...some economist seems to imply that the cost will be recouped within 5 years.
Sure, but that's because there was a tangible benefit to creating the Euro zone: lower transaction costs, for one thing. There is no such benefit to changing our currency. Making it harder to counterfeit is a benefit, but we're already taking steps to do that without radically changing our system.
Just think about the war in Iraq, more than $300bn and counting, and it doesn't look to me like the population of the US is starving, neither are the businesses collapsing.
The implication seems to be that any plan that doesn't cause widespread economic collapse is a bargain. Is that really what you meant?
He is Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. He was born in 65,000,000 BC in the village of the Cephalopods on the shores of Loch Shiel. And he is immortal.
Did anyone say that blind people aren't allowed to use cash? They certainly can - they simply have to get a little help or be a little ingenious. Some ways are to mark the bills by putting pin pricks in them, or keeping different types of bills in different pockets, or sticking little adhesive tabs to them. You could probably come up with dozens of methods if you gave it some thought. Failing all this, they can always just ask the sales clerk for help - most people are willing to help a blind person, especially if they're already in a service position.
And for crying out loud, if every matter of inconvenience were a major moral issue, I could come up with any number of inconveniences to whine about. There's no question being blind is inconvenient. Changing our entire currency is far more so, though.
I never said that I never use cash; I said (actually, OP said) that it was possible to use no (or very little) cash. All the examples you gave are quite easy to pay for with a debit card. (The newspaper is the most problematic one, although bookstores and convenience stores sell them and take debit cards. And I should note that you aren't buying newspapers from street corners if you're blind.)
So here's the deal. On one hand, we can spend huge amounts of money to change our money system. This means changing money readers in vending machines, retraining sales clerks, changing our printing systems, dealing with fraud during the changeover, etc., etc. It's simply a huge project. On the other hand, we could ask the blind, who have been dealing with this without the benefit of ubiquitous debit cards ever since paper money has been around, to keep dealing with it in an environment more convenient for them than ever before. Maybe I'm hardhearted, but this seems like a really simple choice. We shouldn't have to make huge changes to accommodate every handicap people have.
Not at all - he's simply saying that because one can get by pretty easily these days without using cash at all, then changing our entire system of money seems a bit extreme. I admit I find this a pretty compelling argument.
Right - 32,000 states, which is only 15 bits of information. Get it? You're confusing states with bits. There are always vastly more states than bits (since #states = 2^(#bits)). Think about this a little bit before posting further, please.
I realize I'm breaking a cardinal rule of Internet debate here, but a similar case could be made about Hitler. When Hitler assumed power in January, 1933, he had significant support in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many companies worked with the Nazis. They were allowed to remilitarize without interference. It was only after they started invading countries that we got upset. (Even after the first invasion or two, Chamberlain declared, "Peace in our time!" It took the invasion of Poland to start a widespread war. I shudder to think what would have happened if he'd stuck to gassing Jews and other undesirables in Germany and hadn't pursued lebensraum.) Furthermore, we allied ourselves with the undemocratic tyrant Stalin.
What's the lesson here? I think it's just that countries sometimes support bad guys in order to go after worse guys. It's as true in office politics as in geopolitics.
Thank you - I was going to point out this obvious omission. When asked whether Noether was indeed a great woman mathematician, Edward Landau replied, "I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear." Can you get geekier than that?
You are right, you can make a black hole of any size. But they lose mass quickly if they're small. From the Wikipedia article: "A 1 second-lived black hole has a mass of 228,000 kg." This is only about half the maximum take-off weight of a 747, so my guess that it would last only milliseconds was wrong - it would last over a second before exploding into gamma rays.
Re:teaching a man to fish
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Free Geek Robbed
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· Score: 5, Funny
You mean like: Give a man a Linux box and he'll be confused for a day; Teach a man Linux and he'll be confused for the rest of his life?
...except for very few - if any - primordial black holes, and even then, after swallowing Pluto they'd definitely be more massive...
I'm being nitpicky, but isn't it the case that any black hole that was only as massive as a 747 would evaporate in milliseconds? IIRC Hawking radiation takes care of small black holes at a rate inversely proportional to the surface area of the event horizon.
Sorry, I didn't make my point very clearly - the fact that the Moon is outside the Van Allen belts is relevant because humans have to travel through them to get there. So travel time is important since the belts are a region of high radiation intensity, so the slower you travel, the more shielding you need.
OK, but that's an enormous friggin' asteroid. Your estimates put the cost at around $1000 per metric ton, which is about 0.01% of current launch costs into LEO (roughly $10,000 per kg). Sounds like a bargain! We could move a smaller, one-billion-ton asteroid into orbit for "only" $1 trillion, which, while high, is actually a conceivable value - it's less than 10% of the GDP of the United States for one year.
The back of my envelope is full - how about yours?
So move it six times closer and put it in LEO. The lunar tide would still dominant by a factor of a few thousand.
...falling into the atmosphere...
Atmospheric drag drops quickly with orbital distance. Just pick an orbit that won't decay for a few thousand (or million) years - that's still not very high.
But it matters for people. As does the fact that it's outside the Van Allen belts. The cost in reaction mass is equal to the total delta v, but the cost in time is still dependent on distance.
Slashdot Mirror
Kiwipedia: Your source for all things New Zealandish.
How do you know it is? Maybe people drove less because of An Inconvenient Truth.
And they can even get auto insurance!
