To create our selective surface, we start with a layer of stainless steel and add a thin layer of gold and, on top of that, a thin layer of silicon. The silicon layer looks black to visible light and has e(short wavelength) ~ 1. Since silicon is essentially transparent to infrared light, our selective surface behaves as a gold surface for infrared. Gold has an emissivity of only 0.10 for infrared wavelengths. This combination, then, is an excellent absorber of short wavelength light from the sun and a poor emitter of infrared light. Repeating our calculation, we find that this selective surface can rise to a temperature of 648 K (375 C)!
Sorry, but modern macroeconomic practice is not just some kind of "counter-intuitive emergent phenomena".
It is criminal wealth redistribution perpetrated by incompetent governments and narcissistic plutocrats.
And no one "elects" any of the "leaders" responsible. No one in the US elected the Federal Reserve. No one in China elected any of those totalitarian assclowns. On election day, time and time again, the majority of people consistently stay home and choose to "elect" no leaders whatsoever.
And what we get instead are a bunch of illegitimate, criminally-incompetent windbags masquerading as functional government.
it is REALLY hard to accurately model human behavior.
No it isn't. It's amazingly easy to model human behavior: Humans destroy and consume. You can model humans the exact same way you would model a catalyst, because, in reality, that's what we are: mobile protein-catalyst-containing vessicles.
The fact that economists can't even get this right, and instead think that humans create value, is the basic fallacy upon which all the rest sits.
For example, take cities. Cities arise around concentrations of exploitable resources: energy deposits, minerals, fertile soil, stable climate, fresh water. Humans move in, reproduce, and catalyze the destruction of these resources. In the process, the city expands, consuming the resources of surrounding areas. What's left in the middle is a burnt-out husk of end-products, a lot fewer humans, and relatively little economic activity. You can model this the same way you model a brushfire or any other chemical reaction. In fact the end products are even mostly the same in both processes, a bunch of oxides and salts: iron oxide, calcium carbonate, carbon dioxide, carbamide, etc.
the guys who run banks are very very bright
They would all be bankrupt today if they hadn't been bailed out. All of them. You must be a real idiot if you think they're all geniuses.
I am a certified accountant
Oh.
Anything tangible or intangible that can be owned or controlled to produce an economic benefit is an asset.
How are those mortgage-backed-securities working out for you?
Gold only has value because people believe it does.
Wrong. Gold has value because of it's relatively high energy-equivalence, making it an excellent currency. Put a small layer of gold on the windows of a commercial building and save millions of BTUs of energy. Put gold-plated solar collectors in the desert and produce huge amounts of thermal power. Use gold electronics or instruments and develop technology to displace energy-consuming human workers. Gold is relatively rare, easy to work and lasts thousands of years without corroding, making it an energy investment that pretty much breaks the models of economic valuation.
You will of course be providing your own ever so insightful solution to all the worlds economic problems?
Sure, here's my solution, in three words: ELIMINATE NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES. Limit thermodynamic resource consumption to the amount that can be perpetually recycled using only renewable energy sources and excluding human labor. Create barriers (real or legal) around states that produce net migration; impose a one-child-like policy on them until they return to sustainability. Restrict the rest of the world to no more than replacement-rate procreation. Hold individuals responsible for their actions. Punish theft and fraud, including money-printing central banks. Allow prices to fall, work to be automated, and abundance to return.
Oh, and solve the immediate energy crisis by breeding a giant genetically-engineered hamster on a wheel and feeding him economists.*
*Not my idea originally but I still think it's a good one.
Then how does the US still have the largest economy of any single country in the world?
Lots of resources per capita + brainwashed workers + financial fraud + our tendency to invade and subjugate the competition.
Utility is a completely contrived measure created in order to mask the fact that real sources of wealth are actually depleted over time. By abstracting sources into re-sources and wealth into utility, economist fraudsters can mostly hide this truth and attempt to claim that, eg plastic bags and spam have the same utility as paper bags and pork and that therefore things are getting better instead of worse because hey look at all the plastic crap and shitty food we have now so we better print a bunch of fucking money and destroy a bunch of stuff in fraudulent wars or else the economy will collapse and we might suffer from falling prices.
Specialization is a simplistic canard. Real businesses are not anywhere close to as specialized as a bunch of specialized academics would like to believe. The real specialization driving global trade is specialization in different variants of failed, exploitative government. One type squanders natural resources; another type subsidizes population growth. They simply trade with each other and pretend both systems work as they manage to stave off complete collapse as long as possible.
