to come up with a floating total gross value of all (or top 50%) stocks?
One of the M values does include that, but I forget which one. The answer to your question is probably here, though as I have pointed out your reasoning is flawed. $46T is the value of all the US publicly traded stocks. Remember, though, that most of the value in the US economy is actually in small businesses. Those small businesses are not traded publicly, and so are not counted in these totals.
It could be interesting to find out that 98 or 99% of M is actually owned by corporations and about.0001 percent of the american population.
Like I say, you are going about this wrong - there are no corporations that exist unto themselves. The corporations are totally owned by people. In the US, by far most of the shareholders are normal people from the middle class. In other countries, most shareholders are from old rich families - which is why their economies cannot compete with the US successfully. On the page I linked, there is a breakdown of who owns US corporations. 14% is held by insiders - you would probably consider these people to be the "bad guys", CEOs and whatnot. 86% of the shares are owned by institutions, which are the mutual funds and pension funds that are in turn owned by the middle class.
So, a smallish number of people, say 1%, own about 14% of the US market. And most of those got there because they built the company from nothing. In other words, they deserve the money - they created the value.
In all seriousness, stop looking for the man trying to keep you down - he doesn't exist in the US (though he certainly does in other countries - not totally sure how the US avoided this, really). Instead try to build a company - come up with a value you can create, and then you get to keep a portion!
OK, fair enough. But now that we have the poor people argument out of the way - how can you be sure that marketing money spent is net negative to society? A drug noone ever knows about or uses is of no benefit to society. Especially a drug that in the old days would never have been perscribed by a doctor - a so-called lifestyle drug. Many (maybe most) doctors beleive that the patient is wrong most of the time. Your overwieght? Well, obviously that is because you eat too much - I won't perscribe something for a problem you can fix yourself, etc. Viagra? Who on Earth would proscribe Viagra? Who on Earth would see their doctor about that problem if they didn't know it could be solved?
Now I'm not totally sure that the maximum benefit to society is gained by having a larger marketing budget than a research budget - but I think the marketing budget is more important than doctors and scientists tend to think. And I am backed up by the fact that the pharmas that are advertising make a lot more money - which means that they either sold a lot more drugs or that consumers valued those drugs a lot more. Either way, it sounds like a net win to me...
But my point is that the poor are not harmed by that. The poor cannot afford the name brands they see (on the TV that they can't afford either, but that is a separate issue), so they are cruely forced to buy the same medication at a lower price! How is that wrong? The worst you can say about it is that the poor people may feel slighted, but if they really are getting the same medicine but cheaper who is harmed?
It is rather off topic, but I'll answer as best I can:
How much money is there in the United States?
This is actually harder to answer than you may think. There are many measurements of the amount of cash in an economy - M0, M1, M2, etc. Each includes/excludes various things: for example, banks take a deposit and then loan the money out again. So should that money be counted twice? It turns out that if you are trying to control an economy, the answer is "yes." And in the real world, instead of being twice, it is more like ten times (not understanding that is the direct cause of the great depression). M1 is about $1.5T, M3 is about $10T
To what percentage of currently existing, freely exchanged cash do corporations aspire to?
Unfortunately, this is the wrong question. Obviously, they aspire to all of it - but that is not useful, because you are erroneously assuming a zero sum game. The implicit contract that a corporation (or anyone else) has with society is this: you create value to society, and then we haggle over who gets to keep what fraction. In the US economy, there is a side deal that says: and in the end, society gets the value (primarily because we don't allow monopolies and powerful families indefinately, like they do in most of the world). The key issue here, though, is that corporations create value.
For example, you work and get paid $X. You are willing to trade your time for the $X because the money is worth more to you than the time. The corporation pays you because your time is worth more to them than the money. At the end of the day, the corporation is better off because of your labor (the value of the labor minus the value of your salary is a positive number), and you are better off with the money (the value of the money to you minus the value of the labor to you is a positive number). So society (which includes all the players) is better off - the only real argument is did you get more of the value or did the corporation? And to a certain point, that is only vanity anyway - who is to say which of you "deserves" more? You can make identical arguments about the sale of a product, like an Ipod - every transaction that does not involve coercion creates a net gain for society.
how many of the recessions have been caused by corporate greed?