Sure, but that's because there was a tangible benefit to creating the Euro zone: lower transaction costs, for one thing. There is no such benefit to changing our currency. Making it harder to counterfeit is a benefit, but we're already taking steps to do that without radically changing our system.
The implication seems to be that any plan that doesn't cause widespread economic collapse is a bargain. Is that really what you meant?
He is Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. He was born in 65,000,000 BC in the village of the Cephalopods on the shores of Loch Shiel. And he is immortal.
Yes, and it cost around $100 billion. Not really a great argument in favor.
Also, changing bills and coins regularly makes it easier to counterfeit, not harder. Think about this for two seconds.
Did anyone say that blind people aren't allowed to use cash? They certainly can - they simply have to get a little help or be a little ingenious. Some ways are to mark the bills by putting pin pricks in them, or keeping different types of bills in different pockets, or sticking little adhesive tabs to them. You could probably come up with dozens of methods if you gave it some thought. Failing all this, they can always just ask the sales clerk for help - most people are willing to help a blind person, especially if they're already in a service position.
And for crying out loud, if every matter of inconvenience were a major moral issue, I could come up with any number of inconveniences to whine about. There's no question being blind is inconvenient. Changing our entire currency is far more so, though.
What about a pilot sitting in the pilot's seat?
I have never, not once, experienced a time when I needed to use paper money but couldn't read it. You can choose not to believe this if you wish.
As for the second part of your post, it's just silly anti-Americanism that I'm not going to stoop to responding to.
I never said that I never use cash; I said (actually, OP said) that it was possible to use no (or very little) cash. All the examples you gave are quite easy to pay for with a debit card. (The newspaper is the most problematic one, although bookstores and convenience stores sell them and take debit cards. And I should note that you aren't buying newspapers from street corners if you're blind.)
So here's the deal. On one hand, we can spend huge amounts of money to change our money system. This means changing money readers in vending machines, retraining sales clerks, changing our printing systems, dealing with fraud during the changeover, etc., etc. It's simply a huge project. On the other hand, we could ask the blind, who have been dealing with this without the benefit of ubiquitous debit cards ever since paper money has been around, to keep dealing with it in an environment more convenient for them than ever before. Maybe I'm hardhearted, but this seems like a really simple choice. We shouldn't have to make huge changes to accommodate every handicap people have.
Not at all - he's simply saying that because one can get by pretty easily these days without using cash at all, then changing our entire system of money seems a bit extreme. I admit I find this a pretty compelling argument.
Hey, no arguments here - I didn't really mean to compare the two that way.
Right - 32,000 states, which is only 15 bits of information. Get it? You're confusing states with bits. There are always vastly more states than bits (since #states = 2^(#bits)). Think about this a little bit before posting further, please.
I realize I'm breaking a cardinal rule of Internet debate here, but a similar case could be made about Hitler. When Hitler assumed power in January, 1933, he had significant support in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many companies worked with the Nazis. They were allowed to remilitarize without interference. It was only after they started invading countries that we got upset. (Even after the first invasion or two, Chamberlain declared, "Peace in our time!" It took the invasion of Poland to start a widespread war. I shudder to think what would have happened if he'd stuck to gassing Jews and other undesirables in Germany and hadn't pursued lebensraum.) Furthermore, we allied ourselves with the undemocratic tyrant Stalin.
What's the lesson here? I think it's just that countries sometimes support bad guys in order to go after worse guys. It's as true in office politics as in geopolitics.
But that's not a problem in computer science - it's a problem in software engineering. :P
Thank you - I was going to point out this obvious omission. When asked whether Noether was indeed a great woman mathematician, Edward Landau replied, "I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear." Can you get geekier than that?
I would like to suggest an improvement to your sig...
SELECT i FROM team
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You are right, you can make a black hole of any size. But they lose mass quickly if they're small. From the Wikipedia article: "A 1 second-lived black hole has a mass of 228,000 kg." This is only about half the maximum take-off weight of a 747, so my guess that it would last only milliseconds was wrong - it would last over a second before exploding into gamma rays.
You mean like: Give a man a Linux box and he'll be confused for a day; Teach a man Linux and he'll be confused for the rest of his life?
I kid, of course... ;)
I'm being nitpicky, but isn't it the case that any black hole that was only as massive as a 747 would evaporate in milliseconds? IIRC Hawking radiation takes care of small black holes at a rate inversely proportional to the surface area of the event horizon.
Sorry, I didn't make my point very clearly - the fact that the Moon is outside the Van Allen belts is relevant because humans have to travel through them to get there. So travel time is important since the belts are a region of high radiation intensity, so the slower you travel, the more shielding you need.
OK, but that's an enormous friggin' asteroid. Your estimates put the cost at around $1000 per metric ton, which is about 0.01% of current launch costs into LEO (roughly $10,000 per kg). Sounds like a bargain! We could move a smaller, one-billion-ton asteroid into orbit for "only" $1 trillion, which, while high, is actually a conceivable value - it's less than 10% of the GDP of the United States for one year.
The back of my envelope is full - how about yours?
So move it six times closer and put it in LEO. The lunar tide would still dominant by a factor of a few thousand.
Atmospheric drag drops quickly with orbital distance. Just pick an orbit that won't decay for a few thousand (or million) years - that's still not very high.
Yep. Funniest thing I ever read on Slashdot.
But it matters for people. As does the fact that it's outside the Van Allen belts. The cost in reaction mass is equal to the total delta v, but the cost in time is still dependent on distance.