And every civilization has been wrong, but they all have been able to mask that fact by externalizing most of their costs. Unfortunately, we're running out of other civilizations to plunder, new areas into which to expand, and real sources of wealth to be squandered.
That would be true, if profit were measured in some fixed terms.
Unfortunately, here in reality, the economics profession is a complete fucking failure of a joke. Banks are run by dipshit morons propped up by criminal politicians. Corporate accounting is a total fraud. Ridiculous models conflate assets and technology and labor along with fiat currencies that have no real measurable value. The entire bullshit field is based on a fantasyland premise of perpetual growth in "utility" along with magical non-zero-sum mathematics at odds with even basic physics.
And this is what "free trade" gives us: US companies offshoring jobs and real assets, chasing little pieces of paper printed up by the central banks, earning hypothetical economic "profit" while actually making us all poorer in the process.
With regard to China, the result is exactly what one would expect when trading with a country with few natural resources and a billion consumers: American labor has lost all value. Technology that America has invested heavily in, is either stolen outright or practically given away to rising competitors. Real capital is exported en masse in exchange for worthless consumerist crap. And it won't stop until either we've all been dragged down to the level of the average Chinese peasant or we wake the fuck up and start hanging traitor politicians and bankers in the streets before they give our entire fucking country away and then conscript us into some new bullshit war to try to go get it back.
If you used hydrogen, you could use it for rocket fuel as well.
Send up a hydrogen balloon along with some solar panels and a compressor. Once it reaches altitude, it starts liquifying some of the hydrogen. It would take a while, but it's cold up there so it shouldn't be too hard.
Then send up another balloon with your rocket. Once they meet, the rocket ditches it's balloon and fills up on liquid hydrogen, then continues into space.
If it flies, it will be a threat to others, and subjected to the same security as commercial air.
If it's ground-based, it will be slower and more expensive than air travel, because it will not take a direct route and will require dedicated rights-of-way.
The only even remotely feasible technology that could meet your requirements would be a human-sized cruise missile. Good luck building that without attracting the ire of about a dozen gov't agencies.
Unlike cattle, chickens are not "fattened up". Marbling is not a desirable feature in chicken meat. They get plenty of residual fats from the soybean meal that constitutes nearly half of typical feed. The chicken fat was probably used in pet food or cattle feed previously.
In your world, we would not have been allowed to develop the automobile until all of mankind had the finest horses and carriages available.
I'm not sure where you get this impression. You're the one clamoring for "social justice" (which is just a euphemism for wealth redistribution), not me.
Besides, the first automobiles were steam-powered, and could run on wood, a perfectly renewable resource.
Personal energy consumption is a benefit of responsibility. If larger portions of mankind used the capital and energy they already have in more responsible manner they would be living the same existence as the rest of us.
Yes, a bunch of boomers getting old, drawing on entitlements they didn't earn and couldn't possibly have earned even with 90% tax rates.
Because instead of using their taxes to invest in anything of productive value whatsoever, their government invested in bloated military and foreign wars and the welfare state.
And most of them were too stupid to invest in anything productive themselves.
In fact, most of the boomers voluntarily invested in government bonds. So your tax argument is moot. The US gov't has always had plenty of funding for whatever wasteful bullshit it wants to spend it on. Limiting the boomers' consumption might have delayed the inevitable a decade or so, but it would have made no fundamental difference in the long run.
The problems of the US economy are wholly government-created. And the sooner it implodes and defaults on it's debt, the better off we will all be.
Well it's either communism or slavery. Whichever one, it doesn't really matter. Basically it's not possible to maintain a system like you're suggesting without one or the other. But I don't know what you have in mind specifically. Don't you?
Slavery I think is obvious: enslave the productive members of society in order to force them to provide for the unproductive and destructive members.
Communism, otoh, is just communal property ownership. In fact, "the market" (the stock market at least) is itself a form of communal property ownership. So, perhaps you should consider exactly what part of it you find so disagreeable?
Because, it is possible to live in a society that recognizes individual property rights without ever participating in "the market".
Unfortunately, it's not possible to live in a society that enforces communal property without being forced to either support some lazy degenerate who has a half a dozen kids and an underwater mortgage, or to be one yourself.
Even a one-time re-distribution of wealth is not enough to provide a minimal standard of living for everyone in perpetuity. Guaranteed assistance quickly creates an ever-expanding group of dependents to take advantage of it. Re-distributed wealth is mis-managed, destroyed, or outpaced by demand. Maintaining a guaranteed minimum assistance requires constant re-distribution of wealth, or collective property ownership, or slavery, one. They are functionally equivalent.
