No. We got pesticide infused corn. The pesticide wasn't sprayed on the corn, it was part of the corn because the corn plant was producing the pesticide inside it's cellular structure.
No, just about 6 billion works. We're already strained on production and harvest and no change in practice that makes it harder to grow and harvest is going to do anything but reduce food output (which is exactly what you just suggested) Any jackass can quote all the land area on the planet, but very little of that area is arable for human food crops. Few acres have the water available to grow the crops. And probably than half or more of the areas that meet the water requirement don't have the right climate, have too short of a growing season or don't get enough sunshine or are currently occupied with people.
We've got nearly every producible acre on the planet in production. If you increased the effectiveness to western levels you might be able to add another billion or two population to the planet but a single incident that results in a significant area of the planet experiencing crop failure would doom a large number of people to starvation. This doesn't even take into account that if you put a trillion people on this planet every acre you could grow crops on would be taken by people living on them. That is unless you're suggesting everyone live underground or in space.
I seriously can't believe this was even mod'd up unless only idiots or 12 year olds have mod power today.
At least Microsoft gave a damn about Visio. OneNote was completely neglected. It could have been way more successful than evernote and all the clones had MS embraced it and went multiplatform cloud storage.
It was so carefully mismanaged that you never even knew if it would come with the version of office you were looking at because they frequently didn't even include it in the list of products even when it was included!
I believe so as well but without reviewing every possible phone I wasn't comfortable making that prediction. I know almost every major SOC that produces radio chips does this because of fear that people would tamper with radio power levels but it's a major security hole that I'm sure is being exploited by groups like the NSA.
It's easily one of the most flexible and IMO best products MS has ever produced. The problem is with the amount the charged for it it becomes almost worthless and it received almost no traction because MS didn't give a rats ass about it. Think evernote without the ever portion but far more flexible and with an office type interface. It's been around for more than a decade, had MS been innovative they would have been evernote, except probably far larger more widespread and in nearly every single enterprise. Instead the product was a redheaded stepchild inside MS.
But it's always been handicapped by MS's policies of not supporting non-windows and all the typical lockout and other games they've played their entire existence. It's because of this, onenote outside small niche's has seen very little uptake and almost no one knows about it.
Oh the US doesn't give a rats ass about anyone denominating oil in Euro's because the Europeans are never going to run he deficits necessary to use the Euro as an exchange currency. The second someone tries to denominate a major commodity in $currency the demand for the $currency is going to sky rocket which dramatically increases inflation without massive printing to support it.
The ECB would NEVER print money like the Fed, for one thing it's against their charter. In fact if your goal was to crash the european economy by making the euro so valuable all exports halt the best way to do it would get oil traded Euro's.
Early warning systems prevent first strike. The initiation of the strike would be on NORAD's screen within 45 seconds of the missiles launching. (They have dozens of SATs that watch for heat signatures to indicate ICBM launch. This is one of the reasons launching a satellite into space has to be announced in advance lest it be interpreted to be a nuclear ICBM in boost which would ruin everyone's day.)
Considering flight time is about 45 minutes you can be damn well certain that US nukes would be airborne long before the first missile hits US soil. That's the entire point of MAD, there is no first strike possible because you can't deliver the missiles without the other side knowing long before they arrive.
I always laugh when someone suggests dumping 162 billion in bonds could crush the US economy. That's literally like 3 days worth of auctions. As you said, they dump them all at once and someone pays 72 billion for them, and over a period of a month doubles their money. Now if they owned the 1.3 trillion that china does they could probably hurt the dollar for a month or two while turning their trillion dollars into a 100 billion. And in the process China would destroy their own export economy as the dollar fell and the trade deficit imploded as US imports stopped.
See that's the problem, they try to "crash" the market and they are guaranteed to lose massive amounts of money on the bonds. And in the long run the bonds recover and there is no long term issue. In the short term it may actually help the US economy by devaluing the dollar short term and harming imports.
There are many cellphones where there is an independent CPU running the cellular radio. This CPU runs a proprietary OS that runs has write access to all memory and can actually override the main CPU. In theory the radio CPU and OS could actually overwrite memory on the fly and redirect the kernel in completely transparent ways.
