Ideally, the invisible hand of the market would price the hybrid vehicles higher than their non-hybrid counterparts, to such a degree that the hybrid's price discounts the future value of the gasoline saved over the vehicle's lifetime
Ideally, the invisible hand of the market would put externalities -- wars and other foreign policy costs, ecological damage from oil production and from buring fossil fuels, etcetera -- into the cost of gasoline at the pump, doubling or tripling its price. Without that, though, talk of the "free market" in terms of automobiles is meaningless.
If anything, "greed" (as you want to put it) would most certainly help people get organized to go for another planet if there was one available. Have you heard of a thing called resources? I assume another planet would have those....
There are seven other planets in this system. None have significant resources for allowing humans to live on them. They may have some mineral resources that we'd like to have here, where it's cozy for us to live; we'll send robots out to collect them for us.
In a thousand years, maybe -- if we haven't wiped ourselves out or knocked ourselves back to feudalism -- we can talk about terraforming Mars and Venus. But if we make it through the next thousand years as a technological species, it'll be because we figured out sustainability, and will have made the Earth a nice place to live -- who'd want to move somewhere else?
(This is part of the problem of the supposed "Fermi paradox" -- it assumes the civilizations will maintain the cancer cell ideology -- "growth for the sake of growth". But in fact any species that survives its technological infancy is going to have to adopt technology and philosophy that allows sustainability.)
Daddy - why didn't our ancestors start working on a way to colonize the solar system before the Sun started expanding?
Solar expansion is billions of years away. It may get uncomfortably warm for Terra before then, as Sol's luminosity will increase even as it's still on the main sequence, but we're still talking a time scale of tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Human civilization faces threats from climate change, overpopulation, pollution, and war with WMDs in the near term, decades or centuries.
Putting resources toward working on a way to colonize the solar system, rather than addressing near-term threats, is foolish.
If you're thinking that these threats are good reason to have a "back up" in space, forget it -- far more sensible to dig deep bunkers. Now, addressing those near-term threats may involve space-based solutions, like orbital photovoltaic, but that's far different than some pipe dream of colonizing space.
If we can't take care of Spaceship Earth, and learn how to live on board it in peace, we're not going to do any better on any smaller spaceships we build.
University Rule #1 - the University is a BUSINESS - treat it as such.
Until recently, almost all universities were non-profits, or were run by the states.
If you went back, and only had to take your pre-reqs, and your major classes, you'd probably take only 48h and be done in two years.
And you'd be set to be narrowly-trained cog, rather than an educated human being.
A university education is not merely job training. If you want that, there are vocational colleges out there; but given the choice between a vocational college graduate who has only studied their field, and a university graduate who has studied literature and philosophy and art and has been exposed to different modes of thinking, I'll take the university graduate every time.
Schools aren't interested in churning out grads quickly.
I should hope not, if graduating is to be meaningful.
I never sat is a classroom that didn't have give and take. Why? Because if nobody else did, I made some.
I remember my freshman economics class, at least 100 people in it. One day in the dining hall a girl I didn't know said to me, "You're in my econ class, right?"
"Um, maybe -- it's a big class."
"Yeah, you're in it, I recognize you -- you're that guy who's always asking questions."
I always found that the professors were glad to have the evidence that someone was paying attention.
Now, if you miss out on the opportunity for give and take, then it doesn't matter whether you're in a classroom or on-line, you'll be a a mediocre student. And maybe on-line education can find a way to allow for adequate give-and-take, rather than just having students listen to recordings. But if you're in a class with no give-and-take, that's by your own choice of inaction.
Businesses have decided face time and presence is no longer important. Don't see why universities won't follow suite.
Because businesses have a mission of enriching their investors. Universities have a mission of turning students into educated persons capable of disciplined thought.
Why would you conclude that the tools that a business uses to hold meetings -- "the practical alternative to work", as one wag described them -- would be at all useful to a university?
Note that there's a big difference between what BillyG seems to envision -- learners, on heir own, viewing recorded lectures from a bunch of different universities -- and a university offering an on-line degree.
A friend of mine got her MFA in poetry from Naropa U. via an on-line program. There were a few weeks of summer residency, but otherwise she was able to take part in classes while she was living in Osaka. The level of interaction with other students and with the professors seemed pretty good, they had on-line message boards, and shared their papers with each other via the web. I visited her for a week and listened in on some of the lectures and read some of the papers -- seemed pretty decent.
