What equations? There's been a lot of yapping over the years about solar power. What I hear repeatedly is that it becomes competitive with the usual stuff at around $1 per watt.
Rumsfeld is an idiot. He tripled the cost of basic military needs by doling them them out using the legendary US government contracting system. Oh look, I just found a few thousand Solyndras.
The point is, private industry is not going to account for the fact that fossil fuels will run out.
For someone not doing such a thing, they've developed a remarkable set of alternative technologies over the past century.
Futures contracts - which would normally handle this sort of thing - don't really handle dates 30 or 50 years out in the future.
We have plenty of securities that do extend out that far, such as stocks in energy companies.
As such, I think it is responsible for us as a society to come up with the technology we will need to replace fossil fuels in the future.
Here's the thing I don't get. What makes you think we're shirking that responsibility? Because we can shovel a few billion more dollars down a dark rathole?
Related to my previous argument (the comment that some projects cost a "considerable amount" for the power generated), check out this list of loans and the physical assets that were developed as a result.
One of the more extreme examples was a loan to NRG Energy/BrightSource for $1.6 billion which was used to build a solar plant which produced just under 400 MW of power. That's $4 per watt. But it should be more like $1 per watt (which I understand is the threshold for economically viable, large scale, unsubsidized solar power). But there are several other solar plants on that list getting loans in the $3 to $4 per watt range.
That should have been an automatic "no go" for funding of this scale. If someone wants to try an experimental and costly design, then they can try it for at least an order (and probably two orders) of magnitude less, like sane businesses do.
Almost all of those green energy investments actually are working out. More than 95% of them are.
I have a different definition of "working out" than "hasn't gone bankrupt yet".
That success rate of investment is higher than almost anything. Most new businesses fail. Most new business ipo are a crapshoot.
And most involve money at levels a couple of orders or more less than what the US government gave out. As I see it, to throw half a billion dollars at a business and then trot out the VC excuse that "most businesses fail" completely ignores that lending of that size should be on much less risky things.
When you stop focusing on the very low minority of failure (which we also know was induced by China) it was a huge success.
"A huge success" means something great that wouldn't have been accomplished otherwise. My take is that none of the projects I've seen have qualified. They either fail hard or were going to get funded and work anyway without government funding. My view is that the companies which immediately went bankrupt (which incidentally is a great sign that the lender didn't do any due diligence) are only the tip of the iceberg. You still have all those projects which aren't going to amount to anything and which cost a considerable amount for the level of power generation built.
And with a push towards NG and electric vehicles, then our oil needs will drop.
There's no such "push" unless you count continued, incompetent attempts by various governments in the US.
Finally note, that Keystone is NOT about getting oil to America. It is about getting oil to refineries in Texas who will then ship those oil products out. America will generally gain nothing out of keystone
I gain nothing from your continued existence, but that would be a poor argument for opposing your existence as a consequence. While it could be argued that the US would gain nothing from this pipeline, it is also true that a large number of US citizens would gain at no significant loss to the rest of us (which is why the effort is still progressing along despite the considerable interference from the Obama administration and elsewhere). That's in my view a great reason to allow such endeavors to continue.
Can somebody tell me why they can't put a refinery up in Canada, or even in ND where there is lots of oil.
Regulations greatly inhibit the building of new refineries in the US (only a handful have been built in the last thrity years), but are less restrictive on the expanding of existing refineries. So one builds oil pipelines from where the oil is to where the refineries are.
refineries that are going to be shut down by the storms in the gulf which are getting bigger due to climate change
Where's the evidence that this is happening? My view is that claims of "extreme weather" including your assertion above are remarkably flimsy and unscientific even by the standards of the current "climate change" debate.
It's also worth noting that we've had large hurricanes hit refineries before, and it just isn't that bad. Some may be down for a few weeks, but they come back up.
I believe they do. I also believe those subsidies are lower than the subsidies (and regulatory protection from competition) they get just for being businesses, particularly, large, somewhat grandfathered businesses.
Being able to use 'technology' like ipads fools our less educated citizens into believing their are actually quite bright, and in no further need of education or self reflection.
