This is what would happen, if they have debts in excess of what they can ever pay, they'd go bankrupt, the investors would get nothing, and their assets would be sold to pay some of the debts. 6 billion is nothing compare to 200 billion though...
Prior to this, the assumption was that the moisture percentage in the soil was only a few percent. This meant that to get water for a large greenhouse or to electrolyze to hydrogen to fuel a methane ascent rocket, you'd need a bulldozer and a large oven and rock crusher. Heavy stuff and hardly worth sending to Mars unless you were doing missions on a large scale (easier to just send the water you need and liquid hydrogen as payload on the lander).
If there really is a massive frozen lake of mostly water just a few feet down, you could land on a spot where the soil is thin and drill down. Maybe evaporate the water by sending hot CO2 down the hole or something, and collecting the moisture in the steam that rises back up. (you get the CO2 by compressing martian atmosphere and then heating it)
This seems a lot more feasible, though doing it using a purely robotic lander would still be very hard.
A quick google search says it's $2 an hour. Got a source for the $4 an hour? Either way, it's actually much closer to the U.S. $7.50 than I would have thought.
Great reply. Yeah, slashdot has become pretty toxic, I don't even know why I post here either. Reddit is somewhat better though it has deep flaws as well.
Double the COST. It currently costs $224 to make the 7. So it would cost $448 in the U.S. (probably less actually with automation, I bet this cost estimate is assuming the same labor hours per phone). If apple collects the same profit margin and passes the cost on, the phone would cost $224 more, or about $924.
Annoying but not the end of the world and not $3000.
I'm somewhat in favor of this. Not tax incentives - I just think that plants outside the U.S. that are allowed to import without tariffs should (1) adhere to OSHA and (2) pay their workers a living wage and (3) adhere to comparable environmental regulations as the U.S.
Otherwise, it will never be possible for American manufacturers to compete if the foreign plants can be deathtraps that use slave labor and create mountains of pollution.
They also spy on the police. Only reason there's such an uproar over routine wrongful police shootings (aka shootings the police have gotten away with committing for decades since generally the courts believe anything the officer says) is because of the ubiquitous cameras.
Also, members of the black community would have had personal experience with wrongful police actions - that is why they would generally not hate on and not cooperate with the police. Now the more liberal members of the white community have joined in on the action because with the camera recordings it is obvious which side is correct.
Well, yes, but the overhead power lines for them greatly increase the cost. I wouldn't be surprised if it more than doubled it over just the basic 2 rails spaced by wood on gravel.
What's your thought on neural networks for robotic members that can learn/make better decisions?
That is, as I understand it, to automate a production line you need it to make generally just 1 single product, and you do a lot of mechanical work to design the line to handle that one product. If we had more generic robotic manipulators (they might look like waldos), they could grab products of a variety of sizes and hand them to each other. They could do the assembly work, picking up parts and putting them where they go. The machinery could do this starting with computer generated images of approximately what each part looks like and some learned (through ANN) knowledge on generally the right way to grab something, etc.
What they did give were some verifiable facts. If Trump were to bother to have someone investigate whether or not Republican legislators from his own party were the first to bring it up or not, instead of relying on random internet rumors, he'd have an actual piece of evidence he could use to make a decision with.
Where I've heard it can get ridiculous is "means" can just mean "owns a woodchipper". Obviously, nobody is kidnapping anyone protected by the secret service - much less their biggest VIP - without it being literally over the dead bodies of the secret service detail and any other police/military who have to be nearby. And "has a woodchipper" is a very different set of requirements than "has an entire team of crack commandos to deal with the security". And of course this begs the question - if someone had a team of crack commandos, why would they brag about it online? They'd get on with it or not, but they wouldn't run their mouths.
I saw the ugly truth of biomedical research when I was in grad school. TLDR, while every last stinking one of us has every possible motivation to spend EVERY spare penny not keeping us alive in the near term on the research (since it's the only thing that has the slightest chance of making sure we continue living past a mere 7-10 decades), there are 2 nasty problems :
1. Due to extreme amounts of government and institutional red tape, nothing gets done. Nothing. All those stories you read of brain implants? Basically never going to happen. That's because the way the legal system works is, institution administrators always have to ask "can WE be blamed if this goes wrong?" Basically, if the research kills someone but ultimately saves 1000 lives, our courts won't give any credit to the 1000 lives saved, it's all about slamming the institution for making an error. Also, the government has a very poor model for assessing results. If a drug works on cancer that has failed every other treatment, you don't need a trial with 1000+ participants. Cancers that reach that stage don't just disappear for no reason. A trial with 20 people is enough if 10 of them get up and leave with their tumors destroyed. This is a very strong effect and one that shouldn't require the one size fits all approach the FDA demands.