None of them. As I have shown (I hope), corporations do not have any control over that. The Fed can cause recessions through bad monetary policy - they almost certainly directly caused the great depression (we have learned a lot since then, but we are still not infallible). After the Fed, the number two determinant of a recession is consumer confidence. When the herd gets restless, we have a recession - all the Fed can do is try to soften it. Really, corporations hate recessions even more than you do, and would prevent them if they could. (There is something to be said about business cycles actually strengthening the economy by threatening to cull the herd, but I don't see corporations being that altruistic...)
One final point, if you really think that corporations get an unfair percentage of the profits, then invest! That is by far the easiest way to change things in your favor. If you can't / don't want to do that, start your own company - that is another great way to change the equations in your favor.
Remember for every $1 you invest in stocks now, you can draw $1 per year for the rest of your life after 25 years! Do the math! (This assumes a 10% growth rate of the economy - 1.1^25=10.8, so you get 10.8 times return after 25 years at 10% - after that, you can draw out 10% each year [the growth of your money] without ever touching the principle.)
To show the sensitivity of this to the growth rate here are the years you have to wait to be getting yearly income equal to your initial investment at different rates:
5% - 65 years 6% - 50 years 7% - 40 years 8% - 33 years 9% - 2
So what? Are you saying that it is evil that the poor people of the world cannot afford to pay extra for a brand name? What kind of idiotic argument is that?
You are showing examples of people being dumb - that is a luxury, and the poor people of the world can't afford it...
The way I look at it is this: Society needs people that can turn resources (time, gold, etc) into useful things (digital watches, rockets, etc.). The problem is that society cannot tell who will be successful beforehand. So what society does is reward sucessful people with the resources to do even more stuff. So if you are good a inventing new rockets, you are given more money so that you can invent even more rockets. If you are good at inventing medicine, you are given more resources to invent even more medicine.
I mean really, do you think Steve Jobs is personally any better off at $5B than he was at $1B? People that show they can create value are given more resources so that they can create even more value. It doesn't always work this way, but that is the premise behind capitalism.
How about a rail gun placed on the side of a tall mountain?
That is the clasic almost-reasonable suggestion. You are still going mach 25 in the atmosphere, which I still say ouch to;-}. It could probably be made to work, but you would still need a rocket engine to make your orbit not intersect Earth. (Think about it this way, your final orbit always has to include the point where accelaration stopped). I don't think you could use Earth's magnetic field to change much - though that would be interesting to study, at least. You might be able to use it to make your orbit not hit Earth, which would be a big win.
The real problem with such ideas is that you are competing against a rocket engine. At the current market levels, a rocket engine is pretty hard to beat - if you only fly a few times a year, your construction costs per flight are about 10% of the total project cost divided by the flight rate. For example, if you could build it for $10B, you need to generate $1B per year to cover construction costs. If you fly 10 times a year (which would be really hard to convince people of at this point), you would have to allocate $100M per launch for the construction costs. And then add to that whatever a launch costs incremently.
First, we have to prove the market exists. Then we can build "really big toys!"
And you hit it precisely on the head. The way to compete is not to compete. Offer something different, like packages in a specific time frame, guaranteed. Or be much more customer friendly, etc.
But let me ask you this, if the US postal service closed tomorrow, would that be good or bad for FedEx?
No, this is just the limit on the efficiency from the laws of thermodynamics.
