It's lucky for all the ultra-free-market US libertarians out there that the government is there to safeguard at least some jobs.
At the expense of a bunch of others. It takes other peoples' money to create those jobs. That's money that could have gone to creating productive jobs instead.
If you want to deal with unemployment, just federally mandate 40-hour workweeks maximum for anybody who is not a partial owner of a company (minimum of 1%).
Temp agencies are already the easy workaround to this. It should be pretty easy to group temp employees in groups of say, 40, and incorporate them (with the temp agency owning 60% of the shares).
If you really wanted to deal with unemployment, rather than fuck around, then don't make it so hard to hire local workers. Stupid rules like mandatory 40 hour workweeks don't give the potential employer any incentive to hire workers from your particular country. I'd get rid of rules like minimum wage laws as well.
Are you seriously proposing that we stop doing scientific research? Yes, of course, what happens 10 billion or more years from now is completely irrelevant to us as individuals.
How about 100 years? If there really is a lower vacuum state (and honestly I don't buy that there is), then we're probably not far away technologically from being about to generate it once in the lab. Then you have worry about not just someone somewhere on Earth ending the universe as we know it, but to some degree someone anywhere in the rest of the universe whose lightcone will intersect with our future in a relatively short period of time.
In the US, the big-business class are just a bunch of selfish, stupid pricks who take huge subsidies and then turn around and bite the hand that feeds them. Having the US intelligence community feed intelligence back to US business would make no difference to the autistic Rand-worshipping hand-flappers who run corporate America.
Or one could note that the US has a well established, nationwide, efficient, point to point, cheap, private transportation system that works better for most uses than the public transportation alternative. But by all means, let's pretend it's a character problem.
I'm not talking about quantitative easing (which is still a form of money creation, that goes directly to private banks)
No, QE goes directly to the Fed, who then uses it to buy bonds, which might come from private banks, other businesses, or the federal government.
I have said, government use of money creation for funding, limited by the inflation target.
Banks have issues with any "money creation" methods they employ too. For example, fractional reserve has the problem that if your loans underperform (enough of the loans you make default) enough, then you're bankrupt. How much they have to underperform before bankruptcy happens, depends on how much reserve you have.
I was trying to work out what percentage of Exxon Mobile's net profit for the year that was, but my calculator doesn't display enough 0s.
Interesting choice for a comparison. Excluding a one time sale of Japanese assets, they're making somewhere around $35 billion in profit (which incidentally, $5 million is 0.014% of, easily reached on a calculator). Why aren't we seeing a significant portion of that directed into anti-AGW activities?
Well, I think it's because a lot of their profits come from barriers to entry. They wouldn't be making that much money, if it were a lot easier to put up oil wells and refineries. I think the attempts to restrict oil consumption will end up to the advantage of big oil firms like Exxon once they figure out how to use that to exclude competition.
A corporation giving $5 million is a charitable contribution.
A conservative billionaire giving a similar amount of money to a non-profit in secret is similarly a charitable contribution. The transparency of the donation isn't an indication of its nature.
You can call off nuclear wars or preposition disaster relief supplies and teams ahead of time, even if you can't evacuate many people.
most idiotic statement ever...are you still living in the 1980's? Grow the fuck up already
You mean we can no longer evacuate people or preposition disaster relief supplies like we could in the 80s? We no longer have nuclear weapons or wars like we did in the 80s?
There's no easy answer solution to the 'meteor problem'.
Do nothing. Seriously, that's the easy solution. Spending a relatively small amount of money to catalog asteroids down to a certain size has some value beyond that default strategy.
It does nothing in the event that we find one on an impact trajectory.
Being able to predict a significant disaster even mere hours ahead of time doesn't have value? You can call off nuclear wars or preposition disaster relief supplies and teams ahead of time, even if you can't evacuate many people.
Does anyone think that a 12 hour warning of an impact can have any actual damage mitigation effect?
Sure. As the other replier noted, you can prevent nuclear wars with that much advanced warning. 12 hours is also plenty of time to evacuate most places on the planet, if you're speaking of relatively small air bursts. And you can move a lot of supplies and disaster relief around in that time frame.
If you'd read my post, none of it was supporting any subsidies as a general rule, in fact, I oppose those subsidies which are really just payoffs to those with the power to manipulate the system to their own advantage.
Then you probably should just have a blanket rejection of subsidies.