2. Most medical spending is on overpriced procedures and drugs and equipment that all suck.
It's a valid mathematical notation. You know and I know that 7000 * 1 million = 7 billion. The reason I did it was that it lets you directly compare 30 million to 7000 and see, even if you have below average math skills, that 7000 is much bigger than 30.
We're getting off track here. Are you conceding you were talking out your ass on gasoline prices of the 1960s vs now or not? If CPI is understated - something I am also acknowledging - then gas is now cheaper than $0.35 per gallon is now.
As for college tuition and medical care - the tuition is now so expensive it can consume an adult's entire disposable income for 10+ years to pay off the debt. Medical care is at 17% of GDP - 17 cents of every dollar made by all of America just pays to provide services to try to make Americans live infinitesimally longer.
I just spent 15 minutes browsing "Diamond Foundry", one of the places that makes synthetics. They aren't cheap - but they do seem to be cheaper than natural diamonds, by 40% or so. Anyways, none of their synthetics are flawless. Cut, clarity, or inclusions - none are perfect in all 3. There are some that are supposed to have no flaws you can see without being a gemologist, for around 10k for a big one, but even a lab can't guarantee perfection it seems. Tiny differences in vibration, in the feed nozzles, flaws and contaminants in the production chamber - apparently the process is not yet perfected.
With that said, it might be in 20 more years. There is talk of some day being able to make synthetic diamonds so large and flawless and in such vast quantities that they can be used as microchip wafers. A side effect of putting billions into it for the mass production of microchip wafers would probably be diamonds that are far superior to natural diamonds for less than a tenth of the cost.
I agree there. It's just not something to run around shouting Eureka! about. Discovering a workable form of fusion power, or battery costs + solar panels dropping to the point that they make sense for the baseload, that's a Eureka moment.
Ok, but if you convert $3.00 a gallon back to what it was back then (what year was it?), I bet it'll turn out to be LESS than you were paying then. Again, that's using the CPI, which as you said, understates inflation. (the reason it understates inflation is college tuition and medical care are not even factored in to the CPI !)
And if you survived in a war against a near peer interstellar enemy. In the books I vaguely recall that the bugs weren't primitive or stupid and were a deadly foe. If NATO had fought the Soviets, with nukes left off the table, there would have been massive death tolls on both side. (yeah, NATO would probably have "won" in the end...at which point the nukes start flying and gg)
I can't argue one way or another if inflation is being over or understated. Certainly, essential goods like medical care and education are incredibly more expensive than they used to be, and I don't think they are included in the CPI at all. Also, in some real estate markets, it's the same story.
What I can say is that if you use the UNDERstated numbers for $0.35 in 1963, that would be $2.76 today. Right now, it's $1.87 near me. So that would be $0.24 a gallon in 1963 dollars. You can't have it both ways. If you think the government is purposefully lowballing inflation (and they have an incentive to do so!), you have to admit that gas right now is very cheap.
This is due to the fact that while modern fields need more stuff in order to produce, the cost of delivering that stuff has also declined. Better automation, better equipment, the fracking gear is produced on a larger scale, and so forth.
That's a really neat argument, Marco. I knew oil was inelastic - as I understand it, the current situation is due to a very small imbalance between supply and demand.
With that said, I think you're still wrong and here's why : the production cost of sewage->oil is probably really high. The reason I think that is that you need a lot of sewage for very little oil, so you need a big and expensive and complex plant. And there's no way to get good economies of scale if you can't really pump sewage very far (it's so low value even converted to oil that it isn't worth the energy expenditure of pipelining).
Also, while there might be a short term decline in prices, if the actual cost to produce oil is, say, $55 a barrel for most oil, then the long term market price has to at least pay the oil producers cost. They can borrow money in the short term but the books have to balance in the end. That's why the president of OPEC has projected that prices must rise, because apparently a trillion dollars needs to be spent by 2020 to keep up with consumption, and that money has to come from sales of the oil. The books must balance in the long run. Right now all the producers are minimizing costs, but eventually they'll start having equipment breakdowns and the fracked wells will dry up. Production falls, prices rise, and it has to balance.
Slashdot Mirror
Their market cap is only 6 billion USD.
This is what would happen, if they have debts in excess of what they can ever pay, they'd go bankrupt, the investors would get nothing, and their assets would be sold to pay some of the debts. 6 billion is nothing compare to 200 billion though...
