Well, when I said you could spend your whole life doing that, I meant not just for the one espresso machine, but for the various things you might want to replicate.
And it would be a lifetime well spent. I really don't see the point of your argument. Documentation, if it survives, is of some use and if it doesn't, then it is useless. We're pretty sure the machines will survive and a successful reengineering project will have gone beyond what documentation can do (such as actually build a working device using what you have at your disposal).
Regardless, the few weeks seems overly optimistic. Among other things, it should take longer than that to properly test it.
Why would it? An afternoon would do the job.
Sure, you can probably cobble together something that works well enough, but if there were good reasons for the original design choices in the first place, altering the design is surely going to cause issues that will crop up over time forcing you to repair it again and again and again and again.
Well, then you'll figure it out, if it's important enough.
Believe me, I can see the fun and educational value in doing it from scratch until you get it right, but sometimes you just want to get things right the first time. There's a clear benefit in having the distilled knowledge of those who came before you to reference, even when you decide to go in a different direction.
And there remains the question of how useful this knowledge will be? You won't have industrial civilization at your disposal. So a lot of the design considerations are simply irrelevant due to lack of that infrastructure. And it's likely that the documentation won't actually agree with the machine that was built. This is a common problem which reverse engineering neatly bypasses.
ACA is a bridge to a other system at least in part
Ah, yes, never let a crisis go to waste. Especially, if you went through the trouble of manufacturing it in the first place.
The health care problems in the usa are to big to fix at one time and there is room to change ACA or to use it while working on a better over all idea.
They threw a couple thousand pages (plus the 17,000+ pages of associated regulation from the regulators who cover this law) of crap on top of that problem and made it more intractable than it was.
And I'm sure they remember the 50%, adjusted for inflation, that the US debt has increased under Obama to this point. Well, you'll have four more years to put two and two together.
But with compulsory voting, everyone's vote WILL count. That's the point of compulsory votes. The problem with it not being compulsory is that your vote may not be important. You may want a certain party and vote for it which gives you a single vote, but if 1000 other people have the same idea and don't vote at the same time then your vote is lost.
I don't want everyone's vote to count. If you're too lazy, apathetic, or ignorant to vote voluntarily, then you shouldn't be anywhere near a ballot box. A vote is a responsibility, not just a chore. There's no way there's a thousand people out there who just happen to mirror my voting preferences and won't vote voluntarily.
I thought the American voting system was fairly straight forward until someone pointed out to me that voting isn't compulsory. That's pretty fucked up.
No. It makes sense. A democracy should be first and foremost a place where people have as much choice as possible. All this mandatory bullshit makes it something other than a democracy.
The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
I must admit that it's a lot easier to do proper audit trails on electronic media. Whoever controls the media pretty much decides who gets elected. Can't get much simpler than that.
Which conflicts with what you said earlier about it being a form of power. There is nuance here. The original poster was ignoring that there are other forms of power and that these tended to be higher quality. Hence, my response.
This matters because it affects solutions to related problems. For example, if too much power is concentrated in too few hands, then in the OP's viewpoint, one takes money away from those hands and removes some of the power. My observation is that you can have people who aren't at all rich, but have inordinate power at their disposal.
How is it a problem? The fact of the matter is that government was chosen instead of leaving things as they were (sticking with the libertarian ideal). If things were so fine, then the opponents - those free individuals and businesses that weren't subject to all the government coercion like people today - would have just stayed with that, but they didn't.
And we see that has caused problems, such as the dissolution of labor unions that do little but harm the industries that they work for, the employees that they contain, and the businesses which now labor under unusual and poorly thought out regulatory burdens.
Oh, it's easy for that to happen. See, contrary to libertarian beliefs, economic prosperity (that's your "backwards colony to imminent superpower") does not have to go hand in hand with individual freedom and liberty.
Sure, there are examples, such as Germany or Japan, where it happened that way. But in the US, freedom and liberty was an instrumental part of the process.
That's the point. 19th century is not the libertarian paradise that libertarians want to return to. People who think 19th century is better than today are not really libertarians. They may be conservative, but not libertarian.
