Wait, they're saying we can save potentially billions of dollars, by simply changing our expectations and habits in a very slight and non-destructive fashion?
How about clothing and medical expenses? These things weigh eight times as much as a bill. 25 or 50 of them in a pocket will mess up a lot of clothing with cheaply sown pockets. And banks, vendors, etc will be hauling around a lot of metal, as well as women carrying around heavier purses, leading to greater medical expenses (from back problems and other lifting injuries).
When you say "save potentially billions of dollars", that is for the federal government, not the people who use those coins in place of bills. What we know of the public is that they won't use these coins even when they're given them as long as bills are available.
Let's kill off the non-breeding part of the population to reduce the rate of reproduction.
That is nonsense. And it's not what I said. I said to reduce the population.
Exactly why I called it "nonsense". Glad we agree on something. As to "reducing the population", if you're not reducing the rate of reproduction, you're not reducing the population in the long term.
I have, but exceptions are hardly the rule.
Enough exceptions and they become the norm.
And on a global scale, you'll find our way of life is sustained by younger populations working very very hard.
So what? They'll become older populations working hard in a few decades.
They would always comment about how, when couples back-in-the-day got married, the first thing on their list of wants was children.
And they just dropped a bunch of kids right? No thought given to a place to live or a job to feed those hungry mouths? I somehow doubt it. What happens now is that responsible child rearing is much more expensive now.
Let's kill off the non-breeding part of the population to reduce the rate of reproduction. That's what I called nonsense.
As to your "takes X to support Y" assertion. X and Y are quantities that change over time. And there's no indication we will ever have less than X people to support Y people. ESPECIALLY, when the Y people can also be shifted over to X.
While older people can sit at a desk and shuffle paper, the actual labor required to mine, manufacturer, construct, plant and harvest the things that we need is much younger.
I guess you've never worked with an older person who does these things.
No, it saves the federal government money. For the people who now have to haul around money eight times as heavy as the old bill, it's not saving them money or things that they consider equivalent to money.
I'll just mention as someone who handles money, including (by US federal mandate) a small number of dollar coins, that I see a huge desire among the vast majority of my customers to completely avoid dollar coins. They will get rid of coins the moment they get them. I received over last summer less than one dollar coin per thousand bills.
So there is this vast preference for dollar bills.
Now consider that the US is storing indefinitely somewhere around a billion dollar coins. How did they get this so wrong?
So why do dollar coins have such a big negative preference? I believe it's because of how heavy and bulky they are. They mass 8 grams compared to 1 gram for the bill. Eight times as heavy. Bulkwise the two are probably comparable in density per $. But the bill can be folded while the coin is a rigid circular shape. I don't see myself putting 25 dollar coins in my wallet any time soon.
And we see the usual rather unthinking authoritarian pattern of burdening hundreds of millions of people to save a few bucks. It's worth noting that dollar coins are currently worth as metal about 6% of their face value. If the US gets a large bout of inflation, that's going to make these coins very expensive to produce. Paper bills just don't have that problem.
I imagine I won't surprise many people by saying that I don't see a case for phasing out the dollar bill under these circumstances. Maybe if the dollar coin was much smaller, cheaper, and had a more convenient form factor with actually adoption from some portion of the public.
That's the problem with having a long, occasionally tenuous chain of logic and an opposition that isn't unified in why it disagrees with your argument. You're just not going to get unified disagreement, nor is that disagreement going away merely because stronger links of the chain have been shown. You still have problems with the weak links.
Here, the principle weak link is that harm from AGW hasn't been demonstrated. The next link is demonstrating in turn that proposed fixes for AGW are better than not doing anything about AGW.
It's true because there's "a lot" of eruptions? That's remarkably poor reasoning. Your assertion simply isn't true even if one includes all such emissions of carbon dioxide. Sure, there is a lot of volcanoes. There's also a vast number of vehicles, furnaces and other such human machines producing carbon dioxide. It turns out the latter quantity is a lot bigger than the volcanoes.
