It is, however, a very long time not just to live somewhere, but live somewhere and help to maintain a stable ecosystem. The Pomo people who live in what is now Lake County, CA used to regularly live to be over 100 years old.
So what happened to all the large mammals like mammoths, giant sloths, and saber-toothed cats?
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers.
Counterexamples: Salvador Allende of Chile (the spur for Pinochet's rise to power) and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (in the mid 80s).
BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name
No, he was one of the founders of the National Socialist party. And I gather they did believe in socialism for the master race.
and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists
Well, what is that supposed to mean with respect to the left/right spectrum? That only right-wing countries would invade a communist country like the USSR?
Nazi Germany was an ideologically screwed up country where, for example, animals had better rights than some humans did. Treating animals with rights at least equal to humans is normally considered very left-wing, unless the humans in question are being stuffed into ovens.
same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
They were competitors. I don't think the effort has much meaning with respect to ideology, left or right. The communists of the USSR have a history of taking out leftist rivals both inside the communist party and outside (such as the anarchists).
She wilfully, deliberately created this explosion.
I have to disagree here. She willfully, deliberately mixed some chemicals to create a small pop. Just as the boy in question willfully, deliberately aimed a BB gun at his brother in order to have some harmless fun.
The consequences weren't expected. That makes them equally ACCIDENTAL.
I don't know why SOME of you Americans automatically equal social programs with more state power and vice-versa.
The only question I'd have here is why doesn't EVERYONE do that? Social programs means a) more money for a government bureaucracy to manage the program, and b) the need to police moochers (they created a public good and now that good needs protection). Some of the protections required for b) can be rather intrusive too, such as widespread distribution of medical data for government health services or employment information for unemployment benefits.
Both activities I mentioned naturally result in increased state power.
But I can go further. The protections of b) may require tough choices to be moved to a government level. National level health care is a great example of this effect in practice. To a considerable extent, you can spend more money to get a better health care outcome. So how much money should you spend when there's no obvious bound to how much money you can spend?. In a "sucks to be you" system where everyone pays for their own health care, the patient and their relatives end up being the ones deciding how much gets spent. For a national program, that decision shifts to a government bureaucracy. That is an increase in power for the state.
A third condition that frequently arises is moral hazard. Once you've created a social program, you often also create a dependency on that social program. I think public pensions are a good example of this. If people couldn't rely on government to provide for them in old age, then I bet they would be considerably more prudent with their money now. Such dependency can be used by politicians to expand their power (vote for me because I protect your retirement).
I'd go a bit further than to say that such programs build government power. Most such programs are economically harmful as well with costs, such as what I mentioned above, outweighing the benefits they provide.
There have been many examples of governments with total control on everything that didn't stay in power thanks to social programs in recent history
That's something like saying there's many examples of drunks that splatter people on the highways with the implication that somehow being drunk doesn't make you worse behind the wheel. As I noted earlier, I think most such social programs are harmful to the society that has them. So it comes as no surprise to me that such governments above failed despite (or rather in part due to) a reliance on social programs to keep their populations in line and governments in power.
Oh and it's the "overriding political union" that enables this "Subsidizing countries with relatively low tax" rates. If not for the EU we would tax the profits/potatos as they entered/left our borders.
Oops, I was going to comment on this as well. I think the original poster's plan was that the greater political body would appropriate some of Switzerland's taxes and transfer them to the UK in a "fair" manner. In other words, it would restore the situation that the UK originally had, but at the European level.
I think that's highly dependent on the fallacy that the resulting government would be sufficiently responsive to give a fair share of such tax revenue to the UK rather than just squander it in the usual ways. Needless to say, I'm not so optimistic.
The factory is on UK land and run by UK staff, supplied by UK roads, powerlines, water and gas pipes.
And they pay a lot in taxes and user fees. If that's not enough, then maybe those should be increased rather than trying a value-added tax (VAT), which allows Pepsi to hide its profits in a lower VAT country.
Maybe because it violate the basic tenants fair play?