Where's the inconsistency? Let's look at 19th century US for a bit. At no point was there ever explicitly proposed any sort of coherent social or economic policy or plan at the federal level.
Instead, what transpired was the result of a lot of individual choices throughout a chaotic and fluid society. I'd say freedom and liberty in action.
One doesn't have to like every feature of the Gilded Age in the US to point out the remarkable progress of the age and who made that progress happen.
That's my point as well. The "common explanation" is what libertarians commonly believe in, which makes libertarianism a flawed idea.
Fair enough. I disagree because you have a cartoonish view of that time period. It wasn't all sweat shops and greedy trusts.
No drama and no line. It was a paper ballot with ovals to fill in. Voted for Romney and against a US Representative that had voted for Obamacare. I also voted for Prop 64, some sort of pro-marijuana thing. It probably won't go anywhere simply because federal drug law supercedes state law. Having ground my ax, I strolled into a nice, sunny day.
Why would they be screwed? Their setups don't have to last forever, just long enough to make viable replacements. if they can keep that shop running for say, six months, then they're probably good.
So you agree with the GP? Nothing you said there contradicts what GP said.
He said: money is a form of power
No, he said
What is wealth? POWER, that is all, power in an easy to carry form.
Not a form of power. Power itself.
I think the point is how those things collapsed. The common explanation is the government taking action - the same government action that libertarians complain about as being big bad government interfering with the lives of individuals.
The problem with the common explanation is that the collapse precedes the government action and in a number of cases, such as Standard Oil, enabled the government to act. The monopoly weakened first (competition grew significantly from the start of the Standard Oil monopoly, despite the monopoly buying out more than a hundred rivals) allowing opponents to use government force to break up Standard Oil.
Well, that implies 19th century US, with all those robber barons, was NOT a libertarian paradise, as that sort of mechanism didn't exist or wasn't working. Any self-proclaimed libertarian who thinks things were so much better back then are simply mistaken... or being disingenuous (aka they actually don't want a free society, but one where robber barons can beat the 10,000 to 1 odds)
Again, it's worth noting that the US transitioned from backwards colony to imminent superpower during that time. If everything was so bad, then how did that happen? Second, it's worth noting that unions did succeed against Pinkerton thugs, government connivance, and whatnot while they're dying in today's far more liberal world. Well, at least in the private sector. Why is that?
Sure, the 19th century wasn't quite a libertarian paradise, but it does compare remarkably well to today's world, with nanny governments, short-sighted businesses, and incompetent populace. "Common explanation" is IMHO substantially in error when it comes to this period.
Well, I googled around since I originally posted that. And I still stand by what I said. I don't buy most of the assertions above aside from the possibility that IR might have an effect on flower hormones.
Maximum theoretical overall efficiency of LED lighting is only 43.9 %
It can do a lot better than that. You're discussing white LEDs which smear the frequency of emitted light and reduce its efficiency. Colored LEDs don't have this problem. I've heard 70% or more, but I don't have cites. Google has turned up a bunch of garbage in that respect. High power LEDs seem less efficient than lower power ones, for what that's worth.
Also, luminous efficiency for plants is different than it is for human eyes. Red and blue LEDs would have a higher luminous efficiency as plant lights. Green LEDs would have a lower. This is a peculiar quirk of most terrestrial photosynthesis.
And luminous efficiency for solar cells is yet again different. So here's the angle.
1) Photosynthesis is notoriously inefficient. Something like 1% of the energy of sunlight is converted to usuable energy. A lot of this is merely because
2) Solar cells of the slick, not on the market type, can absorb around 40% or more of that solar energy.
3) Reemit via LEDs the spectrum of light that plants actually can use. I believe you can achieve about 25% luminous efficiency at this point. Raw solar power is probably somewhat worse, perhaps 10-15%. I've heard claims that theoretical limits of solar cells are something like 70% and LEDs somewhere in excess of 90%. If so, you might have a lot of room for improvement.
4) The argument then is that if you can get the efficiencies of the LEDs and solar cell high enough, then you have power left over. I think we'd be a few zeros away from this tech paying for itself, but it's at least thermodynamically feasible.
