I forgot about social security/medicare. That's a huge one, as it is 14.7%
Employees only visibly see half of the tax, but one basic 'law' of economics is that you, the employee, lose all 14.7% because the employer has to pay the other half. (while a lot of stuff in economics is debatable, this one is as close to a law as you can get)
That alone goes a long way to explaining my point.
A "poor" person making under 87,000 a year has to pay AT LEAST this 14.7% in taxes. Warren Buffet can set his finances up so that virtually all of the money he makes is capital gains. Sure, he gets paid some income, but if he made 1 billion in capital gains and 50 million in income, what does that make his tax rate? You see my point.
(actually, Warren Buffet is a bad example, as he has assets in various offshore tax shelter trusts, such as in Panama, where he pays no taxes at all)
The wiki article says that this does depend a lot on conditions, but in many cases, the rich do pay a smaller piece of their income in taxes.
Quick comment : I'll have to produce some numbers. But, I've seen stuff that says the tax system IS regressive.
Meaning, people at the high end of the income stay DO pay a smaller PERCENTAGE of their income than people at the low end.
Why is this? Well, even if you get a rebate on federal taxes, there are lots of others.
Cigarettes, Lottery tickets, gasoline, vehicle registration, SALES tax. If you add all that stuff up, they say that the poor pay a bigger chunk of their income in taxes.
A big reason for this is capital gains : that tax rate is 15%, while income tax can be 35%. That means that, say, Warren Buffet pays a smaller portion of his income in taxes than a doctor or lawyer making 200k a year.
That doctor or lawyer, in turn, organizes his or her expenses to take maximum advantage of all kinds of tax rebates. In addition, her or she buys far fewer things that are covered by sales taxes. (services, like private schools and plastic surgery are not covered by sales tax. Nor are McMansions)
Confusing the issue is that while the rich pay a smaller PERCENTAGE of their income, they pay virtually all of the federal tax dollars. The bottom half of income earning Americans contribute almost nothing in federal taxes.
I think we're finally almost on the same page. You really seem to understand what I mean by scaling. I agree that scaling a process up isn't everything : you have to improve the process as well. I was envisioning an environment where there are multiple competing firms, all doing some practical research, that are always trying to shave another penny off the costs of panels being produced. All would have immense factories, big enough to get the maximum benefit from mass production.
Exactly like the market for computer chips.
And, unlike some of the other industries I mentioned, the amount of regulation and red tape would be vastly reduced.
When multiple suppliers compete to produce equipment used on offshore wells or in oil refineries, they can't shave costs too much, or an industrial disaster will strike. They have to do all kinds of engineering to determine that the parts used will handle the harsh conditions.
With components used in a nuclear plant, there has to be a paper trail for every important piece. Everything has to be overengineered, maximizing costs.
With solar panels, there's none of that. Virtually no government regulation would be needed. Multiple competing firms would try different designs, incrementally improving on each other, all shooting for the lower cost per watt that passes accelerated lifespan testing.
The red tape is the real reason that biotech products used in humans have advanced in technology at a snails pace compared to the semiconductor industry.
If the government subsidized it, I would want two things.
a. Elimination of oil and other hydrocarbon subsidies. I argue that burning hydrocarbons is NOT a positive externality, it is a negative one. Even if you don't slap on carbon taxes, you have to at least make the taxes for using oil the same as for any other corporate activity. Why should other industries have to subsidize big oil? (because when you give, say, Exxon, a tax break, the missing government revenue has to come from other corporations. Like Walmart or Cisco)
b. The government could pay, with low interest loans, for the capital costs for the factories needed to mass produce solar cells. Firms that took the subsidies would still have to compete on price on the open market for their product, and would have to pay the operating + depreciation costs (essentially the marginal cost for production). This would encourage them to produce solar cells that are economically feasible.
As for your single mother example, I have a few comments.
1. The poor always get screwed, no matter how rich the overall economy is. Your hypothetical mother probably has to eat the exhaust fumes from dozens of escalades and Hummer H2s that roar past her subcompact on the freeway
2. In a capatalist society, the only way to not get screwed is to get some capital. Either you inherit some wealth, or you improve your human capital with education.
3. If you try to reproduce without resources, things aren't going to work as well as they would otherwise. Hate to say this, but for millenia women have always tried, with varying success, to get men to stay around and support the kids. Why do single mothers end up alone? The honest answer is usually either they choose a man whose strategy is to be a 'player', moving from woman to woman. Or, the woman lost her attractiveness, most likely from eating too many empty calories that are present in inexpensive food.
Either way, in a free society, if you make a poor choice, you have to live with the consequences. If this single mother had either kept her attractiveness up and chosen a successful man who was likely to stay, or if she had gotten an education first, she more than likely would not have gotten
Imagine what a few copper jacketed bullets could do if they were shot into a capacitor bank. I imagine that they would create shorts that would quickly turn into plasma, making a nice satisfying explosion with blue electric arcing throughout.
Man, if this tech really worked, action movies would have a new cliche to replace the "exploding gas tanks" they love. And the best part is : it would be realistic! (well, ok, Hollywood would probably still go overboard, and have a tiny subcompact blow up as if it had the capacitor pack of a Mac truck)
Well, if energy costs are key to it all, more oil and coal is NOT the way. Even assuming there's a lot more of it where the oil and coal reserves we already have came from, its going to get increasingly complicated and expensive to get at the remaining oil/coal/natural gas.
This is one of the reasons I am on the solar bandwagon : after attending some offshore technology conferences in Houston, and reading about the ridiculously complicated protocols needed to maintain a nuclear reactor, neither hydrocarbons nor nuclear looks like it can ever be made 'cheap'.
If you are right, we need 'cheaper' energy than ever, cheaper than even the easy times in the 1960s when Saudi Arabia had cartesian oil wells and would sell us all the light sweet crude we could haul away in tankers.
We aren't going to get 'cheaper' energy by building nuclear plants : the next ones will have to be 10 times more complicated than anything built before for safety and liability reasons.
A working fusion reactor, if it is even possible, will make a fission plant look simple. Superconducting magnets cooled to 5 K in close proximity with a nuclear furnace? What sort of materials could maintain such a ludicrious temperature difference?
So if hydrocarbons and nuclear are off the list, what's left? There's tidal, which could work in theory, but seawater can screw anything up. Also, you can't build a tidal plant in the middle of the ocean, and there's finite coastline space. Geothermal also seems like it should work great in theory (my dad works in the oil industry, and he's told lots of stories about how the temperature inside deep wells commonly gets to 300 Farenheit. I've always asked the obvious : why bother drilling for the oil, just exploit the temperature difference) but is a no go except in very limited places in the world.
The idea of solar is so SIMPLE. Every panel the same as all the others (versus say offshore well drilling, where you have to use all kinds of expensive, one off technology in hazardous environments). Once you install them, you get energy during the daytime for decades with no worries about finding more. It's trivial to see we have enough land area.