You need X amount of people to actually build things for Y number consuming.
I guess you missed the innovations of the past few thousand years. "X" is a lot lower than it used to be. Quantity "Y" changed as well. But one would expect that if "Y" decreases, then "X" is going to decrease as well.
If you really want to limit population growth you would have to stop the growth on the old end, not the young end. IE put a cap on how long people can live.
To the contrary, I sensed the hyperbole just fine. I think instead the problem is that when you use hyperbole, one also senses the wistful longing for the blood-encrusted guillotine.
Do you think they were risking nuclear war with their adventures in Afghanistan? Doesn't look that way to me.
And how many invasions did the USSR do between 1945 and 1979? While there were a number of proxy wars (for example, in China (end stages of the Communist victory over Kuomintang), Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam), the only genuine invasions were Hungary (to put down a revolt in 1956) and Afghanistan (to prop up a puppet government in 1979).
In comparison, the Eastern Bloc and European soviet republics came from 10 countries that the USSR took over (as well as some land taken from Germany and Finland) between 1938 and 1945.
There was a night and day difference between how the USSR behaved before 1945 and afterward.
It doesn't. Just multiple that figure by 20,000 (which is the inverse of the concentration of U3O8 in that particular coal) to get the corresponding ingested dosage of yellowcake (which is also U3O8).
For fission energy production, we must start with a fissile resource (we need the neutrons!)
You can also start with a fusion source for those neutrons. Farnsworth fusor seems to generate a bunch of neutrons with sufficient energy to induce fusion in U-238 (Wikipedia currently is claiming that the fusor can generate neutrons of almost 2.5 MeV and simultaneously claims that neutrons of 1 MeV are the minimum needed to induce fission of U-238.
Unskilled laborers making decent wages will be a thing of the past on a global scale in the near future, just like what is happening in the US right now.
Only because there is far cheaper unskilled labor elsewhere. It's worth noting that the unskilled labor that you claim supports your point is also the highest paid unskilled labor in the world.
What happens when corporations can no longer exploit global wage differences?
Depends why that is no longer happening. If it's because there's a lot of good paying jobs going around, then they're going to have to offer more pay, that's what happened in the US prior to the 70s. If it's because of massive protectionism, then I guess they'll just hire who they can afford to hire and not hire the rest.
He engages the imagination in a way that Shakespeare just doesn't. Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies.
Ok, how does that engage the imagination? I'll just point out that various Shakespeare plays had that sort of thing as well. For example, the Tempest which had an exotic tropical locale (imaginative panoramas), sorcery (the gadgets/forces to the universe), events (events), and a story that engages you beyond the five year old level.
But what has had more impact in the last 40 years culturally than Star Wars that can be attributed to a single person?
Michael Jackson or Madonna comes to mind as obvious counterexamples, just from the early 80s "big hair" era. For movie directors, I'd suggest Kubrick or Tarantino. For actors, I'd suggest Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, or hell, Jane Fonda.
I have never really understood why many Americans are so hostile to unionization.
There are several things leading to this hostility: a huge connection to organized crime for decades, acting for most of a century against the interests of their employees, and killing off businesses with their demands. You can call a lot of bad history, "decades of brainwashing", but there really is a lot of fail in US labor unions.
and mythos regarding correlation between hardwork and financial success.
Well, if that myth was replaced with a correlation between working smarter and financial success, then you'd have a point. But that doesn't help with the labor unions.
Having a kill switch embedded in commercial backbones saves the lives of the people who work there. the alternative is not no-killswitch, but an explosive kill switch in the form of rocket strikes at key backbone infrastructure locations.
I'm good with that. It makes turning off the internet a much less trivial task. They can always just drive out to the common chokepoints and turn them off themselves. Probably quicker and more effective than missiles anyway.
