The report says just twelve countries (the USA, Germany, Canada, China, Brazil, France, Mexico, India, the UK, Spain and Australia) account for 90 per cent of US multinationals' âoemissingâ profits.
Those profits get processed through various implementations of the âoeIrish-Dutch sandwichâ to be booked in low-tax countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Bermuda.
If the numbers are accurate (the report's authors put a number of caveats on the data), then between $500 and $700 billion gets shuffled around in this way, which is how Bermuda found itself home to $80 billion worth of profits in 2012 (its GDP in the same year was a paltry $5.47 billion).
That's a fair bit of neck that's not getting slit and a fair bit of impotent rage in comments for any tear collectors out there. I also see from a link in the discussions that this may be the tip of a very large iceberg.
A new report finds that around the world the extremely wealthy have accumulated at least $21 trillion in secretive offshore accounts. Thatâ(TM)s a sum equal to the gross domestic products of the United States and Japan added together.
But sure, lecture on how the rich will get their throats slit when they and their wealth are out of reach.
Nobody gets badly screwed by minimum wage laws, because if you're making less than that you are already screwed.
I already stated how they get screwed. By not having a job. One of the things the minimum wage people don't get is that work experience is crucial to being anything other than a minimum wage drone or unemployed deadbeat.
We are creating a long term disaster of people who never will have a job and people who enter the job world late.
For example, I first started working when I was 15 and had about the equivalent of two years of full time work by the time I graduated from college at 22. Fortunately, it's not common, but I occasionally run into people who are at least 25 years old and working their first job ever. It's hard to adapt to something you've never done before and meet expectations you never understood before.
The US health care system really sucks. However, for the individual who has to live with it, employer-provided insurance is very valuable. Ideally, we'd move to a European-style system which would remove a considerable burden from employers, but there's large business interests who don't want that. A European-type system would also remove that "overpriced health care" you complain about.
And why wouldn't the US screw that up? In the beginning before the epic runup in health care costs, the US was comparable with Europe.
They screwed up health insurance that worked. You have completely unrealistic expectations here. The US just had to fix oh, ten or so major problems with health care in the first place and that didn't happen. Thus, I think any transition to European-style plans will fail on similar grounds.
The problem is not a national one. The US is doing great, as a whole. Productivity per worker is up, lots of industrial production, etc. The fact that the median household income in constant dollars has been flat has nothing to do with how well the country is doing, or how offshoring is going. US workers are sacrificing what they're worth in productivity gains.
You just described a national level problem. And it has everything to do with competition with labor that is several times cheaper.
As far as Social Security goes, there are a lot of people, including me, who included Social Security into our retirement plans. I'd be happy to renounce it, provided all the money sent into the system with my SSAN number on it would be refunded to me, adjusted for inflation and with a modest interest rate. I'm over 60, and I don't have time to rearrange my savings to replace Social Security. Darn few of us have defined-benefit pensions any more, and you never know how long savings will last.
Of course, you're over 60. I don't expect this sort of support for terrible programs from people who can do the math and realize they will lose out. You're the last generation (early stage Baby Boomers) who will get more out of Social Security or Medicare than they put in. We similarly don't know how long the US will be able to continuing giving out other peoples' money, but it'll definitely be scaled back by the time I get to retirement age in twenty years.
So, literally in one sentence you say to just tell Congress to do something and expect it shall come to pass, and then in the next sentence you say how that doesn't ever happen.
So what? I don't expect anything here, including that NASA actually does the job that it was meant to do.
At this point, advocating any sort of semi-effective space development strategy for NASA is pushing a wet noodle. There aren't enough people interested and there isn't enough utility in space activities (including exploration and science) to justify it. This is a dead end.
If SpaceX delivers on Falcon Heavy, then I'll advocate to protect them from destruction. But I won't bother with what NASA does unless it should happen to cross over with my interests (here, private sector development of space).
SpaceX says they'll launch Falcon Heavy in 2016. NASA claims it'll launch a Falcon Heavy competitor at the end of 2018 using well over an order of magnitude more funding. We'll see.
And where did you suppose the US was off loading its workforce?