Which also happens with the alleged "Free Market" too, so forgive me for not mentioning them in detail. I was more concerned with other matters than suggesting my preferred solutions. So I didn't mention them. If you had wanted to hear my ideas, you should have asked instead of leaping to a false conclusion.
Well, I didn't bother adressing that merely because I have no idea what you mean by "Free Market". There are standard definitions for free markets, but no one seems to use them here.
BTW, oil-production is subsidized as well. Or do you think those aircraft carriers floating in the waters of the Mid-East are there for giggles? What are taxpayers paying because we can't get over an addiction to oil? How much harm from digging up and burning coal is done because the government protects those responsible? And you rail over electric-car and wind-power subsidies? Whatever for?
And most of those oil subsidies apply to business in general, including electric cars and wind power. As to the "addiction" to oil, come up with something better first rather than just breaking society. That hasn't happened yet.
People who refuse to govern are "radical", because they prevent any form of compromise. Compromise is the center of democracy, and without it, nothing will happen.
Ok, so what's the problem? "Nothing will happen" is a great outcome compared to some of the alternatives.
In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party).
Interesting how advocating adherence to a constitution and fiscal responsibility is termed "radical". Well, it might have been radical in the late 18th century, but we're two centuries out from that time. There are many countries with constitutional governments these days.
The greenhouse effect implies that (except maybe at the poles), surface temperature rises slower than high-altitude temperatures.
No, it doesn't. If overall heat radiated from the surface increases (say because the upper atmosphere is mostly transparent to what escapes from the lower atmosphere), then you can have the effect of high-altitude temperatures decreasing.
It's also worth noting that the WWF got $44 million in government funding for the year 2012. That's one large, pro-AGW organization getting a third as much in a single year just from government as "conservative billionaires" are alleged to give in total over an eight year period.
Also if they were I doubt they would be hiding it.
It's worth noting that a lot of the alleged funding isn't actually hidden. For example, everyone knows about the Koch brothers and their funding habits. And the Koch brothers are widely reviled as a result. Google does something similar and they get accolades. The incentive to be secretive just isn't there.
And no, there's no reason you have to be part of the 1% to buy one. No more than any other car of the same price.
FIFY. Keep in mind that the vehicle is subsidized. So the actual unsubsidized price of the vehicle can be higher than its value. The taxpayer merely makes up the difference. As to whether electric cars are for the 1%, it's worth noting that the wealthy are more able to know of and take advantage of the subsidy.
Perhaps if we introduced some real competition in the markets we'd see some real development in windmill technology. As it is right now the windmill manufacturers make money whether or not the windmills actually produce any electricity.
You probably don't know how much wind-baed energy has grown lately, do you?
You can grow anything with the right level of government subsidy. The real question is how much would wind power have grown in the absence of massive subsidies from the developed world and China?
And what are you going to do if the Free Market doesn't pick something that results in the sunshine and rainbows you seem to think? The free market has a poor history of handling the costs of the winners it picks. Might have something to do with the fact that winners in the Free Market win the most by making other people bear the burdens of their actions. The Free Market doesn't choose to pick winners for society as a whole. So long as some people can get richer, then it's not worth doing so. I say that if we want the world to improve, then get over the notion of worshiping the Free Market as if it was some kind of benevolent deity.
I find it interesting how free market bashers are so economically ignorant. You've made statements several times in your post that indicate you don't have a clue how subsidies can increase consumption of various goods and services, here, like electric cars, corn-based ethanol, and wind power. And it's worth noting that certain wealthy groups, such as the "1%" are well positioned to take advantage of complex and poorly understood subsidy programs.
Having said that, I agree that unconditional "worship" of free markets, should it occur in this thread, would be ill-advised. Markets have a really bad weakness: if it doesn't trade on the market either directly or through proxies, then it is invisible to the market. Externalities, the classic economic problem, are thus invisible to markets as a result, unless a mechanism (often introduced via regulation) is introduced to make them visible.
Spending through direct money creation is a very specific thing, and all of what you point out have side effects which direct money creation does not.
At this point, it sounds to me like the only example of "direct money creation" out there is quantitative easing which is not something which private banks can do. And all methods of money creation, direct or otherwise have the big string of inflation attached to them.
And that's one more than NASA has built in recent decades.
Sorry, they've got a tight focus, a good management structure, and a good eye for incremental cost cutting and understanding system cost issues, but none of this is revolutionary.