(All long range missiles were liquid fueled back then, and with the primitive computers and robotics of the time, it probably would have required a full-time manned presence on the moon, just like we had in earthbound missile silos.)
Or use solid fueled rockets. The "all long range missiles were liquid fueled" doesn't matter because any placement of missiles on the Moon would have been in the future, using near future technologies, not the present. So stable solid rocket motors (which could have been within a decade and were actually developed within two decades) could be included.
The entire idea of revenge in a thermonuclear exchange is what is stupid.
Why? If the USSR thought it could win (in whatever sense, its leaders think "winning" means, probably including the leaders surviving the nuclear exchange) a nuclear war, then it is likely that they would have done so.
It's worth noting that the USSR made several dozen invasions and other military adventures over the decades prior to the development of the nuclear bomb. Ask Finland how aggressive and trustworthy the USSR was during this time.
But after 1945, they magically cleaned up their act. Nuclear weapons did that.
If you're doing very few launches, disposable has the cost advantage since it has lower fixed costs. If you're doing a huge number of launches, say a hundred a year or more, then reusable has the cost advantage.
* Increased CO2 in the oceans leads to acidification of said oceans - elementary chemistry
Acidification and temperature increases aren't bits you set. They're degrees. A little acidification or temperature increases don't necessarily result in harm to coral. And it's worth noting here that we don't know the extent of coral death prior to the modern period. Merely claiming that there is coral death is not useful in itself. We also need to know how that compares to usual levels of coral death.
Now why should be not try to fix this again?
Because the fix is too expensive and harms us too much? It also may be counterproductive. Keep in mind that a large driver of pollution and environmental harm is poverty, something which poorly thought out interventions in our economies tend to increase. So an attempt to fix coral death could make the problem worse by increasing regional poverty to a degree that the coral ecosystem is harmed more than it would have been without the attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, they're saying we can save potentially billions of dollars, by simply changing our expectations and habits in a very slight and non-destructive fashion?
How about clothing and medical expenses? These things weigh eight times as much as a bill. 25 or 50 of them in a pocket will mess up a lot of clothing with cheaply sown pockets. And banks, vendors, etc will be hauling around a lot of metal, as well as women carrying around heavier purses, leading to greater medical expenses (from back problems and other lifting injuries).
When you say "save potentially billions of dollars", that is for the federal government, not the people who use those coins in place of bills. What we know of the public is that they won't use these coins even when they're given them as long as bills are available.
Let's kill off the non-breeding part of the population to reduce the rate of reproduction.
That is nonsense. And it's not what I said. I said to reduce the population.
Exactly why I called it "nonsense". Glad we agree on something. As to "reducing the population", if you're not reducing the rate of reproduction, you're not reducing the population in the long term.
I have, but exceptions are hardly the rule.
Enough exceptions and they become the norm.
And on a global scale, you'll find our way of life is sustained by younger populations working very very hard.
So what? They'll become older populations working hard in a few decades.
They would always comment about how, when couples back-in-the-day got married, the first thing on their list of wants was children.
And they just dropped a bunch of kids right? No thought given to a place to live or a job to feed those hungry mouths? I somehow doubt it. What happens now is that responsible child rearing is much more expensive now.
You call nonsense without thinking it through.
Let's kill off the non-breeding part of the population to reduce the rate of reproduction. That's what I called nonsense.
As to your "takes X to support Y" assertion. X and Y are quantities that change over time. And there's no indication we will ever have less than X people to support Y people. ESPECIALLY, when the Y people can also be shifted over to X.
While older people can sit at a desk and shuffle paper, the actual labor required to mine, manufacturer, construct, plant and harvest the things that we need is much younger.
I guess you've never worked with an older person who does these things.
Removing the $1 bill saves the people money.
No, it saves the federal government money. For the people who now have to haul around money eight times as heavy as the old bill, it's not saving them money or things that they consider equivalent to money.
