I did not say the entire economy of Germany would be devastated by the loss of the US military presence. What I said, and what is true for any economy surrounding a long-term base, is that the local economy would be devastated for a period of time by the abrupt withdrawl of so many people who require so much support infrastructure spend so much money in the local economy.
The EU currently holds powers somewhat similar to those which were originally envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution for the US Federal government, but the reality is that if the EU tried to seize the kind of power and control the US Federal government holds today, most of the EU member states would be riotting in the streets.
Every time there's an upgrade of any part of the EU's authority over individual states, there's a backlash against that. That backlash was prominent when Ireland rejected the Treaty of Lisbon 53 - 47%.
The EU is far more than a simple market enabler, and it will be the undoing - for better or for worse - of the sovereignty of all member nations.
What's interesting about the Euro is that the currency has an additional layer of abstraction from the debt. The US dollar comes from one country, whose debt (and looming debt increases) have shaken the confidence of currency market traders.
In the case of the EU, a handful of irresponsible members may run enormous debts without the Euro actually suffering any major crisis of confidence since there may be a number of strong, stable economies within the EU keeping it afloat. Something else to look at for the Euro is whether there's a coming debt hike from non-discretionary spending areas within EU countries. That, more than anything, is killing the US dollar.
Interesting as well is the fact that the Euro's acceptance across the globe has given currency investors another safe harbor aside from the US dollar in which to invest. Prior to the Euro, no matter how bad the US economy looked, you really had few options on the currency market for something more stable. With the Euro's arrival, the US dollar now has real competition, and is even more sensitive to problems in the US economy.
Were I a currency investor right now, I would be pulling everything out of the US dollar and plugging it right into the Euro for the forseeable future.
"before Bush had a chance to run our economy into the ground."
Don't kid yourself - Bush is part of the problem, but most certainly isn't all of it. First of all, the.com bubble bursting was no President's fault. If you want to attribute it to a President, you'd have to look at Clinton (at the end of whose second term the bubble's burst began), but in truth it was not his fault. That came from speculative rich people looking to get much richer and investing against all the classical economic rules they assumed to be null and void in the 'new economy'.
That is, until their money went buh-bye en masse and the bubble popped.
No, if you want to look at why the economy is tanking, it's because of the dollar. If you want to look at why the dollar is tanking, you have to look at worldwide confidence in the dollar (which indirectly determines its value via the currency markets). If you want to look at why worldwide confidence in the dollar is tanking, you have to look at our current and projected debt.
We're currently somewhere around $10.4 Trillion in debt (this is roughly accurate based on nation debt tracked by Treasury and accounting for the housing bailout + the 2-year stimulus package costs). Now, our absurd spending via normal channels aside (military, etc), the place to really see what's happening is the non-discretionary spending.
Intragovernmental Holdings is a timebomb that's ticking down to 0. If you want to see why our dollar is failing on the markets, and why our economy is suffering because of it, you need only look at the projections for unfunded entitlements over the course of the next 20 years to see plainly that we're on course to default on our debts. The second largest expense behind military spending right now is interest on the national debt. In just a few short years, that's going to become the number one spending item, and all the spending cuts in the world in discretionary spending won't put a dent in it.
What we have to come to grips with is the fact that Social Security and Medicare are failed experiments. They're unsustainable, and will bankrupt the nation. Both will end within the lifetime of those in high school today no matter what we do. The only question is whether we'll default on the national debt before we wake up to the fact that they must end.
It's just simple numbers. Go look at the numbers yourself to see our path to failure.
I'm glad the EU is only the biggest and strongest economy in the World right now, with the best Education and Health systems.. Maybe one day we'll be a "full" First-World country like the US, you know with a 482 billion dollars deficit, poverty everywhere and people unable to cure themselves. Please show us the way, you, young, brash, adventurous, immortal, wise and powerful nation...
A semi-first-world European.
The EU is not a country - but rather a union of countries (hence the name). If you get to add up the economies of a group of countries and call it the largest, I'm going to pick out a bunch of countries, group them together, and call that the largest economy.
