preferably of the flailing-arms variety. We should concentrate on building those.
So then, tell us exactly how you intend to pay for sending people to "venture forth" into space? Because, last I checked, the vast majority of high-income taxpayers tend towards the belief that federal R&D, especially pie-in-the-sky projects with no return other than feel-good propaganda, should be eliminated and left to the voluntary spending of the private sector.
This is Slashdot. If you could make a compelling case for manned space exploration anywhere, it would be here. The fact is that there is far more benefit in unmanned space programs at the moment, and that private space companies are stepping up to make that a reality. I mean, have some perspective. My grandmother worked for NASA. I had teachers who worked at NASA. I'm sure Slashdotters reading this story currently work at NASA. When they tell you that they would rather see 100 unmanned missions that return real benefit rather than 5 manned missions that merely capture people's imagination, why wouldn't you listen to them? If you want to see anyone besides a few space cowboys leave the planet in your lifetime, you should support the development of more reliable, more automated space travel instead of more publicity stunts.
I wonder if this has anything to do with JP Aerospace and their balloon space station.
You could float gaseous hydrogen up in balloons, collect oxygen from the upper atmosphere, use photovoltaics to compress it, and basically eliminate a huge chunk of the launch fuel requirements. Rockets could dock at your floating fuel depot on the way to orbit.
Of course it is. Capt. Willis once piloted a shuttle beyond the moon on a mission to destroy a comet headed for the Earth. I saw a documentary about it.
It's entirely possible that the "weapon" satellites are already up there and the purpose of this is to tidy up the broken ones before someone else does.
So, not only are middle class tax dollars used to bail out and ensure the bonuses of those capable of affording a $90,000 "green" sports car, but they're also used to subsidize the production of said sports cars in another fucking country.
Maybe "growth" was the wrong word. "Economy" is also the wrong word, for that matter. Regardless, once you add up all the government workers, military, social welfare, resource leases, subsidized businesses, legalized fraud, and the various taxes and fees associated with them, there's no doubt governments represent a majority of the economy. Whether it's "growth" or not is beside the point.
Hit the deer, drive into the ditch to avoid a person.
Nobody will buy it, because the software will HAVE to be set to obey the speed limits, and most drivers drive 10 - 20 mph higher
You know, freedom and equality were great ideals and all, but Americans still had slaves. Do you really think, when push comes to shove, that anyone will choose to maintain the idiosyncrasies of our crappy, broken system of government over automated cars?
Any government-mandated stupidity will be immediately hacked out of these things the minute they hit the market. I sure as hell am not riding in a car that tries to kill me in order to avoid hitting some idiot who is playing in traffic.
"Electronic Stability Control keeps car on road during snow"
I will say that I was once saved from ending up in a ditch due to traction control. I was also driving faster than was prudent, though, because I knew the car had traction control to begin with. Success or not?
I'm not sure what private space habitats you're referring to. Even the most ambitious designs are nowhere close to being self-sustaining. They're just small hotel rooms in LEO -- completely dependent upon re-supplies and not intended for long-term occupation. They aren't cheaper, or easier, and are only more desirable as toys for the wealthy.
In order to support actual habitation, you have to be able to harvest resources from at least an acre's equivalent of cross-sectional area. On land, all the capital required to do this is a fence, at most. On the ocean, you need a decent-sized boat or platform and a fishing net. In space, you need either lots of solar panels or a large, fully-enclosed, vacuum-sealed area. Even though solar irradiation is higher in space, we're still talking about several thousand square feet per person. Simply constructing that is prohibitive, let alone launching it into orbit.
Building permanently-floating metal objects is ridiculously expensive. Plastics are kind of a crap shoot since peak oil is upon us. People prefer to live on solid ground. Most economic growth is driven by government wealth redistribution, and governments have no interest in subsidizing ocean colonies. Pick a reason.
That pod would more likely spend most of it's time in space, harvesting resources from the asteroid belt, and depositing them on Mars. Venus is too harsh an environment.
There are probably already some places on earth where it sucks to live more than it would living in space, so now it's just a matter of creating the opportunities to get there.
Yeah, in the antarctic, or underwater. And even in the antarctic, if your shelter gets a hole in it you don't immediately die.
Not surprising. Lately I've been thinking that human lifespan would tend to have been optimized to coincide with the average frequency of some type of environmental catastrophe. The idea being that the young would have better capacity to flee or survive. If you look at the way insect lifecycles are optimized to environmental conditions, for example, it's hard not to think that humans would have developed something similar.
When a brokerage firm opens an account for a new customer, it is usually a "margin" account - one that allows the investor to buy stock on margin, or by borrowing against the investor's stock. This is done although most investors never use the margin feature and are unaware that they have that sort of account.
I would really like to see some evidence of this (anecdotal or otherwise) as well as the names of the brokerages who have done this.