And what is that for a multinational corporation? Keep in mind that the real problem is that you want more money out of these sorts of businesses from a particular, obsolete taxation scheme (here, the VAT). Rather than fix the tax or replace with something that works better, you propose to widen the area of its effect via a kludge, a broader government.
What you are advocating is that we should let differences between the tax regimes be taken care of solely by market forces, and by extension the rapid downsizing of the state in a race to the bottom.
That's how it worked in the past, right? And yet we somehow still have governments. Having a monopoly on force in a location is a very powerful and lucrative advantage.
And if it's so easy to avoid paying those taxes, maybe the UK should tax things that aren't easy to avoid? This seems a lot like using the legal system in the US to enforce *IAA business models.
If both Luxembourg and the UK had similar tax rates, Luxembourg would tax actual companies there (not that many, for 0.5M people) and the UK would tax companies based here (somewhat more, for 68M people).
And why would that be a good idea? As I see it, all that wealth still remains in the EU and the UK gets a portion of it through both taxes from employees in the UK as well as trade with Luxemborg and the corporations that declare profits there.
Nuclear doesn't kill people, but fallout causes large areas of land to have to be evacuated, and causes MASSIVE economic damage.
While wind power meshes better economically than an impromptu nuclear meltdown, it does take up more land, even counting fallout evacuation zones.
The nuclear pushers will claim that modern reactors don't melt down, but there's no good reason to think that that's 100% so. And if it's not, then they will sometimes and the more reactors there are, the more chance of it happening.
I agree that is a problem. The key weakness of nuclear power is that you have to put a lot of energy in one spot and then try to extract from it in a controlled dribble. That's fundamentally the source of the meltdown issue.
However, you are complaining that the nuclear generation process can't be gleaming perfect. Well neither is anything else. We still end up with the situation that wind power kills more people and renders more land area uninhabitable than nuclear power does.
C02 kills civilizations, so the emphasis is pretty much spot-on.
Here's the problem with that statement. There's a lot of research out there. And while some of that research claims considerable stress on a society from anthropogenic global warming (AGW) well down the road, say 5-20% of GDP (which incidentally, I think is exaggerated) spent on AGW-adaptation and clean up by 2200, none have predicted civilization killing effects.
And what makes a stressed society? The traditional social ills do, like, poverty, oppression, corruption, disease, etc. The current proposed solutions for AGW tend to make those problems worse now (AGW is alleged to do so as well, but well down the road rather than right now).
As I see it, the cure is worse than the disease. I guess that means the cure "kills civilizations" as well.
The problem with is that in the EU, we have the free movement of goods through economic union, but there is not overriding political union to plug the loop holes. This needs to be addressed somehow, or otherwise, we are just subsidising Switzerland, Luxembourg and Ireland through tax loopholes.
Subsidizing countries with relatively low tax burdens sounds far preferable to overriding political unions. So I'd have to disagree on the "need" for such things. As I see it, competition at the country level helps curb government abuses.
I think this is classic free lunch thinking. You want a free lunch from Pepsi. Pepsi moves their lunch to Switzerland where they are treated better. Lunch is no longer free. Something must be done. But the obvious solution is not "clean up my act so that Pepsi will come back", but rather "let's destroy the sovereignty of Switzerland".
I imagine you'd be a bit upset if Pepsi had a monopoly of soda drinks. But why aren't you similarly disturbed by the possibility of a government monopoly over all of Europe? Last time that was tried, 70-100 million people died.
And if we have to switch to renewables anyway, why not do it as soon as possible.
That's what cost/benefit analysis is about. As I see it, no one has shown that the downsides of fossil fuels, especially when one considers time value, are worse than the cost of restructuring our energy and transportation infrastructure now.
My solution is laissez faire - let things transition over naturally as oil gets expensive enough. The only real gap is the externality from CO2 emissions. I prefer carbon emission credits with an unlimited pool and increasing cost as more are purchased. That is a "soft cap".This approach wouldn't have the problems of the hard caps of the current European carbon markets.
just a consequence of the nature of institutional memory when you fail to maintain the institutions.
