I think you are full of crap and that you made up that "fact" to either promote Commies or disparage Christians.
From the reference below I estimate that 60 billion people have been born since 1 AD. About 6 billion are alive, so that leaves 54 billion deaths since Christianity was started. As others have pointed out, Commies have really killed between 100 and 200 million. We'll take the low estimate of 100 million. That gives an "order of magnitude more" as being 1000 million or 1 billion. For your assertion to be true, Christianity would have to have killed about 1.7% of all people who have died since it was started. Considering that Christianity started small and spread there are huge areas of the world (some, like China were heavily populated)through history (and even now) where it had little to no chance to kill people. That means that the percent of fatalities caused by Christianity would have to be MUCH higher in the Mid East and Europe where Christianity had an effect. I think your assertion fails this "sanity check" unless you expand your definition of lives "claimed" to include a lot indirect things (although to be consistent, that would also increase the deaths caused by Communism).
Come on, this is a geek forum... You Godless Commies can't just make up numbers and expect people not to check the math.
I happen to like the Interstate system. And I think there is a national defense reason for the Federal gov't to have built it. But it wasn't FDR who was responsible for it; it was Ike. The Interstate and Defense Highways were authorized in 1956, about a decade after FDR was dead.
http://www.publicpurpose.com/freeway1.htm
Certainly roads were one of the things constructed as "makework" programs. My grandmother claims that it was called WPA for "We Poke Along" because of the huge amount of time it took for them to build anything. That is what I would expect out of a massive gov't busywork program with no profit motive. Sure, the website you pointed to has plenty of photos of the nice things built or done by the New Deal. What it doesn't show is the manhours of labor spent to do that which could have been put to more productive use if the "invisible hand" had been guiding and motivating them instead of pork politics.
As for "feeding people", FDRs AAA deliberately reduced the amount of food harvested in an attempt to raise commodity prices. While this did help large commercial farmers, it raised food prices for everyone else at a time when few could afford it and forced many tenant farmers into unemployment. Just one of many examples of where he thought he was smarter than the marketplace and he did more harm than good with huge gov't intrusions. Thankfully the Supreme Court declared many of his worse power grabs as unconstitutional. Again, the website shows what was made and done, but it doesn't show the misery that was extended unnecessarily, the gov't intrusion into private life, and all the things that weren't built or done because of the manhours wasted on busywork or some pork that a politician wanted.
Not that I agree with your last comment either, but I think you mean "too".
"the concept of trickle-down economics was invented in the Reagan era as a faux-conservative justification for massive deficit spending. The idea was that heavy government purchasing would boost the economy without involving direct meddling. "
Nothing about this is right. First. "trickle down" economics was hardly invented by Reagan. Secondly, your discription bears no relation to anything I have heard of "trickle down" economics. Try reading up on supply side economics and the Laffer curve for a real explaination.
So many people would not have been in danger of starving if he hadn't prolonged the depression with his attempt to nationalize the whole freakin' economy. Also, it's not like society has no other mechanism for helping the destitute besides massive federal gov't takeover of the economy. Not every problem is best solved by the President, and I think that in this case his "fixing" did more harm than good.
"Since there are a large number of legitimate privacy issues (even acknowledged by the organization behind RFIDs) that have not remotely addressed yet, further usage of RFIDs is in general a negative."
What are you, some kind of Luddite? Instead of trying to stop a useful logistics tool because you are afraid of privacy implications, why not see it as an opportunity. Someone needs to invent a scanner for the privacy conscious consumer that identifies and fries RFID chips. That way we can have our low retail prices and our privacy too.
Then you can invent a detector that detects your scanner and sell THAT to stores that want to prevent people from disabling RFIDs in the store and then shoplifting the items.
Also, historically bits of information that are classified when put together may sometimes be unclassified when separate. The key to making them important is the association, not the ideas themselves.
Since most Zombie films I have seen were set in America, it was interesting to see one set in a nation where personal firearms are rare.
It is a lot scarrier to watch someone nervously waiting with a baseball bat (why not cricket?) for a group of zombies to close with them than it is to watch someone picking them off with a rifle or shotgun as they approach.
"and I for one will miss him for his unique style of hard science-fiction and his innovations in physics and space travel."
Perhaps you would want to donate to the fund set up to organize and store his papers, which were donated to the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He had more good ideas than he could work on and it is important that they be kept available to inspire other researchers. http://www.robertforward.com/index.h tm
"I wonder if the company he set up will see any money from their use"
They have already. They aren't selling space tether systems (yet), but they have gotten many research grants to develop the technologies and do studies.
