Because if we bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, it decreases the leverage that corporations have when extorting government benefits.
If the iPad/iPhone was assembled in the US, it would be done with robots, not people (Foxconn has gone on record regarding this). It is too expensive to pay people to do simple things in the US, it only makes sense to pay engineers here.
By the way, the US is now at its all-time high level of manufacturing output. With very few workers.
1) We have built qbits 2) We have entangled qbits 3) We have implemented the CNOT which is the universal gate for quantum computing (similar to NAND/NOR universal gates in classical computing)
The question is scaling up number of qbits, increasing coherence times (and possibly using coding solutions to reduce decoherence problems).
But I must admit that it could end up like fusion. We have all the basic theoretical knowledge of how to do fusion, and we can do a bit of fusion in the lab, what we lack is the engineering knowledge to achieve enough fusion on a large enough scale to make it practical.
I'd rather they taxed those who were already rich and living off their savings/company.
Yet that is the problem with our recovery. Personal consumption has returned to pre-crash levels, but private investment has not. And evidently, that lack of investment is keeping companies from hiring. People are scared to invest right now. Do you really want to give them more reason to not invest?
The main reason that Warren Buffer, hedge fund managers, and many of the rest of the ultra-wealthy pay so little in income taxes is that most of their "income" is in the form of long-term capital gains: the appreciation of and sale of investments.
At the same time, there are plenty of lawyers, doctors, entertainers, and athletes that make over $1 million per year whose income is taxed at normal rates.
One could also argue that income from long-term capital gains of corporate securities (stocks and bonds) have already had their income reduced by a corporate income tax and sales taxes before they received their cut (taxed individually at capital gains rate). Income from property capital gains has been reduced by property taxes, etc.
10 million tonnes * 20km * 9.8 kg/m^2 = 1.96 Ã-- 10^15J or 544GW*hr. So that would be about two hours of energy from all the nuclear power plants on Earth currently.
People often get a bit crazy after winning the Nobel Prize. Look at Linus Pauling, who won for determining the nature of the chemical bond linking atoms into molecules, including his key work on the alpha helix of protein structure. Then he started spouting off crazy (unsupported) stuff about vitamin C and cancer.
And there was Einstein and the cosmological constant...
"For example Austerity has never gotten anyone out of a recession."
So why was there a huge private economic boom in the US in the decade after WWII when government spending was drastically cut, and government-provided employment (of soldiers) was reduced?
Nuclear power creates electricity. Electricity splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen enter the Haber process using heat energy from nuclear plant (directly or via electricity) resulting in ammonia. Nitric acid is produced from atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen (again with nuclear heat). Ammonia + nitric acid = ammonium nitrate.
We only use methane or coal as the input to the Haber process today because they are cheaper than electrolysis to generate hydrogen.
Other plant macronutrients are inorganic, and don't come from oil (phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur).
Population rise is highly correlated with poor countries.
Population growth rate is highest in Africa, in countries such as: Liberia, DR Congo, Niger, Uganda, and Eritrea. These have GDP per capita of $222, $160, $352, $490, $369 (in US $, not PPP).
"At the momentary agricultural production rates, yes we probably can supply 10 billion people. But can we do it sustainably? Without depleting oil, drinking water, the top soil, the fisheries? We can't do that right now."
There is plenty of nuclear fission power in readily available uranium (and then thorium) to power all our vehicles, to desalinate water, to move desalinated fresh water where it is needed, and to produce chemical fertilizers.
Yes, we may have a Fukushima every now and then...but we won't starve to death.
""Only two million of our 22 million subscribers actually looked at your content." Which I think would be about right."
I suspect every one of the 22 million subs with kids has streamed "Toy Story 3"....the Starz deal provided new Sony and Disney movies. In fact, Starz accounted for half of the top 50 streaming movie titles for Netflix in 2009 and 2010.
