I seem to remember about 10 years ago, when rapid prototyping machines were all in the news, a story in an engineering journal about the use of such a "replicated" part from a rapid prototyper in the field. I believe it was a pedal or some similar part in the cockpit of a B-52 that needed some slight modification. The engineers made a model on a rapid prototyper and took it to the plane to do a test fitting, and the prototype worked so well that they left it in place. Does anyone else know the source of this story?
But, solar power, windmills, and water turbines do use up finite resources. They may not have fuel costs, but fuel costs are only one of the many costs in bulding and opeating a power plant. For example, the equipment to use the "free" fuel has to be constructed and maintained. This consumes resources (raw materials, energy, labor, land, etc.), which we can convieniently measure as money. If it costs more money to generate power with these "green" technologies, then it is because the amount of resources consumed(measured in dollars) per unit energy produced is higher. I assume that this is the sort of basic economics that you assert even non-Americans possess.
Obviously I realize that it costs money and lives to protect real Rights. I am not suggesting that no form of taxation and gov't can be just, or that the only good Rights are those which cost nothing to enforce. I am merely drawing a distinction between a gov't that collects and spends taxes for the purposes of defending the freedoms of its citizens and one which collects taxes for the purposes of managing peoples lives and redistributing their wealth to achieve what its leaders believe to be some form of "cosmic justice." It doesn't matter that the doctors in your socialized system have "less power" than the police. It will be the police (or whatever you want to call your state security forces) that comes to collect your wealth to pay for the "social rights" your leaders invent to justify whatever redistribution of wealth they think is "fair."
I have no problems with the statement "it would be best for all concerned if every opportunity to legitametly profit from environmentally sensitive behavior was exploited immediately." I also agree with your statment about it being preferable to use waste than pay to dispose of it. In fact, I am in the business of figuring out how to make industrial processes more efficient while complying with safety and environmental regulations. But this isn't an article in a business or engineering journal about HOW to reduce cost (or turn a profit) with green technologies. It is a newspaper article that gives a false impression about the economics of environmental compliance. I'm sorry if you don't like me calling that "propoganda," but I think this article deliberately provides a distorted impression about how often expendatures on compliance yield net profits.
Perhaps my response is somewhat selfishly motivated. What happens when some finance manager who considers himself technically competent because he can turn on his computer reads this article, then attends a meeting where I present a proposal to achieve compliance in some industrial process at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars a year? Well, he is going to be shocked that I can't do it for free; or else at a profit. After all, the NYT said everyone else was making a profit, why can't I figure out how to do it?
I am not saying that none of my capital proposals or process changes results in both profit and environmental benifit. I have made plenty of purchases or changes that were motivated by profit and also wound up eliminating scrap, reducing energy use, or recycling waste products in some other process. Efficiency improvement is, after all, a common way to achieve cost savings. Unfortunately it rarely goes the other way; and giving people the false impression that with modern engineering methods environmental compliance usually yields cost savings does a disservice to the majority of engineers whose compliance efforts will only result in cost increases. It reduces the apparent achievent of engineers who manage to achieve both goals simultaneously. It also does a disservice to the taxpayers who may now think that tougher environmental regulations will come with no cost to the economy. I am not against bragging about clever engineering or applauding those who do it; I am against presenting an atypical result as if it were the norm.
I am familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I even agree with a lot of it. In fact, a lot of it seems to come straight from the Bill or Rights (no surprise considering that the U.S. was very influential in the founding of the U.N.) and some of it that isn't is nonetheless reminiscent of the Rights that most all Americans and The Courts have found to be implied in the Constitution: stuff like the Right to privacy and the Right to own property.
You may notice, however, that in my above comment I specifically restrict my definition of Rights to the "Western" ideas of rights; to be more specific, I restrict it to the definition of Rights as an area of a person's life within which a person is free to make choices that are not restricted or dictated by any government. That doesn't mean that Fate or circumstance or economics or other unpleasantness of reality may not intrude. For example, I have the right to voice my opinions on political issues but I can't afford to take out an ad in the middle of the Superbowl to promote them. Ted Turner could, but that doesn't mean he has more of a right to free speech than I because in neither case is the Gov't restricting us (in fact if anything Turner's right is being restricted more by Gov't since the content of televised material is regulated by the FCC and so he couldn't descend into a string of obscenities if he wanted).
The problem here is that there was another very powerful group that was instrumental in the foundation of the U.N. and has also left their mark on the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: that group is the Soviet Union. If you continue reading the Declaration you will notice that it also contains portions of those dreaded "Eastern Bloc" versions of rights that I mentioned my opposition to. These rights are not "areas of your life you are free to pursue w/o governmental restriction" they are physical items or services that everyone is supposed to get "for free." The problem is that, as those of us who live in the real world know, nothing is "free" and that providing those "rights" can only be done by violating the real Rights that were mentioned in the previous portions of the Declaration (like Article 17: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property"). It is not like governments can just wave a magic wand and create the wealth needed to pay for such communist "rights". The only way those things can be created is through the labor of people.
How can a gov't provide these communist "rights" to its citizens in accord with the UN Declaration? Well, the gov't could confiscate the products that everyone has a "right" to (like food and clothing) and compel people to provide the services that everyone has a "right" to (like education medical care). But, taking peoples property and forcing them to provide free services violates Articles 17 and 4 against confiscating property and slave labor, respectively. Of course, the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc would have had no problem with either of those methods. The gov't could pay for the products and services and then hand them out to its citizens; but how does it get the money since, as your parents may have told you, money doesn't just grow on trees. Well, it taxes people for it. In other words, it confiscates a little bit of the products of a lot of people's labor. While economically more palatable, that is still no more justifiable to steal a little bit from several people than it is to confiscate all the property from one person. Either way, the gov't is taking peoples property and labor at gunpoint and redistributing it. Doesn't sound like my concept of Rights at all. In other words, I don't consider "the right of the gov't to take people's stuff at gunpoint (or threat thereof) for redistribution to other people" to be an "unpopular right." It is not a right at all. It is tyranny. Calling it an "right" is the worst sort of Orwellian double-think. It is wrong, no matter how badly you feel about the poor hungry, undereducated children you use to justify it. No, it is more than wrong; it is evil.
Look at Article 26 of this precious UN Declaration: "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory." Isn't it strange that in a document that should be listing areas of peoples lives that are to be free from Gov't restriction they would list anything as being "compulsory?" Well, this is a reflection of the Article's true origins: The Communist Manifesto. For those of you who have lived in some kind of fairyland your whole lives, when a gov't says something is "compulsory" that is another way of saying "we will use violence (up to and including killing you) in order to make you do this;" because fundamentally all gov't orders are backed by violence, no matter how "benevolent" the gov't claims to be.