"Anyone who thinks they are a just a money sink is either uninformed or blind. "
Or is familiar with some of the crap that really goes on at some of the NASA centers.
Yes, NASA has plenty of spinoff technologies. Imagine what those engineers and technicians would have invented if they were working in the private sector trying to make a profitable product rather than using blind luck or a gov't administrator's guess at what would be a good invention.
"putting a Chinese man somewhere above the trophosphere"
A hate to break it to the undisclosed Chinese official, but a Chinese man has already been above the troposphere. We sent him up in the Space Shuttle. He is my former boss, and all around great guy Taylor Wang. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/wang-t.html
He is now a prof. at Vanderbilt University, where I worked for his dept. as a student worker for several years.
Why would we WANT to change the system. Yes, people have uncertainty in their jobs. I would not be surprised if there was another round of layoffs in my company tommorow. But that is an artifact of our fast changing world. As things change, the optimum job that people should be in changes.
We have two options, to change the current system. One would be to slow down the rate of development in our world. I don't know about you, but I would HATE to live in a world where R&D was greatly curtailed and where the barrier to developing new products, processes, or other ideas was very, very high. I don't want to see the development of the next "automobile" squashed because it would put buggywhip makers out of work. I want that automobile, and let the buggywhip makers find a new product to make.
The other method (though the drag on progress would eventually be the same) would be to have massive jobs programs. We pay people to work even if the product isn't needed. I think that would suck, too. We only have a finite number of people, and the more we pay to spend their effort and/or creativity doing "make work", then the less people will be out there making the useful stuff we all need or want. And that means useful stuff will be harder and harder to come by. Sure, we could have someone (like the gov't) pay the buggy whip makers to keep making buggy whips and they wouldn't have to go through the horrible trama of looking for new work. But think of all the new or cheaper S&M toys or other quality leather goods that are not being made because we are wasting the talents of the subsidesed buggywhip makers on something usesless*.
Oh, but you say, your "democratically run" rather than "top down" business model offers a third way by avoiding the tyranny of the heartless blah blah blah. No it doesn't. So what if your buggywhip organization is owned by the workers rather than Mr. Buggywhip. That doesn't matter. Either one of two things can happen. One, they vote to get out of the buggywhip business, downsize and move into the premium retro buggywhip business, or some other similar drastic move that is in tune with the needs of the new automobile driving world. In that case they continue to succeed, BUT at the cost of forcing people to change jobs. Maybe some people would take comfort in the fact that their job was voted out of existence by astute co-workers who were doing the best for the organization rather than a small group of analysists but the end result is the same. People are forced to change so the organization continues. The second path that could be taken is that the workers vote to all keep their jobs and to keep doing the same thing. That saves their jobs only for a short while. Then the company goes out of business because no one is buying their product, and they have a warehouse full of buggywhips that they can't sell. A more efficient or agile organization buys up the buggywhip company's production equipment at auction and puts it to better use. All the former employees of the buggywhip company now have to go and get new jobs doing something that is more valuable to the world than making an obsolete and unwanted product. It doesn't matter that the workers voted to keep making buggywhips until they can all retire, because it is NOT the evil capitalist decision makers that are the tyrants of the economy. It is the invisible hand that is the ultimate tyrant. And thank God for that invisible hand or else we would all be riding around in horsedrawn carriages listening to 8 track tapes if it weren't out there weeding out bad products and inefficient organizations. If you don't like the invisible hand, then perhaps you should start listening to more 8 track tapes because YOU are the invisible hand.
Of course any real decision the organization makes will probably be a compromise between the two extremes, but at the elemental level it is always the same decision: accept some inefficiency by employing someone in an uneeded or less than optimum job and increase the r
"What's the major source for hydrogen right now? Natural Gas. What's the major byproduct of extracting hydrogen from Natural Gas? Carbon Dioxide"
Yes, making hydrogen from natural gas still releases carbon. However, it will be a lot easier to control the disposal of that carbon in dozens or hundreds of industrial hydrogen production facilities than it would be to try to contain and dispose of the carbon coming out of each of the millions of gas powered automobile exhausts. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/greenhou se-02h.html
"Have you seen the price of Natural Gas lately?"