I'll just mention as someone who handles money, including (by US federal mandate) a small number of dollar coins, that I see a huge desire among the vast majority of my customers to completely avoid dollar coins. They will get rid of coins the moment they get them. I received over last summer less than one dollar coin per thousand bills.
So there is this vast preference for dollar bills.
Now consider that the US is storing indefinitely somewhere around a billion dollar coins. How did they get this so wrong?
So why do dollar coins have such a big negative preference? I believe it's because of how heavy and bulky they are. They mass 8 grams compared to 1 gram for the bill. Eight times as heavy. Bulkwise the two are probably comparable in density per $. But the bill can be folded while the coin is a rigid circular shape. I don't see myself putting 25 dollar coins in my wallet any time soon.
And we see the usual rather unthinking authoritarian pattern of burdening hundreds of millions of people to save a few bucks. It's worth noting that dollar coins are currently worth as metal about 6% of their face value. If the US gets a large bout of inflation, that's going to make these coins very expensive to produce. Paper bills just don't have that problem.
I imagine I won't surprise many people by saying that I don't see a case for phasing out the dollar bill under these circumstances. Maybe if the dollar coin was much smaller, cheaper, and had a more convenient form factor with actually adoption from some portion of the public.
That's the problem with having a long, occasionally tenuous chain of logic and an opposition that isn't unified in why it disagrees with your argument. You're just not going to get unified disagreement, nor is that disagreement going away merely because stronger links of the chain have been shown. You still have problems with the weak links.
Here, the principle weak link is that harm from AGW hasn't been demonstrated. The next link is demonstrating in turn that proposed fixes for AGW are better than not doing anything about AGW.
It's true because there's "a lot" of eruptions? That's remarkably poor reasoning. Your assertion simply isn't true even if one includes all such emissions of carbon dioxide. Sure, there is a lot of volcanoes. There's also a vast number of vehicles, furnaces and other such human machines producing carbon dioxide. It turns out the latter quantity is a lot bigger than the volcanoes.
You need X amount of people to actually build things for Y number consuming.
I guess you missed the innovations of the past few thousand years. "X" is a lot lower than it used to be. Quantity "Y" changed as well. But one would expect that if "Y" decreases, then "X" is going to decrease as well.
If you really want to limit population growth you would have to stop the growth on the old end, not the young end. IE put a cap on how long people can live.
Nonsense. Old people aren't the ones having kids.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, I doubt many of us want them efficiently made and distributed.
To the contrary, I sensed the hyperbole just fine. I think instead the problem is that when you use hyperbole, one also senses the wistful longing for the blood-encrusted guillotine.
So how do you explain Afghanistan, funny man?
Do you think they were risking nuclear war with their adventures in Afghanistan? Doesn't look that way to me.
And how many invasions did the USSR do between 1945 and 1979? While there were a number of proxy wars (for example, in China (end stages of the Communist victory over Kuomintang), Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam), the only genuine invasions were Hungary (to put down a revolt in 1956) and Afghanistan (to prop up a puppet government in 1979).
In comparison, the Eastern Bloc and European soviet republics came from 10 countries that the USSR took over (as well as some land taken from Germany and Finland) between 1938 and 1945.
There was a night and day difference between how the USSR behaved before 1945 and afterward.
It doesn't. Just multiple that figure by 20,000 (which is the inverse of the concentration of U3O8 in that particular coal) to get the corresponding ingested dosage of yellowcake (which is also U3O8).
For fission energy production, we must start with a fissile resource (we need the neutrons!)
You can also start with a fusion source for those neutrons. Farnsworth fusor seems to generate a bunch of neutrons with sufficient energy to induce fusion in U-238 (Wikipedia currently is claiming that the fusor can generate neutrons of almost 2.5 MeV and simultaneously claims that neutrons of 1 MeV are the minimum needed to induce fission of U-238.
Unskilled laborers making decent wages will be a thing of the past on a global scale in the near future, just like what is happening in the US right now.