Actually, all of the major space institutions, even Russia's have been well maintained given the circumstances. But maintenance doesn't mean knowledge gets retained. You have to actually use the knowledge in question on a regular basis. For example, NASA hasn't designed a new launch vehicle in about three decades and that absence of institutional memory shows.
You were right the first time. SSO only reached 112km, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5km/s of d-V.
Hmmm, when I last did the calculation, I thought there was considerable horizontal velocity (of 1,200 m/s, but that turns out to be the maximum speed during the trajectory). That is quite wrong since the trajectory was almost straight up. It does simplify the calculation though.
So let's take your number of 1.5 km/s of delta-v for the highest trajectory. For that trajectory, the engines burned for 80 seconds straight up (I had 65 seconds which I believe was for the first flight which barely passed 100km). That's roughly 750 m/s of delta-v lost to gravity losses, meaning the engine plus initial velocity produced roughly 2,250 m/s of delta-v. Even if we assume White Knight was flying at 300 m/s straight up when SpaceShipOne detached, that's at least 1,950 m/s of delta-v from the rocket engine.
So you still end up with roughly quarter of the delta-v required to get to orbit.
The outrage created by the glory days of coal has been in large part mitigated
This has nothing to do with regulated oil production.
Of course we need oil and gas. At some point though, we aren't supposed to destroy the land for everyone in the future. But fuck the fishermen, the hunters, the foresters, the real estate people, the farmers and the people that live there.
Land owners do quite well. They get a piece of the action for oil wells on their land. And oil doesn't require a lot of real estate unlike surface mining of coal.
After that gas is extracted, the Utica shale is next. It's deeper and lies over a larger area.
So it's even more isolated from ground water.
But they need to extract the stuff with an eye toward the environment. That should be interesting.
Should be no difference. Environmental regulations have been around for a while.
I was answering the question why we're pumping oil as fast as we can, not fracking specifically.
And I was pointing out that the US acts the same even though government isn't in charge. I also wanted to make the point that most of the world has little to do with OPEC governments.
The costs are just passed on to the consumers (the people).
And to the everyone else in the gasoline supply chain. Competion means you can't pass all of your costs on to the end consumer else you get undercut.
And much of that is wasted to enrich the government's friends rather than accomplishing results, as most government projects go. Of course, where does the government get all this money? From the people, and thus the people are chained to more taxes and fees.
So what? It's no different for those subsidies in oil production.
Finally, you mention the rocket equation! I find it interesting how the people who talk about how hard it is, tend to be weak on the actual math. So you have some inkling of the difficulties. Now, use a more efficient engine, for example, LOX/kerosene optimized for vacuum.
I also was a bit in error. Delta-v for SpaceShipOne was a quarter what they needed to get in orbit. Using LOX/kerosene would boost that delta-v by about 40%. Sure, you still need a high propellant to dry mass ratio (something like 12 or 13 to 1 for achieving 9,500m/s starting from 300 m/s at 350 sec ISP, there's also a minute boost from the altitude, something like 20-40 m/s equivalent in delta-v and drop in air resistance and gravity losses, I'll stab at another 300 m/s) for a very good LOX/kerosene engine), but as I mentioned earlier, I don't think that's so hard.
For reentry, the key is surface area. The larger the cross sectional area of the return vehicle relative to its mass, then the less heating the vehicle will endure. Since these vehicles are launched above most of the atmosphere, the constraint on surface area (for air resistance losses and stress on vehicle) are greatly reduced. At 50k feet, I understand that pressure is about a tenth what it is at sea level. So those forces from air resistance tend to be a factor of ten smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
That means nobody maintained a "stable ecosystem".
We're talking dictators, not democratically elected leaders./quote? Hitler was also a democratically elected leader. He didn't stay that way either.
It is, however, a very long time not just to live somewhere, but live somewhere and help to maintain a stable ecosystem. The Pomo people who live in what is now Lake County, CA used to regularly live to be over 100 years old.
So what happened to all the large mammals like mammoths, giant sloths, and saber-toothed cats?
And the obvious rebuttal is that there was no intent on the girl's part for the size of the explosion.