No, I could have calculated the theoretical limit at 90.3%. The described rocket engine will get very close to that - rockets are by far the most efficient machines ever made by man. Look up losses for standard nozzle flows sometime - they are tiny! That said, this engine was never built, so who knows.
there's no way that the exhaust is at 50 C at the point when it loses contact with the nozzle
Um, so what is it going to do? I'm talking about a vacuum engine, obviously - so what is the exhaust going to do, just decide to ignore physics? The exhaust expands to fill the nozzle no matter how big the exit is - you just have to make it really long so that you do not get shock losses.
this is definitely not the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines
If you read carefully, I did not claim it was the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines. In fact, later in that same paragraph I gave the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines at 76% - and gave you a reference. So you will have to come back with a little more than "you're wrong", more like "I know the secret that makes you, NASA, and all of physics wrong!" The 99% is one measure of how close they come to ideal thermodynamic efficiency. The only other factors in this type of engine is friction losses in the nozzle (tiny for large engines - surface vs area effect) and imperfect flows (which is also very small for real engines).
The wasted energy is going into KE of the exhaust
To show why this is a dumb measure: The energy of the exhaust exactly equals the energy coming in with the propellants. The outside of the engine never sees any of the energy inside it, since the heat "leaking" from the chamber is put into the propellant and thrown back into the engine. So if you count KE of the exhaust as "waste", then all a rocket does is waste. (And of course, in a vacuum there is no heating of the atmosphere)
I believe what you are trying to get at is that the way to move something using the least amount of energy is to push off of the most massive thing available. So trains that use the Earth as their reaction mass are "more efficient" than aircraft which uses the atmosphere which are more efficient than spacecraft that have to push off of their own fuel. That is true, but is not "thermodynamic efficiency".
To prove it to you in a mind game, pretend that you could get some "unobtainium", which is as strong as you would like it to be and yet weighs very little. Build an engine, where you have a huge rocket nozzle attached to an arm that turns a generator. Once you turn on the engine, let it get up to about 4.5 km/s (that's why it is made from unobtainium), and then connect the generator.
The exhaust from the rocket nozzle is at rest in the frame of reference of the generator, and is 350 K. That is the exhaust temperature. The chamber temperature of the rocket engine, 3600 K, is the inlet temperature. So you now have a generator that is 90% efficient. If you want to calculate the power supplied, it is the thrust of the rocket times the velocity (in this case 4.5 km/s).
You can use the engine in many ways, so it is best to clarify what you mean by "efficiency". "Thermodynamic efficiency" is a very precise term, and a useful measure for engineering.
There is a little more to it than that - a key point being that it is impossible to "throw" something to orbit - you can give it altitude and velocity, but not in the right direction. (Essentially, either you throw it too hard and put it in escape or the orbit you threw it to intersects the Earth again). By "throwing" you can greatly decrease the strain/requirements put on your rocket engine, but you still will need a rocket engine.
The other thing I will say is that for reasonable structures, you need to fly through the lower atmosphere at mach 25. Ouch.
What makes this work is that the chamber temperature is way higher than can be contained by any materials that we can make - so they cool the chamber walls (which would be an efficiency loss) but they cool them with propellants (so that the energy lost is put back into the system). So the engine itself has virtually no losses - and if you put a large enough nozzle on it, you can take it to just above the boiling point of water. So the engine can go from 3300 C (the SSME combustion temperature) to about 50 C (nozzle exit is way below atmospheric pressure, so the boiling point of water is lower). Efficiency = 1 - 350/3600, >90%. Several engines like this were designed, but since it would only make sense on a very long term deep space mission, I don't think anything this efficient was ever really built.
As a more concrete example, the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) have a combustion efficiency of 99%. So the only thing that makes the total efficiency less than 99% is that the engines must operate in the atmosphere - so the nozzles cannot be too large (the exit pressure needs to be close to one atmosphere). The overall system efficiency of the SSME is 76%. More efficient engines have been made (look at the J-2 or any upper stage hydrogen engine), but this one everyone is familiar with.
Note that an inefficient rocket engine is a really bad idea - the SSME are 6.4 GW reactors, and are only a few meters long. Think about it - any losses in the engine (wasted heat) would need to be radiated away. What temperature would it have to be to radiate away 5% of 6.4 GW?!?
