Nothing prevents the next president from revoking\backing out of a treaty.
Except that nasty old Constitution. The Congress can back out of a Treaty, the President can't.
Noting prevents the next congressional session from re-writing\repealing\altering existing law.
True enough, they do it all the time. For instance, they did it when last they extended Copyright to essentially forever.
Nothing prevents a SCOTUS member from being removed from their position via an impeachment. Their life time tenure is contingent on "good behavior" and as such any high crime should apply including Treason, Sedition, Perjury, etc.
Other than the requirement that it can only be done by Senate and House acting in convert, with the appropriate super-majorities. Note that even now, neither Party has enough votes in House or Senate to do so, even if they were so inclined. (And neither would risk it, I think, for fear of retaliation during the next turn of the wheel).
BLOCKQUOTE>Anyone could levy a charge that signing secret Treaties with foreign powers is Treason, but that is a long shot at best.
They'd be wasting their time, since Treason is defined in the Constitution, and a Secret Treaty doesn't meet the definition in and of itself.
A copy of OS X and Mac is profitable for Apple. A copy of OS X and an netbook probably isn't.
What a bizarre notion! Incremental cost for one more copy of the software is less than $1, so profit on a copy of OSX is above 97% of sale price, and in the thousands of percent of cost.
I would think the exact-opposite since the thin women I've known had "easy" pregnancies with quick labor, while the heavier women had more difficult, painful times.
Since the "heavier" women we're talking about are averaging 1 kg heavier, and the "shorter" ones average 2.5 cm shorter, I'd think you'd have a hard time sorting out the "shorter, heavier" ones from the "taller, lighter" ones being talked about in this study.
The whole "raise the standard of living and birthrates will fall to low enough levels that the population will decline" has been disproven as a general case for several years, and was NEVER true in the US.
You've obviously not spent a lot of time looking at US Census data. Excluding immigration (and the related reproduction - immigrants don't tend to live at the standard of living of the US and Western Europe for several generations), US population has been on the decline for the last several decades.
but uncontrolled population expansion will also have the same effect. A better one would be to engineer a bug that inhibits either male sperm production, or female pregnancy. Drop the population below 2 billion over the next 50 years.
Are you off on your overpopulation maunderings again?
The world isn't overpopulated. It is likely that most of the parts of the world you think are overpopulated (with the notable exceptions of China and India) have lower population densities than the parts you think are not overpopulated.
If the world were overpopulated, we've already proved out a simple, humane solution to the problem - raise everyone's standard of living to that of the USA and Western Europe. Then birthrates will fall naturally to low enough levels that population will decline.
Course, in that case, there's not yet any reason to believe that the population decline will STOP, but that's a problem for another day.
We'll get volunteers - there's absolutely no doubt of that. We just need to build the mission. If you could launch next month, you could find at least 30 academics, scientists and good old fashioned laborers who would sign up just for the shot at making human history who would have their bags packed in half a day and be asking for their airline ticket to Cape Canaveral.
Including me. I'd do it as a labourer, if that was the only option. and I'd be on the highway toward Canaveral in 45 minutes....
No, the tax rates would be established only by the board which oversees it, which would be elected by you, the people. They would not be established by congress or be withdrawn by congress.
So indeed, it would be completely independant of the state and would be democratically controlled by the people.
The goal is to make sure all sides and viewpoints are able to be
You haven't read the Constitution, I gather?
Relevant points to consider:
1) Only Congress may levy taxes.
2) The Federal Budget (all expenditures of tax money) can only be written for a one year period. So a federally funded news organization would have to have their funding approved
every single year.
If you have to get your funding approved by Congress (and signed by the President) every single year, you're going to be pretty dependent on them liking you and what you do.
Note that a quasi-independent agency like the BBC cannot be created in the USA without a Constitutional Amendment. Good luck with that.
That bill you linked to qualifies as "mostly harmless" - the keywords and tricky phrases you should be paying attention to are "owner or authorized user".
Note that it's all about what people who are NOT the "owner or authorized user" are allowed to inflict upon the "owner or authorized user".
Note that since you are, presumably, the "owner or authorized user" of your personal computer, nothing in this bill would have any effect whatsoever on what you can do with your own computer.
One of the best Australian TV shows that is quite prepared to ask tough/embaressing questions of any member of parliament is the "7:30 Report", on the ABC.
How does the show pick the guests to question?
That's probably the key question that determines whether they're really non-political...
This is not the way it has to be set up. We could have a completely independnat source of news and information that was funded not by congress but directly from tax revenue
The tax rates would be set by Congress. And could be changed at will.