Besides, the US at least already provides a very basic standard of living. There are jails and homeless shelters and food stamps and subsidized housing and maternity assistance. Predictably, all this has accomplished is to increase the number of impoverished at the expense of the working middle-class, and to bankrupt the governments with debt.
If you can't envision a fanatically pragmatic, just philosophy, you should think harder about it rather than settling for some "moderate" jumble of unjust ones.
It's a jungle out there, and people organize themselves into societies, with rules, to better their odds.
Yes, people voluntarily form groups and behave in their individual and collective interests. None of that requires formal government. Besides, the reality is that most primal governments are principalities dictated by a warlord.
Generally, crimes would be behavior that harms the group, and would include things like murder, hoarding, sabotage, rape, etc.
Hoarding doesn't necessarily harm the group. And rape has been an integral part of the founding of many societies. Why are you trying to create a modern consumer-driven democracy on a deserted island? You've failed already in your governing experiment.
And your definition of "crime" is wrong. Did you just blindly memorize everything they told you in law school?
If one person tries to lay claim to the only well,
Wells don't exist naturally on deserted islands. If someone digs a well, it's his. More likely, in fact, anyone trying to "lay claim to the only well" would be a government official.
Natural rights are not equivalent to the law of the jungle. Locke pretty clearly spells this out.
This seems to be a major stumbling block for non-libertarian types, but there are layers of nuance between "do anything you want" and "democratic government".
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh...
To create our selective surface, we start with a layer of stainless steel and add a thin layer of gold and, on top of that, a thin layer of silicon. The silicon layer looks black to visible light and has e(short wavelength) ~ 1. Since silicon is essentially transparent to infrared light, our selective surface behaves as a gold surface for infrared. Gold has an emissivity of only 0.10 for infrared wavelengths. This combination, then, is an excellent absorber of short wavelength light from the sun and a poor emitter of infrared light. Repeating our calculation, we find that this selective surface can rise to a temperature of 648 K (375 C)!
http://physics.indiana.edu/~brabson/p310/selectivesurf.html
Sorry, but modern macroeconomic practice is not just some kind of "counter-intuitive emergent phenomena".
It is criminal wealth redistribution perpetrated by incompetent governments and narcissistic plutocrats.
And no one "elects" any of the "leaders" responsible. No one in the US elected the Federal Reserve. No one in China elected any of those totalitarian assclowns. On election day, time and time again, the majority of people consistently stay home and choose to "elect" no leaders whatsoever.
And what we get instead are a bunch of illegitimate, criminally-incompetent windbags masquerading as functional government.
Do you have any specific points?
it is REALLY hard to accurately model human behavior.
No it isn't. It's amazingly easy to model human behavior: Humans destroy and consume. You can model humans the exact same way you would model a catalyst, because, in reality, that's what we are: mobile protein-catalyst-containing vessicles.
The fact that economists can't even get this right, and instead think that humans create value, is the basic fallacy upon which all the rest sits.
For example, take cities. Cities arise around concentrations of exploitable resources: energy deposits, minerals, fertile soil, stable climate, fresh water. Humans move in, reproduce, and catalyze the destruction of these resources. In the process, the city expands, consuming the resources of surrounding areas. What's left in the middle is a burnt-out husk of end-products, a lot fewer humans, and relatively little economic activity. You can model this the same way you model a brushfire or any other chemical reaction. In fact the end products are even mostly the same in both processes, a bunch of oxides and salts: iron oxide, calcium carbonate, carbon dioxide, carbamide, etc.
the guys who run banks are very very bright
They would all be bankrupt today if they hadn't been bailed out. All of them. You must be a real idiot if you think they're all geniuses.
I am a certified accountant
Oh.
Anything tangible or intangible that can be owned or controlled to produce an economic benefit is an asset.
How are those mortgage-backed-securities working out for you?
Gold only has value because people believe it does.
Wrong. Gold has value because of it's relatively high energy-equivalence, making it an excellent currency. Put a small layer of gold on the windows of a commercial building and save millions of BTUs of energy. Put gold-plated solar collectors in the desert and produce huge amounts of thermal power. Use gold electronics or instruments and develop technology to displace energy-consuming human workers. Gold is relatively rare, easy to work and lasts thousands of years without corroding, making it an energy investment that pretty much breaks the models of economic valuation.
