If you lower the cost of the fuel enough, the cost of the engine becomes moot.
No, high fixed costs can trump low variable costs easily. Keep in mind opportunity costs. You could have put that money into something else, like an investment, rather than an expensive engine. So a cheap engine with moderate fuel costs can beat a very expensive engine with no fuel costs.
One can also react that hydrogen with other chemicals to create more conventional (and useful) chemicals such as methane, ethane (useful base compound for making gasoline), ethylene (common plastics building block), and ammonia (usual starting point for fertilizers).
The internet has been growing exponential more or less for a couple of decades. Efficiency on the other hand can only do so well. You're not going to get exponentially improved efficiency (maybe in computing power, but not in cooling, manufacture, resource footprint of employees, etc). And efficiency is a trade off with actually doing stuff too. Try too hard to make something efficient and you will lose some degree of capability or action.
So of course, one would expect neither efficiency to be able to keep up with the growth of the internet nor for that criteria to be remotely useful to consider.
So they were supposed to come negotiate with us...when, exactly?
1953. And they can go ahead and do that any time they want to. Nobody aside from North Korea wants a forever war.
And why would they?
Just look at all of their neighbors. Japan, South Korea, China, even Russia are all experiencing unparalleled prosperity. They could be getting a piece of that.
I'm not saying this is entirely our fault, I'm just saying if you look at the history you sure as hell can't pretend we're entirely blameless.
Now, don't get me wrong here. I don't care in the least whether blame can be assigned to any particular country. I'm merely pointing out that North Korea has had sixty years in which to clean up its act, whether anyone else helped or hindered. It didn't.
L1 is between Earth and the Moon. That makes it quite useful for anything going on between the two, like communications networks. It also makes a great anchor point for a space tether (something which could be made with current materials!) from the Moon.
L3 is just like L2 though a touch closer to Earth. You can park spacecraft out there with modest station keeping issues. The L2 advantage is that it's line of sight with the far side of the Moon so you can either park spacecraft that hide from Earth (when very close to the L2 point) or which can communicate with both Earth and the far side of the Moon (a halo orbit further away from L2). But if you're just looking for some place to put something, L3 will work.
If you allow someone to pollute without charging them for it and the EPA, health insurance etc picks up the cost that is a subsidy to that industry.
No, it's an externality, a cost imposed on a third party. Which is why it's called that. A subsidy is a payment or transfer of something of value usually to assist in a given activity.
If the EPA deliberately paid for the harm caused by a business's pollution so that the business wouldn't have to pay for the externality itself (something the EPA doesn't do, BTW), then that could be a subsidy which also happens to be an externality.
I have read a fair number of reports on natural gas fracking sites
There's a lot of environmentalism oriented propaganda out there. I'm sure there is some truth to the claims of pollution and regulatory misconduct in there somewhere, but we need to keep in mind that fracking as well as any other major fossil fuel-based innovation is a huge threat to those who wish to end the use of fossil fuels (or even industrial society itself). And a lot of those people are willing to lie outrageously to get what they want.
My view is that oil drilling has gone on for a long time. Even fracking as a technique has been used for decades. If there was a serious pollution problem with this stuff we would have seen it long ago with major air and water quality problems nowhere near an oil well.
L2 is even more precious as it is the only fairly stable spot in the Earth-moon system where if you're not careful you fall into interplanetary space.
L1 through L3 are not stable points. L4 and L5 have weird dynamics, but things put there will stay there with extremely low delta v.
And you can "fall" into interplanetary space very easily (that is, with arbitrarily low, but well timed delta-v) from any of the Lagrange points. L2 is not unique in this respect.
The GP has not experienced this and so is not basing his impression on any fundamentals.
Bitcoins would not rise as much as they have on fundamentals. My take is that like most bubble markets where most of the good is owned by a few people, this will keep going up until one or more of the bigger holders cashes out (which in turn may be spurred by a major drop in perceived value, say because a number of governments outlaw its use or it gets hacked). Then it'll collapse hard.
I don't know whether it'll have value in the long term, but I don't trust the currency a bit at present.
The Bolsheviks had a huge fight in the Russian Civil War which followed their capitulation in the First World War. The foes were all funded by the winners of the First World War who had axes to grind.
It wasn't till about 1921 or 1922 that the war wrapped up (Wikipedia puts it roughly in third place by death toll after the two world wars!). So they indeed lost the First World War and had to pay major consequences as a result.
