I agree. Which is why I don't buy "unintended consequences". They (the rich, the special interest groups) know exactly what the consequences are, and they figured out what's the best way to profit from those consequences, which keeps them rich.
The thing is that the rich weren't the driving force behind the biggest regulations of the past forty years. Instead it was large voting populations who wanted certain things fixed, such as pollution or today's income inequity.
For example, the recent Obamacare didn't start as a giveaway to insurance companies and others. It started as an urge to get a common level of health care insurance and care beyond that of emergency rooms.
Well then, do you have suggestions? From my point of view, an interesting application would be cheap creation of high tolerance metal molds (at least at the dimensions you mentioned above for an envelope) for advanced composites work.
Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.
I'm a bit puzzled by the apparent emphasis on crazies in space. If one looks at the New World after colonization started, there have been some nasty wars, but most of these have been small in scale (such as King Phillip's War, a particularly notorious example of a large number of wars with American Indian tribes). There have been three notable wars in the New World, the Mexican revolution of 1911-1920, the US Civil War of 1861-1865, and the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870. All had a bit of craziness to them, but only the last one was high grade crazy (Paraguay declared war on its three neighbors, two who were bigger than it was economically, and fought until at least 60% of the population had died).
Instead, one merely needs to look to the Old World to see plenty of high grade crazy wars. The First and Second World Wars started in Europe. There was the Taiping Rebellion in China. The Russian Civil War. The Thirty Years' War. The Napoleonic Wars.
The problem wasn't that the New World was chock full of crazies (it was to some degree and remains so today), but that the real problem for the New World was keeping the craziness (and huge body counts) of the Old World from spilling over.
So by analogy, why it is possible for a space-side power to do considerable damage to Earth (say dropping nukes or asteroids on population centers), I bet most of the trouble will run the other way.
You're putting the cart before the horse. There are regulations BECAUSE special interest groups want to pay certain wealthy people (i.e their friends, each other) more
Then how come the economy started to slow when we tried to fix these problems?
When the wealthy manipulate the economy like that, of course your economy would decline in competitiveness. If you believe in capitalism, this manipulation is deplorable because it's not free market. Even if you're a full blown communist believer in central planning, this manipulation is still bad, because the wealthy are not supposed to be the central planners (it's supposed to be Big Brother who plans eveything)
As I see it, this is classic unintended consequences of historical attempts to fix the very problems you're complaining about now. The rich are simply better at the game that was created than you are.
For example, with the increasing globalization of trade, what has the US done to make US labor more employable? It's made it harder and more costly to employ people. I think that's accelerated the trend of moving jobs out of the country and in turn increased the gap between the workers who get their wealth from work, which has a depressed value right now (due to all that competition), and the rich who get their income ultimately from capital (which hasn't experienced a similar decline).
Giving real names is not security for the account holder, it is securtiy for Facebook... If an account holder plots something on Facebook, they have more to give the authorities than jjbb6r.
No, they don't. And they can give a lot more than just the nym even in the circumstances that the user gave a fake name. Keep in mind that they don't currently check to see if names are real now, except when it is brought to their attention. That indicates to me that a more likely benefit is having to provide less user support.
And the thing about treaties is that they are valid only as long as the signatories choose to abide by them. My view is that the Outer Space Treaty and similar stuff will only last until it's more valuable to withdraw from the treaty.
Things are complicated by the other aspects of the Outer Space Treaty (such as restrictions on militarization of space and responsibility for third party harm caused by a space activity) so it is possible for some powerful party hostile to private property in space to complicate any attempt to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty.
But in the end, there's a lot of tax to be collected from private activities in space and the other things that the Outer Space Treaty does can be put into a new treaty.
Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses."
A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison. But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.
Problem is, production doesn't scale linearly - building 1000 takes a LOT more effort than building 250.
It's generally sublinear, until you hit production levels that start distorting the whole economy. What's happening here is the typical consequence of changing your original plan a lot, not some complexity that kicks in when you make more things.