Um... all a rocket engine does is accelerate a high temperature gas - so the energy of the steam leaving the nozzle is not loss, it is the whole point of the engine.
Now, using that to accelarate am object may have useful or non-useful metrics. But it is hard to call that efficiency, though. (For example, accelarating a stationary object using a rocket engine takes more energy than picking the object up and throwing it. But we still don't try to throw the space shuttle into orbit for some reason...)
In fact, just FYI, there are several engines available now that convert heat energy into velocity at more than 90% efficiency - high expansion hydrogen based rocket engines! Really amazing devices, really.
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this.
Let me ask a question: at what point is it profitable to compete when your competition's profit is based on their ability to spend larger and larger amounts of someone else's money?
The more money Nasa spends on spaceflight, the harder it is for comercial flights to happen - who is going to invest in a business competing with the US government?
That said, I think the current Nasa management sees the problem, and is trying to avoid it. The launcher they are currently building is so large that it will never be profitable, even ignoring sunk costs. That leaves an opening for the little guys to shine on a per mission cost basis.
But never doubt - Nasa being there delays comercialization of space. Unfortunate, but true.
The thing is - it is hard to put legal limits on the word "novel". By its very nature, you cannot predict what will be novel. The current law is "not obvious to someone with advanced knowlege of the art" - I don't see how you could improve that, and it really is not working. So perhaps the answer is to limit the number of patents to some number X, and then the law would be that each year only the X most novel concepts get patented. It might be easier to rank patents in their novelty rather than figure out what the heck novelty really is.
Well, they lose a lot of efficiency when the temperature difference becomes large. They still can work - we can make liquid hydrogen, which involves pumping heat from nearly liquid hydrogen into room temperature air. I think they just become non-economical at some point.
For an extreme example, let's say it is 200K outside (carbon dioxide is snowing down) and it is 300K inside, nice and toasty. This makes the efficiency some fraction of 1/(1-200/300)=3. So if your heat pump is closer than 33% of carnot efficiency, you would get a net gain - I believe most heat pump surpass that. However, when you factor in the initial cost of the heat pump you get a net loss at some point. You reach that point sooner when it is colder outside.
Correct - I just thought I'd mention it. Technically, that makes an electric heat pump the least expensive method of heating - but only if you ignore the initial investment, which is rather large.
This is not entirely true. Although it is seldom used this way (because it almost never recupes its cost), a heat pump can take the heat out of cold outside air and "pump" it into the warmer inside air - just like an air conditioner in reverse. Assuming that you get some fraction "k" of carnot efficiency, 1 joule of electricity can be move k/(1-Tout/Tin) joules of heat into the house. So a 50% carnot efficient heat pump operating between 270K outside and 300K inside moves 5 joules of heat for every one joule of electricity used - to say something useful in your notation, this would be a 500% efficient heater.
I don't know why everyone is saying that gas is so safe - I live in a house with a gas stove just once in my life. I came home after a vacation to a house so full of explosive gas that you couldn't breathe in it. The fire department came out (personally, I thought that was overkill) and cleared the building and let the gas dissapate.
It really does seem unsafe to me. You can say all you want about how impossible it is, but that won't change what actually happened to me, will it?
You asked for some proof, I gave it to you. You then said that my proof was not valid, and you provided no proof of that assertion.
You need to realize that this is religion to you. You will not accept any proof I can give you, because you have an irrational belief. There is always a way to discount facts - but if you are doing that without any counter-proof, you are irrationally clinging to your original belief.
To put it simply, where is your evidence that food crops are more heat sensitive than every other plant on Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
to come up with a floating total gross value of all (or top 50%) stocks?
.0001 percent of the american population.
One of the M values does include that, but I forget which one. The answer to your question is probably here, though as I have pointed out your reasoning is flawed. $46T is the value of all the US publicly traded stocks. Remember, though, that most of the value in the US economy is actually in small businesses. Those small businesses are not traded publicly, and so are not counted in these totals.