Probably the easiest and most sustainable setup would be to convert a port-a-potty into a biogas digester, and use it to run a small gas genset or even a thermoelectric generator. Of course that would make something of a target for police.
Some motorcycles or scooters have alternators, that can be used for battery charging. Or if size is an issue, there's always a small generator like the Honda EX350 that can be had for around $200.
Even self-replicating machines can only represent local order. So what you view as "self-replicating" or not depends on the scale at which you examine it.
I used to drive an RX-7. Now I have a Civic Del Sol. With one person in the car, the Del Sol accelerates just as quickly, handles better, and gets 30 mpg instead of 20. The only practical difference is that it tops out at about 100 mph instead of 145. But with $4/gallon gas, it's worth the trade-off.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the maze of bullshit that is the US financial system, the Chinese appear to be engaging in actual beneficial capitalism. Instead of subsidizing banks and petro-warfare, their government subsidizes the manufacture of distributed, individual-scale, liberating technologies that are mostly produced for export, benefiting consumers in the US and around the world. Look at what the Chinese produce: affordable solar energy, small-scale agricultural equipment, bicycles. Compare that to what the US produces: large-scale strip-mining equipment, large-scale industrial-farming equipment, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. When US consumers inevitably use imported individual-scale technologies to escape our own system of corporate-dominated, crony-capitalist citizenship-slavery, the banks and corporations at the center of the US control grid lose their grip and send an army of lobbyists to DC in order to draft favorable legislation and bail-outs in an attempt to maintain their coercive, dominant position.
And I'm not just being hyperbolic. The American consumer needs to wake up and realize that it is literally a control grid, maintained through government-sanctioned force and fraud. Banks and the FED, through derivative contracts and control of the mortgage and municipal bond markets, use a maze of 600 trillion dollars worth of fraudulent debt to herd Americans into city/slums where they can be fleeced of all capital and resources by coercive corporate monopolies maintained through regulatory arbitrage. From there, it's into permanent wage-slavery, prisons or the military where economic dependence is used as the excuse to liquidate human and civil rights. Corporations, banks and bureaucrats profit every step of the way.
This is the reason we see, for example in the Senate's proposed currency tariff bill, instead of flat-rate, across-the-board tariffs that address actual currency manipulation while respecting free trade, targeted tariffs designed to protect individual companies proportional to their ability to fleece American consumers. The current design of tariffs according to the US ruling elite, instead of protecting Americans from unfair trade as intended, is to protect US corporations by leading American consumers to slaughter either in the figurative economic sense or, when that fails, in the literal "perpetrating false-flag terror and sending them to die in some fraudulent war" sense.
Frankly the Chinese should complain that our trillion-dollar subsidies of petro-warfare is hurting sales of their solar panels.
Putting more humans in space IS the benefit. It is not a means to some scientific end. It IS the end. If you think doing 100 unmanned missions is the best way to get more humans into space on a larger scale, by all means, I'm listening.
How is it a benefit? We've demonstrated that we can put hundreds of humans in space, if we wanted. That's not the problem. The problem is keeping them there. Because they would be totally dependent up on supplies from Earth. In order to keep them in space, they need more than just an endless string of manned missions to every corner of the solar system. They need some reason to stay in space. And they need to be able to self-sufficiently obtain the resources to do so.
So, if science fiction has taught me anything, the first thing a self-sufficient space family needs is a robot helper, preferably of the flailing-arms variety. We should concentrate on building those.
I have no inclination to shackle anyone.
So then, tell us exactly how you intend to pay for sending people to "venture forth" into space? Because, last I checked, the vast majority of high-income taxpayers tend towards the belief that federal R&D, especially pie-in-the-sky projects with no return other than feel-good propaganda, should be eliminated and left to the voluntary spending of the private sector.
This is Slashdot. If you could make a compelling case for manned space exploration anywhere, it would be here. The fact is that there is far more benefit in unmanned space programs at the moment, and that private space companies are stepping up to make that a reality. I mean, have some perspective. My grandmother worked for NASA. I had teachers who worked at NASA. I'm sure Slashdotters reading this story currently work at NASA. When they tell you that they would rather see 100 unmanned missions that return real benefit rather than 5 manned missions that merely capture people's imagination, why wouldn't you listen to them? If you want to see anyone besides a few space cowboys leave the planet in your lifetime, you should support the development of more reliable, more automated space travel instead of more publicity stunts.
Why exactly is Skylon cheaper? It still looks like chemicals (H2, O2) to me, just in the form of a space plane instead of a vertical take-off rocket.
I wonder if this has anything to do with JP Aerospace and their balloon space station.
You could float gaseous hydrogen up in balloons, collect oxygen from the upper atmosphere, use photovoltaics to compress it, and basically eliminate a huge chunk of the launch fuel requirements. Rockets could dock at your floating fuel depot on the way to orbit.