It has grown, but it's never been looked at as a whole in terms of hardware.
Why should it ever be someone's job to do that, at least with respect to energy efficiency? I can see the boon to human knowledge to have people study the extent and impact of the internet.
But there's no genuine energy efficiency problem here. If there was, then everyone would be working harder on reducing energy consumption than on expanding their infrastructure. As it turns out, energy is dirt cheap, while the value from the internet is considerable. So I think the right balance is struck here with little to no interest in energy efficiency because there's little to no value to doing so.
For some reason many people see externalizing costs as completely okay and not a subsidy but if you suggest taking away the ability to externalize costs that is seen as a tax.
While I grant that it is possible to have a externality as a subsidy (for example, the nuclear industry's relative protection to liability from accidents), most externalities are not subsidies.
Further, many common approaches to "taking away the ability to externalize costs", such as pollution taxes, for example, are taxes.
I do know that natural gas fracking could be done safely but it would also be more expensive than it is now and companies are cutting too many corners. Would natural gas fracking still be a good source of natural gas if it had to be done safely?
I see no evidence to back your claim that fracking collectively isn't done safely. I'm sure someone out there is doing something unsafe or polluting. But that's why we have regulators and laws.
What happens when our brains don't meet the efficiency standard? What do you propose then?
I might add that I find efficiency standards to be one of those dumb things that sounds smart at first. First, the obvious solution to efficiency is simply not to do it. Don't have a zillion people, don't have an internet, don't do anything that uses power, etc. Then you achieve perfect efficiency.
But the moment you decide that there's some things that we really need to be doing (say because those seven billion people aren't going away any time soon), then you are implicitly recognizing that there are more important things out there than efficiency.
Does the efficiency standard somehow take into account that some uses of energy are more important than conserving energy? Of course not. It's a standard applied blindly to everything. Hence, reason number one why it is a dumb idea.
Reason number two is that there simply isn't much value in conserving energy. Energy is dirt cheap. That indicates it is plentiful enough that we shouldn't care so much about how efficiently we use it.
Last, but not least, reason number three is closely related. As I noted, cheap energy means no real reason to conserve electricity. But in the case of expensive energy, everyone who pays for energy suddenly have huge incentives to conserve it. There still remains no reason to have a conservation standard, because everyone is working hard on conserving it.
But it's definitely sounds a bit 'shadey' to launch a misinformation-campaign for this, especially for an antispam-firm.
What part of "launch a misinformation-campaign" doesn't sound "shadey"? Well, aside from the accusation coming from from an anonymous poster who doesn't bother to provide a shred of supporting evidence for the claim. That part doesn't sound the least bit shady.
Why make an artificial distinction between technical and business innovation? You're not going to have true innovation until the technology gets used for something valuable and/or interesting. From the VC point of view, that means a sellable product that a working business gets wrapped around.
What happens if the problem has been long solved, but you refuse to acknowledge the solution? That's what I see as the main problem with the world's most pressing problems.
Becasue they didn't watch the news during desert storm?
How would watching the news help? As I already said, they know the planes exist, but it's one thing to see talking heads yapping about B-2 bombers on the TV and another to have them fly right next to your airspace.
Well, that will happen sooner or later. Frankly, I think there are limits to how terrifying a weapon can be that is stored in a single known place in Missouri.
No. For example, if 90% of all man-made things you touch are now made via 3-D printers, it'd be way too large to be considered niche. But it could still be low usage among people in general. Alternately, its use could be widespread, like regular printers. Do we say that laser printers serve only a "niche market"?
and the fusion is taking place near the "surface" as an electromagnetic pinch and not in the interior
If it really were, then why don't we see more variable conditions on the Sun's surface, greater mass escaping from the Sun, or similar fusion events on the gas giants?
Fukushima is a peering legacy like Chernobyl before it about the dangers of conventional generation I, II, and III nuclear reactors.
No. It's a flaw of this particular design which spans generation I and very old generation II. Lumping generation III, which all has passive cooling, with Fukushima is mere deception.
Slashdot Mirror
COST =/= PRICE
That billion bucks is a cost not a price. Get it now?
If you lower the cost of the fuel enough, the cost of the engine becomes moot.
No, high fixed costs can trump low variable costs easily. Keep in mind opportunity costs. You could have put that money into something else, like an investment, rather than an expensive engine. So a cheap engine with moderate fuel costs can beat a very expensive engine with no fuel costs.