Secondly, the US deficit is not $482 Billion, but actually around $10.4 Trillion. That number grows incredibly higher when you account for unfunded entitlement growth through the next 20 years. The causes of this are the pseudo-socialized medical and retirement programs we've been running for a while (primarily the latter in that group), and our massive ongoing worldwide military committments. Now, the former is entirely our fault. We hatched both of those terribly misguided plans, and both are helping to bankrupt us.
As for the other major problem in our spending plan - the worldwide military commitments - well, those are mostly thanks to NATO and the UN, and our willingness to do their bidding and foot the bill. We've been in Korea since the 50s, paying for equipment, manpower, training, etc. We've been in Germany and Japan since WWII, supporting the local economies - essentially - under the guise of providing forward basing for other (unnecessary) operations (generally supporting UN or NATO missions). Iraq in 1990 was a UN mission to push Saddam out of Kuwait. Somalia 1993 was a UN humanitarian mission. The current Iraq war is another UN mission (granted our genius of a President pushed hard to get resolutions passed supporting the actual fighting, but it was based on previous UN resolutions).
All-in-all, US military personnel are deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, mostly in nations where UN or NATO obligations exist for things like humanitarian missions (ie delivering food to war-torn places) or security missions (pulling apart combatants). Almost 370,000 active-duty personnel and many reserves are spread out through those 150 countries. All told, we spend about $625 Billion a year on our military. Currently, about $320 Billion of that is on ongoing operations including Iraq and Afghanistan.
So if you'd really like us to get back to being a healthier nation, you're going to need to start supplying and running those missions entirely on your own, or drop them altogether. Now, since the largest economic superpower in the world can't afford to do it all, we're probably going to have to assume that no one can, and many of those people will just have to wait until their number comes up for help to arrive. In the meantime, we need to end our pseudo-socialized entitlements before they bankrupt us and get back to the capitalist system that made this country the powerful nation it has been.
If we stay on the path we're on right now, we may just be asking you guys for help pretty soon, and that's just sad.
It's actually in the nature of governments to behave this way. That's why libertarian-minded folks hold a distrustful view of government and work to keep it contained to just the functions where it's absolutely necessary. That helps to keep it from interfering in other areas.
Of course, we're often ridiculed for this; as if the preservation of rights were some absurd concept in need of ridicule.
That is a feature you find across the globe. Plenty of 'everyday' people haven't the slightest clue what's happening outside their own neighborhood.
Interestingly, despite the extensive involvement the United States has throughout the world in business, humanitarian, and other areas, it's still generalized that we're all clueless about the rest of the world. I'm not entirely certain why that falsehood spread like wildfire, but I am pretty sure that the comparisons to the United States and Rome (speaking to the fall thereof the latter) are made out of sheer jealousy and ego; as if to say that no one could sustain more success than they, and that if the Americans have, they must be headed for a fall.
Funny, we heard the same dire warnings in the 70s. Only back then it was because the world was on the verge of freezing over.
Heard the same dire warnings in the 90s. Only then it was because the world was on the verge of burning up.
Now we've got dire warnings again in the present. Only now it's because we're on the verge of running out of oil.
Go ahead and tax, tax, tax, tax the "wealthy" right out of the country. Keeping hitting the people who invest in small businesses, run farms, etc. Because kneejerk reactions like that always work best...
Maybe if you work hard enough, we can all be equally poor with a government so far in debt that it starts defaulting. Keep up the good work.
Amusingly enough, no I don't. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about - just that I always keep a lean military except when it's needed. Building up just wastes money.
Now, something I did leave out in previous posts was that I'm an early technology adopter in many cases. I bought a second-gen HP CD burner for about $300 when nobody even knew what that was and the discs were $4 - $5 each. I bought a first-gen DVD-RW (also HP, and despite the promises, it was never updated to do DVD-R) for around $500. I spent about $550 on a first-gen 17" LCD monitor when those were brand new.