Capitalism, by contrast, is based on the regulation of individual exchanges to the benefit of the corporations and the governments.
Capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital, nothing more or less. It has nothing to do with the presence or absence of regulation.
Because in the end, property rights are nothing more and nothing less than the consequences of saying, "I own myself, and no one else does."
If all that one "owns" is one's self and one's labor, then no goods can be produced. The creation of goods requires raw materials. Materials are derived from land. Land is only turned into property by an act of government. Ergo, all claims of objects as property rest on government action.
One's relationship with oneself should never be described as "ownership". It cheapens and distorts the nature of human beings, and suggests that you could be separated from yourself, the way that any of us can be separated from property. If you "own" yourself, this introduces the idea that someone else could "own" you. No. Human beings are not ownable.
Property is an artificial creation meant to help ensure certain fundamental rights of privacy and self-determination. It is not in itself a basic right; when the misapplication of the concept of property becomes destructive of basic human rights, it is property that must yield.
The McD coffee was at the temperature recommended by the National Coffee Association, and generally not that far off from what most chains serve.
Ah, the National Coffee Association, that noted consumer safety organization.
The McDonalds lawsuit was meritorious -- the woman suffered third degree burns. More than 700 people had previously been burned, some with third degree burns, by their dangerously defective product. McDonalds deliberately served their coffee much hotter than competitors, at a temperature that their own quality assurance manager testified posed a burn hazard.
safety feature (that tight lid)
The vast majority of coffee consumers add things like cream and sugar to their coffee. This necessitates removing the lid. Calling that "defeating a safety feature" is the stupidest thing I've heard this week.
while holding the cup in an inherently unsafe way (by holding it between her legs.)
Let's see, I'm sitting in a car, I've got my sugar in one hand, I need one hand to remove the lid. (I'm 79 years old so it's not like my fingers are the most dexterous any more and I can do both with one hand.) Where the fsck else do I put the coffee? (Kids -- cars didn't always come with cupholders. They were pretty rare in 1992.)
You may now apologize for your defamation of Ms. Liebeck...or you can show yourself to be a mindless corporate apologist.
- The majority of the Democrats (like KKK Wizard Robert Byrd) voted against the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Legislation. They don't teach you that in history books, do they?
They don't teach that (except maybe in Texas) because it's not true.
And the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate when the 1960 and 1957 Civil Rights Acts were passed. Though I can't find vote breakdowns, with control of both chambers, Democrats could have squashed the bill if that was the desire of the majority of them.
Nor was Robert Byrd ever a "Wizard" of the KKK. He was a member, and was elected to the position of "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter, but was never a Wizard and had quit entirely before he ever ran for Congress. Throughout his career he repeatedly and very publicly apologized and recanted for his mistake, and came to be lauded by the NAACP. He stands as a shining example for everyone who believes that human beings are possible of reform. (Which of course makes his story anathema to the black-and-white, good-versus-evil sort of thinking that dominates the American conservative movement these days.)
A few minutes with Google could have saved you from looking like an ass. You owe Mr. Byrd a posthumous apology.
How can you gain the knowledge of producing systems to help humans survive in space with robots?
You're begging the question. If we understand that sending humans into space on long exploration missions is not a useful thing to do, then producing systems to keep them alive for such voyages is not useful knowledge. It's as if you were to complain (to steal a concept from someone else in this thread), "We'll never gain the knowledge of how to build popsicle-stick skyscrapers, if we don't build build popsicle-stick skyscrapers!"
Most people interested in space are interested in it because of the possibility of man one day making it possible to live out there for long periods...I don't know what you think on the issue, however if you personally think humans should never go to space then a vast majority disagree with you.
Many people interested in space are interested in it because they think we're going to encounter humanoid aliens a la Star Trek. That's not a justification.
Hey, I would really like it to be economically viable for me, personally, to go into space. But my wants do jack shit to effect physics and economics. There's nothing I could do in space that makes it worthwhile for anyone to send me up there. If an occasional rich person wants to take the ultimate thrill ride, I don't think the government should be subsidizing them. (I also don't think we should have an economic system where the government helps a handful of people assemble billions in wealth while others have trouble with basic necessities, but that's another rant.)