You will of course be providing your own ever so insightful solution to all the worlds economic problems?
Sure, here's my solution, in three words: ELIMINATE NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES. Limit thermodynamic resource consumption to the amount that can be perpetually recycled using only renewable energy sources and excluding human labor. Create barriers (real or legal) around states that produce net migration; impose a one-child-like policy on them until they return to sustainability. Restrict the rest of the world to no more than replacement-rate procreation. Hold individuals responsible for their actions. Punish theft and fraud, including money-printing central banks. Allow prices to fall, work to be automated, and abundance to return.
Oh, and solve the immediate energy crisis by breeding a giant genetically-engineered hamster on a wheel and feeding him economists.*
*Not my idea originally but I still think it's a good one.
Then how does the US still have the largest economy of any single country in the world?
Lots of resources per capita + brainwashed workers + financial fraud + our tendency to invade and subjugate the competition.
Utility is a completely contrived measure created in order to mask the fact that real sources of wealth are actually depleted over time. By abstracting sources into re-sources and wealth into utility, economist fraudsters can mostly hide this truth and attempt to claim that, eg plastic bags and spam have the same utility as paper bags and pork and that therefore things are getting better instead of worse because hey look at all the plastic crap and shitty food we have now so we better print a bunch of fucking money and destroy a bunch of stuff in fraudulent wars or else the economy will collapse and we might suffer from falling prices.
Specialization is a simplistic canard. Real businesses are not anywhere close to as specialized as a bunch of specialized academics would like to believe. The real specialization driving global trade is specialization in different variants of failed, exploitative government. One type squanders natural resources; another type subsidizes population growth. They simply trade with each other and pretend both systems work as they manage to stave off complete collapse as long as possible.
And every civilization has been wrong, but they all have been able to mask that fact by externalizing most of their costs. Unfortunately, we're running out of other civilizations to plunder, new areas into which to expand, and real sources of wealth to be squandered.
That would be true, if profit were measured in some fixed terms.
Unfortunately, here in reality, the economics profession is a complete fucking failure of a joke. Banks are run by dipshit morons propped up by criminal politicians. Corporate accounting is a total fraud. Ridiculous models conflate assets and technology and labor along with fiat currencies that have no real measurable value. The entire bullshit field is based on a fantasyland premise of perpetual growth in "utility" along with magical non-zero-sum mathematics at odds with even basic physics.
And this is what "free trade" gives us: US companies offshoring jobs and real assets, chasing little pieces of paper printed up by the central banks, earning hypothetical economic "profit" while actually making us all poorer in the process.
With regard to China, the result is exactly what one would expect when trading with a country with few natural resources and a billion consumers: American labor has lost all value. Technology that America has invested heavily in, is either stolen outright or practically given away to rising competitors. Real capital is exported en masse in exchange for worthless consumerist crap. And it won't stop until either we've all been dragged down to the level of the average Chinese peasant or we wake the fuck up and start hanging traitor politicians and bankers in the streets before they give our entire fucking country away and then conscript us into some new bullshit war to try to go get it back.
Blasphemy is illegal in Israel as well.
If you used hydrogen, you could use it for rocket fuel as well.
Send up a hydrogen balloon along with some solar panels and a compressor. Once it reaches altitude, it starts liquifying some of the hydrogen. It would take a while, but it's cold up there so it shouldn't be too hard.
Then send up another balloon with your rocket. Once they meet, the rocket ditches it's balloon and fills up on liquid hydrogen, then continues into space.
US missiles go over the north pole for targeting and range purposes due to the magnetic fields there.
What? Do you have a source for this? I always assumed it was just the most direct route over unoccupied territory we (mostly, eh) control.
And it's even possible for a browser to alter the registry exactly why???
Broken Windows create jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFmWhwyA0NU
Um, and what would that be exactly? Teleporters?
If it flies, it will be a threat to others, and subjected to the same security as commercial air.
If it's ground-based, it will be slower and more expensive than air travel, because it will not take a direct route and will require dedicated rights-of-way.
The only even remotely feasible technology that could meet your requirements would be a human-sized cruise missile. Good luck building that without attracting the ire of about a dozen gov't agencies.
Unlike cattle, chickens are not "fattened up". Marbling is not a desirable feature in chicken meat. They get plenty of residual fats from the soybean meal that constitutes nearly half of typical feed. The chicken fat was probably used in pet food or cattle feed previously.
one of them generates gobs of power, while the other just kinda sits there.
Not true.