The silliest part of it is where the book comes from. The bible is a creation of a committee of the early catholic church that sat down with more than 1500 spiritual texts and decided on 300 that were important enough to include in a book given to all priests. Now ask a young earth creationist what they think of the catholic church and the typical response is the whore of Babylon, yet the book they so revere as the accurate word of god was creating by a committee of early members of the catholic church. It's terribly ironic.
I hope he sues and he gets compensation for his destroyed employment chances. The shoody level of journalism here is just unbelievable. The dick reporter basically looked up the name in a phone book found the first match that had an engineering background and started hounding the guy then did the big "reveal" which ruined the guys life.
Human waste used on crops for consumption is a major vector of transmission of disease in undeveloped countries. Human pathogens can survive the composting process. This is actually a major vector for Hepatitis transmission in the undeveloped world. We shouldn't be encouraging these practices because of the significant number of lives lost to disease due to these practices. One of the major advancements in industrialization is the end of these processes and the eventual banning of them.
Urine is sterile and pathogen free and can be used on human crops but we're better off providing a solution like this that uses solar energy to char the solid waste and thereby kill the pathogens. None of the carbon or nutrients are lost in this process. Properly mixed into the soil the carbon is then digested by the soil bacteria to produce the same nutrients that a composting toilet generates, it just eliminates the chance of pathogen transmission. The whole reason for this prize is that composting toilets don't work when you put the compost back on human crops. In the west we know to use the human compost on vegetation that's fed to livestock not humans. But the lack of available compost in poor areas leads the people to the very dangerous practice of using the human waste on human crops which becomes a major vector for unregulated disease transmission.
Because people routinely file complaints against cops to try to sway a judge that they were mistreated, and even just because they are mad about being caught. Those complaints are the primary reason complaints of actual misconduct never amount to anything, because they are lost in the noise and even when they aren't the cops can say it's just another bogus complaint. This is also tied to the fact that when people know they are recorded they are more polite and that applies to both sides which leads to less escalation.
The 90% reduction in complaints is the reduction in the noise and situations where both parties escalated the confrontation. What you find is that in the other 10% of cases where there is solid misconduct the video is "lost. So as I noted it's entirely possible to have a massive reduction in complaints and conversely no actual drop in misconduct.
Allow me to rebut! A drop in complaints does NOT mean there has been a drop in misconduct. If that was the case there would have been drops in misconduct when cameras were installed in cars (there wasn't). This is because, as I noted, when cops do bad things the video suddenly isn't available, either because it was turned off, the tape was "lost" or the equipment was "broken" and couldn't record.
I fully support and attempted to articulate the ACLU view on this, that cameras can work, but only if precautions are taken to ensure that what I described doesn't happen. Remember that old saying about statistics. The evidence presented in the linked report does not show what you've been lead to believe it shows.
It's thanks to a Brit that we have to deal with the anti-vax'ers. It was a British doctor that (IMO) faked a study proclaiming Vaccines cause Autism. Unfortunately right after his bogus paper he ran off to Texas and set up a clinic and started recruiting idiots like Jenny McCarthy.
Fact is as long as they can turn the cameras on or off and the video is in police custody this will do almost nothing to reduce police abuse. Either the camera will be off, the video will be "lost" or the recording device will be "broken". They want the video for convictions, but they will make damn sure the video is lost or the camera is off when they go to beat the shit out of some innocent person.
They should be required to wear camera, the cameras should record while they are on shift and video should be stored by an independent third party. Any missing footage should result in someone being fired.
I'm not in this test group but I've been in another where the previous colored background went away and there was only a little tiny (font size 4) AD way to the right after the link. I know I was clicking AD's because it tried to bounce me off the doubleclick servers (I use extensions that block redirects without my approval). I thought I'd gone insane at first and was blind but I went back and looked and they had deliberately obfuscated that it was an ad. Without being very careful it was almost impossibly easy to accidentally click ad's because you thought they were real search results.
The new format is WAY better than what I was getting before. I wish I'd taken a screenshot of it but I assumed everyone saw the same thing I did.