Agreed - we have enough interference problems to work out among licensed broadcast television stations in the US already! The industry is still maximizing transmitter power and moving around antennas after the transition from analog to digital (I know a station finally moving on to Sutro Tower with their full-power DTV signal next week, for instance), and on a daily basis working out interference problems.
Even for non-co-channel interference, Intermodulation product problems in DTV receiver circuits abound for unlicensed transmissions in adjacent and second adjacent channels. If you want to understand these issues, check out Charlie Rhodes column in TV Technology.
If you want to set up an entire band for "cognitive radio", I'm sure that would work OK, but mixing licensed high-power and unlicensed low-power broadcasts in the same band is simply going to lead to interference.
There is a reason why whitespace data is being pushed on the broadcast TV bands rather than the military bands (where there is even more "white space").
"Netflix basically just said, "Meh, we'll take the money we were going to give to you and give it to someone else for their content." Starz is not the only game in town. It's not even the best game in town. And now everybody knows how much is too much. It's just hardball."
I'd argue that Starz cut an incredibly cheap (and perhaps stupid) deal with Netflix that allowed Netflix to start an unsustainable business model with pricing to the consumer that is too low. Everyone in Hollywood felt the Starz/Netflix deal was too cheap.
Look at the cable retrans fees, ~$4/sub/month for ESPN, ~$1/sub/month for many broadcast networks. It is not surprising that Starz wants ~$1/sub/month for their movies.
No surprise here. Netflix has been getting an incredibly cheap deal on the Starz content, and the whole deal was a little "creative" in the first place from a legal point of view.
Hollywood wants money for its content...Netflix may need to double prices to be able to sustainably offer the kind of content that its users demand.
What we really need is a "standardized" open-source quantum computing language so that we can develop and exchange quantum algorithms to prepare for the day when quantum computers are real.
Right now we have the QCL language, QCF for Matlab/Octave, and the Cove framework that could be used with any language, but it looks like there is really only a C# implementation right now.
None of these have really taken hold as a "standard" though, and probably elements of all of them could be brought together in something multi-platform and all-inclusive.
is it really about innovation anymore? It's similar to starvation. It isn't that we don't have food.
Indeed, the problem is 100% political fear of free market capitalism. Where actual market reforms have been taken on, populations have had access to more calories. Example:
China under Mao: starves 20-40 million people to death
China after Mao: 300 million people leave poverty, net food exporter, very little hunger.
"Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably...needles and...sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures...all the terrible pain!"
"while letting the drug companies make huge profits."
Major drug manufacturers' profit margin averages 16% (2008 data). This is high, but below the profit margins of software companies and brewers.
Of course drug manufacturers face major risks due to failure of drugs in the pipeline as well as court decisions. Schering-Plough had losses of -1% and -10% in 2003 and 2004. Wyeth only had a profit margin of 7% in 2004, Pfizer only had a margin of 9% in 2003.
It's called price discrimination. It means people who have more elasticity of demand pay a lower price than people who have less elasticity.
This is how cars are priced differently through the negotiation process, why people pay different amounts for airline tickets, and until the recent advent of mass pricing, almost every transaction in the marketplace was a haggle.
Price discrimination helps to maximize seller's surplus, thus making it profitable to serve those with more elastic demand with lower prices. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals that are very expensive in rich countries and cheaper in poor countries. Without price discrimination, they may only be profitable in rich countries at a single price.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if we bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, it decreases the leverage that corporations have when extorting government benefits.
If the iPad/iPhone was assembled in the US, it would be done with robots, not people (Foxconn has gone on record regarding this). It is too expensive to pay people to do simple things in the US, it only makes sense to pay engineers here.
By the way, the US is now at its all-time high level of manufacturing output. With very few workers.
1) We have built qbits
2) We have entangled qbits
3) We have implemented the CNOT which is the universal gate for quantum computing (similar to NAND/NOR universal gates in classical computing)
The question is scaling up number of qbits, increasing coherence times (and possibly using coding solutions to reduce decoherence problems).