Fortunately the Soviet Union is dead. Unfortunately communism is not. It lives on not only in the hearts of weak-minded or evil people, but also in such institutional anachronisms as some of the later articles of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Until this UN declaration is purged of these remnants of Soviet influence it will remain an inferior document to the Bill of Rights and I will oppose its strict imposition on any people. While we're at it we should rid the U.N. of other remnants of communism still existing in its various agencies and bureaucracies. Not "rid" it the way the Soviets or Chicom's would (i.e. mass murder), but just fire them and make them get a job in academia. Or would that violate Article 23, which says everyone has a right to a job.
One last comment, I am not against everyone having access to food and clothing and healthcare and education. I am merely against the idea of a government that forces me to provide (or pay for) other people's food and healthcare at gunpoint. Charity should be voluntary. If someone wants to keep all the products of his labor to himself, then he is selfish and merits the disdain of his neighbors, but he is within his Rights to do so. Is there, after all, any more fundamental Right than the Right to one's own person and therefore the Right to the products of one's toil?
The tyranny of the majority can be just as bad as the tyranny of the few. Don't forget, Hitler was elected.
That is why I am glad to live in a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. My rights* are protected regardless of how unpopular a minority I belong to or how "unnecessary" those rights seem to some. It's not perfect** but it protects against "the mob" a #@!! of a lot better than a real Democracy.
* Traditional Western Civ. Bill of Rights sort of stuff, not that Eastern Bloc "You have the right to a state job, state housing and food rations crap"
** Just look at treatment of the Japanese during WW2 or Colored People in the pre-civil rights South, or at how DMCA and the Assualt Weapons Ban violate the Bill of Rights w/o going through proper constitutional amendment proceedures to see how unpopular people or rights can be trampled upon even with consititutional protections against the whims of the majority. But the treatment of the unpopular could be far, far worse, and in either a pure democracy or totalitarianism it would be.
I just finished reading a book called _The_Next_200_Years_ by Herman Kahn (the same guy who wrote "_Thinking_About_the_Unthinkable_), that talked about these issues specifically. It was written in 1976 (hence the title), but took a much more thorough apporach than most of the Malthusians of the day. It guessed that the increase in population growth would continue to decrease (second derivitive of growth is negative) and result in a global population peaking around 15 billion (plus or minus a factor of 2) in the 22nd century. It also made very good arguments along your lines as to why we won't likely run out of resources on Earth.
My personal belief is that just to be sure, we should go ahead and start expanding out into space anyway.
Interestingly, the book also predicted that around 1985 there would be the potential for dangerous internal political issues on the subject of computerized records, computerized surveillance, and improved techniques for preventing disturbances as well as improved means of terrorism and "agitprop".
No, so many countries besides us signed up because they didn't get the same penalties as the U.S., so it was in their interests to sign while it was not in ours. If the treaty just came right out and said "we will take several hundred billion dollars out of the United States economy, and use it to clean up everybody else's polution" then the result would have been the same, but no one would have been as surprised when everyone but the U.S. is for it.
Don't forget that those "stupid and partisan" senators from both parties in the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly not to ratify Kyoto; it was hardly just Bush's doing.
That is a wonderful piece of propaganda. I don't doubt that the examples cited are true; I just notice that they don't cover the vast majority of cases where complying with evironmental regulation costs the company money but the only payback is that they don't get fined by the EPA and one of the company's executives doesn't risk going to jail. It seems to me that the article is obviously attempting to make more environmental regulation tolerable to businesses by offering the false hope (most of the time) that it will help their bottom line. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." The article does admit that not all companies are lucky enough to turn a profit on environmental compliance, but it says it with the same amount of emphasis as a lottery commerical that briefly mentions the real odds of winning.
I want to be clear that I am not against keeping the environment clean, I am just against deluding ourselves into thinking that it is cheaper to have high environmental standards than it is to have low ones (unless you start playing with the accounting system like the article suggests and assigning dollar values to intangible things*). Such delusions are not helpful. I will admit that the article is probably right about environmental groups being more effective at dealing with businesses when they learn to talk the language of businessmen; that was an informative tidbit. Any change a business makes, they will tend to try to find a way to make it profitible, so I am not surprised that as an UNINTENDED SIDE EFFECT of environmental regulation, some businesses have figured out a way to make money off their compliance efforts.
Having made the radical claim that high envirnomental standards cost more to achieve than low standards in most cases; I will admit that there is a link between profit and a clean environment, but in my experience it usually goes the other way. Companies looking for ways to make the most profit tend to also make the most efficient use of raw materials and energy. I have written plenty of capital justifications for changing processes or buying new equipment based on just such efficiency improvements. While the pursuit of profit will help the environment we cannot count on profit alone to keep the country clean. There are too many times where the cheapest thing to do would be to improperly dispose of your waste products. We have to have some judicial, legal, or regulatory measures to prevent abuse of the air and water as waste depositories, but we should not pretend that there is no economic cost to such environmental pursuits.
While they are doing articles on the economics of environmental compliance, I would like to have seen an article on how premature or bad environmental regulation costs money and jobs and consumes extra resources (isn't that what money represents?) and mis-prioritizes dangers. Like the billions of dollars and increadible amounts of man-hours wasted when useful materials like non-amphible asbestos** are banned or restricted because of ignorance (or sensationalism and pandering) in the newsmedia and the regulatory authories.
* I do think we, as a society, need to figure out how to put a dollar value on the cleanliness of our envirnoment so that we can more accurately determine what evnironmental regulations can be justified and which ones will have the most benifit per dollar invested. It seems unusual to me that this is actually being done on a corprate level; but I am happy that someone is thinking about it. I wonder if this is the Megacorp. equivilent of those businesses that sell all sorts of products on the basis that they cost more but "help the rainforest" or the electric companies whose power costs more (i.e. consumes more resources) but don't release as much pollution. Something like, "Well, our stocks don't pay as big a dividens but you can feel better yourself by owning our stock because we consider community issues in our business decisions."
** which was banned along with the "bad" asbestos.
As an engineer who has had to help numerous companies "clean themselves up," I can tell you that the above statement is crap. While I don't doubt that SOME companies may manage to get the local gov't to help with environmental costs, MOST companies certainly do not.
The above poster is taking the activities of a few crafty and politically savvy companies and trying to claim that such things are the norm.
I am certainly against politicians handing out "corprate welfare" to their corprate allies (like Al Gore and Occidental Petrolium, for example*) but lets not exaggerate the problem (even though that tactic has worked SO well for the environmental extremists) and claim that the majority of all companies are guilty of recieving such "welfare."
*What you thought Bush and the Republicans were the only people with ties to big oil companies?
The problem of birds ingesting lead shot and getting poisened is real.
That is why almost all responsible hunters use STEEL shot now instead of lead.
Lead is still used in bullets (though it is usually covered in a full jacket of copper), but animals don't tend to swallow bullets like they do the much smaller shot.
It may be surprising to many non-hunters, but hunters are generally people who love being outdoors and spend a lot of time in the wilderness. Being a carnivore doesn't mean you can't appreciate nature and enjoy your place in it; in fact it is probably easier to enjoy it from the top of the food chain (I doubt the view from the bottom is very pleasant). Many hunters, therefore, are very conservation minded.