If we do switch to a hydrogen economy, then presumably hydrogen production will have become cheap enough to compete with gasoline production (including the fact that gas has a lot of taxes, and that hydrogen will initially probably have some gov't subsidy). That will require pumping more natural gas to get the price down. With investment (again, probably encouraged by gov't) that increase in natural gas production can occur One likely source of the additional natural gas is natural gas hydrates. See http://www.fe.doe.gov/oil_gas/methanehydrates/
Some more people will complain that the energy companies are benifiting from gov't hydrogen research expenditures (or later, subsidies). To which I would point out that the energy companies would be perfectly happy to keep selling gasoline instead. Sure, we only have a few decades of oil left; but then we have only had a few decades of oil left for about a century now.
I would encourage anyone who doesn't like that state of affairs to spend some effort trying to perfect fusion. Failing that, work on safer fission or cheap space access would be helpful.
"They will can your ass with as much regret as not having chicken salad for lunch."
Written like someone who has never had to lay someone off. A good businessman will be willing to make hard decisions, but that doesn't mean he will have no feelings of regret.
"do not under any circumstances forget that you are making money for them by doing them a favor in showing up every morning and using your skills and talents."
I don't know about that; I know quite a few people that must cost their employers more money than they bring in. They do not "do their employers a favor" in showing up. Why aren't they fired? Not every employer is a ruthless business tycoon who can be modeled as a "rational man" decision maker. Spend a little more time working in the private sector, and perhaps your "black and white" take on the employer/employee relationship will be a little more realistic.
Re:but it's more humane!
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
I agree. A game animal shot on the run definately tastes less appealing than one who never saw it coming.
Oh sorry, I forgot about Kruschev emptying the gulags, disbanding the secret police, swearing off political murgers, ending show trials, and giving the Soviets freedom of speech, religion, etc.
And yes, you are correct. Everything the Soviets did from to Ukraine to Budapest to Chechnya pale in comparison to that "Nazi-style" My Lai incident.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.prb.org/Content/ContentGroups/PTarticle /0ct-Dec02/How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Eart h_.htm
Take out extra spaces
I think you are full of crap and that you made up that "fact" to either promote Commies or disparage Christians.
From the reference below I estimate that 60 billion people have been born since 1 AD. About 6 billion are alive, so that leaves 54 billion deaths since Christianity was started. As others have pointed out, Commies have really killed between 100 and 200 million. We'll take the low estimate of 100 million. That gives an "order of magnitude more" as being 1000 million or 1 billion. For your assertion to be true, Christianity would have to have killed about 1.7% of all people who have died since it was started. Considering that Christianity started small and spread there are huge areas of the world (some, like China were heavily populated)through history (and even now) where it had little to no chance to kill people. That means that the percent of fatalities caused by Christianity would have to be MUCH higher in the Mid East and Europe where Christianity had an effect. I think your assertion fails this "sanity check" unless you expand your definition of lives "claimed" to include a lot indirect things (although to be consistent, that would also increase the deaths caused by Communism).
Come on, this is a geek forum... You Godless Commies can't just make up numbers and expect people not to check the math.
LBJ
I happen to like the Interstate system. And I think there is a national defense reason for the Federal gov't to have built it. But it wasn't FDR who was responsible for it; it was Ike. The Interstate and Defense Highways were authorized in 1956, about a decade after FDR was dead.
http://www.publicpurpose.com/freeway1.htm
Certainly roads were one of the things constructed as "makework" programs. My grandmother claims that it was called WPA for "We Poke Along" because of the huge amount of time it took for them to build anything. That is what I would expect out of a massive gov't busywork program with no profit motive. Sure, the website you pointed to has plenty of photos of the nice things built or done by the New Deal. What it doesn't show is the manhours of labor spent to do that which could have been put to more productive use if the "invisible hand" had been guiding and motivating them instead of pork politics.
As for "feeding people", FDRs AAA deliberately reduced the amount of food harvested in an attempt to raise commodity prices. While this did help large commercial farmers, it raised food prices for everyone else at a time when few could afford it and forced many tenant farmers into unemployment. Just one of many examples of where he thought he was smarter than the marketplace and he did more harm than good with huge gov't intrusions. Thankfully the Supreme Court declared many of his worse power grabs as unconstitutional. Again, the website shows what was made and done, but it doesn't show the misery that was extended unnecessarily, the gov't intrusion into private life, and all the things that weren't built or done because of the manhours wasted on busywork or some pork that a politician wanted.
Not that I agree with your last comment either, but I think you mean "too".