Prior to this, the assumption was that the moisture percentage in the soil was only a few percent. This meant that to get water for a large greenhouse or to electrolyze to hydrogen to fuel a methane ascent rocket, you'd need a bulldozer and a large oven and rock crusher. Heavy stuff and hardly worth sending to Mars unless you were doing missions on a large scale (easier to just send the water you need and liquid hydrogen as payload on the lander).
If there really is a massive frozen lake of mostly water just a few feet down, you could land on a spot where the soil is thin and drill down. Maybe evaporate the water by sending hot CO2 down the hole or something, and collecting the moisture in the steam that rises back up. (you get the CO2 by compressing martian atmosphere and then heating it)
This seems a lot more feasible, though doing it using a purely robotic lander would still be very hard.
Couldn't you wire it with a current limiting diode so a short won't lead to an explosion?
A quick google search says it's $2 an hour. Got a source for the $4 an hour? Either way, it's actually much closer to the U.S. $7.50 than I would have thought.
Great reply. Yeah, slashdot has become pretty toxic, I don't even know why I post here either. Reddit is somewhat better though it has deep flaws as well.
Double the COST. It currently costs $224 to make the 7. So it would cost $448 in the U.S. (probably less actually with automation, I bet this cost estimate is assuming the same labor hours per phone). If apple collects the same profit margin and passes the cost on, the phone would cost $224 more, or about $924.
Annoying but not the end of the world and not $3000.
I'm somewhat in favor of this. Not tax incentives - I just think that plants outside the U.S. that are allowed to import without tariffs should (1) adhere to OSHA and (2) pay their workers a living wage and (3) adhere to comparable environmental regulations as the U.S.
Otherwise, it will never be possible for American manufacturers to compete if the foreign plants can be deathtraps that use slave labor and create mountains of pollution.
http://fortune.com/2016/09/20/...
They also spy on the police. Only reason there's such an uproar over routine wrongful police shootings (aka shootings the police have gotten away with committing for decades since generally the courts believe anything the officer says) is because of the ubiquitous cameras.
Also, members of the black community would have had personal experience with wrongful police actions - that is why they would generally not hate on and not cooperate with the police. Now the more liberal members of the white community have joined in on the action because with the camera recordings it is obvious which side is correct.
Well, yes, but the overhead power lines for them greatly increase the cost. I wouldn't be surprised if it more than doubled it over just the basic 2 rails spaced by wood on gravel.
Renewable isn't cheaper for running trains/planes/automobiles/trucks yet. It may take a while, the batteries are expensive.
Yep, including machines that were basically just typewriter sized calculators with roughly the same capability as a standard pocket calculator.
What's your thought on neural networks for robotic members that can learn/make better decisions?
That is, as I understand it, to automate a production line you need it to make generally just 1 single product, and you do a lot of mechanical work to design the line to handle that one product. If we had more generic robotic manipulators (they might look like waldos), they could grab products of a variety of sizes and hand them to each other. They could do the assembly work, picking up parts and putting them where they go. The machinery could do this starting with computer generated images of approximately what each part looks like and some learned (through ANN) knowledge on generally the right way to grab something, etc.
What they did give were some verifiable facts. If Trump were to bother to have someone investigate whether or not Republican legislators from his own party were the first to bring it up or not, instead of relying on random internet rumors, he'd have an actual piece of evidence he could use to make a decision with.
Where I've heard it can get ridiculous is "means" can just mean "owns a woodchipper". Obviously, nobody is kidnapping anyone protected by the secret service - much less their biggest VIP - without it being literally over the dead bodies of the secret service detail and any other police/military who have to be nearby. And "has a woodchipper" is a very different set of requirements than "has an entire team of crack commandos to deal with the security". And of course this begs the question - if someone had a team of crack commandos, why would they brag about it online? They'd get on with it or not, but they wouldn't run their mouths.
I saw the ugly truth of biomedical research when I was in grad school. TLDR, while every last stinking one of us has every possible motivation to spend EVERY spare penny not keeping us alive in the near term on the research (since it's the only thing that has the slightest chance of making sure we continue living past a mere 7-10 decades), there are 2 nasty problems :
1. Due to extreme amounts of government and institutional red tape, nothing gets done. Nothing. All those stories you read of brain implants? Basically never going to happen. That's because the way the legal system works is, institution administrators always have to ask "can WE be blamed if this goes wrong?" Basically, if the research kills someone but ultimately saves 1000 lives, our courts won't give any credit to the 1000 lives saved, it's all about slamming the institution for making an error. Also, the government has a very poor model for assessing results. If a drug works on cancer that has failed every other treatment, you don't need a trial with 1000+ participants. Cancers that reach that stage don't just disappear for no reason. A trial with 20 people is enough if 10 of them get up and leave with their tumors destroyed. This is a very strong effect and one that shouldn't require the one size fits all approach the FDA demands.