Alternately, it might be cheaper just to bioengineer a plant with better efficiency photosynthesis (eg, the "bionic leaf" that transhumanists occasionally discuss).
What is wealth? POWER, that is all, power in an easy to carry form.
You are in error already. History is chock full of examples of people who pursued power through wealth. And yes, it turns out that money does buy power. But it is far easier for power to take money than it is for money to buy power. And that's usually how those wealthy find their end. Power is ultimately a higher value currency than wealth is.
This is why we had private armies (which the same thing would happen in a 21st century libertarian state, see Blackwater) private enforcers to bash the heads of any peasants that dare strike (Pinkertons, again see Blackwater) and the trusts controlling pretty much every bit of commerce going into or out of the country.
And those trusts collapsed and those strikes happened anyway.
Personally I kinda wish all the right wingers would get their wish, no more help for the poor, no more social security, no more welfare, because "The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and I would bet my last dollar that it wouldn't last a decade before we had violent revolution. The poor outnumber you by about 10,000 to 1, like those odds? You have a country with national guard armories in every little piss ant town and it takes less than 3 hours to turn a truck into a technical. If you want to see what zero regulation looks like, see Somalia, he who has the most guns wins, and in a country as highly armed as this one it would be a bloodbath.
I take it you don't have a clue how this would work. That's exactly the ultimate mechanisms for preventing a robber baron from taking everything. 10,000 to 1 odds. You aren't going to have enough money for enough private army.
Because after an apocalypse, there is no set period of time before things return to normal or near normal. By definition, they won't for generations, if at all. Preparing for an earthquake, or hurricane is for a relatively short duration because it is regional. But, something that pretty much wipes out civilization means you have to rebuild it. The survivorists may be able to do that, particularly by taking from others, for a time, but history has shown, for civilization to occur requires community which is the opposite of what the OP proposed.
Well then, the error would be "I can take stuff forever from fellow survivors", not "six months of food probably gives me enough time to adapt to whatever comes next".
And I think it's been noted that solar cells plus LEDs are a bit more efficient than raw sunlight for plants (I understand plant photosynthesis can't use the IR, a narrow green band, and UV portions of sunlight).
When only the extremes vote, you end up with extreme representatives.
So the lazy and ignorant are the "moderate vote"? I don't buy it.
Also, it's hard to claim a government is truly representative when only 40-60% of the populace voted for it (This btw is also an argument against FTTP voting)
Enlighten me. What makes it hard? Last I checked a variety of totalitarian governments were able to claim the same with about as much effort as it takes to walk and breathe at the same time.
As I've indicated I have no problem with not representing the people who don't bother to vote. Those people should be disfranchised. I consider that sort of voting superior to "truly representative" voting.
OTOH, I agree with your comment about "first past the post" voting. It might have seemed a good idea at the time, but it hasn't worked out.
In this age of modern speed-of-light communications, it takes TWO YEARS to choose a president.
What do you say that? Last I looked, it took a day plus early voting.
Oh, and thanks to Florida's genius governor, Rick Scott, cutting early voting short, you've got a good chance of another six weeks of court battles an recounts.
Last I heard, he cut it off on time. The problem was that there were a bunch of huge lines with ridiculous wait times. Being an asshole even as governor is legal. Just vote him out.
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Well, when I said you could spend your whole life doing that, I meant not just for the one espresso machine, but for the various things you might want to replicate.
And it would be a lifetime well spent. I really don't see the point of your argument. Documentation, if it survives, is of some use and if it doesn't, then it is useless. We're pretty sure the machines will survive and a successful reengineering project will have gone beyond what documentation can do (such as actually build a working device using what you have at your disposal).
Regardless, the few weeks seems overly optimistic. Among other things, it should take longer than that to properly test it.
Why would it? An afternoon would do the job.
Sure, you can probably cobble together something that works well enough, but if there were good reasons for the original design choices in the first place, altering the design is surely going to cause issues that will crop up over time forcing you to repair it again and again and again and again.
Well, then you'll figure it out, if it's important enough.