It could be interesting to find out that 98 or 99% of M is actually owned by corporations and about
Like I say, you are going about this wrong - there are no corporations that exist unto themselves. The corporations are totally owned by people. In the US, by far most of the shareholders are normal people from the middle class. In other countries, most shareholders are from old rich families - which is why their economies cannot compete with the US successfully. On the page I linked, there is a breakdown of who owns US corporations. 14% is held by insiders - you would probably consider these people to be the "bad guys", CEOs and whatnot. 86% of the shares are owned by institutions, which are the mutual funds and pension funds that are in turn owned by the middle class.
So, a smallish number of people, say 1%, own about 14% of the US market. And most of those got there because they built the company from nothing. In other words, they deserve the money - they created the value.
In all seriousness, stop looking for the man trying to keep you down - he doesn't exist in the US (though he certainly does in other countries - not totally sure how the US avoided this, really). Instead try to build a company - come up with a value you can create, and then you get to keep a portion!
OK, fair enough. But now that we have the poor people argument out of the way - how can you be sure that marketing money spent is net negative to society? A drug noone ever knows about or uses is of no benefit to society. Especially a drug that in the old days would never have been perscribed by a doctor - a so-called lifestyle drug. Many (maybe most) doctors beleive that the patient is wrong most of the time. Your overwieght? Well, obviously that is because you eat too much - I won't perscribe something for a problem you can fix yourself, etc. Viagra? Who on Earth would proscribe Viagra? Who on Earth would see their doctor about that problem if they didn't know it could be solved?
Now I'm not totally sure that the maximum benefit to society is gained by having a larger marketing budget than a research budget - but I think the marketing budget is more important than doctors and scientists tend to think. And I am backed up by the fact that the pharmas that are advertising make a lot more money - which means that they either sold a lot more drugs or that consumers valued those drugs a lot more. Either way, it sounds like a net win to me...
But my point is that the poor are not harmed by that. The poor cannot afford the name brands they see (on the TV that they can't afford either, but that is a separate issue), so they are cruely forced to buy the same medication at a lower price! How is that wrong? The worst you can say about it is that the poor people may feel slighted, but if they really are getting the same medicine but cheaper who is harmed?
It is rather off topic, but I'll answer as best I can:
How much money is there in the United States?
This is actually harder to answer than you may think. There are many measurements of the amount of cash in an economy - M0, M1, M2, etc. Each includes/excludes various things: for example, banks take a deposit and then loan the money out again. So should that money be counted twice? It turns out that if you are trying to control an economy, the answer is "yes." And in the real world, instead of being twice, it is more like ten times (not understanding that is the direct cause of the great depression). M1 is about $1.5T, M3 is about $10T
To what percentage of currently existing, freely exchanged cash do corporations aspire to?
Unfortunately, this is the wrong question. Obviously, they aspire to all of it - but that is not useful, because you are erroneously assuming a zero sum game. The implicit contract that a corporation (or anyone else) has with society is this: you create value to society, and then we haggle over who gets to keep what fraction. In the US economy, there is a side deal that says: and in the end, society gets the value (primarily because we don't allow monopolies and powerful families indefinately, like they do in most of the world). The key issue here, though, is that corporations create value.
For example, you work and get paid $X. You are willing to trade your time for the $X because the money is worth more to you than the time. The corporation pays you because your time is worth more to them than the money. At the end of the day, the corporation is better off because of your labor (the value of the labor minus the value of your salary is a positive number), and you are better off with the money (the value of the money to you minus the value of the labor to you is a positive number). So society (which includes all the players) is better off - the only real argument is did you get more of the value or did the corporation? And to a certain point, that is only vanity anyway - who is to say which of you "deserves" more? You can make identical arguments about the sale of a product, like an Ipod - every transaction that does not involve coercion creates a net gain for society.
how many of the recessions have been caused by corporate greed?