Haven't you looked at the stats on an ipad? +20 int, +20 status, last I checked.
Really, can you provide some examples of how you "take more immigrants" and i don't mean "temporary" H1B's but real immigration with full citizenship.
For example, the US takes in more immigrants per thousand people than the EU countries, except for Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy. During the 90's, the immigration rate was considerably higher and the US probably outmatched any other developed world country.
It looks to me like most of the slow down, while occurring in the restrictive 9/11 era, also was due to the economic and political weakness of the largest states, particular California, Illinois, and New York. For example, the fraction of California's population that was foreign born jumped by 4.5% between 1990 and 2000 and increased a further 1% between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile, its increase in population dropped from 14% increase between 1990 and 2000 to 10% between 2000 and 2010. That probably is most of the decline in immigration for the US just in that state. There are some smaller states that show similar trends of high immigration in 1990-2000, but not in 2000-2010. The rest of the big states (for example, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) don't show that.
If your point is energy market regulations are necessary and should not have been changed (because when restrictions were lifted things immediately went to shit due to greed) then I agree with you.
Restrictions were lifted and new restrictions put in their place. Here, the problem was that certain companies were required to buy expensive power on a spot market and then sell it for considerably less to the general public. This was ideal hunting ground for market manipulators such as Enron.
And there was plenty of time to fix the problem once it was discovered. But it wasn't fixed until one of the three major private electricity utilities for California went bankrupt and a second was on the verge of going bankrupt.
I think your post is saying the CA gov is at fault because it opened the door for abuse of the system. But I feel like that's the same as saying: if Edison and Tesla never popularized electricity the CA crisis wouldn't have happened. Which is technically true provided no one else made electricity mainstream. The door may well been opened by the government (I'm guessing due to extensive lobbying by Enron and co) but I'm pretty sure the energy traders walked through that door on their own accord, orchestrating an unnecessary crisis for their own gain. Did you not hear the "Grandma Milly" phone recordings.
Yes, let's not blame the government for putting chainsaws in the playground.
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they?
Don't blow a gasket. The previous poster is quite correct. Yes, the markets were deregulated, but the California electricity crisis can be completely explained by the structure of the electricity spot market. The big electricity utilities had to buy a certain amount of power on the spot market. And two of them had to sell that power at a fixed and lower rate. Customers were completely insulated from the negative effects of their electricity use decisions.
A predictable, mandatory behavior like that is blood in the water to any would-be market manipulators. And as we see, they profited handsomely from that. So we have the first fault with the California government. They signed off on a poorly designed market.
The real trouble though happened when the flaws in the market were exposed. In the summer of 2000, the prices on the spot market jumped to very high levels several times. At this point, the two power companies which hadn't fully deregulated (they were enjoying the benefits of a high fixed rate) attempted to do and were rebuffed by the governor of California.
I think that if those two companies had been allowed to pass the actual costs of electricity to their customers, the crisis would have never happened. Or they could have been allowed to buy long term contracts again and not be so dependent on the spot market. Neither happened. Over the next nine or so months, one company went bankrupt and the other was about to.
Only then did the governor of California permit any sort of reform. It was naturally to reverse some aspects of the California electricity deregulation.
I don't know whether the governor was intending to use the crisis for ideological purposes or simply was on Enron's payroll, but the effect was to cause a lot of trouble for everyone involved. He got booted in a recall election shortly thereafter.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
No. What happens is that you and everyone else use less power and the price doesn't go up much. The "suffering" only happened because there was no incentive to use less power. When I was in Silicon Valley during that time, I was charged a fix rate, I think it was $70-80 per MWh. The power company, PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) paid as much as $250 per MWh for the worst of it. Where's my incentive to reduce my demand to prevent PG&E from going bankrupt?
An important note: the power crisis was caused entirely by market manipulation with Enron at the front of the line.
In other words, the power crisis was caused by bad market design. That kind of market manipulation loses money in a well designed market. But in a market where certain parties are required or forced to act in a predictable way (here, the big private electricity utilities were required to buy a certain amount of power on the spot market, no matter how expensive it became), you can make quite a killing.
I agree, but I think it should be tempered by the needs of planetary defense.