Of course it is. Capt. Willis once piloted a shuttle beyond the moon on a mission to destroy a comet headed for the Earth. I saw a documentary about it.
It's entirely possible that the "weapon" satellites are already up there and the purpose of this is to tidy up the broken ones before someone else does.
So, not only are middle class tax dollars used to bail out and ensure the bonuses of those capable of affording a $90,000 "green" sports car, but they're also used to subsidize the production of said sports cars in another fucking country.
Maybe "growth" was the wrong word. "Economy" is also the wrong word, for that matter. Regardless, once you add up all the government workers, military, social welfare, resource leases, subsidized businesses, legalized fraud, and the various taxes and fees associated with them, there's no doubt governments represent a majority of the economy. Whether it's "growth" or not is beside the point.
I think this is an acceptable alternative to taking drivers licenses away from the elderly.
Hit the deer, drive into the ditch to avoid a person.
Nobody will buy it, because the software will HAVE to be set to obey the speed limits, and most drivers drive 10 - 20 mph higher
You know, freedom and equality were great ideals and all, but Americans still had slaves. Do you really think, when push comes to shove, that anyone will choose to maintain the idiosyncrasies of our crappy, broken system of government over automated cars?
Any government-mandated stupidity will be immediately hacked out of these things the minute they hit the market. I sure as hell am not riding in a car that tries to kill me in order to avoid hitting some idiot who is playing in traffic.
"Electronic Stability Control keeps car on road during snow"
I will say that I was once saved from ending up in a ditch due to traction control. I was also driving faster than was prudent, though, because I knew the car had traction control to begin with. Success or not?
There was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Space is a hedge against extinction
Yes but the important point is that it is a cost of existence, not a benefit derived from expansion.
I'm not sure what private space habitats you're referring to. Even the most ambitious designs are nowhere close to being self-sustaining. They're just small hotel rooms in LEO -- completely dependent upon re-supplies and not intended for long-term occupation. They aren't cheaper, or easier, and are only more desirable as toys for the wealthy.
In order to support actual habitation, you have to be able to harvest resources from at least an acre's equivalent of cross-sectional area. On land, all the capital required to do this is a fence, at most. On the ocean, you need a decent-sized boat or platform and a fishing net. In space, you need either lots of solar panels or a large, fully-enclosed, vacuum-sealed area. Even though solar irradiation is higher in space, we're still talking about several thousand square feet per person. Simply constructing that is prohibitive, let alone launching it into orbit.
Building permanently-floating metal objects is ridiculously expensive. Plastics are kind of a crap shoot since peak oil is upon us. People prefer to live on solid ground. Most economic growth is driven by government wealth redistribution, and governments have no interest in subsidizing ocean colonies. Pick a reason.
That pod would more likely spend most of it's time in space, harvesting resources from the asteroid belt, and depositing them on Mars. Venus is too harsh an environment.
There are probably already some places on earth where it sucks to live more than it would living in space, so now it's just a matter of creating the opportunities to get there.
Yeah, in the antarctic, or underwater. And even in the antarctic, if your shelter gets a hole in it you don't immediately die.
Not surprising. Lately I've been thinking that human lifespan would tend to have been optimized to coincide with the average frequency of some type of environmental catastrophe. The idea being that the young would have better capacity to flee or survive. If you look at the way insect lifecycles are optimized to environmental conditions, for example, it's hard not to think that humans would have developed something similar.
Dick Proenneke wasn't even self-sufficient at 85.
When a brokerage firm opens an account for a new customer, it is usually a "margin" account - one that allows the investor to buy stock on margin, or by borrowing against the investor's stock. This is done although most investors never use the margin feature and are unaware that they have that sort of account.
I would really like to see some evidence of this (anecdotal or otherwise) as well as the names of the brokerages who have done this.
Probably the easiest and most sustainable setup would be to convert a port-a-potty into a biogas digester, and use it to run a small gas genset or even a thermoelectric generator. Of course that would make something of a target for police.
Some motorcycles or scooters have alternators, that can be used for battery charging. Or if size is an issue, there's always a small generator like the Honda EX350 that can be had for around $200.
Even self-replicating machines can only represent local order. So what you view as "self-replicating" or not depends on the scale at which you examine it.
That's pretty much what the Volt looks like in the alternate universe where US auto companies don't suck ass.
Instead, all that great engineering goes into a gay hatchback that's been designed to run over pedestrians as painlessly as possible.
I used to drive an RX-7. Now I have a Civic Del Sol. With one person in the car, the Del Sol accelerates just as quickly, handles better, and gets 30 mpg instead of 20. The only practical difference is that it tops out at about 100 mph instead of 145. But with $4/gallon gas, it's worth the trade-off.