None of them. As I have shown (I hope), corporations do not have any control over that. The Fed can cause recessions through bad monetary policy - they almost certainly directly caused the great depression (we have learned a lot since then, but we are still not infallible). After the Fed, the number two determinant of a recession is consumer confidence. When the herd gets restless, we have a recession - all the Fed can do is try to soften it. Really, corporations hate recessions even more than you do, and would prevent them if they could. (There is something to be said about business cycles actually strengthening the economy by threatening to cull the herd, but I don't see corporations being that altruistic...)
One final point, if you really think that corporations get an unfair percentage of the profits, then invest! That is by far the easiest way to change things in your favor. If you can't / don't want to do that, start your own company - that is another great way to change the equations in your favor.
Remember for every $1 you invest in stocks now, you can draw $1 per year for the rest of your life after 25 years! Do the math! (This assumes a 10% growth rate of the economy - 1.1^25=10.8, so you get 10.8 times return after 25 years at 10% - after that, you can draw out 10% each year [the growth of your money] without ever touching the principle.)
To show the sensitivity of this to the growth rate here are the years you have to wait to be getting yearly income equal to your initial investment at different rates:
5% - 65 years
6% - 50 years
7% - 40 years
8% - 33 years
9% - 2
So what? Are you saying that it is evil that the poor people of the world cannot afford to pay extra for a brand name? What kind of idiotic argument is that?
You are showing examples of people being dumb - that is a luxury, and the poor people of the world can't afford it...
The way I look at it is this: Society needs people that can turn resources (time, gold, etc) into useful things (digital watches, rockets, etc.). The problem is that society cannot tell who will be successful beforehand. So what society does is reward sucessful people with the resources to do even more stuff. So if you are good a inventing new rockets, you are given more money so that you can invent even more rockets. If you are good at inventing medicine, you are given more resources to invent even more medicine.
I mean really, do you think Steve Jobs is personally any better off at $5B than he was at $1B? People that show they can create value are given more resources so that they can create even more value. It doesn't always work this way, but that is the premise behind capitalism.
How about a rail gun placed on the side of a tall mountain?
;-}. It could probably be made to work, but you would still need a rocket engine to make your orbit not intersect Earth. (Think about it this way, your final orbit always has to include the point where accelaration stopped). I don't think you could use Earth's magnetic field to change much - though that would be interesting to study, at least. You might be able to use it to make your orbit not hit Earth, which would be a big win.
That is the clasic almost-reasonable suggestion. You are still going mach 25 in the atmosphere, which I still say ouch to
The real problem with such ideas is that you are competing against a rocket engine. At the current market levels, a rocket engine is pretty hard to beat - if you only fly a few times a year, your construction costs per flight are about 10% of the total project cost divided by the flight rate. For example, if you could build it for $10B, you need to generate $1B per year to cover construction costs. If you fly 10 times a year (which would be really hard to convince people of at this point), you would have to allocate $100M per launch for the construction costs. And then add to that whatever a launch costs incremently.
First, we have to prove the market exists. Then we can build "really big toys!"
And you hit it precisely on the head. The way to compete is not to compete. Offer something different, like packages in a specific time frame, guaranteed. Or be much more customer friendly, etc.
But let me ask you this, if the US postal service closed tomorrow, would that be good or bad for FedEx?
No, this is just the limit on the efficiency from the laws of thermodynamics.
No, I could have calculated the theoretical limit at 90.3%. The described rocket engine will get very close to that - rockets are by far the most efficient machines ever made by man. Look up losses for standard nozzle flows sometime - they are tiny! That said, this engine was never built, so who knows.
there's no way that the exhaust is at 50 C at the point when it loses contact with the nozzle
Um, so what is it going to do? I'm talking about a vacuum engine, obviously - so what is the exhaust going to do, just decide to ignore physics? The exhaust expands to fill the nozzle no matter how big the exit is - you just have to make it really long so that you do not get shock losses.
this is definitely not the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines
If you read carefully, I did not claim it was the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines. In fact, later in that same paragraph I gave the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines at 76% - and gave you a reference. So you will have to come back with a little more than "you're wrong", more like "I know the secret that makes you, NASA, and all of physics wrong!" The 99% is one measure of how close they come to ideal thermodynamic efficiency. The only other factors in this type of engine is friction losses in the nozzle (tiny for large engines - surface vs area effect) and imperfect flows (which is also very small for real engines).