The only economic argument for putting men in space is the same as subsidizing the arts: it creates jobs and people find it inspiring. So, I say again, let's consider manned space flight as just another bit of performance art, put it under the NEA, and let it compete for funding with other art forms.
Also you overlook the fact that the reason we have up until now genuinely sent humans into space instead of robots was because we didn't have the technology available at the time,
Wow. Friend, you need a history review badly. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had robotic probes on the moon before we we put people there. Here's some remedial reading for you: wik pages on the Luna and Surveyor program.
We went men to the moon as part of a pissing contest with the U.S.S.R. That is all.
Also on your point about the wind farm. You're comparing money spent on research that was being pioneered to a complex that was simply being built.
Um, yes. I mentioned that. I'm talking about what else could be done with the money.
RTFA. "The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards..."
I.e., what was released was a file containing a relatively recent letter from a UFO crank, not an actual Churchill document. "I am writing you because my mom told me that my grandfather told her that one time he overheard Churchill say..."
Without a doubt the most pointless "news" story I've seen this week.
If your editor can't read a press of the tab key as "insert enough spaces to move me over to the next tab stop", then you need a new editor.
The meaning of "tab" when displaying a file is ill-defined; some software takes it as "insert 8 spaces here", some as "move over to the next tab stop, with stops every 8 spaces", some as "move over to the next tab stop, with stops configurable". For this reason, tabs should never be used in a plain text file, including program source code.
So you think humans on Mars isn't progress? The knowledge gained, the space vehicles needed for such a feat, etc. None of that is progress?
Gaining knowledge is progress, yes. The point of this discussion is that said knowledge can be gathered much more cheaply with robots; and can thus leave free resources to put towards more important and practical sorts of progress.
For example, the cost of the Apollo program was $170 billion in 2005 dollars. If we take the Roscoe Wind Complex as a model, for then for $1 billion we can get 781.5 MW of wind power; so for the cost of another Apollo program, we could install 130 Gigawatts of wind, not even figuring on any advanced R&D.
The astronauts do not go to do science or explore, robots can do that better more reliably, cheaper, and we don't need to get them back, astronauts go to experience it...
And you don't think we could direct our limited resources to something more useful than allowing a handful of people to have a really neat experience? I can think of several really neat experiences I'd like to have, and as poet I think I could convey them to others better than Armstrong or Aldrin -- can I get billions in federal funding? If it's all about "experience" than let's put the manned space program under the direction of the National Endowment for the Arts, where it can compete for funding with other "inspirational" activities.
The U.S. is stuck in two wars and has mounting debt; the whole world is in an immediate financial crisis, and a long-term ecological crisis. Letting a couple of privileged people go on a trip to the moon is not the best use of our collective resources.
Human spaceflight is the last bastion of pure Progress. Technological, secular ideological, grand society style progress.
You don't sound very secular about it, actually. If you want to make manned spaceflight your religion, if you want to claim it's some sort of Manifest Destiny, fine; just be up front about it, and don't confuse it with progress.
It's the same reason why the British and the French set out to colonize the world. There was no economic justification for it, it's just what great nations do.
Uh, no. Britain and France colonized the world to exploit people and resources in other nations, in order to enrich their ruling classes.
If there are exploitable resources in space, economics demands that we'll collect them with robots.
You don't learn to live on other planets with robots - Jeff Greason
We're not going to be living on other planets anytime soon. Quite likely, not at any time, beyond maybe McMurdo base style outposts on Luna and Mars.
"This is my land, and I've got the government-issued deed to prove it, and I can trace it all the way back to when the British government under King Charles gave the land to Lord Baltimore. How dare some government interfere with my land!?"
Of course, I'm one of those crackpots that think land ownership should be meaningful, and that if you want to control something, you should have to own it first. Radical, I know.
Land "ownership" means that some government stole the land from its previous inhabitants and turned it into "property" which it sold or gave away, and has issued you a piece of paper certifying the chain of custody down to you after that initial theft. The idea that government shouldn't interfere in land ownership is self-contradictory -- land ownership is created by government. If you don't want the government involved, tear up your land deeds.
I'm not married to the $5/gallon figure specifically; the specifics are, as the range of figures shows, debatable. But it seems about right to me, and it's what was put on the table upthread.
The only reason you are suggesting to "gradually" implement a tax of this nature is that you know full well that if it was introduced at once that enough people would be so ticked off that any politician suggesting something this bold would be voted out of office immediately.