That's why I don't buy any of the cost arguments : the market is NOT always accurate on this kind of thing. It seems clear and obvious that solar is fundamentally cheaper than all the other techs, especially scaled up.
I mean, if you try to scale up building nuclear plants, what happens? The more plants you build, the greater the risk of an accident, which would impose so many regulations to make new ones impossible, if even a minor accident occurred.
If you try to scale up hydrocarbons? You have to go to more and more complex and expensive places in the world to find them. Plus, it is impossible to give all of China the same energy consuming lifestyle as in the U.S. using hydrocarbon fuel. Even if climate change isn't happening now, if you increased the amount of hydrocarbons burned TENFOLD, I bet there would be some.
With wind and geothermal and tidal, you exhaust all the good places in the world to put these things.
Fusion might work fine scaled up, but it doesn't work at all, yet.
The more you scale up solar, for the most part it would get cheaper. Yes, if rare elements were a limiting ingredient, it could put a halt in things. But, there are ways of working around rare elements (use less rare ones), and you could recycle old panels to get the rare elements back. (versus oil, where once you exhaust the good oilfields, you never get that fuel back. Once you exhaust the good places in the world to find rare elements, you can keep recycling what you already have)
I'm an optimist : I think if the energy problem can be solved, this high energy "Western" lifestyle could be enjoyed by every nation in the world who works for it. More energy could be used to air condition all the homes of the people in China and India, to build new cars or other fast transit systems, to reprocess all this garbage back into useful elements, ect.
Without energy, well, entropy kills everything. And we can't get enough energy from hydrocarbons.
Despite your nick, this was a surprisingly informative discussion. I no longer care to continue it : time will tell which one of us is right, anyway. Besides, there's nothing that can be done now : the Feds have blown trillions of dollars, and with financing on the debt they have less and less discretionary funds.
Our country might or might not be able to fall into ruin, depending on if someone implements a way out of this 'credit default swaps' mess. It appears that the whole financial system has effectively tried out buggy, beta code that has corrupted the entire database. (Essentially, the swaps are a new form of financial transaction, first started in 1997, that allowed banks to buy insurance against risk that was worthless. It would be like the banks converting a big chunk of their cash into monopoly money, only revealed for what it is when there is an economic downturn. I know that no wealth or cash is 'real', but older financial instruments, such as blue chip stocks and plain old cash have proven stability)
Oh, and where do the nuts like Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, Iran, the Russians, heck even the Mexicans get all of their money? Oh, right, they get to steal the fruits of our economy because all those countries export a shitton of oil, and we have almost none by comparison.
Once we develop the means to give all those douchebags the "big F-U", our economy would grow like never before.
I guess those SUV fumes are interfering with your reading comprehension, because the Berkley study assumed an installed price of $8 a watt!
Nanosolar claims that their process ultimately will lead to a wholesale cost of $1/watt, INCLUDING the cost of the inverter. (everything but labor to install the panels)
At that cost, solar would be economically feasible anywhere.
But, there's a huge capital cost for the big plants : I want the government to subsidize the capital costs for new plants, so long as the depreciation and operating costs come to under $1/watt for the panels the plants produce.
Go hop in your gas guzzling SUV and make a nice fat doobie with what I just told you.
Again, every little piece of a panel is the same as all of the others. If you can't automate that, I'll eat my hat.
And once you install them, the number of man hours needed to maintain them is near 0.
There's a trivial way to tell when to clean the panels : each panel would have a small electronics module that would monitor output, uploading it via by modulating the output current. (a piece of tech that I saw 20 years ago, in common use on an air conditioner)
If the output of the panel starts to drop, maybe the cleaning robot needs triggering. It doesn't have to be an exact science, and since each panel would produce several hundred watts per square meter (versus maybe 20-100 watts to run the robot motors) the loss would also be trivial. Oh, and trigger the robot during a time of day when the panels are producing more juice than is being used.
All of these are easy to solve problems.
As for cost, has nanosolar already announced that they have solved the problem? This is a company in CALIFORNIA, highest labor rates in the Western world, that claims their process is already at $1/watt, generally considered to be the point at which solar is better than other forms of power generation. Any idiot can see that once they finalize their 'recipe', we could move the factory to China, make it 100 times larger, and replace all other forms of new electricity generation facilities. (meaning, we keep the old plants until they wear out)
We could do this in the next 4 years instead of the next 20 if they had declared energy independence to be a worthy national security goal as a response to terrorism, and spent the money to make it happen now, not once venture capital makes it happen in 20 years.(to bankrupt Saudi Arabia, home of the REAL culprits behind Al Quaeda...their obscene oil wealth, earned for doing nothing but existing as a nation, made Osama Bin Ladin wealthy, making the attacks possible)
Nanosolar has a tiny plant the size of a Sam's club. Current photovoltaic panel plants often depend on scrap silicon wafers from the microprocessor industry. Again, any idiot can see that nothing is maxed out, and economies of scale are not fully realized.
My examples of risk and labor was to point out the obvious : certain INHERENT factors are much cheaper for solar. If we doubled the number of natural gas turbine plants built over the next 10 years, we would have to pay double in skilled labor to fix the turbines. If we doubled the number of solar panels - well, we would have to buy twice as many panels, but every piece of every panel is the same as every other piece. A VERY easy to automate task. So, it would not cost twice as much to scale up solar panel manufacturing. Once we nail down a way of making good panels, cheaply, that does not depend on rare elemtns
You obviously are not an engineer. I am talking about a machine for panel cleaning that is only slightly more complex than a windshield wiper. And no, it would not even have to know if the panels are dirty - it would be on a timer. 1950s technology (except for a microcontroller instead of a mechanical timer)
You lack vision. You seem to believe that the pricing for early, relatively small scale technologies reflects the costs for mass production. You also seem to be forgetting that long term (over the next 10-20 years) there will be unprecendented demand for energy. This is because China and India and other nations have grown their economies to be closer to the size of the U.S., and will be competing for fuel for the foreseeable future.
This means that more and more expensive sources of oil will need to be tapped, raising the price further.
By the way, there is basically no such problem with solar : the United States has entire states that could be covered in panels, enough to power all electricity generation and transportion needs at the current level of usage. (leaving 10 times that area for future needs)
As for illness and disease : it has long been an accepted fact that the use of coal power causes additional lung cancer deaths. I'm sure you will claim liberals invented any statistics I try to produce, so I will say this : a significant number of people have died from lung cancer due to coal power.
Economics will eventually make all of this happen on their own. I think the government should have spent the money that was blown on wars on speeding up the process.
Actually, solar panel pricing has followed a steady curve of improving price/performance all the way until the present.
If you read my post, I said "a simple robot to brush off dust and grit". That is virtually 0 maintainence, versus running a coal plant or gas turbine power plant. And when I say simple, I mean something like a machine that basically runs an electric brush or compressed air over the glass panel surfaces. It would track along a rail running along a line of panels. It would need few electronics or sensors, probably just overload switches and some way of reporting errors if it got stuck.