They "offloaded" several times more work than the US's total workforce.
I submit that having a population pissed that they can't get decent liveable jobs is preferable to slave labour in the face of no labour policy. That way, at least the greedy will cut their own throats with the peoples hand in a more timely fashion.
And I would disagree because ultimately the latter "slave labour" get paid more, have a better standard of living, and more freedom. This is all about how developed world labor competes with the rest of the world.
Developed world standard of living will decline somewhat, no matter how much a pissed off population wriggles on the hook because it simply is several times more expensive. But it is just not that hard to create systems and regulations that make the problem worse rather than better y making that labor even more expensive or lessening demand for that labor.
And why would the "greedy" be cutting their throat when they can move somewhere else out of reach of a clueless but enraged public?
Please tell me how NASA is going to use the $3B that is allotted for SLS by Congress
Have Congress allot the money for something else.
If you're not happy with the direction NASA is going, tell your elected Congressional representative. And do it in writing, because emails are very easy to ignore.
I'll need a few million of my favorite friends to do that too.
In addition, if NASA really wants another large launch system for back up, throw some money at the United Launch Alliance to upgrade one of their rockets.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet.
It's much further along than SLS. SpaceX claims they'll launch it next year. SLS isn't even to the point of starting to build something that can be launched.
Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal.
No, that isn't NASA's job. Once again, we have the ridiculous assertion that NASA is doing something so vital that it needs to secure its own ridiculously expensive launch systems in case something bad happens to an existing launch system.
And we still have the problem of the money. NASA funding has been almost flat for about 40 years. Where's the money for both an expensive launch system and payloads to launch on that system coming from? "economically non-optimal" turns out to be equivalent to "do nothing else".
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
Back at you. NASA had three decade to come up with this new launch system and strong incentive to develop it after the Challenger accident. Where is it?
SpaceX has demonstrated actual experience at developing and flying new launch systems and the Falcon Heavy is close to first launch. The complete development cost of Falcon Heavy is probably well under a billion dollars, none of which was paid for by NASA. Meanwhile NASA squanders around $3 billion a year on SLS.
It's not "candy and nuts" to make the obvious observation that NASA could be using that $3 billion per year for deep space rather than purposes completely irrelevant to NASA's stated missions (and yes, I'm aware of the real reasons for throwing money without accountability at the usual military-industrial complex suspects).
Given Boldenâ(TM)s desire to pursue the âoeJourney to Mars,â it would seem only natural that the Orion and SLS programs, the only means currently in development for taking us beyond low Earth orbit, would be doing well since 2010. They are, but not for lack of effort by the Obama administration to underfund them â" proposals that congressional appropriators each year reverse. Since 2012, annual White House proposed budgets for NASA have fallen short of authorized levels by 78 percent and 70 percent respectively for the Orion or SLS programs.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars. Or if you want competition and can't be bothered to fund other big rocket development, you can fall back to the 20-25 ton range and use more than half a dozen or more different rocket systems throughout the world (Falcon 9, Atlas V Heavy, Delta IV Heavy, Soyuz, Angara, Ariane V, and Chang Zheng 5).
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
For starters, the working conditions in India and China are mostly miserable.
India and China started from really bad starting positions. So it doesn't matter if working conditions are "mostly miserable". You completely miss the obvious change, that working conditions, their economies, their standards of living, etc are much better than they were around 1950. Why does your supposed problems exist for your country, but not for these countries?
Secondly, an entire political system that favours trickle down economics over meritocratic incentives.
Another place where you don't seem to be paying attention. What trickle down economics? What meritocratic incentives?
Neo liberalism has screwed us, not labour policy, you twat
Neo liberalism seems to be code for global trade which would have happened anyway. It has elevated many billions of people out of poverty.
Why are you willing to ignore evidence of vast, global improvements in peoples' lives? What's so compelling about this fake story that you peddle that you prefer it over reality?
Gee, minimum wage and labor hour policies? Those are screwing up the market?
Of course they are. Young adults, the poorer minorities, ex-criminals, and the less educated get badly screwed by minimum wage. Nobody wants to work hard for a pittance. But they don't want to just not work at all and starve either.