It's actually so heavy IIRC it's engine is a 8 cylinder diesel engine that's typically used in the largest commercial pick up trucks (think 1 ton dualies) with more than 7 liters of displacement and a fuel efficiency of 8MPG. The car has sealed air tight compartments, oxygen supplies, armor thick enough to stop armor piercing 50 caliber rounds, a blood bank in the trunk and numerous other features to prevent attacks on the president including physical, chemical and biological attacks.
The possibility of the presidential limo/tank being a Tesla are insignificant. It needs a big fucking engine. As others have noted it's a tank disguised to look like a Limo.
Just "ended my membership by telling to to not auto-renew. I hate dirty tricks like that. I hope 50% of more of prime members do what you and I both did. Wall street thinks only a small group will quit but revenues will still double. If enough people quit it will actually cause revenues to fall which would be catastrophic.
Because there is a certain segment of the population that believes that private enterprise is the solution to every single problem, regardless of the results.
Other people think K-12 education should be handled at the local level, that parent and teacher organizations should work in the local schools to provide the appropriate programs to educate their children given the budget and local constraints and that the role of the state is only to set minimum (and I do mean minimum) standards and that there should be no role for either private companies or the federal government.
It's always interesting that those that advocate for gold always pick arbitrary dates for comparison. The only valid comparison with gold's value is common commodity purchasing value and does so against a VERY long time period. Picking some arbitrary time period allows you to emphasize one of the periods where market fundamentals have allowed gold to appreciate while at the same time selecting different periods in time will demonstrate anywhere from small appreciation in value to negative appreciation.
Gold has and is traditionally the worst investment you could ever make for long term investing. And just like times past when quantitative easing has stopped and the US economy has recovered gold prices will crater, just like they have every other time people have sheltered in gold.
Other than the relatively small industrial uses of gold it's primary value is as Jewelry. This is actually a very small market as testament to the fact that 95% of the worlds gold supply is sitting in government owned vaults in brick form gathering dust. A single country with several tons of bullion could crash the price of gold in almost no time. And in fact all it takes is a government in need of hard currency to start dumping bullion on the market and crash the price because there is almost no elasticity in the market demand. This is what happened in the early 80's as the Soviet economy was collapsing and they started dumping their gold stocks to purchase hard currency. This could easily happen again to a nation like Venezuela that is suffering from hard currency shortages.
X tons of gold are needed every year to satisfy the demand for gold from the worlds expanding population. All of this expanding demand is satisfied by mining because as I noted most of the worlds gold sits in government vaults. The higher the price of gold the more mining. For the last 10 years because of the investors sheltering money in gold it's value has been 5-10x times higher than the supply/demand curve balance because investors are hoarding bullion. As a result the amount of extracted gold has gone up an equal amount relative to the price. When the investors decide that gold isn't providing the returns, (which is going to be very soon, probably within 2 years as it's already started the bouncing collapse). All that excess mined gold is going to flood the market, a market who's only demand is jewelery. By the time the price crash comes the amount of extra extracted bullion (sitting in investor vaults) available to satisfy the luxury demand is going to be probably a decades worth of demand. And just like the housing market collapse when you flood the market with 10 years of demand prices will crater and crater hard. With that much excess bullion in the pipeline I'd imagine prices will drop so bad that almost all mining will halt until the excess gold is consumed by the luxury market. The low price will accelerate purchases but ultimately there is only so much luxury demand for gold. In the end we'll probably see gold prices below $200 an ounce before the end of the decade and sustained until excess production is consumed.
The only people that make long term money on gold are the people that sell it to others, often with the promise that it has some intrinsic value (it doesn't). Just like the 80's when the economy recovered from the Regan recession, gold's price will crash, all the little investors (less than several million invested) will lose their shirts and the middle men will walk away with billions of dollars. This has happened so many times in history it's amazing anyone is dumb enough to consider investments in gold anything other than straight up gambling with only slightly lower risks than betting on the roulette wheel in Vegas. Yea if you get lucky on the timing you can make a bundle, but if you get it wrong you'll lose everything. Gold is already bubble that's already started to pop.