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20030619.html
remove space between b and e
"the concept of trickle-down economics was invented in the Reagan era as a faux-conservative justification for massive deficit spending. The idea was that heavy government purchasing would boost the economy without involving direct meddling. "
Nothing about this is right. First. "trickle down" economics was hardly invented by Reagan. Secondly, your discription bears no relation to anything I have heard of "trickle down" economics. Try reading up on supply side economics and the Laffer curve for a real explaination.
So many people would not have been in danger of starving if he hadn't prolonged the depression with his attempt to nationalize the whole freakin' economy. Also, it's not like society has no other mechanism for helping the destitute besides massive federal gov't takeover of the economy. Not every problem is best solved by the President, and I think that in this case his "fixing" did more harm than good.
You have to plot deficit vs. GNP (or GDP) to get a real feel for deficit spending.
"Since there are a large number of legitimate privacy issues (even acknowledged by the organization behind RFIDs) that have not remotely addressed yet, further usage of RFIDs is in general a negative."
What are you, some kind of Luddite? Instead of trying to stop a useful logistics tool because you are afraid of privacy implications, why not see it as an opportunity. Someone needs to invent a scanner for the privacy conscious consumer that identifies and fries RFID chips. That way we can have our low retail prices and our privacy too.
Then you can invent a detector that detects your scanner and sell THAT to stores that want to prevent people from disabling RFIDs in the store and then shoplifting the items.
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/0835766381
Also, historically bits of information that are classified when put together may sometimes be unclassified when separate. The key to making them important is the association, not the ideas themselves.
Since most Zombie films I have seen were set in America, it was interesting to see one set in a nation where personal firearms are rare.
It is a lot scarrier to watch someone nervously waiting with a baseball bat (why not cricket?) for a group of zombies to close with them than it is to watch someone picking them off with a rifle or shotgun as they approach.
"Did he support Al Quedda? Nope. They hated him almost as much as they hated us."
Like we hated our ally Stalin almost as much as we hated Hitler?
China is a long way from becoming first world.
u nt ries.htm
It is liberty, not money that differentiates the 1st and 2nd world.
http://www.netscout.net/oneworld/third_world_co
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ithacus.htm
I thought everyone copied from Xerox.
Do you also think the point of Toy Story was that toys get sad if they aren't played with?
You know, there aren't really monsters in your closet either.
"and I for one will miss him for his unique style of hard science-fiction and his innovations in physics and space travel."
h tm
Perhaps you would want to donate to the fund set up to organize and store his papers, which were donated to the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He had more good ideas than he could work on and it is important that they be kept available to inspire other researchers.
http://www.robertforward.com/index.
"I wonder if the company he set up will see any money from their use"
They have already. They aren't selling space tether systems (yet), but they have gotten many research grants to develop the technologies and do studies.
"Anyone who thinks they are a just a money sink is either uninformed or blind. "
Or is familiar with some of the crap that really goes on at some of the NASA centers.
Yes, NASA has plenty of spinoff technologies. Imagine what those engineers and technicians would have invented if they were working in the private sector trying to make a profitable product rather than using blind luck or a gov't administrator's guess at what would be a good invention.
"putting a Chinese man somewhere above the trophosphere"
A hate to break it to the undisclosed Chinese official, but a Chinese man has already been above the troposphere. We sent him up in the Space Shuttle. He is my former boss, and all around great guy Taylor Wang. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/wang-t.html
He is now a prof. at Vanderbilt University, where I worked for his dept. as a student worker for several years.
Why would we WANT to change the system. Yes, people have uncertainty in their jobs. I would not be surprised if there was another round of layoffs in my company tommorow. But that is an artifact of our fast changing world. As things change, the optimum job that people should be in changes.
We have two options, to change the current system. One would be to slow down the rate of development in our world. I don't know about you, but I would HATE to live in a world where R&D was greatly curtailed and where the barrier to developing new products, processes, or other ideas was very, very high. I don't want to see the development of the next "automobile" squashed because it would put buggywhip makers out of work. I want that automobile, and let the buggywhip makers find a new product to make.
The other method (though the drag on progress would eventually be the same) would be to have massive jobs programs. We pay people to work even if the product isn't needed. I think that would suck, too. We only have a finite number of people, and the more we pay to spend their effort and/or creativity doing "make work", then the less people will be out there making the useful stuff we all need or want. And that means useful stuff will be harder and harder to come by. Sure, we could have someone (like the gov't) pay the buggy whip makers to keep making buggy whips and they wouldn't have to go through the horrible trama of looking for new work. But think of all the new or cheaper S&M toys or other quality leather goods that are not being made because we are wasting the talents of the subsidesed buggywhip makers on something usesless*.