A 25% cost premium, for a technology that does not need fuel, is something our country should have jumped on 10 years ago. Again, any competent engineer or economist would realize that if a technology that is only used on a very small scale in prototypes is scaled up, it would get considerably cheaper. Especially since solar, especially solar thermal like you point out, completely eliminates a stack of problems.
1. It does not depend on megatons of a finite, polluting resource that must be extracted from the earth in 50 different complex, expensive, and dangerous ways. Even coal requires a miner to hunt down each and every vein of coal, and spend millions on safety equipment in underground tunnels to get it. Coal miners have to be paid high wages, to compensate them for some of the risks they bear.
2. Unlike nuclear, coal, gas turbines, or even hydroelectric dams, there is no way for a solar panel plant to "blow up" or require a control room with operators watching the equipment round the clock. Solar thermal might require a small amount of oversight, but even then, if the liquid salt tanks blew, and the plant was in the middle of nowhere, the damage and complications would be minimal.
3. Skilled mechanics don't have to take apart big turbines. Every other form of power generation relies on big, expensive turbines that are carefully balanced, mechanical devices with finite lifespans. All maintainence of a solar farm is vastly simpler, and requires little skill.
4. Speculators can't manipulate the price of a commodity, doubling costs overnight. A large solar grid would produce a predictable amount of power during all daytimes.
5. Pollution is negligible. No belching clouds of smoke that possibly affects global temperatures and causes many, many additional cases of lung cancer.
Problems with it : it costs money to make photoelectric devices, and they have very low power density, so until we can make them by the square kilometer cheaply, we have to use other forms of power generation.
Second, they only produce power when the sun is shining. This is not as big a problem as it sounds : all of the existing power generation plants can provide night baseload, and once pricing becomes variable, most industries and households can shift their heaviest power usage times to the daytime.
Also, a breakthrough in energy storage would simultaneously make electric cars practical and solve the storage problem.
I suspect the breakthrough has basically already happened : there are new lithium ion batteries that the manufacturer claims do not wear out, and can be recharged in 4 minutes. Yeah, yeah, right now they are twice as expensive and have lower power density, but these are temporary problems. Once these batteries are cheap and have higher energy density, we could actually use them for electric cars on a large scale.
The 5 minute recharges mean that the cars could be all electric, and since the batteries don't appreciably wear out with each cycle, households and businesses would charge them during the day, and sell power back to the grid at night.
Again, even a crappily done subsidy could do a LOT with 2 trillion. 2 trillion is enough to pay for 5 different fusion research reactors , 10 companies to build brand new solar panel plants, a yearly competition for a better battery with millions in seed money given to competing teams, and tax rebates for everyone to convert to the new tech.
I know a lot of the 'debates' and policy changes are really just greenwashing.
Here's what I do know : we have blown a couple of trillion on wars that WERE about oil. Otherwise, we would have fought wars to help stop various African genocides, or Bosnia, or 50 other places I don't know about.
Here's another thing I know : even if we just used nuclear fission plants that bred nuclear fuel, we could totally ELIMINATE use of hydrocarbons for energy. Alternatives include fission, fusion, solar, and maybe wind. Any one of these alternatives (well, maybe not wind) could be used to power every machine on the planet.
Your solar comments are bullshit, and reveal your ignorance. Actually, solar is almost to the point of being cheaper than any other form of energy, including coal. Rare element shortages are a temporary problem, at worst, and in any case, you can do recycling to conserve these rare elements.
Nearly any credible engineer or economist, when presented with the numbers, would agree that if we had spent a trillion or two on solar research and mass production plants, we would have a form of energy generation cheaper than any other. Any idiot can see that if we could apply the same economies of scale to making solar panels that we do to making integrated circuits, they would be at least 10 times cheaper. In addition, there's vast amounts of desert such as the SouthWestern U.S. that could be covered with said panels, and used to power the country. Since solar needs no maintainence and no fuel to be extracted, nor safety concerns, it requires vastly less human labor than every form of energy generation used today. (just a robotic factory to make panels by the square kilometer, and some kind of simple robot that can brush the panels daily for grit and dirt)
No breakthroughs needed, just investment in what works.
Your comments on how long solar is in development is idiotic. That would be like you saying, in 1980, that computers had been around since Babbage and that a portable calculator that can do symbolic math would never be possible.
Alright, if you want to have a sensible debate on this subject, email me at geraldNO00SPAM.monroe@gmail.com (without the NO00SPAM or the )
The simple fact is, there is clear and obvious local air pollution caused by gas and diesel burning vehicles in major cities. No credible scientist in the world has ever argued otherwise.
Second, global CO2 levels have doubled.
One can argue all day on HOW MUCH damage this does to the world, but the dollar figure to "repair" the damage (which would require fusion powered CO2 scrubbers or some other super complex and expensive technology that does not even exist yet) is NOT zero. It is trillions of dollars, at least.
That means, at the very least, you should NEVER, EVER subsidize oil production. (aka the various subsidies Congress has given out).
Basic economics : you just take the dollar figure of the amount of damage done by the negative externality, and divide it by the total amount of activity to determine the tax. You can argue all day about how much this tax should be, but it is certainly a positive number.
Gulf War I was a war for oil, in order to secure the crucial supplies of light sweet crude present in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It had no other purpose.
If the money blown on Gulf Wars I and II were spent developing fusion power and solar energy (around 2 trillion dollars), we would most likely develop practical versions of each. Fusion, while complex, offers the possibility of nearly unlimited, high density power production with minimal nuclear waste and no danger of a meltdown. Solar is inherently incredibly cheap because installed solar panels continue to work until they wear out, 20 years or more later.
Here's the deal : burning hydrocarbon products causes measurable economic damage to other people besides the entity burning them. I.E. : if you burn a gallon of gas, you create air pollution. Also, your country may have to fight a war to make sure that gas is available.
Economists call these things "negative externalities". The correct approach to fixing negative externalities is to charge a tax on the activities that cause a negative externality to other people.
This would have the net effect of making alternative energy relatively cheaper, stimulating more investment in it, and eventually replacing the use of hydrocarbons for energy altogether.
Why doesn't the patent office just charge fees sufficient to fund enough examiners to get anything done in a month? Meaning, they should be allowed to charge whatever fees they need in order to, BY LAW, respond to anything filed in their office within 30 days.
So if you send them 10,000 pages of documents, you have to pay $5 a page or whatever it costs them to employ an educated person to read and respond to said documents.
Too late for this comment to be noticed, but here goes.