That is an out and out lie without a wink of truth to it. Solar PV can generate power at a rate that is cheaper than nuclear without subsidies. With the minor subsidies that remain its cheaper than coal generated power in tge southwest. Solar is so lucrative that Solar City (a company who's entire business model is selling and installing residential solar panels and financing the costs with a fixed power rate where the resident agrees to buy the power) is turning down investment money and hiring 15 installers a week and has never layed off a single employee.
So in summary you are a fucking liar or a sock puppet, which is it?
The wealthiest individuals do not pay income tax because they don't have income. Their "income" is actually long term capital gains with the highest rate paid at 20%. They don't pay SSI, Medicare or Medicaide and even if they did they are capped at $125,000 in income. Because of this Mitt Romney had to pay extra taxes for his effective rate (the actual taxation rate) to be 15%.
For a wage slave to pay an effective rate of 15% they would need to make less than $10,000 per year. Warren Buffet has noted that he has paid less taxes (as a percentage of income) than his secretary since Regan was in office. Most of the 1% in fact avoid almost all taxes, including sales and others by using their wealth to exploit different state level taxation rates (such as keeping a home in a zero income tax state and a home in a zero sales tax state then spending part time in each state with sufficient time spent to eliminate both income and sales tax).
Properly executed with a good accountant the 1% have paid less than 10% in taxes by careful manipulation of their long term capital gains. It's possible to not only make money on a stock but claim an overall loss. And the best part about capital gains is that, baring dividends, no gains are realized until there is a transaction. This makes is possible to sink 100's of millions into a trust that appreciates in value but never pay taxes on it because a sale of shares never takes place. Then when money is needed a paper loss equal to the 20% tax is realized at the same time to eliminate the liability. This is so common now that the rich like Mitt Romney are forced to pay extra to hit net tax rates of 15%.
Only the middle class and upper middle class pay high taxable percentages, once you reach a certain asset threshold your taxation rate begins to drop substantially. The middle and upper middle class are the ones getting hosed, all so the richest among us can pay super low rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Pesticide free Corn?
No. We got pesticide infused corn. The pesticide wasn't sprayed on the corn, it was part of the corn because the corn plant was producing the pesticide inside it's cellular structure.
No, just about 6 billion works. We're already strained on production and harvest and no change in practice that makes it harder to grow and harvest is going to do anything but reduce food output (which is exactly what you just suggested) Any jackass can quote all the land area on the planet, but very little of that area is arable for human food crops. Few acres have the water available to grow the crops. And probably than half or more of the areas that meet the water requirement don't have the right climate, have too short of a growing season or don't get enough sunshine or are currently occupied with people.
We've got nearly every producible acre on the planet in production. If you increased the effectiveness to western levels you might be able to add another billion or two population to the planet but a single incident that results in a significant area of the planet experiencing crop failure would doom a large number of people to starvation. This doesn't even take into account that if you put a trillion people on this planet every acre you could grow crops on would be taken by people living on them. That is unless you're suggesting everyone live underground or in space.
I seriously can't believe this was even mod'd up unless only idiots or 12 year olds have mod power today.
Doesn't he know this is Slasthdot? Facts are neither required nor requested!
At least Microsoft gave a damn about Visio. OneNote was completely neglected. It could have been way more successful than evernote and all the clones had MS embraced it and went multiplatform cloud storage.
It was so carefully mismanaged that you never even knew if it would come with the version of office you were looking at because they frequently didn't even include it in the list of products even when it was included!
I believe so as well but without reviewing every possible phone I wasn't comfortable making that prediction. I know almost every major SOC that produces radio chips does this because of fear that people would tamper with radio power levels but it's a major security hole that I'm sure is being exploited by groups like the NSA.
It's easily one of the most flexible and IMO best products MS has ever produced. The problem is with the amount the charged for it it becomes almost worthless and it received almost no traction because MS didn't give a rats ass about it. Think evernote without the ever portion but far more flexible and with an office type interface. It's been around for more than a decade, had MS been innovative they would have been evernote, except probably far larger more widespread and in nearly every single enterprise. Instead the product was a redheaded stepchild inside MS.