Ideally, a full-time job at minimum wage wouldn't leave a family collecting government benefits.
Ideally, you'd be able to afford a mansion, a huge robot staff, and whatnot on your basic income and not ever have to work a day in your life, but we don't live in that ideal world.
Social Security is not a low-value benefit, and neither is health insurance.
And the Moon is made of green cheese. Social Security, for example, raises the cost of almost every employee by roughly 15%. In return, you get a paltry stipend (which grows ever more paltry with the decades) when you retire which isn't much good for anything, including keeping granny from eating cat food.
And as I recall, most of the complaints about US health care are about how expensive it is for no additional benefit compared to other countries's systems.
Given a market without externalities applied, pollution would be as bad as I said.
You don't need any of the things I've spoken of to this point to curb pollution. And there are sensible regulatory changes that would lower the cost for the employer without negatively affecting pollution controls. For example, in a number of industries, it is practically impossible not to violate some regulation (eg, oil drilling and nuclear power plants). But rather than pass impossible regulations and then ignore minor violations after the fact (in order to keep society functioning), how about creating regulations that make it possible to comply with those regulations in the first place?
When the government starts reining in externalities, business people start moaning about the high costs and liabilities.
Their moaning has teeth. There's been 50 years of decline in US living standards and 50 years of employers moving their operations overseas, but as here, a lot of people refuse to do anything about it. There's all this empty noise about how workers want to work for a bunch of money, want to retire on a plush government pension, or get cheap access to a ton of overpriced health care, but not a lot of thought about how that's going to happen.
My thinking on the matter is that if you aren't willing to sacrifice to preserve your country's future, then I'm not willing to care because that indicates to me that you don't really think it is important. For example, the US is going down. All the wants of labor are increasingly difficult to deliver with really dumb and irrelevant crap like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid sucking up an increasing share of the budget (it's getting towards 50% these days) without contributing anything to the future of the country.
But there's a lot of people who don't care as long as their Social Security payouts aren't touched and their medical conditions are treated.
Essentially since 2008, economies have been cannibalizing themselves, and more and more jobs are getting crappier and crappier.
And yet China and India don't have this problem. Maybe you should ask yourself why, when you've gotten everything you've wanted for labor policy for the past century, that this problem exists in the first place.
yes, no different from the 1400 Spain, 1500's UK, 1800's US, but hasn't the world advance a little in the last 150yrs?
That question works against your argument too. Why would China stew in such an ancient state of affairs when via the "cheaper" methods you complain about, they are building a modern economy?
My understanding is that the Jovian radiation belt is strong enough that we may never even land on them excepting perhaps short trips to Ganymede.
Callisto and Ganymede are relatively low hazard in this regard. I see estimates of about 80 mSievert for Ganymede and maybe 15-20 mSievert for Callisto.
Of course we might travel beyond Mars, but at this point I think that we have enough scientific reason to think that colonizing beyond Mars is so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. There are a host of reasons, but to name a few: (1) faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible (and only possible in mere speculations), (2) near-FTL travel is a mere dream, (3) the human body can hardly take long-term space travel as it is, (4) we allow ourselves to be guided more by politics and profit than by any "higher" goals, so we will never unite our resources on such a project unless it promises major returns in these areas, etc.
The chief problem with the assertion that we will never go beyond Mars, is that once you go to Mars and live there, you have the capable to travel to and live on a variety of other bodies in the Solar System such as the Moon, the Asteroid Belt, the two groups of Sun-Jupiter Trojan asteroids, Mercury, and the primary four Jovian moons. They are only a little bit harder to travel to and to live on.
The nearness of these bodies means you don't need FTL or near C travel. Near zero gravity is just a thing to adapt to via genetic or biological engineering (assuming the habitat doesn't just generate its own artificial gravity instead). And profit is just a demonstrate of positive return on value, which any space project will need in order to be more than a one-time thing.
And once, you're able to colonize the region around Jupiter, you can colonize any of the moons of the gas giants, and in turn colonize Kuiper Belt objects or fly multi-generational interstellar colonies to other stars. The key observation here is that once you colonize anywhere in space, it is only incrementally harder to colonize many other regions in space and there is a smooth continuum of incremental difficulty to multi-generational interstellar travel.