However, each of those (and other, similar) purchases were small-scale buys of what I fully understood to be experimental gadgets. My problem with the whole solar/wind/etc power generation as a replacement for typical grid configurations comes into play when it's someone looking to save money vs someone who wants new toys (and can afford them). If someone's complaining about the cost of electric, they almost certainly cannot afford the massive investment, upkeep, and replacement costs of new, experimental, rapidly changing technologies.
Someone who spends $400 on an HD-DVD player is probably going to be ok when Blu-Ray wins and their player is a paperweight. But what of those who spend $12,000 converting their home to solar because they can't keep up with their electric bill increases? What are they to do when it's found out 5 years down the road that the materials used in their panels wear out prematurely and rapidly drop in efficiency? What are they to do when the untested support equipment needs maintenance all the time?
And I have the same issue with the various fuel-combustion engine replacements out there today. How are all the Prius owners going to handle it when their batteries konk out due to unforseen issues with the system? The ones who bought the thing as a toy will simply have the local shop do whatever it is they do to make it go again. The ones who bought them because they couldn't keep up with gasoline price increases? They're stuck paying higher car loan payments AND higher maintenance costs on their experimental toy cars.
My problem is not with new technology and it's not even with the people who buy it. My problem is when early adoption is marketed as a way to save money. 90% of the time, early adoption is a death sentence for spare cash. You take big risks picking up high-cost emerging technologies, and if you can't afford to see it all go down in flames, then it really sucks to be you 90% of the time. I no problem with those who understand the risks and who can afford to take the hit choosing to become early adopters. Those people are needed to hammer out bugs in real-world environments so that second, third, and successive generations of products can be refined, improved, and standardized for mass adoption.
But it really pisses me off to see early adoption marketed to those who really can't afford it and are too stupid to recognize that as some kind of money-saving opportunity. Solar, geo-thermal, wind, hydrogen cars, cars that run on water/garbage/childrens' dreams, etc are expensive, non-standardized, experimental, subject to rapid development/redevelopment, and less reliable/maintainable than existing, proven technologies.
Let the millionaires play with these toys until their hearts' content, but stop trying to prod the average Joe to dump his last dime (and a bunch of dimes he had to borrow with interest) into experimental crap that's being radically altered all the time by convincing his stupid self that it's a guaranteed money-saver. You'll know when he's ready for it because it'll be down to refinements - not radical underlying technological alterations - and cheap enough that he can really afford to buy it and to keep it.
Keeping in mind that 90% of the people who invest vast sums as early adopters "rake in" nothing but overpriced experimental toys, I again thank you. If you find a way to make money off of it, more power to you, but recognize that almost everyone who invests early on in emerging tech (especially when competing versions or routes to the same end are available) gets nothing but the fun of trying out something earlier than other people.
Be it CD burners, DVD burners, VCRs, LCD monitors, televisions, or any other tech you like, ask most of the people who bought the first-gen if what they got matched the cost:benefit ratio of the fourth, fifth, or tenth generation.
Not sure where you're from, but where I'm from (NJ in the United States), the answer to this in any context other than 'as you went backwards in time' is most certainly "no".
You mean trade kwh for kwh + transmission and operating costs, right?
No, of course not, the equipment doing the transmission didn't cost anything, the people maintaining the transmission equipment work for free, as do the people running the power company, right?
I just love how people who claim to be "fighting for the little people" want to put so many of those little people out of the job by killing the company they work for.
Cool, you do that, I'll keep using my MUCH cheaper and more efficient oil/gas setup until that happens.
Then I'll switch to your solution at 1/10th the price you paid, get something 10 times more efficient than you have, and have half the problems you have because you (and those like you) spent all that money buying up an untested, unproven, inefficient system.
First of all, drop the "it's so simple a child could understand it" attitude. In a room full of geniuses (ie 120+ IQs), maybe half can have this stuff explained to them on a better than absurdly simplified level. Get deep into the mathematics and you're down to about 5%.
Secondly, "what the hell is so weird" about what you just talked about?
Gee, I dunno, how about the fact that you have to combine things that can't exist to get something that can?