Nor does it need to be revolutionary. My view is that the biggest obstacles to cheap space flight, manned or unmanned, are economical, mainly not exploiting the economy of scale for higher frequency of use of the thing in question, be it orbital launch, space probes, etc.
In fact ULA charges currently between 150 and 200% of what SpaceX charges, but they also have an unbroken string of launch successes going back a couple decades, vs what 6 total launches for SpaceX, which consequently charges a discount price.
The ULA sells to the federal government (the Delta IV is exclusively to the federal government) so they have little reason to cut costs.
Also there's have been 9 total launches for SpaceX of which 3 have failed outright (the first three I might add) and 1 which lost a secondary payload. Further as SpaceX launches more and at a higher launch frequency, they will charge less. That's a little different than how the ULA does things.
So, frankly I just reject your numbers.
You can reject whatever you'd like. But in one of the few comparisons between an efficient space business and a government space agency, spending money in all the right congressional districts, the former outperformed the latter by at least an order of magnitude.
Note that the costing for the NASA contract equivalent would have been a factor of ten higher. The actual amount paid would have probably been even higher than that. I think people don't understand just how inefficient space programs are.
My understanding of the economics of space launch though is it will never get a LOT cheaper. It might drop by another factor of 3, maybe with really high demand 5, but rockets are just EXPENSIVE, they exist at the very limits of the maximum performance of physical machines.
I believe they will drop to a multiple of propellant costs (about a factor of three like it is in the air passenger industry). Currently, fuel costs are about $30 (kerosene/LOX) to $100 (liquid H2/LOX) per kilogram of payload. So maybe $100 to $300 in launch costs per kilogram of payload. It'll require almost perfect reusability of the launch hardware, just like it does in the air passenger industry.
Slashdot Mirror
It's lucky for all the ultra-free-market US libertarians out there that the government is there to safeguard at least some jobs.
At the expense of a bunch of others. It takes other peoples' money to create those jobs. That's money that could have gone to creating productive jobs instead.
If you want to deal with unemployment, just federally mandate 40-hour workweeks maximum for anybody who is not a partial owner of a company (minimum of 1%).
Temp agencies are already the easy workaround to this. It should be pretty easy to group temp employees in groups of say, 40, and incorporate them (with the temp agency owning 60% of the shares).
If you really wanted to deal with unemployment, rather than fuck around, then don't make it so hard to hire local workers. Stupid rules like mandatory 40 hour workweeks don't give the potential employer any incentive to hire workers from your particular country. I'd get rid of rules like minimum wage laws as well.
Are you seriously proposing that we stop doing scientific research? Yes, of course, what happens 10 billion or more years from now is completely irrelevant to us as individuals.
How about 100 years? If there really is a lower vacuum state (and honestly I don't buy that there is), then we're probably not far away technologically from being about to generate it once in the lab. Then you have worry about not just someone somewhere on Earth ending the universe as we know it, but to some degree someone anywhere in the rest of the universe whose lightcone will intersect with our future in a relatively short period of time.
In the US, the big-business class are just a bunch of selfish, stupid pricks who take huge subsidies and then turn around and bite the hand that feeds them. Having the US intelligence community feed intelligence back to US business would make no difference to the autistic Rand-worshipping hand-flappers who run corporate America.
There's a simple solution here. Call their bluff.
Except that, without any empirical basis whatsoever, studies of real things don't have much value.
Real things inherently have an empirical basis. Otherwise they wouldn't be real.
Or one could note that the US has a well established, nationwide, efficient, point to point, cheap, private transportation system that works better for most uses than the public transportation alternative. But by all means, let's pretend it's a character problem.
And there weren't as many countries with nuclear weapons. People seem to forget that nuclear proliferation is still going on.
As an aside, I consider a small scale nuclear war involving a few bombs of small size to be more likely in the next decade than in the 80s.
I'm not talking about quantitative easing (which is still a form of money creation, that goes directly to private banks)
No, QE goes directly to the Fed, who then uses it to buy bonds, which might come from private banks, other businesses, or the federal government.
I have said, government use of money creation for funding, limited by the inflation target.
Banks have issues with any "money creation" methods they employ too. For example, fractional reserve has the problem that if your loans underperform (enough of the loans you make default) enough, then you're bankrupt. How much they have to underperform before bankruptcy happens, depends on how much reserve you have.