Believe me, I can see the fun and educational value in doing it from scratch until you get it right, but sometimes you just want to get things right the first time. There's a clear benefit in having the distilled knowledge of those who came before you to reference, even when you decide to go in a different direction.
And there remains the question of how useful this knowledge will be? You won't have industrial civilization at your disposal. So a lot of the design considerations are simply irrelevant due to lack of that infrastructure. And it's likely that the documentation won't actually agree with the machine that was built. This is a common problem which reverse engineering neatly bypasses.
ACA is a bridge to a other system at least in part
Ah, yes, never let a crisis go to waste. Especially, if you went through the trouble of manufacturing it in the first place.
The health care problems in the usa are to big to fix at one time and there is room to change ACA or to use it while working on a better over all idea.
They threw a couple thousand pages (plus the 17,000+ pages of associated regulation from the regulators who cover this law) of crap on top of that problem and made it more intractable than it was.
And I'm sure they remember the 50%, adjusted for inflation, that the US debt has increased under Obama to this point. Well, you'll have four more years to put two and two together.
But with compulsory voting, everyone's vote WILL count. That's the point of compulsory votes. The problem with it not being compulsory is that your vote may not be important. You may want a certain party and vote for it which gives you a single vote, but if 1000 other people have the same idea and don't vote at the same time then your vote is lost.
I don't want everyone's vote to count. If you're too lazy, apathetic, or ignorant to vote voluntarily, then you shouldn't be anywhere near a ballot box. A vote is a responsibility, not just a chore. There's no way there's a thousand people out there who just happen to mirror my voting preferences and won't vote voluntarily.
I thought the American voting system was fairly straight forward until someone pointed out to me that voting isn't compulsory. That's pretty fucked up.
No. It makes sense. A democracy should be first and foremost a place where people have as much choice as possible. All this mandatory bullshit makes it something other than a democracy.
A rational actor won't vote because his vote has (not absolute) zero value, hence without compulsory voting only irrational actors will vote.
So because a vote is worthless, we should force people to vote? Do you realize how little sense that makes?
other countries have compulsory voting.
What doesnt the USA?
Because we're not quite as stupid?
An Americans right to free speech should make it compulsory to vote and compulsory to include on all forms "None of the Above".
As long as we make suicide compulsory for people who come up with such dumb ideas. Rights aren't obligations.
The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
I must admit that it's a lot easier to do proper audit trails on electronic media. Whoever controls the media pretty much decides who gets elected. Can't get much simpler than that.
I guess he should have gotten a new ID then. Funny how looking out for the things you care about takes some work.
So money is power itself.
Which conflicts with what you said earlier about it being a form of power. There is nuance here. The original poster was ignoring that there are other forms of power and that these tended to be higher quality. Hence, my response.
This matters because it affects solutions to related problems. For example, if too much power is concentrated in too few hands, then in the OP's viewpoint, one takes money away from those hands and removes some of the power. My observation is that you can have people who aren't at all rich, but have inordinate power at their disposal.
How is it a problem? The fact of the matter is that government was chosen instead of leaving things as they were (sticking with the libertarian ideal). If things were so fine, then the opponents - those free individuals and businesses that weren't subject to all the government coercion like people today - would have just stayed with that, but they didn't.
And we see that has caused problems, such as the dissolution of labor unions that do little but harm the industries that they work for, the employees that they contain, and the businesses which now labor under unusual and poorly thought out regulatory burdens.
Oh, it's easy for that to happen. See, contrary to libertarian beliefs, economic prosperity (that's your "backwards colony to imminent superpower") does not have to go hand in hand with individual freedom and liberty.
Sure, there are examples, such as Germany or Japan, where it happened that way. But in the US, freedom and liberty was an instrumental part of the process.
That's the point. 19th century is not the libertarian paradise that libertarians want to return to. People who think 19th century is better than today are not really libertarians. They may be conservative, but not libertarian.
Where's the inconsistency? Let's look at 19th century US for a bit. At no point was there ever explicitly proposed any sort of coherent social or economic policy or plan at the federal level.