Look, we will not have the artificial intelligence software capable of running autonomous robot warfighters for a very long time. I suspect "we" will never have it : the day we develop AI this smart, the AI will be smart enough to take control of such bots away from us. (this does not necessarily mean doom and gloom, it is just reality. We have no hope of controlling beings who are effectively 10 million times smarter than us)
But, we WILL have TELEPRESENCE. Every "infantry replacement" robot would be directly controlled by a operator located elsewhere, using controllers (with force feedback) similar to those used by existing bots like the Da Vinci surgical robot. The robots will be able to walk, run, and kick down doors (using a door-kicking attachment, of course, not with a foot).
They'll be able to go into buildings, searching every room for the enemy fighters. Since the operator does not fear for his life, the robots could employ less lethal weapons, such as concussion grenades and taser shotguns, in most circumstances. It would usually not be necessary to kill enemy soldiers. The same goes with "shooting them in the leg" - the reason soldiers do not do this today is because doing so gives the enemy fighter a chance to kill you. If your life is not at risk, you can try to capture your enemy alive, even if you lose a bot.
I think each robot would cost about $100,000 to manufacture in mass quantities. This is cheaper to replace than a human soldier. (because training and life insurance costs the U.S. Army more)
Also, a destroyed robot could simply be cannibalized for spare parts. Thus, unless the enemy actually melted one of your robots to slag, you could probably get some of those expensive parts back when they "killed" one, once you recover it. Robots could have integrated claymore mines or teargas cannisters that the operator would detonate if someone managed to "blind" a robot by jumping it from behind or putting a sheet on it, ect.
One time pad encryption would be used to protect the communications link between each robot and the control station. It would be impossible to hack without gaining physical access to either the circuitry in the robot or the control station consoles. Thus, there would be no way for the enemy to suborn a large number of these robots.
Wireless mesh networking, with nodes in every bot of a robot army would allow for the high bandwidth video links needed to control the bots.
We could use the robots to kill terrorist leaders while risking no troop presence. The reason we did not kill/capture Osama Bin Laden during the Clinton era when we knew his location was because it would have taken a supply chain of hundreds of aircraft to support even a small special forces squad in hostile territory.
Robots could be deployed using missiles or other cheap and fast methods that human soldiers cannot tolerate. Upon landing, like a REAL smart bomb, they would search the nearby buildings for the target, controlled by a human operator.
1 second explanation why this was never a feasible idea :
The cost of stuff on the International Space Station is the cost of the flights to put the items in orbit. As in, about $10,000 per pound. The cost to manufacture even pricey tools or satellites is nothing compared to launch costs, usually.
So the robot would have massed more than the stuff it retrieved.
Even, assuming, they solved the control problems...
Here's what I am saying. The expletives are a quick way to say an offensive message, sort of a linguistic shortcut. You can STILL SAY EQUALLY OFFENSIVE MESSAGES WITHOUT THEM. Instead of "fuck you", you can say "I hate you, and I want to smear human feces on your car door handle. I want to seduce your wife and sodomize her with a broomstick"
That's an offensive message, and I would argue it is more offensive than just saying "fuck you". Yet I have used no words banned by the FCC.
Precisely how does the use of expletives ever harm children? Arguments against sex and violence do hold a small amount of water. After all, many people who watch scenes of sex will feel various biological cues to engage in it. There are links between sex on TV and teen pregnancy. Of course, given the existence of the internet and cable television, access to contraceptives would probably be a more effective strategy to prevent teen pregnancy...
The same, to a less extent, with violence. The reason television violence is not as harmful is that it is difficult for the 'children' watching it to actually engage in violence, even if watching it on TV makes them want to. While almost anyone can have sex, assuming they find a partner, it takes training and practice to hit someone and cause real damage. Firearms are usually not just lying around, either, and also take practice before they can be used effectively.
So there isn't a neurological pattern in your brain that lets a person go from the couch to doing whatever violence that person sees on TV.
But course language? It never was the word that was offensive, it was the meaning...and there are plenty of messages to get the meaning out without using the words.
Heck, the F word is so over-used that it really isn't that offensive. "We fucked" can mean "we had sex in a lustful, vigorous manner". "fuck you, I'm quitting" can mean "this job does not compensate me at what I consider market value for my services, good day sir".
Want to know a secret : ALL OF EARTH BIOLOGY is "built wrong"
Every cell alive today is STUCK with certain long ago 'decisions', such as the codon : amino acid pairings. There are some disadvantages to this degenerate genetic code.
It's effectively impossible for an organism to evolve away from certain ancient 'choices', whether those choices were made by random chance or by God.
What I meant by assets is things like the property certain American companies own, like oilfields and factories. I also had Taiwan, Western Europe, and other countries we have under our wing.
With that said, the current budget is obscenely wasteful. If I were about to be elected president, I would plan on ending the wars and cutting back on spending severely. I would close down many operational units, and I would refocus defense spending on research and acquistion of more advanced weapons.
The last thing is important, because while America might not face any serious threats today, more advanced weaponry gives us a much bigger stick in the future.
One thing I am convinced of is that robotics is ready, today, to be developed into an effective replacement for human infantry. If we spent the money, rather than pathetic remote controlled car 'land drones', we could have bipedal bots that could charge up stairs and bust right through walls in their pursuit of terrorist scum.
No, they would not really be 'robots', they would actually be telepresence machines. But the point remains.
5 trillion? How did you come up with this number? I know it's been a lot of money, but I've never seen an estimate this high.
Remember, the U.S. does have to spend a certain amount of money on defense, by definition. We're a rich country with a bunch of assets, we have to have a military to keep anyone from stealing our stuff. This includes overseas assets.
An electronic voting machine should be simple. Why the f- are they even using an operating system at all? Wouldn't a stripped down the bone OS do the job? How about using DOS?
(before you laugh or say to use free software, the reason I say DOS is there is ZERO chance someone 20 years ago inserted code that would corrupt a voting machine)
Also, with DOS you could easily verify the md5 of the OS image.
I say use DOS, and write the vote counting program in terminal graphics mode, with those colored ASCII characters for a GUI. A SIMPLE GUI. The feature count on this program should be limited to the crucial things only.
And NO network access. The only way to count votes should be to physically gather all the flash memory cartridges in one place. Each cartridge would have a ONE TIME PAD encryption lock. There would be a central "vote counting" terminal that would be the only machine in the county with the other copy of the one time pad used.
One simple issue is this : there are a stupendous number of wireless devices manufactured and sold. Some are software defined, such that a simple change of firmware will cause the radio to transmit on disallowed spectrum.
Perhaps these devices should be heavily engineered to deal with interference more than depending on FCC regulations to prevent it. Among other things, two devices on the exact same spectrum are almost always located a physical distance apart. Phased array antennae can be used to distinguish between the two, and the base station using such an antenna can then beam an individual reply packet to each distinct device.
Musion is not a true hologram. The images are actually 2-dimensional, but an optical illusion makes the 2d image appear to be located in front of the display. It's basically fake.