But it's always been handicapped by MS's policies of not supporting non-windows and all the typical lockout and other games they've played their entire existence. It's because of this, onenote outside small niche's has seen very little uptake and almost no one knows about it.
Oh the US doesn't give a rats ass about anyone denominating oil in Euro's because the Europeans are never going to run he deficits necessary to use the Euro as an exchange currency. The second someone tries to denominate a major commodity in $currency the demand for the $currency is going to sky rocket which dramatically increases inflation without massive printing to support it.
The ECB would NEVER print money like the Fed, for one thing it's against their charter. In fact if your goal was to crash the european economy by making the euro so valuable all exports halt the best way to do it would get oil traded Euro's.
Early warning systems prevent first strike. The initiation of the strike would be on NORAD's screen within 45 seconds of the missiles launching. (They have dozens of SATs that watch for heat signatures to indicate ICBM launch. This is one of the reasons launching a satellite into space has to be announced in advance lest it be interpreted to be a nuclear ICBM in boost which would ruin everyone's day.)
Considering flight time is about 45 minutes you can be damn well certain that US nukes would be airborne long before the first missile hits US soil. That's the entire point of MAD, there is no first strike possible because you can't deliver the missiles without the other side knowing long before they arrive.
The proper analogy is "Cut off their own nose to spite their face". Not despite.
I always laugh when someone suggests dumping 162 billion in bonds could crush the US economy. That's literally like 3 days worth of auctions. As you said, they dump them all at once and someone pays 72 billion for them, and over a period of a month doubles their money. Now if they owned the 1.3 trillion that china does they could probably hurt the dollar for a month or two while turning their trillion dollars into a 100 billion. And in the process China would destroy their own export economy as the dollar fell and the trade deficit imploded as US imports stopped.
See that's the problem, they try to "crash" the market and they are guaranteed to lose massive amounts of money on the bonds. And in the long run the bonds recover and there is no long term issue. In the short term it may actually help the US economy by devaluing the dollar short term and harming imports.
There are many cellphones where there is an independent CPU running the cellular radio. This CPU runs a proprietary OS that runs has write access to all memory and can actually override the main CPU. In theory the radio CPU and OS could actually overwrite memory on the fly and redirect the kernel in completely transparent ways.
The silliest part of it is where the book comes from. The bible is a creation of a committee of the early catholic church that sat down with more than 1500 spiritual texts and decided on 300 that were important enough to include in a book given to all priests. Now ask a young earth creationist what they think of the catholic church and the typical response is the whore of Babylon, yet the book they so revere as the accurate word of god was creating by a committee of early members of the catholic church. It's terribly ironic.
I hope he sues and he gets compensation for his destroyed employment chances. The shoody level of journalism here is just unbelievable. The dick reporter basically looked up the name in a phone book found the first match that had an engineering background and started hounding the guy then did the big "reveal" which ruined the guys life.
I hope he sues and I hope he wins.
Human waste used on crops for consumption is a major vector of transmission of disease in undeveloped countries. Human pathogens can survive the composting process. This is actually a major vector for Hepatitis transmission in the undeveloped world. We shouldn't be encouraging these practices because of the significant number of lives lost to disease due to these practices. One of the major advancements in industrialization is the end of these processes and the eventual banning of them.
Urine is sterile and pathogen free and can be used on human crops but we're better off providing a solution like this that uses solar energy to char the solid waste and thereby kill the pathogens. None of the carbon or nutrients are lost in this process. Properly mixed into the soil the carbon is then digested by the soil bacteria to produce the same nutrients that a composting toilet generates, it just eliminates the chance of pathogen transmission. The whole reason for this prize is that composting toilets don't work when you put the compost back on human crops. In the west we know to use the human compost on vegetation that's fed to livestock not humans. But the lack of available compost in poor areas leads the people to the very dangerous practice of using the human waste on human crops which becomes a major vector for unregulated disease transmission.
Because people routinely file complaints against cops to try to sway a judge that they were mistreated, and even just because they are mad about being caught. Those complaints are the primary reason complaints of actual misconduct never amount to anything, because they are lost in the noise and even when they aren't the cops can say it's just another bogus complaint. This is also tied to the fact that when people know they are recorded they are more polite and that applies to both sides which leads to less escalation.