Of course there are a few "bad apples," but that is true of any large demographic. There are also those that oppose steel shot because it is more likely to cripple birds but not bring them down. Tungsten will probably be the non-toxic shot material of the future because its better ballistics will reduce the arguments against it. Gold would probably be even better, except for the obvious problems that would create.
For more information on steel shot:
http://www.clede.com/Articles/guns/steelsh.htm
And I am quite aware of how lucky we were that Engineering got to approve the suppliers instead of Purchasing. You may be happy to know that sometimes even very large contracts get made on technical merit. Not that we didn't have to fight for it (and undersell the potential cost savings to make sure the project didn't get hijacked... nobody said engineers have to be politically naive).
I understand your comment, but in this case, if the supplier sent us bad product it could screw up one of the production lines and I would be the person who would have to straighten it all out. It was very much in my best interest (and the rest of the team) to give the suppliers involved the most objective analysis possible. No matter how bad our mood, I doubt we would have taken it out on the supplier simply because it was personally very important to us to find a top notch supplier (failing to do so would make our work far more difficult for years to come). Plus we were a bunch of engineers, and therefore presumably able to differentiate between "I'm unhappy" and "What's the point in running a test if you don't have any standards you are testing to? Is this place run by monkeys or something?" Less developed forms of life (like Pointy Headed Bosses) may not be able to make that distinction.
But the supplier didn't know that.
I'm sure in most cases you are right, a person's mood is very important in such activities (even when it shouldn't be).
The Boeing Sonic Cruiser is a brilliant ploy to counter Airbus's superjumbo aircraft plans. The Sonic Cruiser can be targeted to the much more profitable First Class, Executive Class, and Business Classes. I think Boeing hopes that the airlines which buy the superjumbos will be stuck hauling the low profit "cattle car" coach class passengers only (and all the other airlines will rush to place orders for more Sonic Cruisers). But, those supersonic business jets would seem to cut into the Sonic Cruiser's market share. And companies like Southwest seem to be getting along fine targeting the low end passengers. It will be interesting to see whose business strategy pays off.
There is more economic benifit to corprate jets than just getting your employees from point A to point B faster. A number of companies use them as sales tools. I once had a supplier fly me and 4 other engineers and technicians from the local airport near our plant to their production facility in a very nice corprate jet so that we could do a supplier audit* on them. They were trying to get a very valuable supplier contract with us, but it hinged on whether we thought they could consistently provide us the quality we required. We approved the company's product and process, and so they got the contract.
In this case it had very little** to do with the aircraft; we were impressed with their Quality Assurance system at the plant. BUT, if the team sent to audit the plant had consisted of a bunch of muddle-headed artsie craftsies with MBAs then I could easily see them being swayed by the possibility of more such rides, and the free steak dinners, and the liquor, and... I have got to schedule more supplier reviews.
Anyway, properly used a corprate jet can be a great tool for the sales staff in addition to transporting a companies own people. Winning one big sales account for this company could easily pay the annual maintenance and salaries to support that plane (yes, I know how expensive that is).
* A little word of advice to younger engineers; never trust a supplier's ISO, QS, or other certification. Remember how much stuff the auditor missed on your audit? They did the same thing for your suppliers. If quality is important then check them yourself.
** It did let us take the trip sooner than if we had driven or scheduled commerical flights; so they wound up getting the contract sooner than they otherwise would have been able to. But that comes back to just getting from Point A to B. Plus we were in a better mood at their plant than if we had taken conventional travel and could spend more time there. That allowed us to do a more thorough audit than we probably otherwise would have, but since these guys had a 1st rate facility that helped them more than it hurt them.
As cmorriss points out, laws in the U.S. are not only amended through the legislature, they are also declared null and void if they are found unconstitutional by The Court. This does NOT require any sort of "democratic action". In fact, if the Supreme Court rules that a law is unconstitutional then it doesn't matter how popular it is with the public, it is gone. Personally I rather like it that way; it prevents a "tyranny of the majority" and protects even unpopular rights and the rights of unpopular groups (to a point).
I suspect DMCA is very unconstitutional, and hopefully if EFF can make a good enough case The Court can be convinced to overturn it; so supporting them in this effort is important.
Your "democratic action" does have its place. Even if it doesn't reverse this law, making your displeasure over DMCA known (in an thoughtful, clear fashion) to your representatives in Congress gives them feedback on the quality of their legislation and may prevent future similar "bad laws" from being enacted in the 1st place. This feedback is very important, but often times legislatures get insulated from the results of their work, and then some poor person (like Dimitri) has to be the "test case" victim to get it corrected in The Courts.
"Democratic action" has its place, but democracy (or in our case a republic) without constitutional restrictions and a judiciary system is tyranny waiting to happen.
While in theory I also disagree that all "wrong laws" must be obeyed, in this context the difference is only academic. The injustices and tragedies of war are so great that I think the laws must be very, very wrong and very, very uncorrectable before that step can be justified. But having your gov't know in the back of their mind that they could never rule out such a response is a useful deterrence to extremist bureaucrats.
Of course, pulsejets are also much cheaper and easier to build. For a hobbyist wanting to do something cool a pulsejet is fine. For a really high performance aircraft or SSTO spacecraft they aren't even worth considering. At the other extreme, scramjets are great but VERY hard to build because you basically have to create a standing wave of detonation in your engine. That is why everyone is so excited about even a.03 second scramjet flight.
A nice compromise engine is actually somewhat related to the pulsejet; it is called the pulse detonation engine or PDE. It creates thrust by a series of explosions in the engine somewhat similar to the way that a pulsejet uses a series of flame pulses. Like pulsejet, the PDE is easier to build because you don't have to make the combustion stable and well-behaved like in a normal engine. Like a scramjet you get the efficiency of supersonic combustion (an explosion) instead of a subsonic combustion (a flame). But also like pulsejets, PDEs don't produce as much thrust because they are "on" only in brief pulses while a scramjet is generating continuous thrust. And of course you also have all sorts of fatigue and noise issues with the PDEs from all those pulses.
To simplify, Ramjet:Scramjet = Puslejet:PDE
For more info on PDEs, see:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/AERO/base/pdet.htm
Expect to see a lot more about PDEs over the next 10 years.
According to Janes Defense Weekly (Feb. 28, 1992), Aurora is most likely powered by a conventional ramjet and uses liquid methane for fuel. My personal feeling is that it uses some type of combined cycle engine.
Base bleed arty shells reduce drag, but don't produce accelleration. Also, I think the base bleed gas generation system carries its own oxidizer (like a weak rocket).
The Aereon concept is a weird hybrid rigid lighter-than-air vehicle shaped like large delta wing. It was the dream of the Aereon Co. ( http://www.njave.com/aviation/aereon/index.html ). Its history is told in the book _The_Deltoid_Pumpkin_Seed_; but we all know the story: it was an innovative idea that never caught on because it was too different for the little minds of the conventional world to appreciate. How many times have we heard that myth?