There are technologies in the works to create a true hologram, that has actual depth and appears different from different viewing angles, but this is incredibly performance intensive and expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot about social security/medicare. That's a huge one, as it is 14.7%
Employees only visibly see half of the tax, but one basic 'law' of economics is that you, the employee, lose all 14.7% because the employer has to pay the other half. (while a lot of stuff in economics is debatable, this one is as close to a law as you can get)
That alone goes a long way to explaining my point.
A "poor" person making under 87,000 a year has to pay AT LEAST this 14.7% in taxes. Warren Buffet can set his finances up so that virtually all of the money he makes is capital gains. Sure, he gets paid some income, but if he made 1 billion in capital gains and 50 million in income, what does that make his tax rate? You see my point.
(actually, Warren Buffet is a bad example, as he has assets in various offshore tax shelter trusts, such as in Panama, where he pays no taxes at all)
The wiki article says that this does depend a lot on conditions, but in many cases, the rich do pay a smaller piece of their income in taxes.
Quick comment : I'll have to produce some numbers. But, I've seen stuff that says the tax system IS regressive.
Meaning, people at the high end of the income stay DO pay a smaller PERCENTAGE of their income than people at the low end.
Why is this? Well, even if you get a rebate on federal taxes, there are lots of others.
Cigarettes, Lottery tickets, gasoline, vehicle registration, SALES tax. If you add all that stuff up, they say that the poor pay a bigger chunk of their income in taxes.
A big reason for this is capital gains : that tax rate is 15%, while income tax can be 35%. That means that, say, Warren Buffet pays a smaller portion of his income in taxes than a doctor or lawyer making 200k a year.
That doctor or lawyer, in turn, organizes his or her expenses to take maximum advantage of all kinds of tax rebates. In addition, her or she buys far fewer things that are covered by sales taxes. (services, like private schools and plastic surgery are not covered by sales tax. Nor are McMansions)
Confusing the issue is that while the rich pay a smaller PERCENTAGE of their income, they pay virtually all of the federal tax dollars. The bottom half of income earning Americans contribute almost nothing in federal taxes.
I think we're finally almost on the same page. You really seem to understand what I mean by scaling. I agree that scaling a process up isn't everything : you have to improve the process as well. I was envisioning an environment where there are multiple competing firms, all doing some practical research, that are always trying to shave another penny off the costs of panels being produced. All would have immense factories, big enough to get the maximum benefit from mass production.
Exactly like the market for computer chips.
And, unlike some of the other industries I mentioned, the amount of regulation and red tape would be vastly reduced.
When multiple suppliers compete to produce equipment used on offshore wells or in oil refineries, they can't shave costs too much, or an industrial disaster will strike. They have to do all kinds of engineering to determine that the parts used will handle the harsh conditions.
With components used in a nuclear plant, there has to be a paper trail for every important piece. Everything has to be overengineered, maximizing costs.
With solar panels, there's none of that. Virtually no government regulation would be needed. Multiple competing firms would try different designs, incrementally improving on each other, all shooting for the lower cost per watt that passes accelerated lifespan testing.
The red tape is the real reason that biotech products used in humans have advanced in technology at a snails pace compared to the semiconductor industry.
If the government subsidized it, I would want two things.
a. Elimination of oil and other hydrocarbon subsidies. I argue that burning hydrocarbons is NOT a positive externality, it is a negative one. Even if you don't slap on carbon taxes, you have to at least make the taxes for using oil the same as for any other corporate activity. Why should other industries have to subsidize big oil? (because when you give, say, Exxon, a tax break, the missing government revenue has to come from other corporations. Like Walmart or Cisco)
b. The government could pay, with low interest loans, for the capital costs for the factories needed to mass produce solar cells. Firms that took the subsidies would still have to compete on price on the open market for their product, and would have to pay the operating + depreciation costs (essentially the marginal cost for production). This would encourage them to produce solar cells that are economically feasible.
As for your single mother example, I have a few comments.
1. The poor always get screwed, no matter how rich the overall economy is. Your hypothetical mother probably has to eat the exhaust fumes from dozens of escalades and Hummer H2s that roar past her subcompact on the freeway
2. In a capatalist society, the only way to not get screwed is to get some capital. Either you inherit some wealth, or you improve your human capital with education.
3. If you try to reproduce without resources, things aren't going to work as well as they would otherwise. Hate to say this, but for millenia women have always tried, with varying success, to get men to stay around and support the kids. Why do single mothers end up alone? The honest answer is usually either they choose a man whose strategy is to be a 'player', moving from woman to woman. Or, the woman lost her attractiveness, most likely from eating too many empty calories that are present in inexpensive food.
Either way, in a free society, if you make a poor choice, you have to live with the consequences. If this single mother had either kept her attractiveness up and chosen a successful man who was likely to stay, or if she had gotten an education first, she more than likely would not have gotten
Imagine what a few copper jacketed bullets could do if they were shot into a capacitor bank. I imagine that they would create shorts that would quickly turn into plasma, making a nice satisfying explosion with blue electric arcing throughout.
Man, if this tech really worked, action movies would have a new cliche to replace the "exploding gas tanks" they love. And the best part is : it would be realistic! (well, ok, Hollywood would probably still go overboard, and have a tiny subcompact blow up as if it had the capacitor pack of a Mac truck)
Well, if energy costs are key to it all, more oil and coal is NOT the way. Even assuming there's a lot more of it where the oil and coal reserves we already have came from, its going to get increasingly complicated and expensive to get at the remaining oil/coal/natural gas.
This is one of the reasons I am on the solar bandwagon : after attending some offshore technology conferences in Houston, and reading about the ridiculously complicated protocols needed to maintain a nuclear reactor, neither hydrocarbons nor nuclear looks like it can ever be made 'cheap'.
If you are right, we need 'cheaper' energy than ever, cheaper than even the easy times in the 1960s when Saudi Arabia had cartesian oil wells and would sell us all the light sweet crude we could haul away in tankers.
We aren't going to get 'cheaper' energy by building nuclear plants : the next ones will have to be 10 times more complicated than anything built before for safety and liability reasons.
A working fusion reactor, if it is even possible, will make a fission plant look simple. Superconducting magnets cooled to 5 K in close proximity with a nuclear furnace? What sort of materials could maintain such a ludicrious temperature difference?
So if hydrocarbons and nuclear are off the list, what's left? There's tidal, which could work in theory, but seawater can screw anything up. Also, you can't build a tidal plant in the middle of the ocean, and there's finite coastline space. Geothermal also seems like it should work great in theory (my dad works in the oil industry, and he's told lots of stories about how the temperature inside deep wells commonly gets to 300 Farenheit. I've always asked the obvious : why bother drilling for the oil, just exploit the temperature difference) but is a no go except in very limited places in the world.
The idea of solar is so SIMPLE. Every panel the same as all the others (versus say offshore well drilling, where you have to use all kinds of expensive, one off technology in hazardous environments). Once you install them, you get energy during the daytime for decades with no worries about finding more. It's trivial to see we have enough land area.