Instead, what transpired was the result of a lot of individual choices throughout a chaotic and fluid society. I'd say freedom and liberty in action.
One doesn't have to like every feature of the Gilded Age in the US to point out the remarkable progress of the age and who made that progress happen.
That's my point as well. The "common explanation" is what libertarians commonly believe in, which makes libertarianism a flawed idea.
Fair enough. I disagree because you have a cartoonish view of that time period. It wasn't all sweat shops and greedy trusts.
We are getting better whiners.
No drama and no line. It was a paper ballot with ovals to fill in. Voted for Romney and against a US Representative that had voted for Obamacare. I also voted for Prop 64, some sort of pro-marijuana thing. It probably won't go anywhere simply because federal drug law supercedes state law. Having ground my ax, I strolled into a nice, sunny day.
Why would they be screwed? Their setups don't have to last forever, just long enough to make viable replacements. if they can keep that shop running for say, six months, then they're probably good.
So you agree with the GP? Nothing you said there contradicts what GP said.
He said: money is a form of power
No, he said
What is wealth? POWER, that is all, power in an easy to carry form.
Not a form of power. Power itself.
I think the point is how those things collapsed. The common explanation is the government taking action - the same government action that libertarians complain about as being big bad government interfering with the lives of individuals.
The problem with the common explanation is that the collapse precedes the government action and in a number of cases, such as Standard Oil, enabled the government to act. The monopoly weakened first (competition grew significantly from the start of the Standard Oil monopoly, despite the monopoly buying out more than a hundred rivals) allowing opponents to use government force to break up Standard Oil.
Well, that implies 19th century US, with all those robber barons, was NOT a libertarian paradise, as that sort of mechanism didn't exist or wasn't working. Any self-proclaimed libertarian who thinks things were so much better back then are simply mistaken... or being disingenuous (aka they actually don't want a free society, but one where robber barons can beat the 10,000 to 1 odds)
Again, it's worth noting that the US transitioned from backwards colony to imminent superpower during that time. If everything was so bad, then how did that happen? Second, it's worth noting that unions did succeed against Pinkerton thugs, government connivance, and whatnot while they're dying in today's far more liberal world. Well, at least in the private sector. Why is that?
Sure, the 19th century wasn't quite a libertarian paradise, but it does compare remarkably well to today's world, with nanny governments, short-sighted businesses, and incompetent populace. "Common explanation" is IMHO substantially in error when it comes to this period.
Well, I googled around since I originally posted that. And I still stand by what I said. I don't buy most of the assertions above aside from the possibility that IR might have an effect on flower hormones.
The fixed costs of developing infrastructure and technology to get to and live on Mars will be very high.
Well, how high is "very high"?
Why have a few hundred people on Mars, when you can have a few million, and not have to develop many small scale, inefficient technologies.
Well, someone will be first. That's the "few hundred" stage.
So this situation requires someone to sit down for a few days and figure out how to make a working pencil? Yep, that's pretty "dire" alright.
What's up with all the doomsday posturing on making simple tools? Haven't you ever made anything before?
Yes, you could spend your whole life doing that.
Or you could spend a few weeks. Again, the difficulty of this task is greatly exaggerated.
Or you could have some documentation providing that knowledge right off the bat.
The actual device is documentation as well.
Maximum theoretical overall efficiency of LED lighting is only 43.9 %
It can do a lot better than that. You're discussing white LEDs which smear the frequency of emitted light and reduce its efficiency. Colored LEDs don't have this problem. I've heard 70% or more, but I don't have cites. Google has turned up a bunch of garbage in that respect. High power LEDs seem less efficient than lower power ones, for what that's worth.
Also, luminous efficiency for plants is different than it is for human eyes. Red and blue LEDs would have a higher luminous efficiency as plant lights. Green LEDs would have a lower. This is a peculiar quirk of most terrestrial photosynthesis.
And luminous efficiency for solar cells is yet again different. So here's the angle.
1) Photosynthesis is notoriously inefficient. Something like 1% of the energy of sunlight is converted to usuable energy. A lot of this is merely because
2) Solar cells of the slick, not on the market type, can absorb around 40% or more of that solar energy.