Yes, I realize that mathematically, manifesting energies in various forms makes wonderful sense. To the casual observer, however, much of QM is anti-intuitive and difficult at best to understand. To the average Joe on the street, most of physics is completely impossible to understand, unless you're going to dumb it down to 4-year-old terminology (and lose all nuance and consequence along the way).
"Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, fertilizing the biota and resulting in the increased green side effect."
So if we get more plant growth, that's global warming. And if we get higher temperatures, that's global warming. And if we get more hurricanes, that's global warming. More tornadoes? Global warming. And if it hails in Tokyo? Global warming. Less vegitation? Global warming.
Higher temps, lower temps, more storms, less storms, higher humidity, lower humidity, floods and droughts, and everything else - no matter what's going on around you, it's all due to global warming.
Sounds a lot like the stuff of internal memos at a pharmaceutical company to me. "Whatever's going on with you, our new miracle drug Xylamiaciliacin will make it all better"
Two major North-South highways? Are we still trying to keep 295 a secret? For southern Jersey folks, the Turnpike's for tourists and suckers. Unless you're heading north of Princeton, there's no reason to touch that cop-infested pothole fantasy road.
Still though, if you took away the areas near NYC, you'd have a hard time finding another state in the nation with a road system as good as New Jersey's.
Unfortunately, the roads within the Elizabeth-Paterson-Weehawken area resemble some sort of Escherian Triangle of Hell wherein you can see your destination literally right across the street, but must wander aimlessly for 30 minutes or more before stumbling quite accidentally across the series of correct access roads which will allow you to arrive there. Street names and route numbers seem paradoxically interwoven in some impossible fabric of pain, while unnamed and unmarked (and in many cases, seemingly unpaved) access roads vere wildly in every direction while menacing you with signs which threaten to take you to every place but the one you want, often with tolls along the way for your troubles.
Anyone who would like an example of this, I invite you to plot a course from the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, NJ to the Mill Creek Mall in Secaucus, NJ. I suggest you get help from Commander Data. Being a mere two miles apart, one can well imagine this being an easy task, but looking at the final result, one can't help but wonder if the road system in that area was an attempt at humor.
The Manhattan Project took some bleeding edge mathematical theories and transformed them into two different types of nuclear weapons which were used to end World War II. How such a stunning success could be viewed as anything other than functional is mind-boggling.
As for the bomb inventory after the war, that wasn't particularly relevant. We could have built more bombs in a few weeks if it became necessary, but the cost simply wasn't justified with the war being over. The Soviets didn't know the time-table for constructing new bombs and didn't know our inventory. With how well the project itself was guarded, and the incredible consequences of being wrong, there was no chance the Soviets were going to provoke the US until they had bombs of their own which could be used as nuclear deterrants.
The military can often push the boundaries of technology far more rapidly than those inspired purely by curiosity. The military sees only an objective and plans to achieve it. It pushes ahead toward that objective regardless of any failures or problems unless and until it becomes obvious that said objective is either impossible to reach or is not worth the effort.
There's something to be said for military-inspired scientific work. Look at how quickly the Manhattan Project took some then-wild and crazy scientific speculation and turned it into a functional technology. If you'd told scientific spectators what they were planning to do at the start of the project and the timeframe for completion, they'd be laughing at the author as some sort of ignorant fool who had no idea of the kinds of technical and scientific challenges that lay ahead. Of course, the beauty of the military was that it didn't give a damn about the challenges - it wanted its bomb.
Which, if it becomes popular among them, could trigger guys and women to break down a lot of romance in favor of demanding a bloodtest (eg Gattaca) in order to determine whether their new love interest is who (and what) they claim to be.
Yes, I understand the appeal to transexuals. I can only hope they have the self-restraint not to use such a thing.
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I did not say the entire economy of Germany would be devastated by the loss of the US military presence. What I said, and what is true for any economy surrounding a long-term base, is that the local economy would be devastated for a period of time by the abrupt withdrawl of so many people who require so much support infrastructure spend so much money in the local economy.
I said nothing radical; I spoke common sense.