I was trying to work out what percentage of Exxon Mobile's net profit for the year that was, but my calculator doesn't display enough 0s.
Interesting choice for a comparison. Excluding a one time sale of Japanese assets, they're making somewhere around $35 billion in profit (which incidentally, $5 million is 0.014% of, easily reached on a calculator). Why aren't we seeing a significant portion of that directed into anti-AGW activities?
Well, I think it's because a lot of their profits come from barriers to entry. They wouldn't be making that much money, if it were a lot easier to put up oil wells and refineries. I think the attempts to restrict oil consumption will end up to the advantage of big oil firms like Exxon once they figure out how to use that to exclude competition.
A corporation giving $5 million is a charitable contribution.
A conservative billionaire giving a similar amount of money to a non-profit in secret is similarly a charitable contribution. The transparency of the donation isn't an indication of its nature.
You can call off nuclear wars or preposition disaster relief supplies and teams ahead of time, even if you can't evacuate many people.
most idiotic statement ever...are you still living in the 1980's? Grow the fuck up already
You mean we can no longer evacuate people or preposition disaster relief supplies like we could in the 80s? We no longer have nuclear weapons or wars like we did in the 80s?
There's no easy answer solution to the 'meteor problem'.
Do nothing. Seriously, that's the easy solution. Spending a relatively small amount of money to catalog asteroids down to a certain size has some value beyond that default strategy.
It does nothing in the event that we find one on an impact trajectory.
Being able to predict a significant disaster even mere hours ahead of time doesn't have value? You can call off nuclear wars or preposition disaster relief supplies and teams ahead of time, even if you can't evacuate many people.
Does anyone think that a 12 hour warning of an impact can have any actual damage mitigation effect?
Sure. As the other replier noted, you can prevent nuclear wars with that much advanced warning. 12 hours is also plenty of time to evacuate most places on the planet, if you're speaking of relatively small air bursts. And you can move a lot of supplies and disaster relief around in that time frame.
If you'd read my post, none of it was supporting any subsidies as a general rule, in fact, I oppose those subsidies which are really just payoffs to those with the power to manipulate the system to their own advantage.
Then you probably should just have a blanket rejection of subsidies.
Which also happens with the alleged "Free Market" too, so forgive me for not mentioning them in detail. I was more concerned with other matters than suggesting my preferred solutions. So I didn't mention them. If you had wanted to hear my ideas, you should have asked instead of leaping to a false conclusion.
Well, I didn't bother adressing that merely because I have no idea what you mean by "Free Market". There are standard definitions for free markets, but no one seems to use them here.
BTW, oil-production is subsidized as well. Or do you think those aircraft carriers floating in the waters of the Mid-East are there for giggles? What are taxpayers paying because we can't get over an addiction to oil? How much harm from digging up and burning coal is done because the government protects those responsible? And you rail over electric-car and wind-power subsidies? Whatever for?
And most of those oil subsidies apply to business in general, including electric cars and wind power. As to the "addiction" to oil, come up with something better first rather than just breaking society. That hasn't happened yet.
People who refuse to govern are "radical", because they prevent any form of compromise. Compromise is the center of democracy, and without it, nothing will happen.
Ok, so what's the problem? "Nothing will happen" is a great outcome compared to some of the alternatives.
In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party).
Interesting how advocating adherence to a constitution and fiscal responsibility is termed "radical". Well, it might have been radical in the late 18th century, but we're two centuries out from that time. There are many countries with constitutional governments these days.
The greenhouse effect implies that (except maybe at the poles), surface temperature rises slower than high-altitude temperatures.
No, it doesn't. If overall heat radiated from the surface increases (say because the upper atmosphere is mostly transparent to what escapes from the lower atmosphere), then you can have the effect of high-altitude temperatures decreasing.
It turns out that the poster boy of US companies, Exxon, is paying 27.3/486*100, or a mighty 5.6% of revenues, in tax.
So what? Revenue != income.
it's a cherry-picked selection of the US companies that had to pay a relatively large amount of tax in one given year.
And they state straight up in the title that they're cherry picking and what criteria they use.
It's also worth noting that the WWF got $44 million in government funding for the year 2012. That's one large, pro-AGW organization getting a third as much in a single year just from government as "conservative billionaires" are alleged to give in total over an eight year period.
Also if they were I doubt they would be hiding it.