The 90% reduction in complaints is the reduction in the noise and situations where both parties escalated the confrontation. What you find is that in the other 10% of cases where there is solid misconduct the video is "lost. So as I noted it's entirely possible to have a massive reduction in complaints and conversely no actual drop in misconduct.
Ooo a stalker!
Allow me to rebut! A drop in complaints does NOT mean there has been a drop in misconduct. If that was the case there would have been drops in misconduct when cameras were installed in cars (there wasn't). This is because, as I noted, when cops do bad things the video suddenly isn't available, either because it was turned off, the tape was "lost" or the equipment was "broken" and couldn't record.
I fully support and attempted to articulate the ACLU view on this, that cameras can work, but only if precautions are taken to ensure that what I described doesn't happen. Remember that old saying about statistics. The evidence presented in the linked report does not show what you've been lead to believe it shows.
It's thanks to a Brit that we have to deal with the anti-vax'ers. It was a British doctor that (IMO) faked a study proclaiming Vaccines cause Autism. Unfortunately right after his bogus paper he ran off to Texas and set up a clinic and started recruiting idiots like Jenny McCarthy.
Fact is as long as they can turn the cameras on or off and the video is in police custody this will do almost nothing to reduce police abuse. Either the camera will be off, the video will be "lost" or the recording device will be "broken". They want the video for convictions, but they will make damn sure the video is lost or the camera is off when they go to beat the shit out of some innocent person.
They should be required to wear camera, the cameras should record while they are on shift and video should be stored by an independent third party. Any missing footage should result in someone being fired.
I'm not in this test group but I've been in another where the previous colored background went away and there was only a little tiny (font size 4) AD way to the right after the link. I know I was clicking AD's because it tried to bounce me off the doubleclick servers (I use extensions that block redirects without my approval). I thought I'd gone insane at first and was blind but I went back and looked and they had deliberately obfuscated that it was an ad. Without being very careful it was almost impossibly easy to accidentally click ad's because you thought they were real search results.
The new format is WAY better than what I was getting before. I wish I'd taken a screenshot of it but I assumed everyone saw the same thing I did.
It's actually so heavy IIRC it's engine is a 8 cylinder diesel engine that's typically used in the largest commercial pick up trucks (think 1 ton dualies) with more than 7 liters of displacement and a fuel efficiency of 8MPG. The car has sealed air tight compartments, oxygen supplies, armor thick enough to stop armor piercing 50 caliber rounds, a blood bank in the trunk and numerous other features to prevent attacks on the president including physical, chemical and biological attacks.
The possibility of the presidential limo/tank being a Tesla are insignificant. It needs a big fucking engine. As others have noted it's a tank disguised to look like a Limo.
Just "ended my membership by telling to to not auto-renew. I hate dirty tricks like that. I hope 50% of more of prime members do what you and I both did. Wall street thinks only a small group will quit but revenues will still double. If enough people quit it will actually cause revenues to fall which would be catastrophic.
Because there is a certain segment of the population that believes that private enterprise is the solution to every single problem, regardless of the results.
Other people think K-12 education should be handled at the local level, that parent and teacher organizations should work in the local schools to provide the appropriate programs to educate their children given the budget and local constraints and that the role of the state is only to set minimum (and I do mean minimum) standards and that there should be no role for either private companies or the federal government.
It's always interesting that those that advocate for gold always pick arbitrary dates for comparison. The only valid comparison with gold's value is common commodity purchasing value and does so against a VERY long time period. Picking some arbitrary time period allows you to emphasize one of the periods where market fundamentals have allowed gold to appreciate while at the same time selecting different periods in time will demonstrate anywhere from small appreciation in value to negative appreciation.
Gold has and is traditionally the worst investment you could ever make for long term investing. And just like times past when quantitative easing has stopped and the US economy has recovered gold prices will crater, just like they have every other time people have sheltered in gold.