You realize, of course, that the local economy would be devastated for quite some time, yes?
Is your hatred of Americans so great that you would happily watch your own people suffer just to have us off your soil?
The EU currently holds powers somewhat similar to those which were originally envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution for the US Federal government, but the reality is that if the EU tried to seize the kind of power and control the US Federal government holds today, most of the EU member states would be riotting in the streets.
Every time there's an upgrade of any part of the EU's authority over individual states, there's a backlash against that. That backlash was prominent when Ireland rejected the Treaty of Lisbon 53 - 47%.
The EU is far more than a simple market enabler, and it will be the undoing - for better or for worse - of the sovereignty of all member nations.
But again, the EU is not a country.
What's interesting about the Euro is that the currency has an additional layer of abstraction from the debt. The US dollar comes from one country, whose debt (and looming debt increases) have shaken the confidence of currency market traders.
In the case of the EU, a handful of irresponsible members may run enormous debts without the Euro actually suffering any major crisis of confidence since there may be a number of strong, stable economies within the EU keeping it afloat. Something else to look at for the Euro is whether there's a coming debt hike from non-discretionary spending areas within EU countries. That, more than anything, is killing the US dollar.
Interesting as well is the fact that the Euro's acceptance across the globe has given currency investors another safe harbor aside from the US dollar in which to invest. Prior to the Euro, no matter how bad the US economy looked, you really had few options on the currency market for something more stable. With the Euro's arrival, the US dollar now has real competition, and is even more sensitive to problems in the US economy.
Were I a currency investor right now, I would be pulling everything out of the US dollar and plugging it right into the Euro for the forseeable future.
"before Bush had a chance to run our economy into the ground."
Don't kid yourself - Bush is part of the problem, but most certainly isn't all of it. First of all, the .com bubble bursting was no President's fault. If you want to attribute it to a President, you'd have to look at Clinton (at the end of whose second term the bubble's burst began), but in truth it was not his fault. That came from speculative rich people looking to get much richer and investing against all the classical economic rules they assumed to be null and void in the 'new economy'.
That is, until their money went buh-bye en masse and the bubble popped.
No, if you want to look at why the economy is tanking, it's because of the dollar. If you want to look at why the dollar is tanking, you have to look at worldwide confidence in the dollar (which indirectly determines its value via the currency markets). If you want to look at why worldwide confidence in the dollar is tanking, you have to look at our current and projected debt.
We're currently somewhere around $10.4 Trillion in debt (this is roughly accurate based on nation debt tracked by Treasury and accounting for the housing bailout + the 2-year stimulus package costs). Now, our absurd spending via normal channels aside (military, etc), the place to really see what's happening is the non-discretionary spending.
Intragovernmental Holdings is a timebomb that's ticking down to 0. If you want to see why our dollar is failing on the markets, and why our economy is suffering because of it, you need only look at the projections for unfunded entitlements over the course of the next 20 years to see plainly that we're on course to default on our debts. The second largest expense behind military spending right now is interest on the national debt. In just a few short years, that's going to become the number one spending item, and all the spending cuts in the world in discretionary spending won't put a dent in it.
What we have to come to grips with is the fact that Social Security and Medicare are failed experiments. They're unsustainable, and will bankrupt the nation. Both will end within the lifetime of those in high school today no matter what we do. The only question is whether we'll default on the national debt before we wake up to the fact that they must end.
It's just simple numbers. Go look at the numbers yourself to see our path to failure.
I'm glad the EU is only the biggest and strongest economy in the World right now, with the best Education and Health systems.. Maybe one day we'll be a "full" First-World country like the US, you know with a 482 billion dollars deficit, poverty everywhere and people unable to cure themselves. Please show us the way, you, young, brash, adventurous, immortal, wise and powerful nation...
A semi-first-world European.
The EU is not a country - but rather a union of countries (hence the name). If you get to add up the economies of a group of countries and call it the largest, I'm going to pick out a bunch of countries, group them together, and call that the largest economy.