Maybe not. The world of aerospace is full of lighter than air concepts that never get developed because of good technical or economic reasons, no matter how cool or elegant they are: Aereon, Skyship, Atlantis Autonomous Airship, etc. But the idea of a rigid hybrid aircraft/airship has a lot of merit; and better it has potential uses. Military Uses. If you could make a vehicle that combined the hover and long loiter time of an airship with the speed of a subsonic aircraft, you'd have a good recon platform. Make it stealthy and you'd have a nice ground troop insertion method. If you don't care about stealth then it would make a great radar platform or subhunter.
That is probably why NASA selected the concept a couple of years ago as a Revolutionary Concept project that would be pursued by a NASA/Lockheed/Microcraft team ( http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/PAO/PressReleases/1999/99 -31.html ). Except that there is something a little suspicious about that announcement. Any avid reader of Aviation Week & Space Technology (sometimes called Aviation Leak) can tell you, we have had pulse detonation test planes flying since the 90s (when their unique "donut on a rope" contrails started appearing around military test sites). This already flown technology is one of the other Revolutionary Concepts this team is supposed to be developing a flying prototype of. There are also numerous UFO sightings of large hovering triangular shapes that are too fast to be airships (or at least conventional airships); and an Aereon like vehicle is one of the proposed explanations ( http://www.nidsci.org/news/aereon.html ). What if the Revolutionary Concepts NASA wants to develop with this industry team are actually existing classified technologies that have commercial applications, and NASA is just providing a backstory to explain their development if or when they are declassified?
So what's the point of all this? IF this is true, then the state-of-the-art in lighter than air craft may be much more advanced than a lot of you Zeppelin fans think. All you people wishing that SOMEONE would develop this technology properly may be comforted to know that the U.S. Navy** may already have a fleet of advanced rigid airships. And IF the gov't is going through all this trouble to delcassify it with the Revolutionary Concepts program, then someone must think it has potential civilian applications.
* apologies to Mr. Dundee
** The Navy has always seemed more excited about lighter-than-air aircraft than the USAF, and one of the UFO sightings happened right outside a USAF base which suggests to me that the craft might be of Navy origin (the USAF wouldn't turn on a bunch of lights on a classified aircraft just outside one of its own bases, but a less-than-professional Navy crew with their own "UFO" might not be able to resist the temptation of having a little fun by scaring the crap out of a bunch of Air Force guys).
The problem is the "last mile," so isn't gov't ownership of those lines more like the gov't owning everyone's driveway instead of it owning the Interstate Highways. I can see the national defense justification for fed gov't owned interstate fiber the same way I can see it for interstate roads, but not the "last mile". City owned makes a little more sense, especially compared to having a large company that owns everyones driveway; but I don't think I'd be happy with the service a gov't run broadband service would provide or the idea of my ISP rates going up because some city councilmen want money to build a sports stadium. City owned, run by private contracters would be preferable. What about a completely private co op? I suspect that like other utilities, different areas will ultimately use different solutions; with a few solutions "winning out" and being adopted by most areas.
I agree that a "free market" should be a means to an end, but I disagree on what that end has to be.
You seem to think the end should be some kind of equitable distribution of worldly possessions (i.e. "prosperity... for the majority").
I think that the end should be the protection of human rights.
I don't mean those crappy socialist Soviet/Chicom style rights like "the right to a job" and "the right to a place to live." I mean the good old fashion Western Civilization* idea of rights like "the right peaceably assemble" and, "the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures" and, to be honest I'd like "the right to the product of my own labor." A gov't which takes stuff away from one person and gives it to another to satisfy some politician's sense of "cosmic justice" is not respecting what I would argue are man's basic Rights.
Sure, I like stuff as much as the next guy. I want surround sound and a big TV and a fast computer and a new car. But, how can you suggest that bringing "prosperity and economic growth to a majority of people" can be more important than a person's right to keep what they have legitimately earned, even if that right is only taken from a minority of the people? Ourselves, and therefore our labor, and therefore the fruits of our labor should belong to us as individuals, not to society as a whole, certainly not to the government or to political leaders**. Gov't should worry about protecting the rights of its citizens first and foremost; if that means some people get screwed over economically, that is unfortunate***; but not as unfortunate as the tyranny that would result if the gov't tried to control the economy to prevent it. And who really belives the politicians would actually control the economy for the benfit of the "little man" anyway; they would eventually control it for the benifit of themselves and/or their most powerful constituents.
I don't think that any gov't regulation is automatically evil... as long as the levels of gov't stay within their areas of authority, and regulation is minimized so that it does not, as Thomas Jeffeson said "take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." (for you Europeans, "labor" here does NOT refer to a socialist political party or to just the "working poor" or the underclass). For publically traded companies, anti-trust laws I think CAN be done in a reasonable way that does respect the rights of citizens. But if they can't, which should we sacrifice: Cheap long distance telephone calls, or human rights? Thankfully we live an a society where what is RIGHT almost always works out to what will also create general prosperity, so compromise is not necessary. But when some politician tries to offer you a choice between the two, be careful which one you pick.
*of course I mean Enlightenment era old fashioned, not the sort of "that person acts a little different, so lets call her an agent of Satan and burn her at the stake" Middle Ages sort of old fashoned.
** Not that I think we should have NO taxes, I don't know how to pay for a gov't without taxees. It's just that they only should be used for legitimate gov't purposes. Of course, my idea of legitimate is a very American, _Federalist_Papers_ sort of thing ( http://www.mcs.net/~knautzr/fed/fedpaper.html ), not at all what many Eurocentric or Eastern thinkers might call "legitimate."
*** Not that I think that society should not help the economically unfortunate, just that help for economic problems should come from economic sources and NGOs not through the forcible confiscation of wealth for redistribution according to the preferences of the political leaders.
In a truely free market economy, being able to afford powerful lobbyists wouldn't help a company keep its customers because the gov't couldn't use regulation to restrain the companies competitors or to force the companies customers to stay. Instead, even established companies would have to worry that some small start up could come along and kick their @$$ if it could provide better service for less money.
I agree about the importance of the free market, and not wanting regulation.
Anti-trust laws, however, are one of the few gov't intrusion into the free market that I think are acceptable. They seem to be the least of all evil, and really do "promote the general welfare." I suppose I might be conflicted if the monopoly was a privately held company instead of a publiclly traded one; but generally private companies don't get that large.
Originally I was against the breakup of AT&T. I was wrong. Telephone service has gotten better and prices have dropped. My only complaint is that when AT&T was a monopoly, no one ever called and asked me if I wanted to switch phone companies.