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers.
Counterexamples: Salvador Allende of Chile (the spur for Pinochet's rise to power) and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (in the mid 80s).
BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name
No, he was one of the founders of the National Socialist party. And I gather they did believe in socialism for the master race.
and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists
Well, what is that supposed to mean with respect to the left/right spectrum? That only right-wing countries would invade a communist country like the USSR?
Nazi Germany was an ideologically screwed up country where, for example, animals had better rights than some humans did. Treating animals with rights at least equal to humans is normally considered very left-wing, unless the humans in question are being stuffed into ovens.
same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
They were competitors. I don't think the effort has much meaning with respect to ideology, left or right. The communists of the USSR have a history of taking out leftist rivals both inside the communist party and outside (such as the anarchists).
She wilfully, deliberately created this explosion.
I have to disagree here. She willfully, deliberately mixed some chemicals to create a small pop. Just as the boy in question willfully, deliberately aimed a BB gun at his brother in order to have some harmless fun.
The consequences weren't expected. That makes them equally ACCIDENTAL.
I don't know why SOME of you Americans automatically equal social programs with more state power and vice-versa.
The only question I'd have here is why doesn't EVERYONE do that? Social programs means a) more money for a government bureaucracy to manage the program, and b) the need to police moochers (they created a public good and now that good needs protection). Some of the protections required for b) can be rather intrusive too, such as widespread distribution of medical data for government health services or employment information for unemployment benefits.
Both activities I mentioned naturally result in increased state power.
But I can go further. The protections of b) may require tough choices to be moved to a government level. National level health care is a great example of this effect in practice. To a considerable extent, you can spend more money to get a better health care outcome. So how much money should you spend when there's no obvious bound to how much money you can spend?. In a "sucks to be you" system where everyone pays for their own health care, the patient and their relatives end up being the ones deciding how much gets spent. For a national program, that decision shifts to a government bureaucracy. That is an increase in power for the state.
A third condition that frequently arises is moral hazard. Once you've created a social program, you often also create a dependency on that social program. I think public pensions are a good example of this. If people couldn't rely on government to provide for them in old age, then I bet they would be considerably more prudent with their money now. Such dependency can be used by politicians to expand their power (vote for me because I protect your retirement).
I'd go a bit further than to say that such programs build government power. Most such programs are economically harmful as well with costs, such as what I mentioned above, outweighing the benefits they provide.
There have been many examples of governments with total control on everything that didn't stay in power thanks to social programs in recent history
That's something like saying there's many examples of drunks that splatter people on the highways with the implication that somehow being drunk doesn't make you worse behind the wheel. As I noted earlier, I think most such social programs are harmful to the society that has them. So it comes as no surprise to me that such governments above failed despite (or rather in part due to) a reliance on social programs to keep their populations in line and governments in power.
Oh and it's the "overriding political union" that enables this "Subsidizing countries with relatively low tax" rates. If not for the EU we would tax the profits/potatos as they entered/left our borders.
Oops, I was going to comment on this as well. I think the original poster's plan was that the greater political body would appropriate some of Switzerland's taxes and transfer them to the UK in a "fair" manner. In other words, it would restore the situation that the UK originally had, but at the European level.
I think that's highly dependent on the fallacy that the resulting government would be sufficiently responsive to give a fair share of such tax revenue to the UK rather than just squander it in the usual ways. Needless to say, I'm not so optimistic.
The factory is on UK land and run by UK staff, supplied by UK roads, powerlines, water and gas pipes.
And they pay a lot in taxes and user fees. If that's not enough, then maybe those should be increased rather than trying a value-added tax (VAT), which allows Pepsi to hide its profits in a lower VAT country.
Maybe because it violate the basic tenants fair play?
And what is that for a multinational corporation? Keep in mind that the real problem is that you want more money out of these sorts of businesses from a particular, obsolete taxation scheme (here, the VAT). Rather than fix the tax or replace with something that works better, you propose to widen the area of its effect via a kludge, a broader government.