No, I'm saying that people have made choices based on cheap gas, and we need to give them time to make better choices.
I'm talking about what's necessary, not what's politically expedient. If we want to avoid catastrophe, we have to move off of fossil fuels; sadly, it seems the odds are good that my fellow Americans will continue to elect politicians who will tell them that everything is just fine, that they need not make the slightest changes in their gluttonous lifestyles, that all our problems are caused by brown-skinned people and can be solved by pointing more guns at such people.
You also haven't accounted for already existing taxes of close to a dollar a gallon anyway,
A few seconds with Google can often keep you from looking like an ass. The federal tax is only 18.4 cents per gallon, and the average state tax is 27.2 cents, a total of 45.6 cents a gallon. State fuel taxes are generally a way to collect a road use tax anyway, and don't enter into this issue.
Making people pay for costs that they've been getting away with externalizing is not "artificially increasing" the price.
Cheap energy means better lives for humanity, period.
Yes, so let get moving on building truly cheap energy -- wind, solar, biomass -- and get away from fossil fuel and fission systems that are only getting more expensive even if we don't bother to count externalities.
A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period
Insect life, perhaps; tropical disease virus, maybe. But for human civilization, rapid warming -- rapid change of any sort -- will be disastrous.
Let them move or die? Why do you have to DO anything with those populations?
Because even if you're a sociopath with no compassion, you have to deal with the fact that people don't just sit down and die when food runs out. They often pick up weapons and go to where there is food. They'll move, all right, but without the benefit of real estate transactions recorded by governments.
And many of them will be highly pissed at the nation most responsible for setting off the climate change that ruined their old homeland. You think the U.S. faces a terrorist threat now? Just wait until some third-world rabble rousers starts telling people that we're responsbile for turning their farms into desert.
Except, no. There was in fact a warming trend, as Phil Jones explained: "I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
This argument has been so thoroughly debunked, so often, that it takes either a shill or a dangerously ignorant person to put it forth. If you're a shill, karma's a bitch; if you're ignorant, than the question is, are you teachable?
Most people claim 8 while on their cellphone, eating a sandwich, or laughing with friends.
Of course they do, because they're scared that if that say "5", you're going to discontinue their pain meds. I'm not even talking about junkies, just regular folks in pain.
Accurate communication is only possible between equals. So long as you have the power -- or are perceived to have the power -- to give or withhold meds, you'll get distorted information.
The "Free Market" that you're manipulating with taxes to get the outcome you want? Are you being sarcastic?
A $5/gallon tax would just about cover the externalized costs of gasoline -- the environmental destruction, the foreign policy costs of keeping cheap oil flowing, the social costs of automobile-centric planning. A "free market" only exists when such costs are brought into the equation.
Unfortunately, we've spend so long making public policy decisions based on externalizing such costs that to throw them all in at once would be highly destructive. We need to implement such as tax gradually, maybe over ten years; 5 cents a gallon the first year, then 10, then 20, then 50, then 75, then a dollar, 2 dollars, 3, 4, and up to 5 dollars in the tenth year; with proceeds earmarked at mass transit projects and buybacks of inefficient vehicles. That'd be about right, if we made a WWII-level all-out effort to move to sustainable transportation.
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Ideally, the invisible hand of the market would put externalities -- wars and other foreign policy costs, ecological damage from oil production and from buring fossil fuels, etcetera -- into the cost of gasoline at the pump, doubling or tripling its price. Without that, though, talk of the "free market" in terms of automobiles is meaningless.
There are seven other planets in this system. None have significant resources for allowing humans to live on them. They may have some mineral resources that we'd like to have here, where it's cozy for us to live; we'll send robots out to collect them for us.
In a thousand years, maybe -- if we haven't wiped ourselves out or knocked ourselves back to feudalism -- we can talk about terraforming Mars and Venus. But if we make it through the next thousand years as a technological species, it'll be because we figured out sustainability, and will have made the Earth a nice place to live -- who'd want to move somewhere else?
(This is part of the problem of the supposed "Fermi paradox" -- it assumes the civilizations will maintain the cancer cell ideology -- "growth for the sake of growth". But in fact any species that survives its technological infancy is going to have to adopt technology and philosophy that allows sustainability.)