I suggest that for starters treating all space bodies as public domain is the best way to go.
So that paint speck in LEO should be the property of the world? How about a triage system, If it's small enough (and either natural or abandoned), then it's the property of whoever stuffs it in their hold. If it's bigger than that, but below some arbitrary threshold one can institute a policy of claim staking. Namely, that the property belongs to whoever is using it (with emphasis on "using"). If the object is big enough then make it property of the World. So the Moon is property of the World; a km wide asteroid can be claim staked; and that one meter wide boulder you came across is finders-keepers.
if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth
There are other reasons to have decreasing growth. Such as increasing regulation or a decline in the competitiveness of the US economy, both which have happened and can explain the problems, even including wealth concentration.
How relevant is a treaty which is signed by only a few countries? Virtually all of the serious space faring countries haven't signed the treaty, meaning they don't have to abide by its restrictions. Only a few of the ESA countries have, France being the most significant.
Even if it doesn't, such a sovereign would have to be willing to stand up against the combined military might countries who are willing to go to war to defend the "right of all mankind" to "own" the asteroid or whatever piece of property is at issue.
And who in the world is willing to go to war for the "right of all mankind"? I doubt there is even one country willing to do that.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.
So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.
Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses?
It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.
If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?
Judging by what I read and see on TV, it appears that the WBC's behaviour is certainly a public order issue.
How?
I actually see the contrary in this story. Here, the Westboro group is distracting another noxious group, Anonymous, which otherwise might be causing much more serious harm to society.
How can an experience be a problem? It's simply events that happened.
I'm not surprised that someone yet again confuses their personal biases for "events that happened". Confirmation bias is insidious by definition.
Here, the problem is simply that conservative and libertarian beliefs are substantially different. It is only circumstances of the current political environment, particularly with respect to the remarkably bad spending policies of various levels of government, that the two are allied. If one had gone back to the 2004 election, for example, G. W. Bush was relatively attractive to conservatives, but not at all to libertarians.
The person you directly replied to is the OP, who did not do so in the thread leading up all the way to his original post.
I read the thread as well, reviewing it after the first reply. It's pretty clear that the thread had veered to speaking of what was permitted or not via government action. For example, he spoke of "freedom of speech" and "freedom to spread hate". That implies government action even if he never said "government".
If a business doesn't like your speech, it's very limited in what it can do, either asking you to leave the premises, if you were a customer or guest, or firing you, if you were an employee. There are significant costs either way for any penalty it applies to you for your speech.
A government response, depending on the restrictions it is forced to observe, may range from no reaction whatsoever to killing you without repercussion. One end of that spectrum has a great deal of freedom while the other has none.
The rights relating to assembly and family life are infringed with the cemetery picketing
Nobody's right to assembly is being infringed. And while some places have a "right" to "family life" whatever that means, it sounds like it pertains only to public authorities and it's not a recognized right in the US.
I think there is a case to be made for harassment or even vexatious litigation. But I imagine that it must be very difficult to show (or a very thin argument to make) else they'd have changed their behavior by now.
You also have to consider that you can build wind turbines offshore, an area that can't be used for any other type of generation except perhaps wave power.
Or nuclear and fusion. Water makes a great heat sink.
Wind is extremely reliable because it is so distributed, unlike nuclear where a single reactor problem can take out 500MW+ in one hit.
Centralization is not the only systemic risk that a network can have. Highly correlated failure modes introduce their own systemic risk. Here, it's possible to have low wind over a large region.
It's worth noting that reliability is very important to most electric grids. Hence, merely having enough theoretical power isn't generally good enough. They also need enough power to cover for failures, including wind cessation and nuclear reactor downtime.
Offshore wind is more expensive but once in place the base lasts pretty much forever and you can just replace the turbine on top after 50 years service.
Based on what evidence? According to Wikipedia, the oldest off shore wind farm generation dates from 1991 (based in Denmark). Glancing through Wikipedia's list of the top 25 active off shore wind farms, I see that the oldest of those is in 2002.