The US military happens to be a better fit than NASA for planetary defense as well. Among other things, the US military has a bigger space budget than NASA does and they built and operated the existing systems for detecting threats on Earth and in space.
Also, pork.
The problem here is that NASA is just as pork-ridden and inefficient as the US military. If we redirect the waste from the US military without doing a similar cleanup at NASA, then we'll still squander that money.
No, you made an argument. Anyone can do that for anything. Let's start with the definition of slavery:
a person held in servitude as the chattel of another
There are other definitions, but they are irrelevant to this discussion.
You wrote:
If the only freedom we have gained (for the vast majority of people) is the right to choose a different owner, then we have gained no freedom at all.
Well, that means you aren't chattel then since you aren't actually owned. Property doesn't get to decide who owns it or change its mind. As a result, your claim doesn't fit the definition of slavery.
We also have as a result absurdities like the self-employed simultaneously being their own slaves and masters or someone becoming a master for a few minutes by renting a taxi or other such service.
Hence, my evaluation of the claim as "quite dumb".
I think the US is spending too much on the military, but the military does national defense, which is one of the few things that most people agree is important.
-- The problem, generally speaking, is that government is inefficient. A dollar spent on government goods and services is, more likely than not, better left in your pocket to spend on the private sector's goods and services. That's as true of NASA as it is of the DOD. We've already spent hundreds of billions of dollars, both directly and indirectly, on things like solar technologies, fusion, etc., that have gone nowhere. It would have been better if that money had been left in our pockets to buy the goods and services that we want; at least then we'd have something for it. Yes, government occasionally invents something from time to time that proves useful; the same is true for the private sector, but the private sector does it for less.
To throw out a NASA example, the International Space Station (ISS) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion (including contributions from many other countries), a third of which was the cost of Space Shuttle flights (36 flights at $1.4 billion each, according to Wikipedia. This includes the fixed costs of keeping the Shuttle program running past the year 2000 since the Shuttle was used almost exclusively for the ISS.).
What did we get as a result? I think the three main benefits were a demonstration of orbital assembly, a platform for testing space technologies, and a modest amount of space R&D. Apparently, on the last point, the ISS is remarkably weak.
It has a crew of six for about 10-11 months of the year (with a skeleton crew of three in between) and when it does, only one person can be spared to do such research. I don't know what the rest of the crew is doing, but it's apparently not research. There is some talk of expanding the crew on the ISS, but that apparently is limited by the need to have a "lifeboat" for everyone on board.
The US could have saved almost all of the Shuttle money, if they had simply decommissioned the Shuttle in 2000 and launched the ISS components on a Delta IV Heavy or Proton. They could have saved a lot more than that including many years of time, if they had decommissioned the Shuttle in 1990 and launched and assembled a Mir sized station (130 tons instead of 450 tons, and 3 crew members instead of 6) station in 1990 using the Titan IV rocket (that rocket was enormously expensive per launch, but only because it was used less frequently than once a year) with some attention paid to lowering the maintenance load of the station.
A low maintenance Mir-class station launched on a cheaper rocket (and operating at least a decade earlier) would have demonstrated just about everything the ISS does for a small fraction of the cost (I'd say one to two orders of magnitude). But that wouldn't have been a big enough pyramid for the politicians writing the checks.
Bull. Normal people don't get legal fictions like "limited liability", they aren't legally required to overrule their conscience in the service of shareholders either.
Normal people don't need limited liability since they don't need other peoples' capital in order to exist. As a result, they have no obligations to shareholders. I see no reason to care about your observation since it is irrelevant to the legal treatment of corporations.
I did nothing of the kind - I called ALL capitalist employment nothing but slavery.
Well, that's quite dumb then, since it isn't slavery.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there.
You're wrong here. Businesses didn't "operate quite well". Getting deep into debt was a common problem. Having a partner in your business disappear with the funds, but not the creditors was another. Corporations provided a sane way for people to invest in a project or business without becoming fully responsibility for whatever the business did.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there. In fact the corporation as we know it didn't exist until the early 20th century - until then the law (in the USA) stated that corporation could never sign more than one customer contract.