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I seem to remember about 10 years ago, when rapid prototyping machines were all in the news, a story in an engineering journal about the use of such a "replicated" part from a rapid prototyper in the field. I believe it was a pedal or some similar part in the cockpit of a B-52 that needed some slight modification. The engineers made a model on a rapid prototyper and took it to the plane to do a test fitting, and the prototype worked so well that they left it in place. Does anyone else know the source of this story?
But, solar power, windmills, and water turbines do use up finite resources. They may not have fuel costs, but fuel costs are only one of the many costs in bulding and opeating a power plant. For example, the equipment to use the "free" fuel has to be constructed and maintained. This consumes resources (raw materials, energy, labor, land, etc.), which we can convieniently measure as money. If it costs more money to generate power with these "green" technologies, then it is because the amount of resources consumed(measured in dollars) per unit energy produced is higher. I assume that this is the sort of basic economics that you assert even non-Americans possess.
Obviously I realize that it costs money and lives to protect real Rights. I am not suggesting that no form of taxation and gov't can be just, or that the only good Rights are those which cost nothing to enforce. I am merely drawing a distinction between a gov't that collects and spends taxes for the purposes of defending the freedoms of its citizens and one which collects taxes for the purposes of managing peoples lives and redistributing their wealth to achieve what its leaders believe to be some form of "cosmic justice." It doesn't matter that the doctors in your socialized system have "less power" than the police. It will be the police (or whatever you want to call your state security forces) that comes to collect your wealth to pay for the "social rights" your leaders invent to justify whatever redistribution of wealth they think is "fair."
I have no problems with the statement "it would be best for all concerned if every opportunity to legitametly profit from environmentally sensitive behavior was exploited immediately." I also agree with your statment about it being preferable to use waste than pay to dispose of it. In fact, I am in the business of figuring out how to make industrial processes more efficient while complying with safety and environmental regulations. But this isn't an article in a business or engineering journal about HOW to reduce cost (or turn a profit) with green technologies. It is a newspaper article that gives a false impression about the economics of environmental compliance. I'm sorry if you don't like me calling that "propoganda," but I think this article deliberately provides a distorted impression about how often expendatures on compliance yield net profits.
Perhaps my response is somewhat selfishly motivated. What happens when some finance manager who considers himself technically competent because he can turn on his computer reads this article, then attends a meeting where I present a proposal to achieve compliance in some industrial process at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars a year? Well, he is going to be shocked that I can't do it for free; or else at a profit. After all, the NYT said everyone else was making a profit, why can't I figure out how to do it?
I am not saying that none of my capital proposals or process changes results in both profit and environmental benifit. I have made plenty of purchases or changes that were motivated by profit and also wound up eliminating scrap, reducing energy use, or recycling waste products in some other process. Efficiency improvement is, after all, a common way to achieve cost savings. Unfortunately it rarely goes the other way; and giving people the false impression that with modern engineering methods environmental compliance usually yields cost savings does a disservice to the majority of engineers whose compliance efforts will only result in cost increases. It reduces the apparent achievent of engineers who manage to achieve both goals simultaneously. It also does a disservice to the taxpayers who may now think that tougher environmental regulations will come with no cost to the economy. I am not against bragging about clever engineering or applauding those who do it; I am against presenting an atypical result as if it were the norm.
I am familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I even agree with a lot of it. In fact, a lot of it seems to come straight from the Bill or Rights (no surprise considering that the U.S. was very influential in the founding of the U.N.) and some of it that isn't is nonetheless reminiscent of the Rights that most all Americans and The Courts have found to be implied in the Constitution: stuff like the Right to privacy and the Right to own property.
You may notice, however, that in my above comment I specifically restrict my definition of Rights to the "Western" ideas of rights; to be more specific, I restrict it to the definition of Rights as an area of a person's life within which a person is free to make choices that are not restricted or dictated by any government. That doesn't mean that Fate or circumstance or economics or other unpleasantness of reality may not intrude. For example, I have the right to voice my opinions on political issues but I can't afford to take out an ad in the middle of the Superbowl to promote them. Ted Turner could, but that doesn't mean he has more of a right to free speech than I because in neither case is the Gov't restricting us (in fact if anything Turner's right is being restricted more by Gov't since the content of televised material is regulated by the FCC and so he couldn't descend into a string of obscenities if he wanted).
The problem here is that there was another very powerful group that was instrumental in the foundation of the U.N. and has also left their mark on the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: that group is the Soviet Union. If you continue reading the Declaration you will notice that it also contains portions of those dreaded "Eastern Bloc" versions of rights that I mentioned my opposition to. These rights are not "areas of your life you are free to pursue w/o governmental restriction" they are physical items or services that everyone is supposed to get "for free." The problem is that, as those of us who live in the real world know, nothing is "free" and that providing those "rights" can only be done by violating the real Rights that were mentioned in the previous portions of the Declaration (like Article 17: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property"). It is not like governments can just wave a magic wand and create the wealth needed to pay for such communist "rights". The only way those things can be created is through the labor of people.
How can a gov't provide these communist "rights" to its citizens in accord with the UN Declaration? Well, the gov't could confiscate the products that everyone has a "right" to (like food and clothing) and compel people to provide the services that everyone has a "right" to (like education medical care). But, taking peoples property and forcing them to provide free services violates Articles 17 and 4 against confiscating property and slave labor, respectively. Of course, the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc would have had no problem with either of those methods. The gov't could pay for the products and services and then hand them out to its citizens; but how does it get the money since, as your parents may have told you, money doesn't just grow on trees. Well, it taxes people for it. In other words, it confiscates a little bit of the products of a lot of people's labor. While economically more palatable, that is still no more justifiable to steal a little bit from several people than it is to confiscate all the property from one person. Either way, the gov't is taking peoples property and labor at gunpoint and redistributing it. Doesn't sound like my concept of Rights at all. In other words, I don't consider "the right of the gov't to take people's stuff at gunpoint (or threat thereof) for redistribution to other people" to be an "unpopular right." It is not a right at all. It is tyranny. Calling it an "right" is the worst sort of Orwellian double-think. It is wrong, no matter how badly you feel about the poor hungry, undereducated children you use to justify it. No, it is more than wrong; it is evil.
Look at Article 26 of this precious UN Declaration: "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory." Isn't it strange that in a document that should be listing areas of peoples lives that are to be free from Gov't restriction they would list anything as being "compulsory?" Well, this is a reflection of the Article's true origins: The Communist Manifesto. For those of you who have lived in some kind of fairyland your whole lives, when a gov't says something is "compulsory" that is another way of saying "we will use violence (up to and including killing you) in order to make you do this;" because fundamentally all gov't orders are backed by violence, no matter how "benevolent" the gov't claims to be.
Fortunately the Soviet Union is dead. Unfortunately communism is not. It lives on not only in the hearts of weak-minded or evil people, but also in such institutional anachronisms as some of the later articles of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Until this UN declaration is purged of these remnants of Soviet influence it will remain an inferior document to the Bill of Rights and I will oppose its strict imposition on any people. While we're at it we should rid the U.N. of other remnants of communism still existing in its various agencies and bureaucracies. Not "rid" it the way the Soviets or Chicom's would (i.e. mass murder), but just fire them and make them get a job in academia. Or would that violate Article 23, which says everyone has a right to a job.