Sea water is very corrosive to everything that isn't suitably protected (and fifty years is a long time for something that sits in sea water). There isn't much support for your assertion that off shore wind farms have low maintenance.
Apparently you don't realize the massive advantage that accrued to whites as a whole due to slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of wage theft that blacks suffered through history.
And you don't "realize" it either. These sorts of racist myths need to die a hard death.
That could be done today, or if you really want to be pessimistic in the next 5-10 years.
And why should it be done? Nuclear power works now. Japan already has somewhere over 30 GW of installed nuclear power ready. That's going to take a vast amount of subsidized solar to cover that. I just don't believe that whatever subsidies are currently given to nuclear is going to be more than what it takes to cover that much solar power.
What TFS fails to mention is that both major parties, including the one just elected, have pledged to move away from nuclear power. It seems unlikely that anything is going to change now.
There is the reality party. It's not going to matter what they pledge, if they can't make those pledges work. Japan already has a huge amount of debt.
In the Beaufort Sea just north of Canada's Yukon there's a spot that has been covered in ice in the winter and exposed to the sun in the summer, for a billion years - give or take some ice ages - back to when the substrate was actually near the equator. And the sediment there on the sea floor has more to tell us about our climate, global insolation and biological action than these antarctic cores do.
Knowledge is not a single quantity. The only way for something to provide "more" knowledge is if it provides everything that a rival thing would provide and more. The Antarctic core provides a possible view of the last 2000 years which is fairly important since that period has temperature proxies which bridge modern temperature measurements to prehistoric ones.
And because it's a particularly critical period of time coming off of the last ice age. For example, was the Medieval Warm Period as warm as present day?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Which is why I don't buy "unintended consequences". They (the rich, the special interest groups) know exactly what the consequences are, and they figured out what's the best way to profit from those consequences, which keeps them rich.
The thing is that the rich weren't the driving force behind the biggest regulations of the past forty years. Instead it was large voting populations who wanted certain things fixed, such as pollution or today's income inequity.
For example, the recent Obamacare didn't start as a giveaway to insurance companies and others. It started as an urge to get a common level of health care insurance and care beyond that of emergency rooms.
Well then, do you have suggestions? From my point of view, an interesting application would be cheap creation of high tolerance metal molds (at least at the dimensions you mentioned above for an envelope) for advanced composites work.
Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.
I'm a bit puzzled by the apparent emphasis on crazies in space. If one looks at the New World after colonization started, there have been some nasty wars, but most of these have been small in scale (such as King Phillip's War, a particularly notorious example of a large number of wars with American Indian tribes). There have been three notable wars in the New World, the Mexican revolution of 1911-1920, the US Civil War of 1861-1865, and the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870. All had a bit of craziness to them, but only the last one was high grade crazy (Paraguay declared war on its three neighbors, two who were bigger than it was economically, and fought until at least 60% of the population had died).
Instead, one merely needs to look to the Old World to see plenty of high grade crazy wars. The First and Second World Wars started in Europe. There was the Taiping Rebellion in China. The Russian Civil War. The Thirty Years' War. The Napoleonic Wars.
The problem wasn't that the New World was chock full of crazies (it was to some degree and remains so today), but that the real problem for the New World was keeping the craziness (and huge body counts) of the Old World from spilling over.
So by analogy, why it is possible for a space-side power to do considerable damage to Earth (say dropping nukes or asteroids on population centers), I bet most of the trouble will run the other way.
You're putting the cart before the horse. There are regulations BECAUSE special interest groups want to pay certain wealthy people (i.e their friends, each other) more
Then how come the economy started to slow when we tried to fix these problems?
When the wealthy manipulate the economy like that, of course your economy would decline in competitiveness. If you believe in capitalism, this manipulation is deplorable because it's not free market. Even if you're a full blown communist believer in central planning, this manipulation is still bad, because the wealthy are not supposed to be the central planners (it's supposed to be Big Brother who plans eveything)
As I see it, this is classic unintended consequences of historical attempts to fix the very problems you're complaining about now. The rich are simply better at the game that was created than you are.