That's why I don't buy any of the cost arguments : the market is NOT always accurate on this kind of thing. It seems clear and obvious that solar is fundamentally cheaper than all the other techs, especially scaled up.
I mean, if you try to scale up building nuclear plants, what happens? The more plants you build, the greater the risk of an accident, which would impose so many regulations to make new ones impossible, if even a minor accident occurred.
If you try to scale up hydrocarbons? You have to go to more and more complex and expensive places in the world to find them. Plus, it is impossible to give all of China the same energy consuming lifestyle as in the U.S. using hydrocarbon fuel. Even if climate change isn't happening now, if you increased the amount of hydrocarbons burned TENFOLD, I bet there would be some.
With wind and geothermal and tidal, you exhaust all the good places in the world to put these things.
Fusion might work fine scaled up, but it doesn't work at all, yet.
The more you scale up solar, for the most part it would get cheaper. Yes, if rare elements were a limiting ingredient, it could put a halt in things. But, there are ways of working around rare elements (use less rare ones), and you could recycle old panels to get the rare elements back. (versus oil, where once you exhaust the good oilfields, you never get that fuel back. Once you exhaust the good places in the world to find rare elements, you can keep recycling what you already have)
I'm an optimist : I think if the energy problem can be solved, this high energy "Western" lifestyle could be enjoyed by every nation in the world who works for it. More energy could be used to air condition all the homes of the people in China and India, to build new cars or other fast transit systems, to reprocess all this garbage back into useful elements, ect.
Without energy, well, entropy kills everything. And we can't get enough energy from hydrocarbons.
Despite your nick, this was a surprisingly informative discussion. I no longer care to continue it : time will tell which one of us is right, anyway. Besides, there's nothing that can be done now : the Feds have blown trillions of dollars, and with financing on the debt they have less and less discretionary funds.
Our country might or might not be able to fall into ruin, depending on if someone implements a way out of this 'credit default swaps' mess. It appears that the whole financial system has effectively tried out buggy, beta code that has corrupted the entire database. (Essentially, the swaps are a new form of financial transaction, first started in 1997, that allowed banks to buy insurance against risk that was worthless. It would be like the banks converting a big chunk of their cash into monopoly money, only revealed for what it is when there is an economic downturn. I know that no wealth or cash is 'real', but older financial instruments, such as blue chip stocks and plain old cash have proven stability)
Oh, and where do the nuts like Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, Iran, the Russians, heck even the Mexicans get all of their money? Oh, right, they get to steal the fruits of our economy because all those countries export a shitton of oil, and we have almost none by comparison. Once we develop the means to give all those douchebags the "big F-U", our economy would grow like never before.
I guess those SUV fumes are interfering with your reading comprehension, because the Berkley study assumed an installed price of $8 a watt!
Nanosolar claims that their process ultimately will lead to a wholesale cost of $1/watt, INCLUDING the cost of the inverter. (everything but labor to install the panels)
At that cost, solar would be economically feasible anywhere.
But, there's a huge capital cost for the big plants : I want the government to subsidize the capital costs for new plants, so long as the depreciation and operating costs come to under $1/watt for the panels the plants produce.
Go hop in your gas guzzling SUV and make a nice fat doobie with what I just told you.
Again, every little piece of a panel is the same as all of the others. If you can't automate that, I'll eat my hat.
And once you install them, the number of man hours needed to maintain them is near 0.
There's a trivial way to tell when to clean the panels : each panel would have a small electronics module that would monitor output, uploading it via by modulating the output current. (a piece of tech that I saw 20 years ago, in common use on an air conditioner)
If the output of the panel starts to drop, maybe the cleaning robot needs triggering. It doesn't have to be an exact science, and since each panel would produce several hundred watts per square meter (versus maybe 20-100 watts to run the robot motors) the loss would also be trivial. Oh, and trigger the robot during a time of day when the panels are producing more juice than is being used.
All of these are easy to solve problems.
As for cost, has nanosolar already announced that they have solved the problem? This is a company in CALIFORNIA, highest labor rates in the Western world, that claims their process is already at $1/watt, generally considered to be the point at which solar is better than other forms of power generation. Any idiot can see that once they finalize their 'recipe', we could move the factory to China, make it 100 times larger, and replace all other forms of new electricity generation facilities. (meaning, we keep the old plants until they wear out)
We could do this in the next 4 years instead of the next 20 if they had declared energy independence to be a worthy national security goal as a response to terrorism, and spent the money to make it happen now, not once venture capital makes it happen in 20 years.(to bankrupt Saudi Arabia, home of the REAL culprits behind Al Quaeda...their obscene oil wealth, earned for doing nothing but existing as a nation, made Osama Bin Ladin wealthy, making the attacks possible)
Nanosolar has a tiny plant the size of a Sam's club. Current photovoltaic panel plants often depend on scrap silicon wafers from the microprocessor industry. Again, any idiot can see that nothing is maxed out, and economies of scale are not fully realized.
My examples of risk and labor was to point out the obvious : certain INHERENT factors are much cheaper for solar. If we doubled the number of natural gas turbine plants built over the next 10 years, we would have to pay double in skilled labor to fix the turbines. If we doubled the number of solar panels - well, we would have to buy twice as many panels, but every piece of every panel is the same as every other piece. A VERY easy to automate task. So, it would not cost twice as much to scale up solar panel manufacturing. Once we nail down a way of making good panels, cheaply, that does not depend on rare elemtns
You obviously are not an engineer. I am talking about a machine for panel cleaning that is only slightly more complex than a windshield wiper. And no, it would not even have to know if the panels are dirty - it would be on a timer. 1950s technology (except for a microcontroller instead of a mechanical timer)
You lack vision. You seem to believe that the pricing for early, relatively small scale technologies reflects the costs for mass production. You also seem to be forgetting that long term (over the next 10-20 years) there will be unprecendented demand for energy. This is because China and India and other nations have grown their economies to be closer to the size of the U.S., and will be competing for fuel for the foreseeable future.
This means that more and more expensive sources of oil will need to be tapped, raising the price further.
By the way, there is basically no such problem with solar : the United States has entire states that could be covered in panels, enough to power all electricity generation and transportion needs at the current level of usage. (leaving 10 times that area for future needs)
As for illness and disease : it has long been an accepted fact that the use of coal power causes additional lung cancer deaths. I'm sure you will claim liberals invented any statistics I try to produce, so I will say this : a significant number of people have died from lung cancer due to coal power.
Economics will eventually make all of this happen on their own. I think the government should have spent the money that was blown on wars on speeding up the process.
Actually, solar panel pricing has followed a steady curve of improving price/performance all the way until the present.
If you read my post, I said "a simple robot to brush off dust and grit". That is virtually 0 maintainence, versus running a coal plant or gas turbine power plant. And when I say simple, I mean something like a machine that basically runs an electric brush or compressed air over the glass panel surfaces. It would track along a rail running along a line of panels. It would need few electronics or sensors, probably just overload switches and some way of reporting errors if it got stuck.