Secondly, the US deficit is not $482 Billion, but actually around $10.4 Trillion. That number grows incredibly higher when you account for unfunded entitlement growth through the next 20 years. The causes of this are the pseudo-socialized medical and retirement programs we've been running for a while (primarily the latter in that group), and our massive ongoing worldwide military committments. Now, the former is entirely our fault. We hatched both of those terribly misguided plans, and both are helping to bankrupt us.
As for the other major problem in our spending plan - the worldwide military commitments - well, those are mostly thanks to NATO and the UN, and our willingness to do their bidding and foot the bill. We've been in Korea since the 50s, paying for equipment, manpower, training, etc. We've been in Germany and Japan since WWII, supporting the local economies - essentially - under the guise of providing forward basing for other (unnecessary) operations (generally supporting UN or NATO missions). Iraq in 1990 was a UN mission to push Saddam out of Kuwait. Somalia 1993 was a UN humanitarian mission. The current Iraq war is another UN mission (granted our genius of a President pushed hard to get resolutions passed supporting the actual fighting, but it was based on previous UN resolutions).
All-in-all, US military personnel are deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, mostly in nations where UN or NATO obligations exist for things like humanitarian missions (ie delivering food to war-torn places) or security missions (pulling apart combatants). Almost 370,000 active-duty personnel and many reserves are spread out through those 150 countries. All told, we spend about $625 Billion a year on our military. Currently, about $320 Billion of that is on ongoing operations including Iraq and Afghanistan.
So if you'd really like us to get back to being a healthier nation, you're going to need to start supplying and running those missions entirely on your own, or drop them altogether. Now, since the largest economic superpower in the world can't afford to do it all, we're probably going to have to assume that no one can, and many of those people will just have to wait until their number comes up for help to arrive. In the meantime, we need to end our pseudo-socialized entitlements before they bankrupt us and get back to the capitalist system that made this country the powerful nation it has been.
If we stay on the path we're on right now, we may just be asking you guys for help pretty soon, and that's just sad.
It's actually in the nature of governments to behave this way. That's why libertarian-minded folks hold a distrustful view of government and work to keep it contained to just the functions where it's absolutely necessary. That helps to keep it from interfering in other areas.
Of course, we're often ridiculed for this; as if the preservation of rights were some absurd concept in need of ridicule.
That is a feature you find across the globe. Plenty of 'everyday' people haven't the slightest clue what's happening outside their own neighborhood.
Interestingly, despite the extensive involvement the United States has throughout the world in business, humanitarian, and other areas, it's still generalized that we're all clueless about the rest of the world. I'm not entirely certain why that falsehood spread like wildfire, but I am pretty sure that the comparisons to the United States and Rome (speaking to the fall thereof the latter) are made out of sheer jealousy and ego; as if to say that no one could sustain more success than they, and that if the Americans have, they must be headed for a fall.
"If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
If it stops moving, subsidize it."
Funny, we heard the same dire warnings in the 70s. Only back then it was because the world was on the verge of freezing over.
Heard the same dire warnings in the 90s. Only then it was because the world was on the verge of burning up.
Now we've got dire warnings again in the present. Only now it's because we're on the verge of running out of oil.
Go ahead and tax, tax, tax, tax the "wealthy" right out of the country. Keeping hitting the people who invest in small businesses, run farms, etc. Because kneejerk reactions like that always work best...
Maybe if you work hard enough, we can all be equally poor with a government so far in debt that it starts defaulting. Keep up the good work.
Amusingly enough, no I don't. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about - just that I always keep a lean military except when it's needed. Building up just wastes money.
Now, something I did leave out in previous posts was that I'm an early technology adopter in many cases. I bought a second-gen HP CD burner for about $300 when nobody even knew what that was and the discs were $4 - $5 each. I bought a first-gen DVD-RW (also HP, and despite the promises, it was never updated to do DVD-R) for around $500. I spent about $550 on a first-gen 17" LCD monitor when those were brand new.