In your world, we would not have been allowed to develop the automobile until all of mankind had the finest horses and carriages available.
I'm not sure where you get this impression. You're the one clamoring for "social justice" (which is just a euphemism for wealth redistribution), not me.
Besides, the first automobiles were steam-powered, and could run on wood, a perfectly renewable resource.
Personal energy consumption is a benefit of responsibility. If larger portions of mankind used the capital and energy they already have in more responsible manner they would be living the same existence as the rest of us.
Not much, obviously. But, then again, what's the difference between a pile of dirt and rocks and a nuclear reactor?
Yes, a bunch of boomers getting old, drawing on entitlements they didn't earn and couldn't possibly have earned even with 90% tax rates.
Because instead of using their taxes to invest in anything of productive value whatsoever, their government invested in bloated military and foreign wars and the welfare state.
And most of them were too stupid to invest in anything productive themselves.
In fact, most of the boomers voluntarily invested in government bonds. So your tax argument is moot. The US gov't has always had plenty of funding for whatever wasteful bullshit it wants to spend it on. Limiting the boomers' consumption might have delayed the inevitable a decade or so, but it would have made no fundamental difference in the long run.
The problems of the US economy are wholly government-created. And the sooner it implodes and defaults on it's debt, the better off we will all be.
Yeah, well, believing in human goodness is one thing. Denying human stupidity is quite another.
I'm curious as to how you blame religion for this. -- how do you explain the gender imbalance in the societies that predated those religions?
I don't -- physical disparity, child-rearing, etc. I don't think religion caused the imbalance, merely reinforced it.
That was an example of Cataphora.
So, you've mis-quoted me.
Well it's either communism or slavery. Whichever one, it doesn't really matter. Basically it's not possible to maintain a system like you're suggesting without one or the other. But I don't know what you have in mind specifically. Don't you?
Slavery I think is obvious: enslave the productive members of society in order to force them to provide for the unproductive and destructive members.
Communism, otoh, is just communal property ownership. In fact, "the market" (the stock market at least) is itself a form of communal property ownership. So, perhaps you should consider exactly what part of it you find so disagreeable?
Because, it is possible to live in a society that recognizes individual property rights without ever participating in "the market".
Unfortunately, it's not possible to live in a society that enforces communal property without being forced to either support some lazy degenerate who has a half a dozen kids and an underwater mortgage, or to be one yourself.
Even a one-time re-distribution of wealth is not enough to provide a minimal standard of living for everyone in perpetuity. Guaranteed assistance quickly creates an ever-expanding group of dependents to take advantage of it. Re-distributed wealth is mis-managed, destroyed, or outpaced by demand. Maintaining a guaranteed minimum assistance requires constant re-distribution of wealth, or collective property ownership, or slavery, one. They are functionally equivalent.
Besides, the US at least already provides a very basic standard of living. There are jails and homeless shelters and food stamps and subsidized housing and maternity assistance. Predictably, all this has accomplished is to increase the number of impoverished at the expense of the working middle-class, and to bankrupt the governments with debt.
If you can't envision a fanatically pragmatic, just philosophy, you should think harder about it rather than settling for some "moderate" jumble of unjust ones.
It's a jungle out there, and people organize themselves into societies, with rules, to better their odds.
Yes, people voluntarily form groups and behave in their individual and collective interests. None of that requires formal government. Besides, the reality is that most primal governments are principalities dictated by a warlord.
Generally, crimes would be behavior that harms the group, and would include things like murder, hoarding, sabotage, rape, etc.
Hoarding doesn't necessarily harm the group. And rape has been an integral part of the founding of many societies. Why are you trying to create a modern consumer-driven democracy on a deserted island? You've failed already in your governing experiment.
And your definition of "crime" is wrong. Did you just blindly memorize everything they told you in law school?
If one person tries to lay claim to the only well,
Wells don't exist naturally on deserted islands. If someone digs a well, it's his. More likely, in fact, anyone trying to "lay claim to the only well" would be a government official.
But when we are unable to form effective governments to pursue the collective good, the law of the jungle is what we're stuck with.
Governments don't exist to "pursue the collective good". You're perfectly capable of doing that yourself.
I am a lawyer
Oh, nevermind.
what's the utilitarian argument for property rights?
All rights are utilitarian.
Natural rights are not equivalent to the law of the jungle. Locke pretty clearly spells this out.
This seems to be a major stumbling block for non-libertarian types, but there are layers of nuance between "do anything you want" and "democratic government".