Another observation is that controlling an exploration program of the galaxy from one single point in the galaxy won't work. There's no way we will orchestrate the exploration of star systems 50k light years away, for example, as our current short lived selves. Round trip communication would be on the order of 1,000 human lives. That's much harder than multi-generational ships. That means substantial AI and von Neumann machines on site. At that point, you've created some form of robotic intelligent life and well, that's what's colonizing the galaxy. First.
At that point, multi-generational ships become rather easy since you can use the robots to prepare homes ahead of time for people who are moving in as well as a support/supply network for every colony ship passing through a region of space.
No but I would prosecute a Christian who said that they needed an extra 15 minute break at work to pray and then we find out that they are actually using that time to do social networking.
This is complete utter BS. Waves cancel each other out all the time. Look up interference patterns and wave propagation on Wikipedia.
Yes, let's look at those things. The first thing we notice when we look at wave propagation is that energy is conserved which in itself is completely at odds with your assertion that waves can cancel themselves.
When we look at interference patterns (which occur when waves interact at best weakly with each other), we see not only local cancellation, but also local reinforcement. When there are regions where waves subtract from each others' amplitude, this process also results in regions where the waves add to each others' amplitude. Thus, energy is conserved.
In reality, ocean waves don't do that. Instead, they pass through each other. If energy were somehow canceling itself out on Earth, we would have noticed by now. In particular, if ocean waves were readily canceling each other's energy out, then we would have a vastly slower rotating Earth due to the loss of energy through such wave action.
Slashdot Mirror
The report says just twelve countries (the USA, Germany, Canada, China, Brazil, France, Mexico, India, the UK, Spain and Australia) account for 90 per cent of US multinationals' âoemissingâ profits.
Those profits get processed through various implementations of the âoeIrish-Dutch sandwichâ to be booked in low-tax countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Bermuda.
If the numbers are accurate (the report's authors put a number of caveats on the data), then between $500 and $700 billion gets shuffled around in this way, which is how Bermuda found itself home to $80 billion worth of profits in 2012 (its GDP in the same year was a paltry $5.47 billion).
That's a fair bit of neck that's not getting slit and a fair bit of impotent rage in comments for any tear collectors out there. I also see from a link in the discussions that this may be the tip of a very large iceberg.
A new report finds that around the world the extremely wealthy have accumulated at least $21 trillion in secretive offshore accounts. Thatâ(TM)s a sum equal to the gross domestic products of the United States and Japan added together.
But sure, lecture on how the rich will get their throats slit when they and their wealth are out of reach.
Nobody gets badly screwed by minimum wage laws, because if you're making less than that you are already screwed.
I already stated how they get screwed. By not having a job. One of the things the minimum wage people don't get is that work experience is crucial to being anything other than a minimum wage drone or unemployed deadbeat.
We are creating a long term disaster of people who never will have a job and people who enter the job world late.
For example, I first started working when I was 15 and had about the equivalent of two years of full time work by the time I graduated from college at 22. Fortunately, it's not common, but I occasionally run into people who are at least 25 years old and working their first job ever. It's hard to adapt to something you've never done before and meet expectations you never understood before.
The US health care system really sucks. However, for the individual who has to live with it, employer-provided insurance is very valuable. Ideally, we'd move to a European-style system which would remove a considerable burden from employers, but there's large business interests who don't want that. A European-type system would also remove that "overpriced health care" you complain about.
And why wouldn't the US screw that up? In the beginning before the epic runup in health care costs, the US was comparable with Europe.
They screwed up health insurance that worked. You have completely unrealistic expectations here. The US just had to fix oh, ten or so major problems with health care in the first place and that didn't happen. Thus, I think any transition to European-style plans will fail on similar grounds.
The problem is not a national one. The US is doing great, as a whole. Productivity per worker is up, lots of industrial production, etc. The fact that the median household income in constant dollars has been flat has nothing to do with how well the country is doing, or how offshoring is going. US workers are sacrificing what they're worth in productivity gains.