The wasted energy is going into KE of the exhaust
To show why this is a dumb measure: The energy of the exhaust exactly equals the energy coming in with the propellants. The outside of the engine never sees any of the energy inside it, since the heat "leaking" from the chamber is put into the propellant and thrown back into the engine. So if you count KE of the exhaust as "waste", then all a rocket does is waste. (And of course, in a vacuum there is no heating of the atmosphere)
I believe what you are trying to get at is that the way to move something using the least amount of energy is to push off of the most massive thing available. So trains that use the Earth as their reaction mass are "more efficient" than aircraft which uses the atmosphere which are more efficient than spacecraft that have to push off of their own fuel. That is true, but is not "thermodynamic efficiency".
To prove it to you in a mind game, pretend that you could get some "unobtainium", which is as strong as you would like it to be and yet weighs very little. Build an engine, where you have a huge rocket nozzle attached to an arm that turns a generator. Once you turn on the engine, let it get up to about 4.5 km/s (that's why it is made from unobtainium), and then connect the generator.
The exhaust from the rocket nozzle is at rest in the frame of reference of the generator, and is 350 K. That is the exhaust temperature. The chamber temperature of the rocket engine, 3600 K, is the inlet temperature. So you now have a generator that is 90% efficient. If you want to calculate the power supplied, it is the thrust of the rocket times the velocity (in this case 4.5 km/s).
You can use the engine in many ways, so it is best to clarify what you mean by "efficiency". "Thermodynamic efficiency" is a very precise term, and a useful measure for engineering.
There is a little more to it than that - a key point being that it is impossible to "throw" something to orbit - you can give it altitude and velocity, but not in the right direction. (Essentially, either you throw it too hard and put it in escape or the orbit you threw it to intersects the Earth again). By "throwing" you can greatly decrease the strain/requirements put on your rocket engine, but you still will need a rocket engine.
The other thing I will say is that for reasonable structures, you need to fly through the lower atmosphere at mach 25. Ouch.
What makes this work is that the chamber temperature is way higher than can be contained by any materials that we can make - so they cool the chamber walls (which would be an efficiency loss) but they cool them with propellants (so that the energy lost is put back into the system). So the engine itself has virtually no losses - and if you put a large enough nozzle on it, you can take it to just above the boiling point of water. So the engine can go from 3300 C (the SSME combustion temperature) to about 50 C (nozzle exit is way below atmospheric pressure, so the boiling point of water is lower). Efficiency = 1 - 350/3600, >90%. Several engines like this were designed, but since it would only make sense on a very long term deep space mission, I don't think anything this efficient was ever really built.
As a more concrete example, the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) have a combustion efficiency of 99%. So the only thing that makes the total efficiency less than 99% is that the engines must operate in the atmosphere - so the nozzles cannot be too large (the exit pressure needs to be close to one atmosphere). The overall system efficiency of the SSME is 76%. More efficient engines have been made (look at the J-2 or any upper stage hydrogen engine), but this one everyone is familiar with.
Note that an inefficient rocket engine is a really bad idea - the SSME are 6.4 GW reactors, and are only a few meters long. Think about it - any losses in the engine (wasted heat) would need to be radiated away. What temperature would it have to be to radiate away 5% of 6.4 GW?!?
Um... all a rocket engine does is accelerate a high temperature gas - so the energy of the steam leaving the nozzle is not loss, it is the whole point of the engine.
Now, using that to accelarate am object may have useful or non-useful metrics. But it is hard to call that efficiency, though. (For example, accelarating a stationary object using a rocket engine takes more energy than picking the object up and throwing it. But we still don't try to throw the space shuttle into orbit for some reason...)