A 25% cost premium, for a technology that does not need fuel, is something our country should have jumped on 10 years ago. Again, any competent engineer or economist would realize that if a technology that is only used on a very small scale in prototypes is scaled up, it would get considerably cheaper. Especially since solar, especially solar thermal like you point out, completely eliminates a stack of problems.
1. It does not depend on megatons of a finite, polluting resource that must be extracted from the earth in 50 different complex, expensive, and dangerous ways. Even coal requires a miner to hunt down each and every vein of coal, and spend millions on safety equipment in underground tunnels to get it. Coal miners have to be paid high wages, to compensate them for some of the risks they bear.
2. Unlike nuclear, coal, gas turbines, or even hydroelectric dams, there is no way for a solar panel plant to "blow up" or require a control room with operators watching the equipment round the clock. Solar thermal might require a small amount of oversight, but even then, if the liquid salt tanks blew, and the plant was in the middle of nowhere, the damage and complications would be minimal.
3. Skilled mechanics don't have to take apart big turbines. Every other form of power generation relies on big, expensive turbines that are carefully balanced, mechanical devices with finite lifespans. All maintainence of a solar farm is vastly simpler, and requires little skill.
4. Speculators can't manipulate the price of a commodity, doubling costs overnight. A large solar grid would produce a predictable amount of power during all daytimes.
5. Pollution is negligible. No belching clouds of smoke that possibly affects global temperatures and causes many, many additional cases of lung cancer.
Problems with it : it costs money to make photoelectric devices, and they have very low power density, so until we can make them by the square kilometer cheaply, we have to use other forms of power generation.
Second, they only produce power when the sun is shining. This is not as big a problem as it sounds : all of the existing power generation plants can provide night baseload, and once pricing becomes variable, most industries and households can shift their heaviest power usage times to the daytime.
Also, a breakthrough in energy storage would simultaneously make electric cars practical and solve the storage problem.
I suspect the breakthrough has basically already happened : there are new lithium ion batteries that the manufacturer claims do not wear out, and can be recharged in 4 minutes. Yeah, yeah, right now they are twice as expensive and have lower power density, but these are temporary problems. Once these batteries are cheap and have higher energy density, we could actually use them for electric cars on a large scale.
The 5 minute recharges mean that the cars could be all electric, and since the batteries don't appreciably wear out with each cycle, households and businesses would charge them during the day, and sell power back to the grid at night.
Again, even a crappily done subsidy could do a LOT with 2 trillion. 2 trillion is enough to pay for 5 different fusion research reactors , 10 companies to build brand new solar panel plants, a yearly competition for a better battery with millions in seed money given to competing teams, and tax rebates for everyone to convert to the new tech.
Ok, I'm not arguing for offsets.
I know a lot of the 'debates' and policy changes are really just greenwashing.
Here's what I do know : we have blown a couple of trillion on wars that WERE about oil. Otherwise, we would have fought wars to help stop various African genocides, or Bosnia, or 50 other places I don't know about.
Here's another thing I know : even if we just used nuclear fission plants that bred nuclear fuel, we could totally ELIMINATE use of hydrocarbons for energy. Alternatives include fission, fusion, solar, and maybe wind. Any one of these alternatives (well, maybe not wind) could be used to power every machine on the planet.
Your solar comments are bullshit, and reveal your ignorance. Actually, solar is almost to the point of being cheaper than any other form of energy, including coal. Rare element shortages are a temporary problem, at worst, and in any case, you can do recycling to conserve these rare elements.
Nearly any credible engineer or economist, when presented with the numbers, would agree that if we had spent a trillion or two on solar research and mass production plants, we would have a form of energy generation cheaper than any other. Any idiot can see that if we could apply the same economies of scale to making solar panels that we do to making integrated circuits, they would be at least 10 times cheaper. In addition, there's vast amounts of desert such as the SouthWestern U.S. that could be covered with said panels, and used to power the country. Since solar needs no maintainence and no fuel to be extracted, nor safety concerns, it requires vastly less human labor than every form of energy generation used today. (just a robotic factory to make panels by the square kilometer, and some kind of simple robot that can brush the panels daily for grit and dirt)
No breakthroughs needed, just investment in what works.
Your comments on how long solar is in development is idiotic. That would be like you saying, in 1980, that computers had been around since Babbage and that a portable calculator that can do symbolic math would never be possible.
Alright, if you want to have a sensible debate on this subject, email me at geraldNO00SPAM.monroe@gmail.com
(without the NO00SPAM or the )
The simple fact is, there is clear and obvious local air pollution caused by gas and diesel burning vehicles in major cities. No credible scientist in the world has ever argued otherwise.
Second, global CO2 levels have doubled.
One can argue all day on HOW MUCH damage this does to the world, but the dollar figure to "repair" the damage (which would require fusion powered CO2 scrubbers or some other super complex and expensive technology that does not even exist yet) is NOT zero. It is trillions of dollars, at least.
That means, at the very least, you should NEVER, EVER subsidize oil production. (aka the various subsidies Congress has given out).
Basic economics : you just take the dollar figure of the amount of damage done by the negative externality, and divide it by the total amount of activity to determine the tax. You can argue all day about how much this tax should be, but it is certainly a positive number.
Gulf War I was a war for oil, in order to secure the crucial supplies of light sweet crude present in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It had no other purpose.
If the money blown on Gulf Wars I and II were spent developing fusion power and solar energy (around 2 trillion dollars), we would most likely develop practical versions of each. Fusion, while complex, offers the possibility of nearly unlimited, high density power production with minimal nuclear waste and no danger of a meltdown. Solar is inherently incredibly cheap because installed solar panels continue to work until they wear out, 20 years or more later.
Here's the deal : burning hydrocarbon products causes measurable economic damage to other people besides the entity burning them. I.E. : if you burn a gallon of gas, you create air pollution. Also, your country may have to fight a war to make sure that gas is available.
Economists call these things "negative externalities". The correct approach to fixing negative externalities is to charge a tax on the activities that cause a negative externality to other people.
This would have the net effect of making alternative energy relatively cheaper, stimulating more investment in it, and eventually replacing the use of hydrocarbons for energy altogether.
Why doesn't the patent office just charge fees sufficient to fund enough examiners to get anything done in a month? Meaning, they should be allowed to charge whatever fees they need in order to, BY LAW, respond to anything filed in their office within 30 days. So if you send them 10,000 pages of documents, you have to pay $5 a page or whatever it costs them to employ an educated person to read and respond to said documents.
Too late for this comment to be noticed, but here goes.