You just described a national level problem. And it has everything to do with competition with labor that is several times cheaper.
As far as Social Security goes, there are a lot of people, including me, who included Social Security into our retirement plans. I'd be happy to renounce it, provided all the money sent into the system with my SSAN number on it would be refunded to me, adjusted for inflation and with a modest interest rate. I'm over 60, and I don't have time to rearrange my savings to replace Social Security. Darn few of us have defined-benefit pensions any more, and you never know how long savings will last.
Of course, you're over 60. I don't expect this sort of support for terrible programs from people who can do the math and realize they will lose out. You're the last generation (early stage Baby Boomers) who will get more out of Social Security or Medicare than they put in. We similarly don't know how long the US will be able to continuing giving out other peoples' money, but it'll definitely be scaled back by the time I get to retirement age in twenty years.
So, literally in one sentence you say to just tell Congress to do something and expect it shall come to pass, and then in the next sentence you say how that doesn't ever happen.
So what? I don't expect anything here, including that NASA actually does the job that it was meant to do.
At this point, advocating any sort of semi-effective space development strategy for NASA is pushing a wet noodle. There aren't enough people interested and there isn't enough utility in space activities (including exploration and science) to justify it. This is a dead end.
If SpaceX delivers on Falcon Heavy, then I'll advocate to protect them from destruction. But I won't bother with what NASA does unless it should happen to cross over with my interests (here, private sector development of space).
SpaceX says they'll launch Falcon Heavy in 2016. NASA claims it'll launch a Falcon Heavy competitor at the end of 2018 using well over an order of magnitude more funding. We'll see.
So what you're saying is that the lunar landing didn't actually happen, right?
Not with the SLS spending. That's money down a rathole.
Usual stuff like NASA now depending on Russia to put Americans in space because Obama gutted NASA?
Not much different than what they were doing with the Shuttle, except that it's cheaper.
And where did you suppose the US was off loading its workforce?
They "offloaded" several times more work than the US's total workforce.
I submit that having a population pissed that they can't get decent liveable jobs is preferable to slave labour in the face of no labour policy. That way, at least the greedy will cut their own throats with the peoples hand in a more timely fashion.
And I would disagree because ultimately the latter "slave labour" get paid more, have a better standard of living, and more freedom. This is all about how developed world labor competes with the rest of the world.
Developed world standard of living will decline somewhat, no matter how much a pissed off population wriggles on the hook because it simply is several times more expensive. But it is just not that hard to create systems and regulations that make the problem worse rather than better y making that labor even more expensive or lessening demand for that labor.
And why would the "greedy" be cutting their throat when they can move somewhere else out of reach of a clueless but enraged public?
Please tell me how NASA is going to use the $3B that is allotted for SLS by Congress
Have Congress allot the money for something else.
If you're not happy with the direction NASA is going, tell your elected Congressional representative. And do it in writing, because emails are very easy to ignore.
I'll need a few million of my favorite friends to do that too.
In addition, if NASA really wants another large launch system for back up, throw some money at the United Launch Alliance to upgrade one of their rockets.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet.
It's much further along than SLS. SpaceX claims they'll launch it next year. SLS isn't even to the point of starting to build something that can be launched.
Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal.
No, that isn't NASA's job. Once again, we have the ridiculous assertion that NASA is doing something so vital that it needs to secure its own ridiculously expensive launch systems in case something bad happens to an existing launch system.
And we still have the problem of the money. NASA funding has been almost flat for about 40 years. Where's the money for both an expensive launch system and payloads to launch on that system coming from? "economically non-optimal" turns out to be equivalent to "do nothing else".
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
Back at you. NASA had three decade to come up with this new launch system and strong incentive to develop it after the Challenger accident. Where is it?
SpaceX has demonstrated actual experience at developing and flying new launch systems and the Falcon Heavy is close to first launch. The complete development cost of Falcon Heavy is probably well under a billion dollars, none of which was paid for by NASA. Meanwhile NASA squanders around $3 billion a year on SLS.
It's not "candy and nuts" to make the obvious observation that NASA could be using that $3 billion per year for deep space rather than purposes completely irrelevant to NASA's stated missions (and yes, I'm aware of the real reasons for throwing money without accountability at the usual military-industrial complex suspects).