2. Most medical spending is on overpriced procedures and drugs and equipment that all suck.
Yeah, probably. He could have inhaled or ingested a bunch of alpha or beta emitters. Colon cancer, lung cancer, take your pick.
Yeah, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. I hope I'm a little more mentally there when I hit your age.
It's a valid mathematical notation. You know and I know that 7000 * 1 million = 7 billion. The reason I did it was that it lets you directly compare 30 million to 7000 and see, even if you have below average math skills, that 7000 is much bigger than 30.
We're getting off track here. Are you conceding you were talking out your ass on gasoline prices of the 1960s vs now or not? If CPI is understated - something I am also acknowledging - then gas is now cheaper than $0.35 per gallon is now.
As for college tuition and medical care - the tuition is now so expensive it can consume an adult's entire disposable income for 10+ years to pay off the debt. Medical care is at 17% of GDP - 17 cents of every dollar made by all of America just pays to provide services to try to make Americans live infinitesimally longer.
I just spent 15 minutes browsing "Diamond Foundry", one of the places that makes synthetics. They aren't cheap - but they do seem to be cheaper than natural diamonds, by 40% or so. Anyways, none of their synthetics are flawless. Cut, clarity, or inclusions - none are perfect in all 3. There are some that are supposed to have no flaws you can see without being a gemologist, for around 10k for a big one, but even a lab can't guarantee perfection it seems. Tiny differences in vibration, in the feed nozzles, flaws and contaminants in the production chamber - apparently the process is not yet perfected.
With that said, it might be in 20 more years. There is talk of some day being able to make synthetic diamonds so large and flawless and in such vast quantities that they can be used as microchip wafers. A side effect of putting billions into it for the mass production of microchip wafers would probably be diamonds that are far superior to natural diamonds for less than a tenth of the cost.
I agree there. It's just not something to run around shouting Eureka! about. Discovering a workable form of fusion power, or battery costs + solar panels dropping to the point that they make sense for the baseload, that's a Eureka moment.
Ok, but if you convert $3.00 a gallon back to what it was back then (what year was it?), I bet it'll turn out to be LESS than you were paying then. Again, that's using the CPI, which as you said, understates inflation. (the reason it understates inflation is college tuition and medical care are not even factored in to the CPI !)
And if you survived in a war against a near peer interstellar enemy. In the books I vaguely recall that the bugs weren't primitive or stupid and were a deadly foe. If NATO had fought the Soviets, with nukes left off the table, there would have been massive death tolls on both side. (yeah, NATO would probably have "won" in the end...at which point the nukes start flying and gg)
I can't argue one way or another if inflation is being over or understated. Certainly, essential goods like medical care and education are incredibly more expensive than they used to be, and I don't think they are included in the CPI at all. Also, in some real estate markets, it's the same story.
What I can say is that if you use the UNDERstated numbers for $0.35 in 1963, that would be $2.76 today. Right now, it's $1.87 near me. So that would be $0.24 a gallon in 1963 dollars. You can't have it both ways. If you think the government is purposefully lowballing inflation (and they have an incentive to do so!), you have to admit that gas right now is very cheap.
This is due to the fact that while modern fields need more stuff in order to produce, the cost of delivering that stuff has also declined. Better automation, better equipment, the fracking gear is produced on a larger scale, and so forth.
That's a really neat argument, Marco. I knew oil was inelastic - as I understand it, the current situation is due to a very small imbalance between supply and demand.
With that said, I think you're still wrong and here's why : the production cost of sewage->oil is probably really high. The reason I think that is that you need a lot of sewage for very little oil, so you need a big and expensive and complex plant. And there's no way to get good economies of scale if you can't really pump sewage very far (it's so low value even converted to oil that it isn't worth the energy expenditure of pipelining).
Also, while there might be a short term decline in prices, if the actual cost to produce oil is, say, $55 a barrel for most oil, then the long term market price has to at least pay the oil producers cost. They can borrow money in the short term but the books have to balance in the end. That's why the president of OPEC has projected that prices must rise, because apparently a trillion dollars needs to be spent by 2020 to keep up with consumption, and that money has to come from sales of the oil. The books must balance in the long run. Right now all the producers are minimizing costs, but eventually they'll start having equipment breakdowns and the fracked wells will dry up. Production falls, prices rise, and it has to balance.