And that authority was widely abused by government and hence, taken away. The business world of today is far more dynamic and flexible than in the old days. And a big part of that is due to the ease of exchanging capital for a voting share of a corporation.
Nope, corporations don't lay any golden eggs
Only if you ignore reality.
Do you know how many Enron executives have served jailtime ?
Jeffrey Skilling is currently serving a four year jail sentence. And according to Wikipedia, 21 Enron employees were found guilty (or plead guilty) of various crimes.
There is no economic benefit from corporations - and indeed every single person employed by one would be living a higher quality life if they were instead employed by a private company doing the exact same business.
The vast majority of corporations are private companies. And one merely needs to look at the real world to see that vast numbers of people are gainfully employeed by corporations throughout the world. Without the limited liability of corporations, one would not have the huge access to capital that made this era of growing global prosperity possible.
One of the most admirable businessmen alive today Richard Branson hates corporations perhaps even more than me - because his company, Virgin -used to be one. Virgin went public in 1999, many people hopefully invested, but sadly so did a lot of the usual people who buy shares only so they can force companies to milk their customers, employees and the environment for all their worth with no regard for long term impacts or costs of their actions. Branson didn't hang around long enough to experience what usually happens with entrepreneurs when their companies go public (96% of them get fired from the companies they started within 3 years) - he realized in just six months that he could not live in good consciences with what these shareholders were demanding he turn his business into, with how they demanded he treat his workers, with how they demanded he gouge and defraud his customers - so he bought the shares back - every last one of them, a
When people's own hypocrisy is revealed to them, instead of accepting that they might be wrong and correct their behavior, they would rationalize and make up excuses/explanations to justify continuing their bad behavior.
And what does everyone else think of that? I doubt everyone will agree with my excuses when my hypocrisy is revealed.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what a LOAN is? It isn't a handout/subsidy.
Do you know what a LOAN GUARANTEE is? It's not a loan, it's a handout/subsidy.
What equations? There's been a lot of yapping over the years about solar power. What I hear repeatedly is that it becomes competitive with the usual stuff at around $1 per watt.
Rumsfeld is an idiot. He tripled the cost of basic military needs by doling them them out using the legendary US government contracting system. Oh look, I just found a few thousand Solyndras.
The point is, private industry is not going to account for the fact that fossil fuels will run out.
For someone not doing such a thing, they've developed a remarkable set of alternative technologies over the past century.
Futures contracts - which would normally handle this sort of thing - don't really handle dates 30 or 50 years out in the future.
We have plenty of securities that do extend out that far, such as stocks in energy companies.
As such, I think it is responsible for us as a society to come up with the technology we will need to replace fossil fuels in the future.
Here's the thing I don't get. What makes you think we're shirking that responsibility? Because we can shovel a few billion more dollars down a dark rathole?
Related to my previous argument (the comment that some projects cost a "considerable amount" for the power generated), check out this list of loans and the physical assets that were developed as a result.
One of the more extreme examples was a loan to NRG Energy/BrightSource for $1.6 billion which was used to build a solar plant which produced just under 400 MW of power. That's $4 per watt. But it should be more like $1 per watt (which I understand is the threshold for economically viable, large scale, unsubsidized solar power). But there are several other solar plants on that list getting loans in the $3 to $4 per watt range.
That should have been an automatic "no go" for funding of this scale. If someone wants to try an experimental and costly design, then they can try it for at least an order (and probably two orders) of magnitude less, like sane businesses do.
Almost all of those green energy investments actually are working out. More than 95% of them are.
I have a different definition of "working out" than "hasn't gone bankrupt yet".
That success rate of investment is higher than almost anything. Most new businesses fail. Most new business ipo are a crapshoot.
And most involve money at levels a couple of orders or more less than what the US government gave out. As I see it, to throw half a billion dollars at a business and then trot out the VC excuse that "most businesses fail" completely ignores that lending of that size should be on much less risky things.
When you stop focusing on the very low minority of failure (which we also know was induced by China) it was a huge success.