Only because there is far cheaper unskilled labor elsewhere. It's worth noting that the unskilled labor that you claim supports your point is also the highest paid unskilled labor in the world.
What happens when corporations can no longer exploit global wage differences?
Depends why that is no longer happening. If it's because there's a lot of good paying jobs going around, then they're going to have to offer more pay, that's what happened in the US prior to the 70s. If it's because of massive protectionism, then I guess they'll just hire who they can afford to hire and not hire the rest.
He engages the imagination in a way that Shakespeare just doesn't. Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies.
Ok, how does that engage the imagination? I'll just point out that various Shakespeare plays had that sort of thing as well. For example, the Tempest which had an exotic tropical locale (imaginative panoramas), sorcery (the gadgets/forces to the universe), events (events), and a story that engages you beyond the five year old level.
But what has had more impact in the last 40 years culturally than Star Wars that can be attributed to a single person?
Michael Jackson or Madonna comes to mind as obvious counterexamples, just from the early 80s "big hair" era. For movie directors, I'd suggest Kubrick or Tarantino. For actors, I'd suggest Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, or hell, Jane Fonda.
I have never really understood why many Americans are so hostile to unionization.
There are several things leading to this hostility: a huge connection to organized crime for decades, acting for most of a century against the interests of their employees, and killing off businesses with their demands. You can call a lot of bad history, "decades of brainwashing", but there really is a lot of fail in US labor unions.
and mythos regarding correlation between hardwork and financial success.
Well, if that myth was replaced with a correlation between working smarter and financial success, then you'd have a point. But that doesn't help with the labor unions.
Having a kill switch embedded in commercial backbones saves the lives of the people who work there. the alternative is not no-killswitch, but an explosive kill switch in the form of rocket strikes at key backbone infrastructure locations.
I'm good with that. It makes turning off the internet a much less trivial task. They can always just drive out to the common chokepoints and turn them off themselves. Probably quicker and more effective than missiles anyway.
(All long range missiles were liquid fueled back then, and with the primitive computers and robotics of the time, it probably would have required a full-time manned presence on the moon, just like we had in earthbound missile silos.)
Or use solid fueled rockets. The "all long range missiles were liquid fueled" doesn't matter because any placement of missiles on the Moon would have been in the future, using near future technologies, not the present. So stable solid rocket motors (which could have been within a decade and were actually developed within two decades) could be included.
The entire idea of revenge in a thermonuclear exchange is what is stupid.
Why? If the USSR thought it could win (in whatever sense, its leaders think "winning" means, probably including the leaders surviving the nuclear exchange) a nuclear war, then it is likely that they would have done so.
It's worth noting that the USSR made several dozen invasions and other military adventures over the decades prior to the development of the nuclear bomb. Ask Finland how aggressive and trustworthy the USSR was during this time.
But after 1945, they magically cleaned up their act. Nuclear weapons did that.
If you're doing very few launches, disposable has the cost advantage since it has lower fixed costs. If you're doing a huge number of launches, say a hundred a year or more, then reusable has the cost advantage.
Yes it has (been mentioned). And yes it is (extinction is a very likely outcome).
Being "mentioned" is irrelevant. There's no actual science supporting the claim. This is a fatal flaw in your argument.
* Increased CO2 in the oceans leads to acidification of said oceans - elementary chemistry
Acidification and temperature increases aren't bits you set. They're degrees. A little acidification or temperature increases don't necessarily result in harm to coral. And it's worth noting here that we don't know the extent of coral death prior to the modern period. Merely claiming that there is coral death is not useful in itself. We also need to know how that compares to usual levels of coral death.
Now why should be not try to fix this again?
Because the fix is too expensive and harms us too much? It also may be counterproductive. Keep in mind that a large driver of pollution and environmental harm is poverty, something which poorly thought out interventions in our economies tend to increase. So an attempt to fix coral death could make the problem worse by increasing regional poverty to a degree that the coral ecosystem is harmed more than it would have been without the attempt.