For example, with the increasing globalization of trade, what has the US done to make US labor more employable? It's made it harder and more costly to employ people. I think that's accelerated the trend of moving jobs out of the country and in turn increased the gap between the workers who get their wealth from work, which has a depressed value right now (due to all that competition), and the rich who get their income ultimately from capital (which hasn't experienced a similar decline).
Giving real names is not security for the account holder, it is securtiy for Facebook... If an account holder plots something on Facebook, they have more to give the authorities than jjbb6r.
No, they don't. And they can give a lot more than just the nym even in the circumstances that the user gave a fake name. Keep in mind that they don't currently check to see if names are real now, except when it is brought to their attention. That indicates to me that a more likely benefit is having to provide less user support.
And the thing about treaties is that they are valid only as long as the signatories choose to abide by them. My view is that the Outer Space Treaty and similar stuff will only last until it's more valuable to withdraw from the treaty.
Things are complicated by the other aspects of the Outer Space Treaty (such as restrictions on militarization of space and responsibility for third party harm caused by a space activity) so it is possible for some powerful party hostile to private property in space to complicate any attempt to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty.
But in the end, there's a lot of tax to be collected from private activities in space and the other things that the Outer Space Treaty does can be put into a new treaty.
Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses."
A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison. But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.
Problem is, production doesn't scale linearly - building 1000 takes a LOT more effort than building 250.
It's generally sublinear, until you hit production levels that start distorting the whole economy. What's happening here is the typical consequence of changing your original plan a lot, not some complexity that kicks in when you make more things.
I suggest that for starters treating all space bodies as public domain is the best way to go.
So that paint speck in LEO should be the property of the world? How about a triage system, If it's small enough (and either natural or abandoned), then it's the property of whoever stuffs it in their hold. If it's bigger than that, but below some arbitrary threshold one can institute a policy of claim staking. Namely, that the property belongs to whoever is using it (with emphasis on "using"). If the object is big enough then make it property of the World. So the Moon is property of the World; a km wide asteroid can be claim staked; and that one meter wide boulder you came across is finders-keepers.
if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth
There are other reasons to have decreasing growth. Such as increasing regulation or a decline in the competitiveness of the US economy, both which have happened and can explain the problems, even including wealth concentration.
Nope - according to the Moon Treaties
How relevant is a treaty which is signed by only a few countries? Virtually all of the serious space faring countries haven't signed the treaty, meaning they don't have to abide by its restrictions. Only a few of the ESA countries have, France being the most significant.
While I like to think that everyone has in it to become engineers or scientists, I don't think everyone believes me in this.
The problem comes even when you're right. What are those engineers or scientists going to do? We don't need that many engineers or scientists.
Even if it doesn't, such a sovereign would have to be willing to stand up against the combined military might countries who are willing to go to war to defend the "right of all mankind" to "own" the asteroid or whatever piece of property is at issue.
And who in the world is willing to go to war for the "right of all mankind"? I doubt there is even one country willing to do that.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.
So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.
Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses?
It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.
If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?
Judging by what I read and see on TV, it appears that the WBC's behaviour is certainly a public order issue.
How?
I actually see the contrary in this story. Here, the Westboro group is distracting another noxious group, Anonymous, which otherwise might be causing much more serious harm to society.
How can an experience be a problem? It's simply events that happened.
I'm not surprised that someone yet again confuses their personal biases for "events that happened". Confirmation bias is insidious by definition.
Here, the problem is simply that conservative and libertarian beliefs are substantially different. It is only circumstances of the current political environment, particularly with respect to the remarkably bad spending policies of various levels of government, that the two are allied. If one had gone back to the 2004 election, for example, G. W. Bush was relatively attractive to conservatives, but not at all to libertarians.
The person you directly replied to is the OP, who did not do so in the thread leading up all the way to his original post.