Which would, sooner or later, make the "independent news source" obliged to favour the views of the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, if no-one else. And for practical purposes, it would have to favour the dominant Party at any given time, since you need votes from a majority to keep the money flowing at the level you will have become accustomed to.
Who said they didn't? The point is that even if they left at the same instant from the same point.9 seconds is much smaller than predicted by the theory in question.
No, TFA seems to say that it's slightly smaller than the theory would predict with the 0.9s difference.
But what if the photons that arrived first had left last? That might put the difference in travel time as high as 3.1s....
Okay, but how long can it maintain that acceleration for? That is the main benefit (presumably) of nuclear devices, the ability to do the same work with less restocking of fuel reserves.
The main problem with chemical rockets is the rate at which they run through the fuel reservoir. A nuclear engine of similar weight (including safety systems and layers) doesn't need to give us more Gs, just output the very comfortable 1G for a longer period.
There isn't a nuclear rocket other than Project Orion that can give us 1G.
That said, Isp for your basic NERVA is about 800 and change, as opposed to 456 for the SSME. For a basic Mars Insertion orbit, the NERVA will reduce fuel requirements by about 50%.
Assuming, of course, that the NERVA itself masses pretty much the same as the chemical rocket (it'll mass more), and that the fuel tankage will mass the same for the NERVA as the chemical rocket (it'll mass more too - LH2 requires larger tanks than LO2/LH2).
Some more...exotic...nuclear rockets have been conceived that considerably improve on that, but it's unlikely we'll bypass the basic NERVA concept in favour of a gaseous-core nuclear rocket (for example) until we get some experience with the basic NERVA.
Note that for serious deltaV, our best bets (other than Project Orion) all leave us looking at accelerations of no more than 0.001G.
Note also that if we could produce antimatter in reasonable quantities (a kilogram or so), there are some interesting things we can do in the way of rockets that have >1G boosts with very high Isp for sustained low acceleration cruises.
Do more government is better because there are other areas that the government is even bigger?
You misunderstood me. I object to characterizing NASA as a "massive government space program" when it is, in fact, by government standards a fairly tiny space program.
The question of libertarian ideals, or the lack of same, I leave to people who care to argue about such a thing.
Personally, I think it's a waste of time. Neither side is willing to consider any point made by the other side as having any validity, so it's like watching two deaf people talking past each other.
Is this a "libertarian except for a massive taxpayer-funded space program" sort of thing?
NASA massive?
Social Security is massive.
The military is massive.
Medicare is massive.
Welfare is massive.
Medicaid is massive.
The "War on Terror" is massive.
Department of Health and Human Services isn't so massive, but it's larger than NASA's budget by a factor of four.
Department of Education? bigger than NASA.
Discretionary spending? yep, bigger than NASA.
VA? You might be starting to see a pattern - yes, it's bigger than NASA.
HUD? ditto.
State Department and Foreign Aid? bigger than NASA.
Department of Homeland Security? Still bigger than NASA.
This isn't a conclusive listing of all the things in the Federal Budget that are larger than NASA. What is actually is is a list of all the things in the Federal Budget that would still be bigger than NASA if we doubled NASA's budget.
You act like there's some question as to whether or not these Treasury bonds are "real". What, do you think they're forged? What reason is there to think these bonds wouldn't be honored like any other Treasury bonds?
You also act like even the process of redeeming a "real" Treasury bond is a sham. Is everyone who buys Treasury bonds the victim of a con? Are they doing us a disservice by lending their money to the government, since the government will have to "borrow extra money" to pay them back?
Do you understand that a T-bill is a loan from someone to the government?
Do you further understand that a T-bill held by the SSA is a loan from the government to itself?
Can you actually conceive of any situation where lending yourself money results in more money to spend? If not, then why do you believe that the government can lend itself money and result in more money to be spent?
Intragovernmental T-bills are IOU's written by the government to itself. Note that if you were to start a business claiming you had $100 million in backing, which backing consisted of $100 million of IOU's written by you to yourself, you would shortly find yourself up on fraud charges.
In short, there is no "Social Security Trust Fund", and never has been one. Which in no way implies that the Feds won't keep paying Social Security. They will, in fact, continue to do so in the same way they always have.
Which, incidently, is the same technique Bernie Madoff used. Except that the Feds have the option of imprisoning you if you won't invest in their Ponzi Scheme.
Oh, and note further that I refer to them as non-interest-bearing because intragovernmental T-bills are always non-interest-bearing, in spite of what the SSA might like to claim.
What is really cool is that I am home almost 12 hours every night, and I drive well under 300 miles a day. Now, this wouldn't work for my vacation trips, but as an every day commuter this would suit me perfectly ( if I could afford it).
So, basically, you're saying that this wouldn't suit you at all?