Bolden is the guy who said that one of his "foremost" tasks is to reach out to the Muslim world.
You might not have noticed. But the world didn't end and NASA is still doing its usual stuff.
Welcome to US space policy. It is by its nature difficult to read. Where it isn't painfully complex, it is painfully stupid.
Given Boldenâ(TM)s desire to pursue the âoeJourney to Mars,â it would seem only natural that the Orion and SLS programs, the only means currently in development for taking us beyond low Earth orbit, would be doing well since 2010. They are, but not for lack of effort by the Obama administration to underfund them â" proposals that congressional appropriators each year reverse. Since 2012, annual White House proposed budgets for NASA have fallen short of authorized levels by 78 percent and 70 percent respectively for the Orion or SLS programs.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars. Or if you want competition and can't be bothered to fund other big rocket development, you can fall back to the 20-25 ton range and use more than half a dozen or more different rocket systems throughout the world (Falcon 9, Atlas V Heavy, Delta IV Heavy, Soyuz, Angara, Ariane V, and Chang Zheng 5).
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
For starters, the working conditions in India and China are mostly miserable.
India and China started from really bad starting positions. So it doesn't matter if working conditions are "mostly miserable". You completely miss the obvious change, that working conditions, their economies, their standards of living, etc are much better than they were around 1950. Why does your supposed problems exist for your country, but not for these countries?
Secondly, an entire political system that favours trickle down economics over meritocratic incentives.
Another place where you don't seem to be paying attention. What trickle down economics? What meritocratic incentives?
Neo liberalism has screwed us, not labour policy, you twat
Neo liberalism seems to be code for global trade which would have happened anyway. It has elevated many billions of people out of poverty.
Why are you willing to ignore evidence of vast, global improvements in peoples' lives? What's so compelling about this fake story that you peddle that you prefer it over reality?
Gee, minimum wage and labor hour policies? Those are screwing up the market?
Of course they are. Young adults, the poorer minorities, ex-criminals, and the less educated get badly screwed by minimum wage. Nobody wants to work hard for a pittance. But they don't want to just not work at all and starve either.
Ideally, a full-time job at minimum wage wouldn't leave a family collecting government benefits.
Ideally, you'd be able to afford a mansion, a huge robot staff, and whatnot on your basic income and not ever have to work a day in your life, but we don't live in that ideal world.
Social Security is not a low-value benefit, and neither is health insurance.
And the Moon is made of green cheese. Social Security, for example, raises the cost of almost every employee by roughly 15%. In return, you get a paltry stipend (which grows ever more paltry with the decades) when you retire which isn't much good for anything, including keeping granny from eating cat food.
And as I recall, most of the complaints about US health care are about how expensive it is for no additional benefit compared to other countries's systems.
Given a market without externalities applied, pollution would be as bad as I said.
You don't need any of the things I've spoken of to this point to curb pollution. And there are sensible regulatory changes that would lower the cost for the employer without negatively affecting pollution controls. For example, in a number of industries, it is practically impossible not to violate some regulation (eg, oil drilling and nuclear power plants). But rather than pass impossible regulations and then ignore minor violations after the fact (in order to keep society functioning), how about creating regulations that make it possible to comply with those regulations in the first place?
When the government starts reining in externalities, business people start moaning about the high costs and liabilities.
Their moaning has teeth. There's been 50 years of decline in US living standards and 50 years of employers moving their operations overseas, but as here, a lot of people refuse to do anything about it. There's all this empty noise about how workers want to work for a bunch of money, want to retire on a plush government pension, or get cheap access to a ton of overpriced health care, but not a lot of thought about how that's going to happen.
My thinking on the matter is that if you aren't willing to sacrifice to preserve your country's future, then I'm not willing to care because that indicates to me that you don't really think it is important. For example, the US is going down. All the wants of labor are increasingly difficult to deliver with really dumb and irrelevant crap like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid sucking up an increasing share of the budget (it's getting towards 50% these days) without contributing anything to the future of the country.