However, each of those (and other, similar) purchases were small-scale buys of what I fully understood to be experimental gadgets. My problem with the whole solar/wind/etc power generation as a replacement for typical grid configurations comes into play when it's someone looking to save money vs someone who wants new toys (and can afford them). If someone's complaining about the cost of electric, they almost certainly cannot afford the massive investment, upkeep, and replacement costs of new, experimental, rapidly changing technologies.
Someone who spends $400 on an HD-DVD player is probably going to be ok when Blu-Ray wins and their player is a paperweight. But what of those who spend $12,000 converting their home to solar because they can't keep up with their electric bill increases? What are they to do when it's found out 5 years down the road that the materials used in their panels wear out prematurely and rapidly drop in efficiency? What are they to do when the untested support equipment needs maintenance all the time?
And I have the same issue with the various fuel-combustion engine replacements out there today. How are all the Prius owners going to handle it when their batteries konk out due to unforseen issues with the system? The ones who bought the thing as a toy will simply have the local shop do whatever it is they do to make it go again. The ones who bought them because they couldn't keep up with gasoline price increases? They're stuck paying higher car loan payments AND higher maintenance costs on their experimental toy cars.
My problem is not with new technology and it's not even with the people who buy it. My problem is when early adoption is marketed as a way to save money. 90% of the time, early adoption is a death sentence for spare cash. You take big risks picking up high-cost emerging technologies, and if you can't afford to see it all go down in flames, then it really sucks to be you 90% of the time. I no problem with those who understand the risks and who can afford to take the hit choosing to become early adopters. Those people are needed to hammer out bugs in real-world environments so that second, third, and successive generations of products can be refined, improved, and standardized for mass adoption.
But it really pisses me off to see early adoption marketed to those who really can't afford it and are too stupid to recognize that as some kind of money-saving opportunity. Solar, geo-thermal, wind, hydrogen cars, cars that run on water/garbage/childrens' dreams, etc are expensive, non-standardized, experimental, subject to rapid development/redevelopment, and less reliable/maintainable than existing, proven technologies.
Let the millionaires play with these toys until their hearts' content, but stop trying to prod the average Joe to dump his last dime (and a bunch of dimes he had to borrow with interest) into experimental crap that's being radically altered all the time by convincing his stupid self that it's a guaranteed money-saver. You'll know when he's ready for it because it'll be down to refinements - not radical underlying technological alterations - and cheap enough that he can really afford to buy it and to keep it.
Good info, but how did you get home from the mall?
Keeping in mind that 90% of the people who invest vast sums as early adopters "rake in" nothing but overpriced experimental toys, I again thank you. If you find a way to make money off of it, more power to you, but recognize that almost everyone who invests early on in emerging tech (especially when competing versions or routes to the same end are available) gets nothing but the fun of trying out something earlier than other people.
Be it CD burners, DVD burners, VCRs, LCD monitors, televisions, or any other tech you like, ask most of the people who bought the first-gen if what they got matched the cost:benefit ratio of the fourth, fifth, or tenth generation.
"Did taxes drop"
Not sure where you're from, but where I'm from (NJ in the United States), the answer to this in any context other than 'as you went backwards in time' is most certainly "no".
You mean trade kwh for kwh + transmission and operating costs, right?
No, of course not, the equipment doing the transmission didn't cost anything, the people maintaining the transmission equipment work for free, as do the people running the power company, right?
I just love how people who claim to be "fighting for the little people" want to put so many of those little people out of the job by killing the company they work for.
Cool, you do that, I'll keep using my MUCH cheaper and more efficient oil/gas setup until that happens.
Then I'll switch to your solution at 1/10th the price you paid, get something 10 times more efficient than you have, and have half the problems you have because you (and those like you) spent all that money buying up an untested, unproven, inefficient system.
Thanks!
First of all, drop the "it's so simple a child could understand it" attitude. In a room full of geniuses (ie 120+ IQs), maybe half can have this stuff explained to them on a better than absurdly simplified level. Get deep into the mathematics and you're down to about 5%.
Secondly, "what the hell is so weird" about what you just talked about?