Solar expansion is billions of years away. It may get uncomfortably warm for Terra before then, as Sol's luminosity will increase even as it's still on the main sequence, but we're still talking a time scale of tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Human civilization faces threats from climate change, overpopulation, pollution, and war with WMDs in the near term, decades or centuries.
Putting resources toward working on a way to colonize the solar system, rather than addressing near-term threats, is foolish.
If you're thinking that these threats are good reason to have a "back up" in space, forget it -- far more sensible to dig deep bunkers. Now, addressing those near-term threats may involve space-based solutions, like orbital photovoltaic, but that's far different than some pipe dream of colonizing space.
If we can't take care of Spaceship Earth, and learn how to live on board it in peace, we're not going to do any better on any smaller spaceships we build.
Until recently, almost all universities were non-profits, or were run by the states.
And you'd be set to be narrowly-trained cog, rather than an educated human being.
A university education is not merely job training. If you want that, there are vocational colleges out there; but given the choice between a vocational college graduate who has only studied their field, and a university graduate who has studied literature and philosophy and art and has been exposed to different modes of thinking, I'll take the university graduate every time.
I should hope not, if graduating is to be meaningful.
Going to air condition the crops when it gets too hot to grow enough food?
I never sat is a classroom that didn't have give and take. Why? Because if nobody else did, I made some.
I remember my freshman economics class, at least 100 people in it. One day in the dining hall a girl I didn't know said to me, "You're in my econ class, right?"
"Um, maybe -- it's a big class."
"Yeah, you're in it, I recognize you -- you're that guy who's always asking questions."
I always found that the professors were glad to have the evidence that someone was paying attention.
Now, if you miss out on the opportunity for give and take, then it doesn't matter whether you're in a classroom or on-line, you'll be a a mediocre student. And maybe on-line education can find a way to allow for adequate give-and-take, rather than just having students listen to recordings. But if you're in a class with no give-and-take, that's by your own choice of inaction.
Because businesses have a mission of enriching their investors. Universities have a mission of turning students into educated persons capable of disciplined thought.
Why would you conclude that the tools that a business uses to hold meetings -- "the practical alternative to work", as one wag described them -- would be at all useful to a university?
Note that there's a big difference between what BillyG seems to envision -- learners, on heir own, viewing recorded lectures from a bunch of different universities -- and a university offering an on-line degree.
A friend of mine got her MFA in poetry from Naropa U. via an on-line program. There were a few weeks of summer residency, but otherwise she was able to take part in classes while she was living in Osaka. The level of interaction with other students and with the professors seemed pretty good, they had on-line message boards, and shared their papers with each other via the web. I visited her for a week and listened in on some of the lectures and read some of the papers -- seemed pretty decent.
Capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital, nothing more or less. It has nothing to do with the presence or absence of regulation.
If all that one "owns" is one's self and one's labor, then no goods can be produced. The creation of goods requires raw materials. Materials are derived from land. Land is only turned into property by an act of government. Ergo, all claims of objects as property rest on government action.
One's relationship with oneself should never be described as "ownership". It cheapens and distorts the nature of human beings, and suggests that you could be separated from yourself, the way that any of us can be separated from property. If you "own" yourself, this introduces the idea that someone else could "own" you. No. Human beings are not ownable.
Property is an artificial creation meant to help ensure certain fundamental rights of privacy and self-determination. It is not in itself a basic right; when the misapplication of the concept of property becomes destructive of basic human rights, it is property that must yield.
Ah, the National Coffee Association, that noted consumer safety organization.
The McDonalds lawsuit was meritorious -- the woman suffered third degree burns. More than 700 people had previously been burned, some with third degree burns, by their dangerously defective product. McDonalds deliberately served their coffee much hotter than competitors, at a temperature that their own quality assurance manager testified posed a burn hazard.
The vast majority of coffee consumers add things like cream and sugar to their coffee. This necessitates removing the lid. Calling that "defeating a safety feature" is the stupidest thing I've heard this week.
Let's see, I'm sitting in a car, I've got my sugar in one hand, I need one hand to remove the lid. (I'm 79 years old so it's not like my fingers are the most dexterous any more and I can do both with one hand.) Where the fsck else do I put the coffee? (Kids -- cars didn't always come with cupholders. They were pretty rare in 1992.)
You may now apologize for your defamation of Ms. Liebeck...or you can show yourself to be a mindless corporate apologist.
They don't teach that (except maybe in Texas) because it's not true.