But there's a lot of people who don't care as long as their Social Security payouts aren't touched and their medical conditions are treated.
Essentially since 2008, economies have been cannibalizing themselves, and more and more jobs are getting crappier and crappier.
And yet China and India don't have this problem. Maybe you should ask yourself why, when you've gotten everything you've wanted for labor policy for the past century, that this problem exists in the first place.
yes, no different from the 1400 Spain, 1500's UK, 1800's US, but hasn't the world advance a little in the last 150yrs?
That question works against your argument too. Why would China stew in such an ancient state of affairs when via the "cheaper" methods you complain about, they are building a modern economy?
My understanding is that the Jovian radiation belt is strong enough that we may never even land on them excepting perhaps short trips to Ganymede.
Callisto and Ganymede are relatively low hazard in this regard. I see estimates of about 80 mSievert for Ganymede and maybe 15-20 mSievert for Callisto.
I think the price of having children being born into captivity is too high though.
Compared to children born on Earth?
Of course we might travel beyond Mars, but at this point I think that we have enough scientific reason to think that colonizing beyond Mars is so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. There are a host of reasons, but to name a few: (1) faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible (and only possible in mere speculations), (2) near-FTL travel is a mere dream, (3) the human body can hardly take long-term space travel as it is, (4) we allow ourselves to be guided more by politics and profit than by any "higher" goals, so we will never unite our resources on such a project unless it promises major returns in these areas, etc.
The chief problem with the assertion that we will never go beyond Mars, is that once you go to Mars and live there, you have the capable to travel to and live on a variety of other bodies in the Solar System such as the Moon, the Asteroid Belt, the two groups of Sun-Jupiter Trojan asteroids, Mercury, and the primary four Jovian moons. They are only a little bit harder to travel to and to live on.
The nearness of these bodies means you don't need FTL or near C travel. Near zero gravity is just a thing to adapt to via genetic or biological engineering (assuming the habitat doesn't just generate its own artificial gravity instead). And profit is just a demonstrate of positive return on value, which any space project will need in order to be more than a one-time thing.
And once, you're able to colonize the region around Jupiter, you can colonize any of the moons of the gas giants, and in turn colonize Kuiper Belt objects or fly multi-generational interstellar colonies to other stars. The key observation here is that once you colonize anywhere in space, it is only incrementally harder to colonize many other regions in space and there is a smooth continuum of incremental difficulty to multi-generational interstellar travel.
Another observation is that controlling an exploration program of the galaxy from one single point in the galaxy won't work. There's no way we will orchestrate the exploration of star systems 50k light years away, for example, as our current short lived selves. Round trip communication would be on the order of 1,000 human lives. That's much harder than multi-generational ships. That means substantial AI and von Neumann machines on site. At that point, you've created some form of robotic intelligent life and well, that's what's colonizing the galaxy. First.
At that point, multi-generational ships become rather easy since you can use the robots to prepare homes ahead of time for people who are moving in as well as a support/supply network for every colony ship passing through a region of space.
No but I would prosecute a Christian who said that they needed an extra 15 minute break at work to pray and then we find out that they are actually using that time to do social networking.
Prosecute that person for what?
This is complete utter BS. Waves cancel each other out all the time. Look up interference patterns and wave propagation on Wikipedia.
Yes, let's look at those things. The first thing we notice when we look at wave propagation is that energy is conserved which in itself is completely at odds with your assertion that waves can cancel themselves.
When we look at interference patterns (which occur when waves interact at best weakly with each other), we see not only local cancellation, but also local reinforcement. When there are regions where waves subtract from each others' amplitude, this process also results in regions where the waves add to each others' amplitude. Thus, energy is conserved.
Taxes aren't all about collecting money, they're mostly about modifying behavior
Always a good anti-tax argument. I suggest a $50 per instance tax on people who suggest any taxes for the purpose of behavior modification.
In reality, ocean waves don't do that. Instead, they pass through each other. If energy were somehow canceling itself out on Earth, we would have noticed by now. In particular, if ocean waves were readily canceling each other's energy out, then we would have a vastly slower rotating Earth due to the loss of energy through such wave action.