Oh, but you say, your "democratically run" rather than "top down" business model offers a third way by avoiding the tyranny of the heartless blah blah blah. No it doesn't. So what if your buggywhip organization is owned by the workers rather than Mr. Buggywhip. That doesn't matter. Either one of two things can happen. One, they vote to get out of the buggywhip business, downsize and move into the premium retro buggywhip business, or some other similar drastic move that is in tune with the needs of the new automobile driving world. In that case they continue to succeed, BUT at the cost of forcing people to change jobs. Maybe some people would take comfort in the fact that their job was voted out of existence by astute co-workers who were doing the best for the organization rather than a small group of analysists but the end result is the same. People are forced to change so the organization continues. The second path that could be taken is that the workers vote to all keep their jobs and to keep doing the same thing. That saves their jobs only for a short while. Then the company goes out of business because no one is buying their product, and they have a warehouse full of buggywhips that they can't sell. A more efficient or agile organization buys up the buggywhip company's production equipment at auction and puts it to better use. All the former employees of the buggywhip company now have to go and get new jobs doing something that is more valuable to the world than making an obsolete and unwanted product. It doesn't matter that the workers voted to keep making buggywhips until they can all retire, because it is NOT the evil capitalist decision makers that are the tyrants of the economy. It is the invisible hand that is the ultimate tyrant. And thank God for that invisible hand or else we would all be riding around in horsedrawn carriages listening to 8 track tapes if it weren't out there weeding out bad products and inefficient organizations. If you don't like the invisible hand, then perhaps you should start listening to more 8 track tapes because YOU are the invisible hand.
Of course any real decision the organization makes will probably be a compromise between the two extremes, but at the elemental level it is always the same decision: accept some inefficiency by employing someone in an uneeded or less than optimum job and increase the r
"What's the major source for hydrogen right now? Natural Gas. What's the major byproduct of extracting hydrogen from Natural Gas? Carbon Dioxide"
u se-02h.html
Yes, making hydrogen from natural gas still releases carbon. However, it will be a lot easier to control the disposal of that carbon in dozens or hundreds of industrial hydrogen production facilities than it would be to try to contain and dispose of the carbon coming out of each of the millions of gas powered automobile exhausts.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/greenho
"Have you seen the price of Natural Gas lately?"
If we do switch to a hydrogen economy, then presumably hydrogen production will have become cheap enough to compete with gasoline production (including the fact that gas has a lot of taxes, and that hydrogen will initially probably have some gov't subsidy). That will require pumping more natural gas to get the price down. With investment (again, probably encouraged by gov't) that increase in natural gas production can occur One likely source of the additional natural gas is natural gas hydrates. See http://www.fe.doe.gov/oil_gas/methanehydrates/
Some more people will complain that the energy companies are benifiting from gov't hydrogen research expenditures (or later, subsidies). To which I would point out that the energy companies would be perfectly happy to keep selling gasoline instead. Sure, we only have a few decades of oil left; but then we have only had a few decades of oil left for about a century now.
I would encourage anyone who doesn't like that state of affairs to spend some effort trying to perfect fusion. Failing that, work on safer fission or cheap space access would be helpful.
"They will can your ass with as much regret as not having chicken salad for lunch."
Written like someone who has never had to lay someone off. A good businessman will be willing to make hard decisions, but that doesn't mean he will have no feelings of regret.
"do not under any circumstances forget that you are making money for them by doing them a favor in showing up every morning and using your skills and talents."
I don't know about that; I know quite a few people that must cost their employers more money than they bring in. They do not "do their employers a favor" in showing up. Why aren't they fired? Not every employer is a ruthless business tycoon who can be modeled as a "rational man" decision maker. Spend a little more time working in the private sector, and perhaps your "black and white" take on the employer/employee relationship will be a little more realistic.
I agree. A game animal shot on the run definately tastes less appealing than one who never saw it coming.
Actually it was a second world country that built the launcher.
Well, I guess there isn't much second world anymore outside of Cuba and N. Korea. So what do we call them? Former second world countries?
Oh sorry, I forgot about Kruschev emptying the gulags, disbanding the secret police, swearing off political murgers, ending show trials, and giving the Soviets freedom of speech, religion, etc.
And yes, you are correct. Everything the Soviets did from to Ukraine to Budapest to Chechnya pale in comparison to that "Nazi-style" My Lai incident.