A majority of Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. A majority of Southern Democrats voted against it, but some voted for it. No Southern Republicans voted for it..
And the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate when the 1960 and 1957 Civil Rights Acts were passed. Though I can't find vote breakdowns, with control of both chambers, Democrats could have squashed the bill if that was the desire of the majority of them.
Nor was Robert Byrd ever a "Wizard" of the KKK. He was a member, and was elected to the position of "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter, but was never a Wizard and had quit entirely before he ever ran for Congress. Throughout his career he repeatedly and very publicly apologized and recanted for his mistake, and came to be lauded by the NAACP. He stands as a shining example for everyone who believes that human beings are possible of reform. (Which of course makes his story anathema to the black-and-white, good-versus-evil sort of thinking that dominates the American conservative movement these days.)
A few minutes with Google could have saved you from looking like an ass. You owe Mr. Byrd a posthumous apology.
You're begging the question. If we understand that sending humans into space on long exploration missions is not a useful thing to do, then producing systems to keep them alive for such voyages is not useful knowledge. It's as if you were to complain (to steal a concept from someone else in this thread), "We'll never gain the knowledge of how to build popsicle-stick skyscrapers, if we don't build build popsicle-stick skyscrapers!"
Many people interested in space are interested in it because they think we're going to encounter humanoid aliens a la Star Trek. That's not a justification.
Look, the facts of the matter are not subject to vote, so people's opinions on this do not tell us whether manned exploration is economically viable or not. But your beliefs about those opinions seem to be erroneous. The fact is that most Americans -- by a very slim margin, within the margin of error -- think that a manned mission to Mars should not be a current goal of the space program. Only 45% think that investment in space exploration since the first moon landing has been worth it.
Hey, I would really like it to be economically viable for me, personally, to go into space. But my wants do jack shit to effect physics and economics. There's nothing I could do in space that makes it worthwhile for anyone to send me up there. If an occasional rich person wants to take the ultimate thrill ride, I don't think the government should be subsidizing them. (I also don't think we should have an economic system where the government helps a handful of people assemble billions in wealth while others have trouble with basic necessities, but that's another rant.)
The only economic argument for putting men in space is the same as subsidizing the arts: it creates jobs and people find it inspiring. So, I say again, let's consider manned space flight as just another bit of performance art, put it under the NEA, and let it compete for funding with other art forms.
Wow. Friend, you need a history review badly. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had robotic probes on the moon before we we put people there. Here's some remedial reading for you: wik pages on the Luna and Surveyor program.
We went men to the moon as part of a pissing contest with the U.S.S.R. That is all.
Um, yes. I mentioned that. I'm talking about what else could be done with the money.
My dog dug up a dead rat and ran around the yard with it as a chew toy. I don't have any problem believing a dog would eat a rotting toe.
RTFA. "The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards..."
I.e., what was released was a file containing a relatively recent letter from a UFO crank, not an actual Churchill document. "I am writing you because my mom told me that my grandfather told her that one time he overheard Churchill say..."
Without a doubt the most pointless "news" story I've seen this week.
If your editor can't read a press of the tab key as "insert enough spaces to move me over to the next tab stop", then you need a new editor.
The meaning of "tab" when displaying a file is ill-defined; some software takes it as "insert 8 spaces here", some as "move over to the next tab stop, with stops every 8 spaces", some as "move over to the next tab stop, with stops configurable". For this reason, tabs should never be used in a plain text file, including program source code.
If I can't look at your code with less, you lose.
Gaining knowledge is progress, yes. The point of this discussion is that said knowledge can be gathered much more cheaply with robots; and can thus leave free resources to put towards more important and practical sorts of progress.
For example, the cost of the Apollo program was $170 billion in 2005 dollars. If we take the Roscoe Wind Complex as a model, for then for $1 billion we can get 781.5 MW of wind power; so for the cost of another Apollo program, we could install 130 Gigawatts of wind, not even figuring on any advanced R&D.
And you don't think we could direct our limited resources to something more useful than allowing a handful of people to have a really neat experience? I can think of several really neat experiences I'd like to have, and as poet I think I could convey them to others better than Armstrong or Aldrin -- can I get billions in federal funding? If it's all about "experience" than let's put the manned space program under the direction of the National Endowment for the Arts, where it can compete for funding with other "inspirational" activities.