We have a number of quantum algorithms waiting to be implemented, and even have quantum programming languages that you can run simulations on at home today. And there is even a LinkedIn Group on quantum information science.
But I must admit that it could end up like fusion. We have all the basic theoretical knowledge of how to do fusion, and we can do a bit of fusion in the lab, what we lack is the engineering knowledge to achieve enough fusion on a large enough scale to make it practical.
I'd rather they taxed those who were already rich and living off their savings/company.
Yet that is the problem with our recovery. Personal consumption has returned to pre-crash levels, but private investment has not. And evidently, that lack of investment is keeping companies from hiring. People are scared to invest right now. Do you really want to give them more reason to not invest?
The main reason that Warren Buffer, hedge fund managers, and many of the rest of the ultra-wealthy pay so little in income taxes is that most of their "income" is in the form of long-term capital gains: the appreciation of and sale of investments.
At the same time, there are plenty of lawyers, doctors, entertainers, and athletes that make over $1 million per year whose income is taxed at normal rates.
One could also argue that income from long-term capital gains of corporate securities (stocks and bonds) have already had their income reduced by a corporate income tax and sales taxes before they received their cut (taxed individually at capital gains rate). Income from property capital gains has been reduced by property taxes, etc.
10 million tonnes * 20km * 9.8 kg/m^2 = 1.96 Ã-- 10^15J or 544GW*hr. So that would be about two hours of energy from all the nuclear power plants on Earth currently.
People often get a bit crazy after winning the Nobel Prize. Look at Linus Pauling, who won for determining the nature of the chemical bond linking atoms into molecules, including his key work on the alpha helix of protein structure. Then he started spouting off crazy (unsupported) stuff about vitamin C and cancer.
And there was Einstein and the cosmological constant...
Krugman's work on modern trade theory was worthy of a Nobel Prize.
The stuff he spouts in his column is another story...
"For example Austerity has never gotten anyone out of a recession."
So why was there a huge private economic boom in the US in the decade after WWII when government spending was drastically cut, and government-provided employment (of soldiers) was reduced?
"What's the intrinsic value of gold? "
Chicks dig it...but of course, Slashdot readers might not understand that.
"Fukushima Daiichi could be found on the third last position in a world wide safety ranking of nuclear power plants in 2010."
Do you have a URL for this list??????
Nuclear power creates electricity. Electricity splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen enter the Haber process using heat energy from nuclear plant (directly or via electricity) resulting in ammonia. Nitric acid is produced from atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen (again with nuclear heat). Ammonia + nitric acid = ammonium nitrate.
We only use methane or coal as the input to the Haber process today because they are cheaper than electrolysis to generate hydrogen.
Other plant macronutrients are inorganic, and don't come from oil (phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur).
" i think it would be generally instructive to visualize where on the planet are the populations rising significantly."
Here you go.
Population rise is highly correlated with poor countries.
Population growth rate is highest in Africa, in countries such as: Liberia, DR Congo, Niger, Uganda, and Eritrea. These have GDP per capita of $222, $160, $352, $490, $369 (in US $, not PPP).
"At the momentary agricultural production rates, yes we probably can supply 10 billion people. But can we do it sustainably? Without depleting oil, drinking water, the top soil, the fisheries? We can't do that right now."
There is plenty of nuclear fission power in readily available uranium (and then thorium) to power all our vehicles, to desalinate water, to move desalinated fresh water where it is needed, and to produce chemical fertilizers.
Yes, we may have a Fukushima every now and then...but we won't starve to death.
""Only two million of our 22 million subscribers actually looked at your content." Which I think would be about right."
I suspect every one of the 22 million subs with kids has streamed "Toy Story 3"....the Starz deal provided new Sony and Disney movies. In fact, Starz accounted for half of the top 50 streaming movie titles for Netflix in 2009 and 2010.