Gee, I dunno, how about the fact that you have to combine things that can't exist to get something that can?
Yes, I realize that mathematically, manifesting energies in various forms makes wonderful sense. To the casual observer, however, much of QM is anti-intuitive and difficult at best to understand. To the average Joe on the street, most of physics is completely impossible to understand, unless you're going to dumb it down to 4-year-old terminology (and lose all nuance and consequence along the way).
Funny, I thought the point of QM was that it was UNpredictable.
Predictable unpredictableness? And you people wonder why outside observers think your topic of study is weird. ;)
I'll move to Somalia as soon as you move to North Korea, you state-worshipping fool.
"Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, fertilizing the biota and resulting in the increased green side effect."
So if we get more plant growth, that's global warming. And if we get higher temperatures, that's global warming. And if we get more hurricanes, that's global warming. More tornadoes? Global warming. And if it hails in Tokyo? Global warming. Less vegitation? Global warming.
Higher temps, lower temps, more storms, less storms, higher humidity, lower humidity, floods and droughts, and everything else - no matter what's going on around you, it's all due to global warming.
Sounds a lot like the stuff of internal memos at a pharmaceutical company to me. "Whatever's going on with you, our new miracle drug Xylamiaciliacin will make it all better"
Two major North-South highways? Are we still trying to keep 295 a secret? For southern Jersey folks, the Turnpike's for tourists and suckers. Unless you're heading north of Princeton, there's no reason to touch that cop-infested pothole fantasy road.
Still though, if you took away the areas near NYC, you'd have a hard time finding another state in the nation with a road system as good as New Jersey's.
Unfortunately, the roads within the Elizabeth-Paterson-Weehawken area resemble some sort of Escherian Triangle of Hell wherein you can see your destination literally right across the street, but must wander aimlessly for 30 minutes or more before stumbling quite accidentally across the series of correct access roads which will allow you to arrive there. Street names and route numbers seem paradoxically interwoven in some impossible fabric of pain, while unnamed and unmarked (and in many cases, seemingly unpaved) access roads vere wildly in every direction while menacing you with signs which threaten to take you to every place but the one you want, often with tolls along the way for your troubles.
Anyone who would like an example of this, I invite you to plot a course from the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, NJ to the Mill Creek Mall in Secaucus, NJ. I suggest you get help from Commander Data. Being a mere two miles apart, one can well imagine this being an easy task, but looking at the final result, one can't help but wonder if the road system in that area was an attempt at humor.
1.
The Manhattan Project took some bleeding edge mathematical theories and transformed them into two different types of nuclear weapons which were used to end World War II. How such a stunning success could be viewed as anything other than functional is mind-boggling.
As for the bomb inventory after the war, that wasn't particularly relevant. We could have built more bombs in a few weeks if it became necessary, but the cost simply wasn't justified with the war being over. The Soviets didn't know the time-table for constructing new bombs and didn't know our inventory. With how well the project itself was guarded, and the incredible consequences of being wrong, there was no chance the Soviets were going to provoke the US until they had bombs of their own which could be used as nuclear deterrants.
The military can often push the boundaries of technology far more rapidly than those inspired purely by curiosity. The military sees only an objective and plans to achieve it. It pushes ahead toward that objective regardless of any failures or problems unless and until it becomes obvious that said objective is either impossible to reach or is not worth the effort.
There's something to be said for military-inspired scientific work. Look at how quickly the Manhattan Project took some then-wild and crazy scientific speculation and turned it into a functional technology. If you'd told scientific spectators what they were planning to do at the start of the project and the timeframe for completion, they'd be laughing at the author as some sort of ignorant fool who had no idea of the kinds of technical and scientific challenges that lay ahead. Of course, the beauty of the military was that it didn't give a damn about the challenges - it wanted its bomb.
Which, if it becomes popular among them, could trigger guys and women to break down a lot of romance in favor of demanding a bloodtest (eg Gattaca) in order to determine whether their new love interest is who (and what) they claim to be.
Yes, I understand the appeal to transexuals. I can only hope they have the self-restraint not to use such a thing.