One last comment, I am not against everyone having access to food and clothing and healthcare and education. I am merely against the idea of a government that forces me to provide (or pay for) other people's food and healthcare at gunpoint. Charity should be voluntary. If someone wants to keep all the products of his labor to himself, then he is selfish and merits the disdain of his neighbors, but he is within his Rights to do so. Is there, after all, any more fundamental Right than the Right to one's own person and therefore the Right to the products of one's toil?
How is "i am favor of clean water, air, and stuff but i have been just turned off by the zealotry and preaching coming from greenies" being a troll?
Somebody mod the parent to this back up, please.
The tyranny of the majority can be just as bad as the tyranny of the few. Don't forget, Hitler was elected.
That is why I am glad to live in a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. My rights* are protected regardless of how unpopular a minority I belong to or how "unnecessary" those rights seem to some. It's not perfect** but it protects against "the mob" a #@!! of a lot better than a real Democracy.
* Traditional Western Civ. Bill of Rights sort of stuff, not that Eastern Bloc "You have the right to a state job, state housing and food rations crap"
** Just look at treatment of the Japanese during WW2 or Colored People in the pre-civil rights South, or at how DMCA and the Assualt Weapons Ban violate the Bill of Rights w/o going through proper constitutional amendment proceedures to see how unpopular people or rights can be trampled upon even with consititutional protections against the whims of the majority. But the treatment of the unpopular could be far, far worse, and in either a pure democracy or totalitarianism it would be.
I just finished reading a book called _The_Next_200_Years_ by Herman Kahn (the same guy who wrote "_Thinking_About_the_Unthinkable_), that talked about these issues specifically. It was written in 1976 (hence the title), but took a much more thorough apporach than most of the Malthusians of the day. It guessed that the increase in population growth would continue to decrease (second derivitive of growth is negative) and result in a global population peaking around 15 billion (plus or minus a factor of 2) in the 22nd century. It also made very good arguments along your lines as to why we won't likely run out of resources on Earth.
My personal belief is that just to be sure, we should go ahead and start expanding out into space anyway.
Interestingly, the book also predicted that around 1985 there would be the potential for dangerous internal political issues on the subject of computerized records, computerized surveillance, and improved techniques for preventing disturbances as well as improved means of terrorism and "agitprop".
No, so many countries besides us signed up because they didn't get the same penalties as the U.S., so it was in their interests to sign while it was not in ours. If the treaty just came right out and said "we will take several hundred billion dollars out of the United States economy, and use it to clean up everybody else's polution" then the result would have been the same, but no one would have been as surprised when everyone but the U.S. is for it.
Don't forget that those "stupid and partisan" senators from both parties in the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly not to ratify Kyoto; it was hardly just Bush's doing.
That is a wonderful piece of propaganda. I don't doubt that the examples cited are true; I just notice that they don't cover the vast majority of cases where complying with evironmental regulation costs the company money but the only payback is that they don't get fined by the EPA and one of the company's executives doesn't risk going to jail. It seems to me that the article is obviously attempting to make more environmental regulation tolerable to businesses by offering the false hope (most of the time) that it will help their bottom line. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." The article does admit that not all companies are lucky enough to turn a profit on environmental compliance, but it says it with the same amount of emphasis as a lottery commerical that briefly mentions the real odds of winning.
I want to be clear that I am not against keeping the environment clean, I am just against deluding ourselves into thinking that it is cheaper to have high environmental standards than it is to have low ones (unless you start playing with the accounting system like the article suggests and assigning dollar values to intangible things*). Such delusions are not helpful. I will admit that the article is probably right about environmental groups being more effective at dealing with businesses when they learn to talk the language of businessmen; that was an informative tidbit. Any change a business makes, they will tend to try to find a way to make it profitible, so I am not surprised that as an UNINTENDED SIDE EFFECT of environmental regulation, some businesses have figured out a way to make money off their compliance efforts.
Having made the radical claim that high envirnomental standards cost more to achieve than low standards in most cases; I will admit that there is a link between profit and a clean environment, but in my experience it usually goes the other way. Companies looking for ways to make the most profit tend to also make the most efficient use of raw materials and energy. I have written plenty of capital justifications for changing processes or buying new equipment based on just such efficiency improvements. While the pursuit of profit will help the environment we cannot count on profit alone to keep the country clean. There are too many times where the cheapest thing to do would be to improperly dispose of your waste products. We have to have some judicial, legal, or regulatory measures to prevent abuse of the air and water as waste depositories, but we should not pretend that there is no economic cost to such environmental pursuits.
While they are doing articles on the economics of environmental compliance, I would like to have seen an article on how premature or bad environmental regulation costs money and jobs and consumes extra resources (isn't that what money represents?) and mis-prioritizes dangers. Like the billions of dollars and increadible amounts of man-hours wasted when useful materials like non-amphible asbestos** are banned or restricted because of ignorance (or sensationalism and pandering) in the newsmedia and the regulatory authories.
* I do think we, as a society, need to figure out how to put a dollar value on the cleanliness of our envirnoment so that we can more accurately determine what evnironmental regulations can be justified and which ones will have the most benifit per dollar invested. It seems unusual to me that this is actually being done on a corprate level; but I am happy that someone is thinking about it. I wonder if this is the Megacorp. equivilent of those businesses that sell all sorts of products on the basis that they cost more but "help the rainforest" or the electric companies whose power costs more (i.e. consumes more resources) but don't release as much pollution. Something like, "Well, our stocks don't pay as big a dividens but you can feel better yourself by owning our stock because we consider community issues in our business decisions."
** which was banned along with the "bad" asbestos.
As an engineer who has had to help numerous companies "clean themselves up," I can tell you that the above statement is crap. While I don't doubt that SOME companies may manage to get the local gov't to help with environmental costs, MOST companies certainly do not.
The above poster is taking the activities of a few crafty and politically savvy companies and trying to claim that such things are the norm.
I am certainly against politicians handing out "corprate welfare" to their corprate allies (like Al Gore and Occidental Petrolium, for example*) but lets not exaggerate the problem (even though that tactic has worked SO well for the environmental extremists) and claim that the majority of all companies are guilty of recieving such "welfare."
*What you thought Bush and the Republicans were the only people with ties to big oil companies?
The problem of birds ingesting lead shot and getting poisened is real.
That is why almost all responsible hunters use STEEL shot now instead of lead.
Lead is still used in bullets (though it is usually covered in a full jacket of copper), but animals don't tend to swallow bullets like they do the much smaller shot.
It may be surprising to many non-hunters, but hunters are generally people who love being outdoors and spend a lot of time in the wilderness. Being a carnivore doesn't mean you can't appreciate nature and enjoy your place in it; in fact it is probably easier to enjoy it from the top of the food chain (I doubt the view from the bottom is very pleasant). Many hunters, therefore, are very conservation minded.