"A huge success" means something great that wouldn't have been accomplished otherwise. My take is that none of the projects I've seen have qualified. They either fail hard or were going to get funded and work anyway without government funding. My view is that the companies which immediately went bankrupt (which incidentally is a great sign that the lender didn't do any due diligence) are only the tip of the iceberg. You still have all those projects which aren't going to amount to anything and which cost a considerable amount for the level of power generation built.
And with a push towards NG and electric vehicles, then our oil needs will drop.
There's no such "push" unless you count continued, incompetent attempts by various governments in the US.
Finally note, that Keystone is NOT about getting oil to America. It is about getting oil to refineries in Texas who will then ship those oil products out. America will generally gain nothing out of keystone
I gain nothing from your continued existence, but that would be a poor argument for opposing your existence as a consequence. While it could be argued that the US would gain nothing from this pipeline, it is also true that a large number of US citizens would gain at no significant loss to the rest of us (which is why the effort is still progressing along despite the considerable interference from the Obama administration and elsewhere). That's in my view a great reason to allow such endeavors to continue.
Can somebody tell me why they can't put a refinery up in Canada, or even in ND where there is lots of oil.
Regulations greatly inhibit the building of new refineries in the US (only a handful have been built in the last thrity years), but are less restrictive on the expanding of existing refineries. So one builds oil pipelines from where the oil is to where the refineries are.
refineries that are going to be shut down by the storms in the gulf which are getting bigger due to climate change
Where's the evidence that this is happening? My view is that claims of "extreme weather" including your assertion above are remarkably flimsy and unscientific even by the standards of the current "climate change" debate.
It's also worth noting that we've had large hurricanes hit refineries before, and it just isn't that bad. Some may be down for a few weeks, but they come back up.
I believe they do. I also believe those subsidies are lower than the subsidies (and regulatory protection from competition) they get just for being businesses, particularly, large, somewhat grandfathered businesses.
Being able to use 'technology' like ipads fools our less educated citizens into believing their are actually quite bright, and in no further need of education or self reflection.
Haven't you looked at the stats on an ipad? +20 int, +20 status, last I checked.
What bothers me is that people who ARE wearing Google Glasses are HAVING A LIGHT BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO THE EYE.
How does that differ from every other light source that you happen to see? The eye is meant for seeing LIGHT BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO THE EYE.
Really, can you provide some examples of how you "take more immigrants" and i don't mean "temporary" H1B's but real immigration with full citizenship.
For example, the US takes in more immigrants per thousand people than the EU countries, except for Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy. During the 90's, the immigration rate was considerably higher and the US probably outmatched any other developed world country.
It looks to me like most of the slow down, while occurring in the restrictive 9/11 era, also was due to the economic and political weakness of the largest states, particular California, Illinois, and New York. For example, the fraction of California's population that was foreign born jumped by 4.5% between 1990 and 2000 and increased a further 1% between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile, its increase in population dropped from 14% increase between 1990 and 2000 to 10% between 2000 and 2010. That probably is most of the decline in immigration for the US just in that state. There are some smaller states that show similar trends of high immigration in 1990-2000, but not in 2000-2010. The rest of the big states (for example, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) don't show that.
If your point is energy market regulations are necessary and should not have been changed (because when restrictions were lifted things immediately went to shit due to greed) then I agree with you.
Restrictions were lifted and new restrictions put in their place. Here, the problem was that certain companies were required to buy expensive power on a spot market and then sell it for considerably less to the general public. This was ideal hunting ground for market manipulators such as Enron.
And there was plenty of time to fix the problem once it was discovered. But it wasn't fixed until one of the three major private electricity utilities for California went bankrupt and a second was on the verge of going bankrupt.
I think your post is saying the CA gov is at fault because it opened the door for abuse of the system. But I feel like that's the same as saying: if Edison and Tesla never popularized electricity the CA crisis wouldn't have happened. Which is technically true provided no one else made electricity mainstream. The door may well been opened by the government (I'm guessing due to extensive lobbying by Enron and co) but I'm pretty sure the energy traders walked through that door on their own accord, orchestrating an unnecessary crisis for their own gain. Did you not hear the "Grandma Milly" phone recordings.
Yes, let's not blame the government for putting chainsaws in the playground.
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they?