Other than the relatively small industrial uses of gold it's primary value is as Jewelry. This is actually a very small market as testament to the fact that 95% of the worlds gold supply is sitting in government owned vaults in brick form gathering dust. A single country with several tons of bullion could crash the price of gold in almost no time. And in fact all it takes is a government in need of hard currency to start dumping bullion on the market and crash the price because there is almost no elasticity in the market demand. This is what happened in the early 80's as the Soviet economy was collapsing and they started dumping their gold stocks to purchase hard currency. This could easily happen again to a nation like Venezuela that is suffering from hard currency shortages.
X tons of gold are needed every year to satisfy the demand for gold from the worlds expanding population. All of this expanding demand is satisfied by mining because as I noted most of the worlds gold sits in government vaults. The higher the price of gold the more mining. For the last 10 years because of the investors sheltering money in gold it's value has been 5-10x times higher than the supply/demand curve balance because investors are hoarding bullion. As a result the amount of extracted gold has gone up an equal amount relative to the price. When the investors decide that gold isn't providing the returns, (which is going to be very soon, probably within 2 years as it's already started the bouncing collapse). All that excess mined gold is going to flood the market, a market who's only demand is jewelery. By the time the price crash comes the amount of extra extracted bullion (sitting in investor vaults) available to satisfy the luxury demand is going to be probably a decades worth of demand. And just like the housing market collapse when you flood the market with 10 years of demand prices will crater and crater hard. With that much excess bullion in the pipeline I'd imagine prices will drop so bad that almost all mining will halt until the excess gold is consumed by the luxury market. The low price will accelerate purchases but ultimately there is only so much luxury demand for gold. In the end we'll probably see gold prices below $200 an ounce before the end of the decade and sustained until excess production is consumed.
The only people that make long term money on gold are the people that sell it to others, often with the promise that it has some intrinsic value (it doesn't). Just like the 80's when the economy recovered from the Regan recession, gold's price will crash, all the little investors (less than several million invested) will lose their shirts and the middle men will walk away with billions of dollars. This has happened so many times in history it's amazing anyone is dumb enough to consider investments in gold anything other than straight up gambling with only slightly lower risks than betting on the roulette wheel in Vegas. Yea if you get lucky on the timing you can make a bundle, but if you get it wrong you'll lose everything. Gold is already bubble that's already started to pop.
That is an out and out lie without a wink of truth to it. Solar PV can generate power at a rate that is cheaper than nuclear without subsidies. With the minor subsidies that remain its cheaper than coal generated power in tge southwest. Solar is so lucrative that Solar City (a company who's entire business model is selling and installing residential solar panels and financing the costs with a fixed power rate where the resident agrees to buy the power) is turning down investment money and hiring 15 installers a week and has never layed off a single employee.
So in summary you are a fucking liar or a sock puppet, which is it?
The wealthiest individuals do not pay income tax because they don't have income. Their "income" is actually long term capital gains with the highest rate paid at 20%. They don't pay SSI, Medicare or Medicaide and even if they did they are capped at $125,000 in income. Because of this Mitt Romney had to pay extra taxes for his effective rate (the actual taxation rate) to be 15%.
For a wage slave to pay an effective rate of 15% they would need to make less than $10,000 per year. Warren Buffet has noted that he has paid less taxes (as a percentage of income) than his secretary since Regan was in office. Most of the 1% in fact avoid almost all taxes, including sales and others by using their wealth to exploit different state level taxation rates (such as keeping a home in a zero income tax state and a home in a zero sales tax state then spending part time in each state with sufficient time spent to eliminate both income and sales tax).
Properly executed with a good accountant the 1% have paid less than 10% in taxes by careful manipulation of their long term capital gains. It's possible to not only make money on a stock but claim an overall loss. And the best part about capital gains is that, baring dividends, no gains are realized until there is a transaction. This makes is possible to sink 100's of millions into a trust that appreciates in value but never pay taxes on it because a sale of shares never takes place. Then when money is needed a paper loss equal to the 20% tax is realized at the same time to eliminate the liability. This is so common now that the rich like Mitt Romney are forced to pay extra to hit net tax rates of 15%.
Only the middle class and upper middle class pay high taxable percentages, once you reach a certain asset threshold your taxation rate begins to drop substantially. The middle and upper middle class are the ones getting hosed, all so the richest among us can pay super low rates.