I read the thread as well, reviewing it after the first reply. It's pretty clear that the thread had veered to speaking of what was permitted or not via government action. For example, he spoke of "freedom of speech" and "freedom to spread hate". That implies government action even if he never said "government".
If a business doesn't like your speech, it's very limited in what it can do, either asking you to leave the premises, if you were a customer or guest, or firing you, if you were an employee. There are significant costs either way for any penalty it applies to you for your speech.
A government response, depending on the restrictions it is forced to observe, may range from no reaction whatsoever to killing you without repercussion. One end of that spectrum has a great deal of freedom while the other has none.
Facebook is not a dating site.
And if it were, then fake names would provide better security than real ones.
The rights relating to assembly and family life are infringed with the cemetery picketing
Nobody's right to assembly is being infringed. And while some places have a "right" to "family life" whatever that means, it sounds like it pertains only to public authorities and it's not a recognized right in the US.
I think there is a case to be made for harassment or even vexatious litigation. But I imagine that it must be very difficult to show (or a very thin argument to make) else they'd have changed their behavior by now.
You also have to consider that you can build wind turbines offshore, an area that can't be used for any other type of generation except perhaps wave power.
Or nuclear and fusion. Water makes a great heat sink.
Wind is extremely reliable because it is so distributed, unlike nuclear where a single reactor problem can take out 500MW+ in one hit.
Centralization is not the only systemic risk that a network can have. Highly correlated failure modes introduce their own systemic risk. Here, it's possible to have low wind over a large region.
It's worth noting that reliability is very important to most electric grids. Hence, merely having enough theoretical power isn't generally good enough. They also need enough power to cover for failures, including wind cessation and nuclear reactor downtime.
Offshore wind is more expensive but once in place the base lasts pretty much forever and you can just replace the turbine on top after 50 years service.
Based on what evidence? According to Wikipedia, the oldest off shore wind farm generation dates from 1991 (based in Denmark). Glancing through Wikipedia's list of the top 25 active off shore wind farms, I see that the oldest of those is in 2002.
Sea water is very corrosive to everything that isn't suitably protected (and fifty years is a long time for something that sits in sea water). There isn't much support for your assertion that off shore wind farms have low maintenance.
Apparently you don't realize the massive advantage that accrued to whites as a whole due to slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of wage theft that blacks suffered through history.
And you don't "realize" it either. These sorts of racist myths need to die a hard death.
That could be done today, or if you really want to be pessimistic in the next 5-10 years.
And why should it be done? Nuclear power works now. Japan already has somewhere over 30 GW of installed nuclear power ready. That's going to take a vast amount of subsidized solar to cover that. I just don't believe that whatever subsidies are currently given to nuclear is going to be more than what it takes to cover that much solar power.
What TFS fails to mention is that both major parties, including the one just elected, have pledged to move away from nuclear power. It seems unlikely that anything is going to change now.
There is the reality party. It's not going to matter what they pledge, if they can't make those pledges work. Japan already has a huge amount of debt.
5 and 6 hadn't even been built yet.
They started operation in 1978 and 1979 respectively.
In the Beaufort Sea just north of Canada's Yukon there's a spot that has been covered in ice in the winter and exposed to the sun in the summer, for a billion years - give or take some ice ages - back to when the substrate was actually near the equator. And the sediment there on the sea floor has more to tell us about our climate, global insolation and biological action than these antarctic cores do.
Knowledge is not a single quantity. The only way for something to provide "more" knowledge is if it provides everything that a rival thing would provide and more. The Antarctic core provides a possible view of the last 2000 years which is fairly important since that period has temperature proxies which bridge modern temperature measurements to prehistoric ones.
And because it's a particularly critical period of time coming off of the last ice age. For example, was the Medieval Warm Period as warm as present day?
However they do and have interfered the rights of others relating to assembly, family life and privacy of home.
Have they? Their noxious efforts seem well calculated to avoid whatever accusations you're trying to claim.