The U.S. is stuck in two wars and has mounting debt; the whole world is in an immediate financial crisis, and a long-term ecological crisis. Letting a couple of privileged people go on a trip to the moon is not the best use of our collective resources.
You don't sound very secular about it, actually. If you want to make manned spaceflight your religion, if you want to claim it's some sort of Manifest Destiny, fine; just be up front about it, and don't confuse it with progress.
Uh, no. Britain and France colonized the world to exploit people and resources in other nations, in order to enrich their ruling classes.
If there are exploitable resources in space, economics demands that we'll collect them with robots.
We're not going to be living on other planets anytime soon. Quite likely, not at any time, beyond maybe McMurdo base style outposts on Luna and Mars.
"This is my land, and I've got the government-issued deed to prove it, and I can trace it all the way back to when the British government under King Charles gave the land to Lord Baltimore. How dare some government interfere with my land!?"
Land "ownership" means that some government stole the land from its previous inhabitants and turned it into "property" which it sold or gave away, and has issued you a piece of paper certifying the chain of custody down to you after that initial theft. The idea that government shouldn't interfere in land ownership is self-contradictory -- land ownership is created by government. If you don't want the government involved, tear up your land deeds.
I read estimates like this (total per gallon price of $5.60 to $15.14.) and this (a total price of $5.28/gallon if only foreign policy costs are accounted for) and this ($1 to $6 a gallon in subsidies).
I'm not married to the $5/gallon figure specifically; the specifics are, as the range of figures shows, debatable. But it seems about right to me, and it's what was put on the table upthread.
No, I'm saying that people have made choices based on cheap gas, and we need to give them time to make better choices.
I'm talking about what's necessary, not what's politically expedient. If we want to avoid catastrophe, we have to move off of fossil fuels; sadly, it seems the odds are good that my fellow Americans will continue to elect politicians who will tell them that everything is just fine, that they need not make the slightest changes in their gluttonous lifestyles, that all our problems are caused by brown-skinned people and can be solved by pointing more guns at such people.
A few seconds with Google can often keep you from looking like an ass. The federal tax is only 18.4 cents per gallon, and the average state tax is 27.2 cents, a total of 45.6 cents a gallon. State fuel taxes are generally a way to collect a road use tax anyway, and don't enter into this issue.
Making people pay for costs that they've been getting away with externalizing is not "artificially increasing" the price.
Yes, so let get moving on building truly cheap energy -- wind, solar, biomass -- and get away from fossil fuel and fission systems that are only getting more expensive even if we don't bother to count externalities.
Insect life, perhaps; tropical disease virus, maybe. But for human civilization, rapid warming -- rapid change of any sort -- will be disastrous.
Because even if you're a sociopath with no compassion, you have to deal with the fact that people don't just sit down and die when food runs out. They often pick up weapons and go to where there is food. They'll move, all right, but without the benefit of real estate transactions recorded by governments.
And many of them will be highly pissed at the nation most responsible for setting off the climate change that ruined their old homeland. You think the U.S. faces a terrorist threat now? Just wait until some third-world rabble rousers starts telling people that we're responsbile for turning their farms into desert.
Except, no. There was in fact a warming trend, as Phil Jones explained: "I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
This argument has been so thoroughly debunked, so often, that it takes either a shill or a dangerously ignorant person to put it forth. If you're a shill, karma's a bitch; if you're ignorant, than the question is, are you teachable?
Of course they do, because they're scared that if that say "5", you're going to discontinue their pain meds. I'm not even talking about junkies, just regular folks in pain.
Accurate communication is only possible between equals. So long as you have the power -- or are perceived to have the power -- to give or withhold meds, you'll get distorted information.
A $5/gallon tax would just about cover the externalized costs of gasoline -- the environmental destruction, the foreign policy costs of keeping cheap oil flowing, the social costs of automobile-centric planning. A "free market" only exists when such costs are brought into the equation.
Unfortunately, we've spend so long making public policy decisions based on externalizing such costs that to throw them all in at once would be highly destructive. We need to implement such as tax gradually, maybe over ten years; 5 cents a gallon the first year, then 10, then 20, then 50, then 75, then a dollar, 2 dollars, 3, 4, and up to 5 dollars in the tenth year; with proceeds earmarked at mass transit projects and buybacks of inefficient vehicles. That'd be about right, if we made a WWII-level all-out effort to move to sustainable transportation.