Of course there are a few "bad apples," but that is true of any large demographic. There are also those that oppose steel shot because it is more likely to cripple birds but not bring them down. Tungsten will probably be the non-toxic shot material of the future because its better ballistics will reduce the arguments against it. Gold would probably be even better, except for the obvious problems that would create.
For more information on steel shot:
http://www.clede.com/Articles/guns/steelsh.htm
I agree.
And I am quite aware of how lucky we were that Engineering got to approve the suppliers instead of Purchasing. You may be happy to know that sometimes even very large contracts get made on technical merit. Not that we didn't have to fight for it (and undersell the potential cost savings to make sure the project didn't get hijacked... nobody said engineers have to be politically naive).
I understand your comment, but in this case, if the supplier sent us bad product it could screw up one of the production lines and I would be the person who would have to straighten it all out. It was very much in my best interest (and the rest of the team) to give the suppliers involved the most objective analysis possible. No matter how bad our mood, I doubt we would have taken it out on the supplier simply because it was personally very important to us to find a top notch supplier (failing to do so would make our work far more difficult for years to come). Plus we were a bunch of engineers, and therefore presumably able to differentiate between "I'm unhappy" and "What's the point in running a test if you don't have any standards you are testing to? Is this place run by monkeys or something?" Less developed forms of life (like Pointy Headed Bosses) may not be able to make that distinction.
But the supplier didn't know that.
I'm sure in most cases you are right, a person's mood is very important in such activities (even when it shouldn't be).
The Boeing Sonic Cruiser is a brilliant ploy to counter Airbus's superjumbo aircraft plans. The Sonic Cruiser can be targeted to the much more profitable First Class, Executive Class, and Business Classes. I think Boeing hopes that the airlines which buy the superjumbos will be stuck hauling the low profit "cattle car" coach class passengers only (and all the other airlines will rush to place orders for more Sonic Cruisers). But, those supersonic business jets would seem to cut into the Sonic Cruiser's market share. And companies like Southwest seem to be getting along fine targeting the low end passengers. It will be interesting to see whose business strategy pays off.
There is more economic benifit to corprate jets than just getting your employees from point A to point B faster. A number of companies use them as sales tools. I once had a supplier fly me and 4 other engineers and technicians from the local airport near our plant to their production facility in a very nice corprate jet so that we could do a supplier audit* on them. They were trying to get a very valuable supplier contract with us, but it hinged on whether we thought they could consistently provide us the quality we required. We approved the company's product and process, and so they got the contract.
In this case it had very little** to do with the aircraft; we were impressed with their Quality Assurance system at the plant. BUT, if the team sent to audit the plant had consisted of a bunch of muddle-headed artsie craftsies with MBAs then I could easily see them being swayed by the possibility of more such rides, and the free steak dinners, and the liquor, and... I have got to schedule more supplier reviews.
Anyway, properly used a corprate jet can be a great tool for the sales staff in addition to transporting a companies own people. Winning one big sales account for this company could easily pay the annual maintenance and salaries to support that plane (yes, I know how expensive that is).
* A little word of advice to younger engineers; never trust a supplier's ISO, QS, or other certification. Remember how much stuff the auditor missed on your audit? They did the same thing for your suppliers. If quality is important then check them yourself.
** It did let us take the trip sooner than if we had driven or scheduled commerical flights; so they wound up getting the contract sooner than they otherwise would have been able to. But that comes back to just getting from Point A to B. Plus we were in a better mood at their plant than if we had taken conventional travel and could spend more time there. That allowed us to do a more thorough audit than we probably otherwise would have, but since these guys had a 1st rate facility that helped them more than it hurt them.
As cmorriss points out, laws in the U.S. are not only amended through the legislature, they are also declared null and void if they are found unconstitutional by The Court. This does NOT require any sort of "democratic action". In fact, if the Supreme Court rules that a law is unconstitutional then it doesn't matter how popular it is with the public, it is gone. Personally I rather like it that way; it prevents a "tyranny of the majority" and protects even unpopular rights and the rights of unpopular groups (to a point).
I suspect DMCA is very unconstitutional, and hopefully if EFF can make a good enough case The Court can be convinced to overturn it; so supporting them in this effort is important.
Your "democratic action" does have its place. Even if it doesn't reverse this law, making your displeasure over DMCA known (in an thoughtful, clear fashion) to your representatives in Congress gives them feedback on the quality of their legislation and may prevent future similar "bad laws" from being enacted in the 1st place. This feedback is very important, but often times legislatures get insulated from the results of their work, and then some poor person (like Dimitri) has to be the "test case" victim to get it corrected in The Courts.
"Democratic action" has its place, but democracy (or in our case a republic) without constitutional restrictions and a judiciary system is tyranny waiting to happen.
While in theory I also disagree that all "wrong laws" must be obeyed, in this context the difference is only academic. The injustices and tragedies of war are so great that I think the laws must be very, very wrong and very, very uncorrectable before that step can be justified. But having your gov't know in the back of their mind that they could never rule out such a response is a useful deterrence to extremist bureaucrats.
What about: "The only way to beat bullies is asymmetric warfare"?
Pulsejets are crap compared to scramjets.
.03 second scramjet flight.
Of course, pulsejets are also much cheaper and easier to build. For a hobbyist wanting to do something cool a pulsejet is fine. For a really high performance aircraft or SSTO spacecraft they aren't even worth considering. At the other extreme, scramjets are great but VERY hard to build because you basically have to create a standing wave of detonation in your engine. That is why everyone is so excited about even a
A nice compromise engine is actually somewhat related to the pulsejet; it is called the pulse detonation engine or PDE. It creates thrust by a series of explosions in the engine somewhat similar to the way that a pulsejet uses a series of flame pulses. Like pulsejet, the PDE is easier to build because you don't have to make the combustion stable and well-behaved like in a normal engine. Like a scramjet you get the efficiency of supersonic combustion (an explosion) instead of a subsonic combustion (a flame). But also like pulsejets, PDEs don't produce as much thrust because they are "on" only in brief pulses while a scramjet is generating continuous thrust. And of course you also have all sorts of fatigue and noise issues with the PDEs from all those pulses.
To simplify, Ramjet:Scramjet = Puslejet:PDE
For more info on PDEs, see:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/AERO/base/pdet.htm
Expect to see a lot more about PDEs over the next 10 years.
According to Janes Defense Weekly (Feb. 28, 1992), Aurora is most likely powered by a conventional ramjet and uses liquid methane for fuel. My personal feeling is that it uses some type of combined cycle engine.
Base bleed arty shells reduce drag, but don't produce accelleration. Also, I think the base bleed gas generation system carries its own oxidizer (like a weak rocket).
... the Aereon was an Airship*.