What you are advocating is that we should let differences between the tax regimes be taken care of solely by market forces, and by extension the rapid downsizing of the state in a race to the bottom.
That's how it worked in the past, right? And yet we somehow still have governments. Having a monopoly on force in a location is a very powerful and lucrative advantage.
That doesn't work very well in practise.
For you. It works quite well for others.
And if it's so easy to avoid paying those taxes, maybe the UK should tax things that aren't easy to avoid? This seems a lot like using the legal system in the US to enforce *IAA business models.
If both Luxembourg and the UK had similar tax rates, Luxembourg would tax actual companies there (not that many, for 0.5M people) and the UK would tax companies based here (somewhat more, for 68M people).
And why would that be a good idea? As I see it, all that wealth still remains in the EU and the UK gets a portion of it through both taxes from employees in the UK as well as trade with Luxemborg and the corporations that declare profits there.
Nuclear doesn't kill people, but fallout causes large areas of land to have to be evacuated, and causes MASSIVE economic damage.
While wind power meshes better economically than an impromptu nuclear meltdown, it does take up more land, even counting fallout evacuation zones.
The nuclear pushers will claim that modern reactors don't melt down, but there's no good reason to think that that's 100% so. And if it's not, then they will sometimes and the more reactors there are, the more chance of it happening.
I agree that is a problem. The key weakness of nuclear power is that you have to put a lot of energy in one spot and then try to extract from it in a controlled dribble. That's fundamentally the source of the meltdown issue.
However, you are complaining that the nuclear generation process can't be gleaming perfect. Well neither is anything else. We still end up with the situation that wind power kills more people and renders more land area uninhabitable than nuclear power does.
C02 kills civilizations, so the emphasis is pretty much spot-on.
Here's the problem with that statement. There's a lot of research out there. And while some of that research claims considerable stress on a society from anthropogenic global warming (AGW) well down the road, say 5-20% of GDP (which incidentally, I think is exaggerated) spent on AGW-adaptation and clean up by 2200, none have predicted civilization killing effects.
And what makes a stressed society? The traditional social ills do, like, poverty, oppression, corruption, disease, etc. The current proposed solutions for AGW tend to make those problems worse now (AGW is alleged to do so as well, but well down the road rather than right now).
As I see it, the cure is worse than the disease. I guess that means the cure "kills civilizations" as well.
The problem with is that in the EU, we have the free movement of goods through economic union, but there is not overriding political union to plug the loop holes. This needs to be addressed somehow, or otherwise, we are just subsidising Switzerland, Luxembourg and Ireland through tax loopholes.
Subsidizing countries with relatively low tax burdens sounds far preferable to overriding political unions. So I'd have to disagree on the "need" for such things. As I see it, competition at the country level helps curb government abuses.
I think this is classic free lunch thinking. You want a free lunch from Pepsi. Pepsi moves their lunch to Switzerland where they are treated better. Lunch is no longer free. Something must be done. But the obvious solution is not "clean up my act so that Pepsi will come back", but rather "let's destroy the sovereignty of Switzerland".
I imagine you'd be a bit upset if Pepsi had a monopoly of soda drinks. But why aren't you similarly disturbed by the possibility of a government monopoly over all of Europe? Last time that was tried, 70-100 million people died.
I propose we attack Uzbekistan.
Why not attack Hawaii instead? The weather is nicer.
And if we have to switch to renewables anyway, why not do it as soon as possible.
That's what cost/benefit analysis is about. As I see it, no one has shown that the downsides of fossil fuels, especially when one considers time value, are worse than the cost of restructuring our energy and transportation infrastructure now.
My solution is laissez faire - let things transition over naturally as oil gets expensive enough. The only real gap is the externality from CO2 emissions. I prefer carbon emission credits with an unlimited pool and increasing cost as more are purchased. That is a "soft cap".This approach wouldn't have the problems of the hard caps of the current European carbon markets.
I know you'll hide this as fast as you can, but every "libertarian" out there would basically set up a kingdom of corporate power.
So no facts, huh? I can't hide what doesn't exist.