Agreed - we have enough interference problems to work out among licensed broadcast television stations in the US already! The industry is still maximizing transmitter power and moving around antennas after the transition from analog to digital (I know a station finally moving on to Sutro Tower with their full-power DTV signal next week, for instance), and on a daily basis working out interference problems.
Even for non-co-channel interference, Intermodulation product problems in DTV receiver circuits abound for unlicensed transmissions in adjacent and second adjacent channels. If you want to understand these issues, check out Charlie Rhodes column in TV Technology.
If you want to set up an entire band for "cognitive radio", I'm sure that would work OK, but mixing licensed high-power and unlicensed low-power broadcasts in the same band is simply going to lead to interference.
There is a reason why whitespace data is being pushed on the broadcast TV bands rather than the military bands (where there is even more "white space").
"Netflix basically just said, "Meh, we'll take the money we were going to give to you and give it to someone else for their content." Starz is not the only game in town. It's not even the best game in town. And now everybody knows how much is too much. It's just hardball."
I'd argue that Starz cut an incredibly cheap (and perhaps stupid) deal with Netflix that allowed Netflix to start an unsustainable business model with pricing to the consumer that is too low. Everyone in Hollywood felt the Starz/Netflix deal was too cheap.
Look at the cable retrans fees, ~$4/sub/month for ESPN, ~$1/sub/month for many broadcast networks. It is not surprising that Starz wants ~$1/sub/month for their movies.
No surprise here. Netflix has been getting an incredibly cheap deal on the Starz content, and the whole deal was a little "creative" in the first place from a legal point of view.
Hollywood wants money for its content...Netflix may need to double prices to be able to sustainably offer the kind of content that its users demand.
"if they guys at the top managed to walk away with more than $150-200k/year in total compensation,"
Come on, this is Silicon Valley, probably even the janitor makes $150K...
What we really need is a "standardized" open-source quantum computing language so that we can develop and exchange quantum algorithms to prepare for the day when quantum computers are real.
Right now we have the QCL language, QCF for Matlab/Octave, and the Cove framework that could be used with any language, but it looks like there is really only a C# implementation right now.
None of these have really taken hold as a "standard" though, and probably elements of all of them could be brought together in something multi-platform and all-inclusive.
is it really about innovation anymore? It's similar to starvation. It isn't that we don't have food.
Indeed, the problem is 100% political fear of free market capitalism. Where actual market reforms have been taken on, populations have had access to more calories. Example:
China under Mao: starves 20-40 million people to death
China after Mao: 300 million people leave poverty, net food exporter, very little hunger.
"Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably...needles and...sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures...all the terrible pain!"
-McCoy, City on the Edge of Forever
"while letting the drug companies make huge profits."
Major drug manufacturers' profit margin averages 16% (2008 data). This is high, but below the profit margins of software companies and brewers.
Of course drug manufacturers face major risks due to failure of drugs in the pipeline as well as court decisions. Schering-Plough had losses of -1% and -10% in 2003 and 2004. Wyeth only had a profit margin of 7% in 2004, Pfizer only had a margin of 9% in 2003.
"If that's the case, I cannot frickin' wait to see the mile-high tower/city complex in Tokyo."
How about Kingdom Tower coming to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia? (OK, now scaled down to 2/3 of a mile).
Berkeley's Cal Memorial Stadium is on top of the Hayward fault, so what?
It's called price discrimination. It means people who have more elasticity of demand pay a lower price than people who have less elasticity.
This is how cars are priced differently through the negotiation process, why people pay different amounts for airline tickets, and until the recent advent of mass pricing, almost every transaction in the marketplace was a haggle.
Price discrimination helps to maximize seller's surplus, thus making it profitable to serve those with more elastic demand with lower prices. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals that are very expensive in rich countries and cheaper in poor countries. Without price discrimination, they may only be profitable in rich countries at a single price.