3) Reemit via LEDs the spectrum of light that plants actually can use. I believe you can achieve about 25% luminous efficiency at this point. Raw solar power is probably somewhat worse, perhaps 10-15%. I've heard claims that theoretical limits of solar cells are something like 70% and LEDs somewhere in excess of 90%. If so, you might have a lot of room for improvement.
4) The argument then is that if you can get the efficiencies of the LEDs and solar cell high enough, then you have power left over. I think we'd be a few zeros away from this tech paying for itself, but it's at least thermodynamically feasible.
Alternately, it might be cheaper just to bioengineer a plant with better efficiency photosynthesis (eg, the "bionic leaf" that transhumanists occasionally discuss).
Uh, that's definitely pretty flaky. I'm guessing "Mses'."
What is wealth? POWER, that is all, power in an easy to carry form.
You are in error already. History is chock full of examples of people who pursued power through wealth. And yes, it turns out that money does buy power. But it is far easier for power to take money than it is for money to buy power. And that's usually how those wealthy find their end. Power is ultimately a higher value currency than wealth is.
This is why we had private armies (which the same thing would happen in a 21st century libertarian state, see Blackwater) private enforcers to bash the heads of any peasants that dare strike (Pinkertons, again see Blackwater) and the trusts controlling pretty much every bit of commerce going into or out of the country.
And those trusts collapsed and those strikes happened anyway.
Personally I kinda wish all the right wingers would get their wish, no more help for the poor, no more social security, no more welfare, because "The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and I would bet my last dollar that it wouldn't last a decade before we had violent revolution. The poor outnumber you by about 10,000 to 1, like those odds? You have a country with national guard armories in every little piss ant town and it takes less than 3 hours to turn a truck into a technical. If you want to see what zero regulation looks like, see Somalia, he who has the most guns wins, and in a country as highly armed as this one it would be a bloodbath.
I take it you don't have a clue how this would work. That's exactly the ultimate mechanisms for preventing a robber baron from taking everything. 10,000 to 1 odds. You aren't going to have enough money for enough private army.
Because after an apocalypse, there is no set period of time before things return to normal or near normal. By definition, they won't for generations, if at all. Preparing for an earthquake, or hurricane is for a relatively short duration because it is regional. But, something that pretty much wipes out civilization means you have to rebuild it. The survivorists may be able to do that, particularly by taking from others, for a time, but history has shown, for civilization to occur requires community which is the opposite of what the OP proposed.
Well then, the error would be "I can take stuff forever from fellow survivors", not "six months of food probably gives me enough time to adapt to whatever comes next".
And I think it's been noted that solar cells plus LEDs are a bit more efficient than raw sunlight for plants (I understand plant photosynthesis can't use the IR, a narrow green band, and UV portions of sunlight).
When only the extremes vote, you end up with extreme representatives.
So the lazy and ignorant are the "moderate vote"? I don't buy it.
Also, it's hard to claim a government is truly representative when only 40-60% of the populace voted for it (This btw is also an argument against FTTP voting)
Enlighten me. What makes it hard? Last I checked a variety of totalitarian governments were able to claim the same with about as much effort as it takes to walk and breathe at the same time.
As I've indicated I have no problem with not representing the people who don't bother to vote. Those people should be disfranchised. I consider that sort of voting superior to "truly representative" voting.
OTOH, I agree with your comment about "first past the post" voting. It might have seemed a good idea at the time, but it hasn't worked out.
In this age of modern speed-of-light communications, it takes TWO YEARS to choose a president.
What do you say that? Last I looked, it took a day plus early voting.
Oh, and thanks to Florida's genius governor, Rick Scott, cutting early voting short, you've got a good chance of another six weeks of court battles an recounts.
Last I heard, he cut it off on time. The problem was that there were a bunch of huge lines with ridiculous wait times. Being an asshole even as governor is legal. Just vote him out.
The members of Congress will be acutely aware that 48 or 49% of the popular vote went to his opponent (and he may even lose the popular vote).
Probably not going to happen. Romney will probably win most of the small states. They have voting weight considerably above that of the larger states.