Don't blow a gasket. The previous poster is quite correct. Yes, the markets were deregulated, but the California electricity crisis can be completely explained by the structure of the electricity spot market. The big electricity utilities had to buy a certain amount of power on the spot market. And two of them had to sell that power at a fixed and lower rate. Customers were completely insulated from the negative effects of their electricity use decisions.
A predictable, mandatory behavior like that is blood in the water to any would-be market manipulators. And as we see, they profited handsomely from that. So we have the first fault with the California government. They signed off on a poorly designed market.
The real trouble though happened when the flaws in the market were exposed. In the summer of 2000, the prices on the spot market jumped to very high levels several times. At this point, the two power companies which hadn't fully deregulated (they were enjoying the benefits of a high fixed rate) attempted to do and were rebuffed by the governor of California.
I think that if those two companies had been allowed to pass the actual costs of electricity to their customers, the crisis would have never happened. Or they could have been allowed to buy long term contracts again and not be so dependent on the spot market. Neither happened. Over the next nine or so months, one company went bankrupt and the other was about to.
Only then did the governor of California permit any sort of reform. It was naturally to reverse some aspects of the California electricity deregulation.
I don't know whether the governor was intending to use the crisis for ideological purposes or simply was on Enron's payroll, but the effect was to cause a lot of trouble for everyone involved. He got booted in a recall election shortly thereafter.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
No. What happens is that you and everyone else use less power and the price doesn't go up much. The "suffering" only happened because there was no incentive to use less power. When I was in Silicon Valley during that time, I was charged a fix rate, I think it was $70-80 per MWh. The power company, PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) paid as much as $250 per MWh for the worst of it. Where's my incentive to reduce my demand to prevent PG&E from going bankrupt?
An important note: the power crisis was caused entirely by market manipulation with Enron at the front of the line.
In other words, the power crisis was caused by bad market design. That kind of market manipulation loses money in a well designed market. But in a market where certain parties are required or forced to act in a predictable way (here, the big private electricity utilities were required to buy a certain amount of power on the spot market, no matter how expensive it became), you can make quite a killing.
What makes you think this is GMO related? Is this guy going to splice in some roundup genes?
lol that someone actually puts any trust in consumer reports
I take it you have a reason for your opinion?
I agree, but I think it should be tempered by the needs of planetary defense.
The US military happens to be a better fit than NASA for planetary defense as well. Among other things, the US military has a bigger space budget than NASA does and they built and operated the existing systems for detecting threats on Earth and in space.
Also, pork.
The problem here is that NASA is just as pork-ridden and inefficient as the US military. If we redirect the waste from the US military without doing a similar cleanup at NASA, then we'll still squander that money.
I backed the claim up
No, you made an argument. Anyone can do that for anything. Let's start with the definition of slavery:
a person held in servitude as the chattel of another
There are other definitions, but they are irrelevant to this discussion.
You wrote:
If the only freedom we have gained (for the vast majority of people) is the right to choose a different owner, then we have gained no freedom at all.
Well, that means you aren't chattel then since you aren't actually owned. Property doesn't get to decide who owns it or change its mind. As a result, your claim doesn't fit the definition of slavery.
We also have as a result absurdities like the self-employed simultaneously being their own slaves and masters or someone becoming a master for a few minutes by renting a taxi or other such service.
Hence, my evaluation of the claim as "quite dumb".
I think the US is spending too much on the military, but the military does national defense, which is one of the few things that most people agree is important.
-- The problem, generally speaking, is that government is inefficient. A dollar spent on government goods and services is, more likely than not, better left in your pocket to spend on the private sector's goods and services. That's as true of NASA as it is of the DOD. We've already spent hundreds of billions of dollars, both directly and indirectly, on things like solar technologies, fusion, etc., that have gone nowhere. It would have been better if that money had been left in our pockets to buy the goods and services that we want; at least then we'd have something for it. Yes, government occasionally invents something from time to time that proves useful; the same is true for the private sector, but the private sector does it for less.
To throw out a NASA example, the International Space Station (ISS) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion (including contributions from many other countries), a third of which was the cost of Space Shuttle flights (36 flights at $1.4 billion each, according to Wikipedia. This includes the fixed costs of keeping the Shuttle program running past the year 2000 since the Shuttle was used almost exclusively for the ISS.).