"Pro-corporate" compared to what? The developed world isn't in its current mess due to any sort of libertarian policy.
Then you look at the facts...
No, all I see it a baseless insinuation.
yet the Republicans are goose-steppers par excellence
Just about everyone in government is - no matter the party.
now glaring irrationalist white Christian male identity
I guess small-minded bigotry is ok, if it's the right sort of small-minded bigotry.
just a consequence of the nature of institutional memory when you fail to maintain the institutions.
Actually, all of the major space institutions, even Russia's have been well maintained given the circumstances. But maintenance doesn't mean knowledge gets retained. You have to actually use the knowledge in question on a regular basis. For example, NASA hasn't designed a new launch vehicle in about three decades and that absence of institutional memory shows.
You were right the first time. SSO only reached 112km, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5km/s of d-V.
Hmmm, when I last did the calculation, I thought there was considerable horizontal velocity (of 1,200 m/s, but that turns out to be the maximum speed during the trajectory). That is quite wrong since the trajectory was almost straight up. It does simplify the calculation though.
So let's take your number of 1.5 km/s of delta-v for the highest trajectory. For that trajectory, the engines burned for 80 seconds straight up (I had 65 seconds which I believe was for the first flight which barely passed 100km). That's roughly 750 m/s of delta-v lost to gravity losses, meaning the engine plus initial velocity produced roughly 2,250 m/s of delta-v. Even if we assume White Knight was flying at 300 m/s straight up when SpaceShipOne detached, that's at least 1,950 m/s of delta-v from the rocket engine.
So you still end up with roughly quarter of the delta-v required to get to orbit.
The outrage created by the glory days of coal has been in large part mitigated
This has nothing to do with regulated oil production.
Of course we need oil and gas. At some point though, we aren't supposed to destroy the land for everyone in the future. But fuck the fishermen, the hunters, the foresters, the real estate people, the farmers and the people that live there.
Land owners do quite well. They get a piece of the action for oil wells on their land. And oil doesn't require a lot of real estate unlike surface mining of coal.
After that gas is extracted, the Utica shale is next. It's deeper and lies over a larger area.
So it's even more isolated from ground water.
But they need to extract the stuff with an eye toward the environment. That should be interesting.
Should be no difference. Environmental regulations have been around for a while.
I was answering the question why we're pumping oil as fast as we can, not fracking specifically.
And I was pointing out that the US acts the same even though government isn't in charge. I also wanted to make the point that most of the world has little to do with OPEC governments.
The costs are just passed on to the consumers (the people).
And to the everyone else in the gasoline supply chain. Competion means you can't pass all of your costs on to the end consumer else you get undercut.
And much of that is wasted to enrich the government's friends rather than accomplishing results, as most government projects go. Of course, where does the government get all this money? From the people, and thus the people are chained to more taxes and fees.
So what? It's no different for those subsidies in oil production.
TL;DR version - your narrative needs work.
Finally, you mention the rocket equation! I find it interesting how the people who talk about how hard it is, tend to be weak on the actual math. So you have some inkling of the difficulties. Now, use a more efficient engine, for example, LOX/kerosene optimized for vacuum.
I also was a bit in error. Delta-v for SpaceShipOne was a quarter what they needed to get in orbit. Using LOX/kerosene would boost that delta-v by about 40%. Sure, you still need a high propellant to dry mass ratio (something like 12 or 13 to 1 for achieving 9,500m/s starting from 300 m/s at 350 sec ISP, there's also a minute boost from the altitude, something like 20-40 m/s equivalent in delta-v and drop in air resistance and gravity losses, I'll stab at another 300 m/s) for a very good LOX/kerosene engine), but as I mentioned earlier, I don't think that's so hard.
For reentry, the key is surface area. The larger the cross sectional area of the return vehicle relative to its mass, then the less heating the vehicle will endure. Since these vehicles are launched above most of the atmosphere, the constraint on surface area (for air resistance losses and stress on vehicle) are greatly reduced. At 50k feet, I understand that pressure is about a tenth what it is at sea level. So those forces from air resistance tend to be a factor of ten smaller.