In fact, just FYI, there are several engines available now that convert heat energy into velocity at more than 90% efficiency - high expansion hydrogen based rocket engines! Really amazing devices, really.
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this.
Let me ask a question: at what point is it profitable to compete when your competition's profit is based on their ability to spend larger and larger amounts of someone else's money?
The more money Nasa spends on spaceflight, the harder it is for comercial flights to happen - who is going to invest in a business competing with the US government?
That said, I think the current Nasa management sees the problem, and is trying to avoid it. The launcher they are currently building is so large that it will never be profitable, even ignoring sunk costs. That leaves an opening for the little guys to shine on a per mission cost basis.
But never doubt - Nasa being there delays comercialization of space. Unfortunate, but true.
What's sad is that what he is saying is true, and is a very important part of dealing with the world effectively.
But nobody gets it, so they think it is funny. Please don't attempt anything important until you understand the statements you just ridiculed...
I take extreme offense that you have a (disparaging/humorous) word for Repugs but not for Demos? Demons? D-craps?
Honestly, what is the propper slur to use here, anyway?
The thing is - it is hard to put legal limits on the word "novel". By its very nature, you cannot predict what will be novel. The current law is "not obvious to someone with advanced knowlege of the art" - I don't see how you could improve that, and it really is not working. So perhaps the answer is to limit the number of patents to some number X, and then the law would be that each year only the X most novel concepts get patented. It might be easier to rank patents in their novelty rather than figure out what the heck novelty really is.
Well, they lose a lot of efficiency when the temperature difference becomes large. They still can work - we can make liquid hydrogen, which involves pumping heat from nearly liquid hydrogen into room temperature air. I think they just become non-economical at some point.
For an extreme example, let's say it is 200K outside (carbon dioxide is snowing down) and it is 300K inside, nice and toasty. This makes the efficiency some fraction of 1/(1-200/300)=3. So if your heat pump is closer than 33% of carnot efficiency, you would get a net gain - I believe most heat pump surpass that. However, when you factor in the initial cost of the heat pump you get a net loss at some point. You reach that point sooner when it is colder outside.
Correct - I just thought I'd mention it. Technically, that makes an electric heat pump the least expensive method of heating - but only if you ignore the initial investment, which is rather large.
Electric heat is always 100% efficient
This is not entirely true. Although it is seldom used this way (because it almost never recupes its cost), a heat pump can take the heat out of cold outside air and "pump" it into the warmer inside air - just like an air conditioner in reverse. Assuming that you get some fraction "k" of carnot efficiency, 1 joule of electricity can be move k/(1-Tout/Tin) joules of heat into the house. So a 50% carnot efficient heat pump operating between 270K outside and 300K inside moves 5 joules of heat for every one joule of electricity used - to say something useful in your notation, this would be a 500% efficient heater.
I don't know why everyone is saying that gas is so safe - I live in a house with a gas stove just once in my life. I came home after a vacation to a house so full of explosive gas that you couldn't breathe in it. The fire department came out (personally, I thought that was overkill) and cleared the building and let the gas dissapate.
It really does seem unsafe to me. You can say all you want about how impossible it is, but that won't change what actually happened to me, will it?
No you don't understand - if LA is washed away, we did get lucky!
The obvious answer is to disolve boiling lead into the ice water.
I knew it! A simple solution to the global warming sea level problem! Salt! We must salt all the ice in the arctic, for the good of humanity!
Someone, please think of the children! (They need salt too!)
You asked for some proof, I gave it to you. You then said that my proof was not valid, and you provided no proof of that assertion.
You need to realize that this is religion to you. You will not accept any proof I can give you, because you have an irrational belief. There is always a way to discount facts - but if you are doing that without any counter-proof, you are irrationally clinging to your original belief.
To put it simply, where is your evidence that food crops are more heat sensitive than every other plant on Earth?