What did we get as a result? I think the three main benefits were a demonstration of orbital assembly, a platform for testing space technologies, and a modest amount of space R&D. Apparently, on the last point, the ISS is remarkably weak.
It has a crew of six for about 10-11 months of the year (with a skeleton crew of three in between) and when it does, only one person can be spared to do such research. I don't know what the rest of the crew is doing, but it's apparently not research. There is some talk of expanding the crew on the ISS, but that apparently is limited by the need to have a "lifeboat" for everyone on board.
The US could have saved almost all of the Shuttle money, if they had simply decommissioned the Shuttle in 2000 and launched the ISS components on a Delta IV Heavy or Proton. They could have saved a lot more than that including many years of time, if they had decommissioned the Shuttle in 1990 and launched and assembled a Mir sized station (130 tons instead of 450 tons, and 3 crew members instead of 6) station in 1990 using the Titan IV rocket (that rocket was enormously expensive per launch, but only because it was used less frequently than once a year) with some attention paid to lowering the maintenance load of the station.
A low maintenance Mir-class station launched on a cheaper rocket (and operating at least a decade earlier) would have demonstrated just about everything the ISS does for a small fraction of the cost (I'd say one to two orders of magnitude). But that wouldn't have been a big enough pyramid for the politicians writing the checks.
Bull. Normal people don't get legal fictions like "limited liability", they aren't legally required to overrule their conscience in the service of shareholders either.
Normal people don't need limited liability since they don't need other peoples' capital in order to exist. As a result, they have no obligations to shareholders. I see no reason to care about your observation since it is irrelevant to the legal treatment of corporations.
I did nothing of the kind - I called ALL capitalist employment nothing but slavery.
Well, that's quite dumb then, since it isn't slavery.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there.
You're wrong here. Businesses didn't "operate quite well". Getting deep into debt was a common problem. Having a partner in your business disappear with the funds, but not the creditors was another. Corporations provided a sane way for people to invest in a project or business without becoming fully responsibility for whatever the business did.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there. In fact the corporation as we know it didn't exist until the early 20th century - until then the law (in the USA) stated that corporation could never sign more than one customer contract.
And that authority was widely abused by government and hence, taken away. The business world of today is far more dynamic and flexible than in the old days. And a big part of that is due to the ease of exchanging capital for a voting share of a corporation.
Nope, corporations don't lay any golden eggs
Only if you ignore reality.
Do you know how many Enron executives have served jailtime ?
Jeffrey Skilling is currently serving a four year jail sentence. And according to Wikipedia, 21 Enron employees were found guilty (or plead guilty) of various crimes.
There is no economic benefit from corporations - and indeed every single person employed by one would be living a higher quality life if they were instead employed by a private company doing the exact same business. The vast majority of corporations are private companies. And one merely needs to look at the real world to see that vast numbers of people are gainfully employeed by corporations throughout the world. Without the limited liability of corporations, one would not have the huge access to capital that made this era of growing global prosperity possible.
One of the most admirable businessmen alive today Richard Branson hates corporations perhaps even more than me - because his company, Virgin -used to be one. Virgin went public in 1999, many people hopefully invested, but sadly so did a lot of the usual people who buy shares only so they can force companies to milk their customers, employees and the environment for all their worth with no regard for long term impacts or costs of their actions. Branson didn't hang around long enough to experience what usually happens with entrepreneurs when their companies go public (96% of them get fired from the companies they started within 3 years) - he realized in just six months that he could not live in good consciences with what these shareholders were demanding he turn his business into, with how they demanded he treat his workers, with how they demanded he gouge and defraud his customers - so he bought the shares back - every last one of them, a
When people's own hypocrisy is revealed to them, instead of accepting that they might be wrong and correct their behavior, they would rationalize and make up excuses/explanations to justify continuing their bad behavior.
And what does everyone else think of that? I doubt everyone will agree with my excuses when my hypocrisy is revealed.
Because you can just choose to not be impacted by pervasive messaging in society.
Yes, that is correct.