Look, we will not have the artificial intelligence software capable of running autonomous robot warfighters for a very long time. I suspect "we" will never have it : the day we develop AI this smart, the AI will be smart enough to take control of such bots away from us. (this does not necessarily mean doom and gloom, it is just reality. We have no hope of controlling beings who are effectively 10 million times smarter than us)
But, we WILL have TELEPRESENCE. Every "infantry replacement" robot would be directly controlled by a operator located elsewhere, using controllers (with force feedback) similar to those used by existing bots like the Da Vinci surgical robot. The robots will be able to walk, run, and kick down doors (using a door-kicking attachment, of course, not with a foot).
They'll be able to go into buildings, searching every room for the enemy fighters. Since the operator does not fear for his life, the robots could employ less lethal weapons, such as concussion grenades and taser shotguns, in most circumstances. It would usually not be necessary to kill enemy soldiers. The same goes with "shooting them in the leg" - the reason soldiers do not do this today is because doing so gives the enemy fighter a chance to kill you. If your life is not at risk, you can try to capture your enemy alive, even if you lose a bot.
I think each robot would cost about $100,000 to manufacture in mass quantities. This is cheaper to replace than a human soldier. (because training and life insurance costs the U.S. Army more)
Also, a destroyed robot could simply be cannibalized for spare parts. Thus, unless the enemy actually melted one of your robots to slag, you could probably get some of those expensive parts back when they "killed" one, once you recover it. Robots could have integrated claymore mines or teargas cannisters that the operator would detonate if someone managed to "blind" a robot by jumping it from behind or putting a sheet on it, ect.
One time pad encryption would be used to protect the communications link between each robot and the control station. It would be impossible to hack without gaining physical access to either the circuitry in the robot or the control station consoles. Thus, there would be no way for the enemy to suborn a large number of these robots.
Wireless mesh networking, with nodes in every bot of a robot army would allow for the high bandwidth video links needed to control the bots.
We could use the robots to kill terrorist leaders while risking no troop presence. The reason we did not kill/capture Osama Bin Laden during the Clinton era when we knew his location was because it would have taken a supply chain of hundreds of aircraft to support even a small special forces squad in hostile territory.
Robots could be deployed using missiles or other cheap and fast methods that human soldiers cannot tolerate. Upon landing, like a REAL smart bomb, they would search the nearby buildings for the target, controlled by a human operator.
1 second explanation why this was never a feasible idea :
The cost of stuff on the International Space Station is the cost of the flights to put the items in orbit. As in, about $10,000 per pound. The cost to manufacture even pricey tools or satellites is nothing compared to launch costs, usually.
So the robot would have massed more than the stuff it retrieved.
Even, assuming, they solved the control problems...
Here's what I am saying. The expletives are a quick way to say an offensive message, sort of a linguistic shortcut. You can STILL SAY EQUALLY OFFENSIVE MESSAGES WITHOUT THEM. Instead of "fuck you", you can say "I hate you, and I want to smear human feces on your car door handle. I want to seduce your wife and sodomize her with a broomstick" That's an offensive message, and I would argue it is more offensive than just saying "fuck you". Yet I have used no words banned by the FCC.
"Think of the children."
Precisely how does the use of expletives ever harm children? Arguments against sex and violence do hold a small amount of water. After all, many people who watch scenes of sex will feel various biological cues to engage in it. There are links between sex on TV and teen pregnancy. Of course, given the existence of the internet and cable television, access to contraceptives would probably be a more effective strategy to prevent teen pregnancy...
The same, to a less extent, with violence. The reason television violence is not as harmful is that it is difficult for the 'children' watching it to actually engage in violence, even if watching it on TV makes them want to. While almost anyone can have sex, assuming they find a partner, it takes training and practice to hit someone and cause real damage. Firearms are usually not just lying around, either, and also take practice before they can be used effectively.
So there isn't a neurological pattern in your brain that lets a person go from the couch to doing whatever violence that person sees on TV.
But course language? It never was the word that was offensive, it was the meaning...and there are plenty of messages to get the meaning out without using the words.
Heck, the F word is so over-used that it really isn't that offensive. "We fucked" can mean "we had sex in a lustful, vigorous manner". "fuck you, I'm quitting" can mean "this job does not compensate me at what I consider market value for my services, good day sir".
Want to know a secret : ALL OF EARTH BIOLOGY is "built wrong"
Every cell alive today is STUCK with certain long ago 'decisions', such as the codon : amino acid pairings. There are some disadvantages to this degenerate genetic code.
It's effectively impossible for an organism to evolve away from certain ancient 'choices', whether those choices were made by random chance or by God.
Wow! That's a lot of money.
What I meant by assets is things like the property certain American companies own, like oilfields and factories. I also had Taiwan, Western Europe, and other countries we have under our wing.
With that said, the current budget is obscenely wasteful. If I were about to be elected president, I would plan on ending the wars and cutting back on spending severely. I would close down many operational units, and I would refocus defense spending on research and acquistion of more advanced weapons.
The last thing is important, because while America might not face any serious threats today, more advanced weaponry gives us a much bigger stick in the future.
One thing I am convinced of is that robotics is ready, today, to be developed into an effective replacement for human infantry. If we spent the money, rather than pathetic remote controlled car 'land drones', we could have bipedal bots that could charge up stairs and bust right through walls in their pursuit of terrorist scum.
No, they would not really be 'robots', they would actually be telepresence machines. But the point remains.
5 trillion? How did you come up with this number? I know it's been a lot of money, but I've never seen an estimate this high.
Remember, the U.S. does have to spend a certain amount of money on defense, by definition. We're a rich country with a bunch of assets, we have to have a military to keep anyone from stealing our stuff. This includes overseas assets.
An electronic voting machine should be simple. Why the f- are they even using an operating system at all? Wouldn't a stripped down the bone OS do the job? How about using DOS?
(before you laugh or say to use free software, the reason I say DOS is there is ZERO chance someone 20 years ago inserted code that would corrupt a voting machine)
Also, with DOS you could easily verify the md5 of the OS image.
I say use DOS, and write the vote counting program in terminal graphics mode, with those colored ASCII characters for a GUI. A SIMPLE GUI. The feature count on this program should be limited to the crucial things only.
And NO network access. The only way to count votes should be to physically gather all the flash memory cartridges in one place. Each cartridge would have a ONE TIME PAD encryption lock. There would be a central "vote counting" terminal that would be the only machine in the county with the other copy of the one time pad used.
One simple issue is this : there are a stupendous number of wireless devices manufactured and sold. Some are software defined, such that a simple change of firmware will cause the radio to transmit on disallowed spectrum.
Perhaps these devices should be heavily engineered to deal with interference more than depending on FCC regulations to prevent it. Among other things, two devices on the exact same spectrum are almost always located a physical distance apart. Phased array antennae can be used to distinguish between the two, and the base station using such an antenna can then beam an individual reply packet to each distinct device.
Musion is not a true hologram. The images are actually 2-dimensional, but an optical illusion makes the 2d image appear to be located in front of the display. It's basically fake. There are technologies in the works to create a true hologram, that has actual depth and appears different from different viewing angles, but this is incredibly performance intensive and expensive.