Don't normally reply to myself, but I find it interesting that people automagically assume I'm saying rude things about the Democrats.
It is certainly true that in this particular case, the Democrats are the issue.
But...(there's always a "but")
We could change the name of the industry to one that favours the Republicans by a significant margin in campaign contributions, replace the current administration with any Republican one of the past (or hypothetical future one), and get EXACTLY THE SAME RESULT!
Neither Party spends a lot of time bringing antitrust charges against the people who hand them bucketloads of cash. Microsoft was brought up on antitrust charges back when they ignored the Washington game, then suddenly they started to contribute big money to the Parties...and the antitrust action pretty much evaporated.
In any other segment of society, it would be called "bribery" or "corruption". But we accept it as a matter of course in Congress (and in our State legislatures of course, which are, if anything, worse than the Feds).
Stop being partisan, and think about it seriously - it's bad when the other side does it, it's just as bad when your side does it.
Those "IOU's" are also known as Treasury bonds. They're just as real when held by Social Security as when held by private investors.
Actually, the phrase you are looking for is "non-interest-bearing Treasury Bills".
SO, what does that really mean? Let's look at some of the possibilities.
1) We don't increase SS taxes and the non-interest-bearing-T-bills have real and actual value. After 2018 or so, we're taking in less SS taxes than we're spending on SS. At that point, those non-interest-bearing T-bills are redeemed. The Federal government then borrows some extra money to pay for those T-bills.
2) We don't increase SS taxes and the non-interest-bearing-T-bills are just scraps of paper. After 2018 or so, we're taking in less SS taxes than we're spending on SS. The federal government then borrows extra money to pay the difference.
3) We do increase SS taxes as needed. We continue issuing non-interest-bearing-T-bills to the SSA, since SS taxes are always greater than we're spending on SS. And the T-bills continue to stack up till doomsday.
Note that in scenarios (1) and (2), our responses to not having enough revenue are the same whether the IOU's are real or not. And in scenario (3), we never find out if the IOU's are real or not.
If there's no difference between the existence or non-existence of a thing, it can safely be assumed not to exist. And if there's no way to determine whether it actually exists or not, it can be safely assumed to not exist.
Which just about covers all the options as regards those non-interest-bearing-T-bills we're piling up in a safe in the SSA offices.
Note also, in spite of what wikipedia thinks, a "trust fund" exists if a pile of money is invested in order to pay for something in perpetuity. It would be no more valid for the government to call the non-interest-bearing-T-bills in the SSA offices a Trust Fund that it would be for you to borrow money from yourself to pay this month's bills, promising yourself that you'll set aside the IOU you just wrote to be redeemable by yourself at any future date to pay your bills.
You would think that the elderly would be those best able to support themselves, considering they have an entire lifetime to prepare for the inevitable breakdowns of old age. Failing that, many of them can fall back on family members to survive. Those without family can get charity. And then only the small subset that would truly starve in the streets should be given SS.
You are now describing the way things worked pre-SS. Nowadays, since you can count on the SS, there's not so much need to set aside for a comfortable retirement.
Especially since things are now set up so that you basically lose everything to the government if you need a nursing home. Which everyone who doesn't die young will need, by and by.
Slashdot Mirror
Good rule of thumb for living a moral life - never advocate others to do things that you find too offensive to do yourself.
While it is certainly possible that that would solve the problems you imagine it would, it would introduce a host of worse problems.
Revolutions aren't bloodless. Nor is the blood spilled limited to the bad guys du jour.
Nor is the effect of a revolution limited to just fixing the problems du jour. A lot of other things will be "fixed" - some you'll like, some not.
Willing to bet your life that the result of the revolution will be better than things are now?
I'm not. Well, I'm willing to bet YOUR life, but I'm not willing to bet my own....
Except that nasty old Constitution. The Congress can back out of a Treaty, the President can't.
True enough, they do it all the time. For instance, they did it when last they extended Copyright to essentially forever.
Other than the requirement that it can only be done by Senate and House acting in convert, with the appropriate super-majorities. Note that even now, neither Party has enough votes in House or Senate to do so, even if they were so inclined. (And neither would risk it, I think, for fear of retaliation during the next turn of the wheel).
BLOCKQUOTE>Anyone could levy a charge that signing secret Treaties with foreign powers is Treason, but that is a long shot at best.
They'd be wasting their time, since Treason is defined in the Constitution, and a Secret Treaty doesn't meet the definition in and of itself.
What a bizarre notion! Incremental cost for one more copy of the software is less than $1, so profit on a copy of OSX is above 97% of sale price, and in the thousands of percent of cost.