9 -31.html ). Except that there is something a little suspicious about that announcement. Any avid reader of Aviation Week & Space Technology (sometimes called Aviation Leak) can tell you, we have had pulse detonation test planes flying since the 90s (when their unique "donut on a rope" contrails started appearing around military test sites). This already flown technology is one of the other Revolutionary Concepts this team is supposed to be developing a flying prototype of. There are also numerous UFO sightings of large hovering triangular shapes that are too fast to be airships (or at least conventional airships); and an Aereon like vehicle is one of the proposed explanations ( http://www.nidsci.org/news/aereon.html ). What if the Revolutionary Concepts NASA wants to develop with this industry team are actually existing classified technologies that have commercial applications, and NASA is just providing a backstory to explain their development if or when they are declassified?
The Aereon concept is a weird hybrid rigid lighter-than-air vehicle shaped like large delta wing. It was the dream of the Aereon Co. ( http://www.njave.com/aviation/aereon/index.html ). Its history is told in the book _The_Deltoid_Pumpkin_Seed_; but we all know the story: it was an innovative idea that never caught on because it was too different for the little minds of the conventional world to appreciate. How many times have we heard that myth?
Maybe not. The world of aerospace is full of lighter than air concepts that never get developed because of good technical or economic reasons, no matter how cool or elegant they are: Aereon, Skyship, Atlantis Autonomous Airship, etc. But the idea of a rigid hybrid aircraft/airship has a lot of merit; and better it has potential uses. Military Uses. If you could make a vehicle that combined the hover and long loiter time of an airship with the speed of a subsonic aircraft, you'd have a good recon platform. Make it stealthy and you'd have a nice ground troop insertion method. If you don't care about stealth then it would make a great radar platform or subhunter.
That is probably why NASA selected the concept a couple of years ago as a Revolutionary Concept project that would be pursued by a NASA/Lockheed/Microcraft team ( http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/PAO/PressReleases/1999/9
So what's the point of all this? IF this is true, then the state-of-the-art in lighter than air craft may be much more advanced than a lot of you Zeppelin fans think. All you people wishing that SOMEONE would develop this technology properly may be comforted to know that the U.S. Navy** may already have a fleet of advanced rigid airships. And IF the gov't is going through all this trouble to delcassify it with the Revolutionary Concepts program, then someone must think it has potential civilian applications.
* apologies to Mr. Dundee
** The Navy has always seemed more excited about lighter-than-air aircraft than the USAF, and one of the UFO sightings happened right outside a USAF base which suggests to me that the craft might be of Navy origin (the USAF wouldn't turn on a bunch of lights on a classified aircraft just outside one of its own bases, but a less-than-professional Navy crew with their own "UFO" might not be able to resist the temptation of having a little fun by scaring the crap out of a bunch of Air Force guys).
The problem is the "last mile," so isn't gov't ownership of those lines more like the gov't owning everyone's driveway instead of it owning the Interstate Highways. I can see the national defense justification for fed gov't owned interstate fiber the same way I can see it for interstate roads, but not the "last mile". City owned makes a little more sense, especially compared to having a large company that owns everyones driveway; but I don't think I'd be happy with the service a gov't run broadband service would provide or the idea of my ISP rates going up because some city councilmen want money to build a sports stadium. City owned, run by private contracters would be preferable. What about a completely private co op? I suspect that like other utilities, different areas will ultimately use different solutions; with a few solutions "winning out" and being adopted by most areas.
I agree that a "free market" should be a means to an end, but I disagree on what that end has to be.
You seem to think the end should be some kind of equitable distribution of worldly possessions (i.e. "prosperity... for the majority").
I think that the end should be the protection of human rights.
I don't mean those crappy socialist Soviet/Chicom style rights like "the right to a job" and "the right to a place to live." I mean the good old fashion Western Civilization* idea of rights like "the right peaceably assemble" and, "the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures" and, to be honest I'd like "the right to the product of my own labor." A gov't which takes stuff away from one person and gives it to another to satisfy some politician's sense of "cosmic justice" is not respecting what I would argue are man's basic Rights.
Sure, I like stuff as much as the next guy. I want surround sound and a big TV and a fast computer and a new car. But, how can you suggest that bringing "prosperity and economic growth to a majority of people" can be more important than a person's right to keep what they have legitimately earned, even if that right is only taken from a minority of the people? Ourselves, and therefore our labor, and therefore the fruits of our labor should belong to us as individuals, not to society as a whole, certainly not to the government or to political leaders**. Gov't should worry about protecting the rights of its citizens first and foremost; if that means some people get screwed over economically, that is unfortunate***; but not as unfortunate as the tyranny that would result if the gov't tried to control the economy to prevent it. And who really belives the politicians would actually control the economy for the benfit of the "little man" anyway; they would eventually control it for the benifit of themselves and/or their most powerful constituents.
I don't think that any gov't regulation is automatically evil... as long as the levels of gov't stay within their areas of authority, and regulation is minimized so that it does not, as Thomas Jeffeson said "take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." (for you Europeans, "labor" here does NOT refer to a socialist political party or to just the "working poor" or the underclass). For publically traded companies, anti-trust laws I think CAN be done in a reasonable way that does respect the rights of citizens. But if they can't, which should we sacrifice: Cheap long distance telephone calls, or human rights? Thankfully we live an a society where what is RIGHT almost always works out to what will also create general prosperity, so compromise is not necessary. But when some politician tries to offer you a choice between the two, be careful which one you pick.
*of course I mean Enlightenment era old fashioned, not the sort of "that person acts a little different, so lets call her an agent of Satan and burn her at the stake" Middle Ages sort of old fashoned.
** Not that I think we should have NO taxes, I don't know how to pay for a gov't without taxees. It's just that they only should be used for legitimate gov't purposes. Of course, my idea of legitimate is a very American, _Federalist_Papers_ sort of thing ( http://www.mcs.net/~knautzr/fed/fedpaper.html ), not at all what many Eurocentric or Eastern thinkers might call "legitimate."
*** Not that I think that society should not help the economically unfortunate, just that help for economic problems should come from economic sources and NGOs not through the forcible confiscation of wealth for redistribution according to the preferences of the political leaders.
In a truely free market economy, being able to afford powerful lobbyists wouldn't help a company keep its customers because the gov't couldn't use regulation to restrain the companies competitors or to force the companies customers to stay. Instead, even established companies would have to worry that some small start up could come along and kick their @$$ if it could provide better service for less money.
I agree about the importance of the free market, and not wanting regulation.
Anti-trust laws, however, are one of the few gov't intrusion into the free market that I think are acceptable. They seem to be the least of all evil, and really do "promote the general welfare." I suppose I might be conflicted if the monopoly was a privately held company instead of a publiclly traded one; but generally private companies don't get that large.
Originally I was against the breakup of AT&T. I was wrong. Telephone service has gotten better and prices have dropped. My only complaint is that when AT&T was a monopoly, no one ever called and asked me if I wanted to switch phone companies.