One can also react that hydrogen with other chemicals to create more conventional (and useful) chemicals such as methane, ethane (useful base compound for making gasoline), ethylene (common plastics building block), and ammonia (usual starting point for fertilizers).
Earth-moon L2 is permanently eclipsed from Earth by the moon. We can't see it from here.
But a spacecraft can orbit the Earth-Moon L2 (via a halo orbit) far enough away and have line of sight with Earth.
The internet has been growing exponential more or less for a couple of decades. Efficiency on the other hand can only do so well. You're not going to get exponentially improved efficiency (maybe in computing power, but not in cooling, manufacture, resource footprint of employees, etc). And efficiency is a trade off with actually doing stuff too. Try too hard to make something efficient and you will lose some degree of capability or action.
So of course, one would expect neither efficiency to be able to keep up with the growth of the internet nor for that criteria to be remotely useful to consider.
So they were supposed to come negotiate with us...when, exactly?
1953. And they can go ahead and do that any time they want to. Nobody aside from North Korea wants a forever war.
And why would they?
Just look at all of their neighbors. Japan, South Korea, China, even Russia are all experiencing unparalleled prosperity. They could be getting a piece of that.
I'm not saying this is entirely our fault, I'm just saying if you look at the history you sure as hell can't pretend we're entirely blameless.
Now, don't get me wrong here. I don't care in the least whether blame can be assigned to any particular country. I'm merely pointing out that North Korea has had sixty years in which to clean up its act, whether anyone else helped or hindered. It didn't.
I don't think L1 or L3 would be very useful.
L1 is between Earth and the Moon. That makes it quite useful for anything going on between the two, like communications networks. It also makes a great anchor point for a space tether (something which could be made with current materials!) from the Moon.
L3 is just like L2 though a touch closer to Earth. You can park spacecraft out there with modest station keeping issues. The L2 advantage is that it's line of sight with the far side of the Moon so you can either park spacecraft that hide from Earth (when very close to the L2 point) or which can communicate with both Earth and the far side of the Moon (a halo orbit further away from L2). But if you're just looking for some place to put something, L3 will work.
If you allow someone to pollute without charging them for it and the EPA, health insurance etc picks up the cost that is a subsidy to that industry.
No, it's an externality, a cost imposed on a third party. Which is why it's called that. A subsidy is a payment or transfer of something of value usually to assist in a given activity.
If the EPA deliberately paid for the harm caused by a business's pollution so that the business wouldn't have to pay for the externality itself (something the EPA doesn't do, BTW), then that could be a subsidy which also happens to be an externality.
I have read a fair number of reports on natural gas fracking sites
There's a lot of environmentalism oriented propaganda out there. I'm sure there is some truth to the claims of pollution and regulatory misconduct in there somewhere, but we need to keep in mind that fracking as well as any other major fossil fuel-based innovation is a huge threat to those who wish to end the use of fossil fuels (or even industrial society itself). And a lot of those people are willing to lie outrageously to get what they want.
My view is that oil drilling has gone on for a long time. Even fracking as a technique has been used for decades. If there was a serious pollution problem with this stuff we would have seen it long ago with major air and water quality problems nowhere near an oil well.
L2 is even more precious as it is the only fairly stable spot in the Earth-moon system where if you're not careful you fall into interplanetary space.
L1 through L3 are not stable points. L4 and L5 have weird dynamics, but things put there will stay there with extremely low delta v.
And you can "fall" into interplanetary space very easily (that is, with arbitrarily low, but well timed delta-v) from any of the Lagrange points. L2 is not unique in this respect.
The GP has not experienced this and so is not basing his impression on any fundamentals.
Bitcoins would not rise as much as they have on fundamentals. My take is that like most bubble markets where most of the good is owned by a few people, this will keep going up until one or more of the bigger holders cashes out (which in turn may be spurred by a major drop in perceived value, say because a number of governments outlaw its use or it gets hacked). Then it'll collapse hard.
I don't know whether it'll have value in the long term, but I don't trust the currency a bit at present.
The Bolsheviks had a huge fight in the Russian Civil War which followed their capitulation in the First World War. The foes were all funded by the winners of the First World War who had axes to grind.
It wasn't till about 1921 or 1922 that the war wrapped up (Wikipedia puts it roughly in third place by death toll after the two world wars!). So they indeed lost the First World War and had to pay major consequences as a result.
It has grown, but it's never been looked at as a whole in terms of hardware.