It's worth noting that a lot of the alleged funding isn't actually hidden. For example, everyone knows about the Koch brothers and their funding habits. And the Koch brothers are widely reviled as a result. Google does something similar and they get accolades. The incentive to be secretive just isn't there.
And no, there's no reason you have to be part of the 1% to buy one. No more than any other car of the same price.
FIFY. Keep in mind that the vehicle is subsidized. So the actual unsubsidized price of the vehicle can be higher than its value. The taxpayer merely makes up the difference. As to whether electric cars are for the 1%, it's worth noting that the wealthy are more able to know of and take advantage of the subsidy.
Perhaps if we introduced some real competition in the markets we'd see some real development in windmill technology. As it is right now the windmill manufacturers make money whether or not the windmills actually produce any electricity.
You probably don't know how much wind-baed energy has grown lately, do you?
You can grow anything with the right level of government subsidy. The real question is how much would wind power have grown in the absence of massive subsidies from the developed world and China?
And what are you going to do if the Free Market doesn't pick something that results in the sunshine and rainbows you seem to think? The free market has a poor history of handling the costs of the winners it picks. Might have something to do with the fact that winners in the Free Market win the most by making other people bear the burdens of their actions. The Free Market doesn't choose to pick winners for society as a whole. So long as some people can get richer, then it's not worth doing so. I say that if we want the world to improve, then get over the notion of worshiping the Free Market as if it was some kind of benevolent deity.
I find it interesting how free market bashers are so economically ignorant. You've made statements several times in your post that indicate you don't have a clue how subsidies can increase consumption of various goods and services, here, like electric cars, corn-based ethanol, and wind power. And it's worth noting that certain wealthy groups, such as the "1%" are well positioned to take advantage of complex and poorly understood subsidy programs.
Having said that, I agree that unconditional "worship" of free markets, should it occur in this thread, would be ill-advised. Markets have a really bad weakness: if it doesn't trade on the market either directly or through proxies, then it is invisible to the market. Externalities, the classic economic problem, are thus invisible to markets as a result, unless a mechanism (often introduced via regulation) is introduced to make them visible.
Spending through direct money creation is a very specific thing, and all of what you point out have side effects which direct money creation does not.
At this point, it sounds to me like the only example of "direct money creation" out there is quantitative easing which is not something which private banks can do. And all methods of money creation, direct or otherwise have the big string of inflation attached to them.
SpaceX has built one spacecraft
And that's one more than NASA has built in recent decades.
Sorry, they've got a tight focus, a good management structure, and a good eye for incremental cost cutting and understanding system cost issues, but none of this is revolutionary.
Nor does it need to be revolutionary. My view is that the biggest obstacles to cheap space flight, manned or unmanned, are economical, mainly not exploiting the economy of scale for higher frequency of use of the thing in question, be it orbital launch, space probes, etc.
In fact ULA charges currently between 150 and 200% of what SpaceX charges, but they also have an unbroken string of launch successes going back a couple decades, vs what 6 total launches for SpaceX, which consequently charges a discount price.
The ULA sells to the federal government (the Delta IV is exclusively to the federal government) so they have little reason to cut costs.
Also there's have been 9 total launches for SpaceX of which 3 have failed outright (the first three I might add) and 1 which lost a secondary payload. Further as SpaceX launches more and at a higher launch frequency, they will charge less. That's a little different than how the ULA does things.
So, frankly I just reject your numbers.
You can reject whatever you'd like. But in one of the few comparisons between an efficient space business and a government space agency, spending money in all the right congressional districts, the former outperformed the latter by at least an order of magnitude.
Note that the costing for the NASA contract equivalent would have been a factor of ten higher. The actual amount paid would have probably been even higher than that. I think people don't understand just how inefficient space programs are.
I'm merely pointing out that the US government has a number of ways of creating money. It doesn't have to use banks as proxies for all money creation.
My understanding of the economics of space launch though is it will never get a LOT cheaper. It might drop by another factor of 3, maybe with really high demand 5, but rockets are just EXPENSIVE, they exist at the very limits of the maximum performance of physical machines.
I believe they will drop to a multiple of propellant costs (about a factor of three like it is in the air passenger industry). Currently, fuel costs are about $30 (kerosene/LOX) to $100 (liquid H2/LOX) per kilogram of payload. So maybe $100 to $300 in launch costs per kilogram of payload. It'll require almost perfect reusability of the launch hardware, just like it does in the air passenger industry.