Why should it ever be someone's job to do that, at least with respect to energy efficiency? I can see the boon to human knowledge to have people study the extent and impact of the internet.
But there's no genuine energy efficiency problem here. If there was, then everyone would be working harder on reducing energy consumption than on expanding their infrastructure. As it turns out, energy is dirt cheap, while the value from the internet is considerable. So I think the right balance is struck here with little to no interest in energy efficiency because there's little to no value to doing so.
For some reason many people see externalizing costs as completely okay and not a subsidy but if you suggest taking away the ability to externalize costs that is seen as a tax.
While I grant that it is possible to have a externality as a subsidy (for example, the nuclear industry's relative protection to liability from accidents), most externalities are not subsidies.
Further, many common approaches to "taking away the ability to externalize costs", such as pollution taxes, for example, are taxes.
I do know that natural gas fracking could be done safely but it would also be more expensive than it is now and companies are cutting too many corners. Would natural gas fracking still be a good source of natural gas if it had to be done safely?
I see no evidence to back your claim that fracking collectively isn't done safely. I'm sure someone out there is doing something unsafe or polluting. But that's why we have regulators and laws.
What happens when our brains don't meet the efficiency standard? What do you propose then?
I might add that I find efficiency standards to be one of those dumb things that sounds smart at first. First, the obvious solution to efficiency is simply not to do it. Don't have a zillion people, don't have an internet, don't do anything that uses power, etc. Then you achieve perfect efficiency.
But the moment you decide that there's some things that we really need to be doing (say because those seven billion people aren't going away any time soon), then you are implicitly recognizing that there are more important things out there than efficiency.
Does the efficiency standard somehow take into account that some uses of energy are more important than conserving energy? Of course not. It's a standard applied blindly to everything. Hence, reason number one why it is a dumb idea.
Reason number two is that there simply isn't much value in conserving energy. Energy is dirt cheap. That indicates it is plentiful enough that we shouldn't care so much about how efficiently we use it.
Last, but not least, reason number three is closely related. As I noted, cheap energy means no real reason to conserve electricity. But in the case of expensive energy, everyone who pays for energy suddenly have huge incentives to conserve it. There still remains no reason to have a conservation standard, because everyone is working hard on conserving it.
But it's definitely sounds a bit 'shadey' to launch a misinformation-campaign for this, especially for an antispam-firm.
What part of "launch a misinformation-campaign" doesn't sound "shadey"? Well, aside from the accusation coming from from an anonymous poster who doesn't bother to provide a shred of supporting evidence for the claim. That part doesn't sound the least bit shady.
Why make an artificial distinction between technical and business innovation? You're not going to have true innovation until the technology gets used for something valuable and/or interesting. From the VC point of view, that means a sellable product that a working business gets wrapped around.
What happens if the problem has been long solved, but you refuse to acknowledge the solution? That's what I see as the main problem with the world's most pressing problems.
Becasue they didn't watch the news during desert storm?
How would watching the news help? As I already said, they know the planes exist, but it's one thing to see talking heads yapping about B-2 bombers on the TV and another to have them fly right next to your airspace.
Except it's the other way around.
Well, that will happen sooner or later. Frankly, I think there are limits to how terrifying a weapon can be that is stored in a single known place in Missouri.
No. For example, if 90% of all man-made things you touch are now made via 3-D printers, it'd be way too large to be considered niche. But it could still be low usage among people in general. Alternately, its use could be widespread, like regular printers. Do we say that laser printers serve only a "niche market"?
and the fusion is taking place near the "surface" as an electromagnetic pinch and not in the interior
If it really were, then why don't we see more variable conditions on the Sun's surface, greater mass escaping from the Sun, or similar fusion events on the gas giants?
I still don't think we really understand how stars work.
Based on what? We have models that explain pretty well the distribution of stars we actually see and the energy output from these stars.
It's the silent radiation killer
Oh yes, let's tremble at the spooky bogey man.
Fukushima is a peering legacy like Chernobyl before it about the dangers of conventional generation I, II, and III nuclear reactors.
No. It's a flaw of this particular design which spans generation I and very old generation II. Lumping generation III, which all has passive cooling, with Fukushima is mere deception.
We can't even claim the Cold War as that was Russia defeating themselves more than anything.
Those count.
Worked for Europe in 1938!
To be blunt, if France had played these games with Germany back in 1936, there wouldn't have been a Second World War.