Since the "heavier" women we're talking about are averaging 1 kg heavier, and the "shorter" ones average 2.5 cm shorter, I'd think you'd have a hard time sorting out the "shorter, heavier" ones from the "taller, lighter" ones being talked about in this study.
You've obviously not spent a lot of time looking at US Census data. Excluding immigration (and the related reproduction - immigrants don't tend to live at the standard of living of the US and Western Europe for several generations), US population has been on the decline for the last several decades.
That's 45 kg per acre per year. Not per day.
Not totally unreasonable.
Are you off on your overpopulation maunderings again?
The world isn't overpopulated. It is likely that most of the parts of the world you think are overpopulated (with the notable exceptions of China and India) have lower population densities than the parts you think are not overpopulated.
If the world were overpopulated, we've already proved out a simple, humane solution to the problem - raise everyone's standard of living to that of the USA and Western Europe. Then birthrates will fall naturally to low enough levels that population will decline.
Course, in that case, there's not yet any reason to believe that the population decline will STOP, but that's a problem for another day.
Including me. I'd do it as a labourer, if that was the only option. and I'd be on the highway toward Canaveral in 45 minutes....
You haven't read the Constitution, I gather?
Relevant points to consider:
1) Only Congress may levy taxes.
2) The Federal Budget (all expenditures of tax money) can only be written for a one year period. So a federally funded news organization would have to have their funding approved
every single year.
If you have to get your funding approved by Congress (and signed by the President) every single year, you're going to be pretty dependent on them liking you and what you do.
Note that a quasi-independent agency like the BBC cannot be created in the USA without a Constitutional Amendment. Good luck with that.
That bill you linked to qualifies as "mostly harmless" - the keywords and tricky phrases you should be paying attention to are "owner or authorized user".
Note that it's all about what people who are NOT the "owner or authorized user" are allowed to inflict upon the "owner or authorized user".
Note that since you are, presumably, the "owner or authorized user" of your personal computer, nothing in this bill would have any effect whatsoever on what you can do with your own computer.
How does the show pick the guests to question?
That's probably the key question that determines whether they're really non-political...
The tax rates would be set by Congress. And could be changed at will.
Which would, sooner or later, make the "independent news source" obliged to favour the views of the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, if no-one else. And for practical purposes, it would have to favour the dominant Party at any given time, since you need votes from a majority to keep the money flowing at the level you will have become accustomed to.
No, TFA seems to say that it's slightly smaller than the theory would predict with the 0.9s difference.
But what if the photons that arrived first had left last? That might put the difference in travel time as high as 3.1s....
No. It produces neutrons, so the material of the reactor will gradually become radioactive.
In addition, things will become more brittle, and thus more prone to crack under stress.
There isn't a nuclear rocket other than Project Orion that can give us 1G.
That said, Isp for your basic NERVA is about 800 and change, as opposed to 456 for the SSME. For a basic Mars Insertion orbit, the NERVA will reduce fuel requirements by about 50%.
Assuming, of course, that the NERVA itself masses pretty much the same as the chemical rocket (it'll mass more), and that the fuel tankage will mass the same for the NERVA as the chemical rocket (it'll mass more too - LH2 requires larger tanks than LO2/LH2).
Some more...exotic...nuclear rockets have been conceived that considerably improve on that, but it's unlikely we'll bypass the basic NERVA concept in favour of a gaseous-core nuclear rocket (for example) until we get some experience with the basic NERVA.
Note that for serious deltaV, our best bets (other than Project Orion) all leave us looking at accelerations of no more than 0.001G.
Note also that if we could produce antimatter in reasonable quantities (a kilogram or so), there are some interesting things we can do in the way of rockets that have >1G boosts with very high Isp for sustained low acceleration cruises.
Other than Project Orion, no nuclear rocket ever conceived had more thrust than an F1. And none of them could actually boost at more than 1G.
You misunderstood me. I object to characterizing NASA as a "massive government space program" when it is, in fact, by government standards a fairly tiny space program.
The question of libertarian ideals, or the lack of same, I leave to people who care to argue about such a thing.
Personally, I think it's a waste of time. Neither side is willing to consider any point made by the other side as having any validity, so it's like watching two deaf people talking past each other.
NASA massive?
Social Security is massive.
The military is massive.
Medicare is massive.
Welfare is massive.
Medicaid is massive.
The "War on Terror" is massive.
Department of Health and Human Services isn't so massive, but it's larger than NASA's budget by a factor of four.
Department of Education? bigger than NASA.
Discretionary spending? yep, bigger than NASA.
VA? You might be starting to see a pattern - yes, it's bigger than NASA.
HUD? ditto.
State Department and Foreign Aid? bigger than NASA.
Department of Homeland Security? Still bigger than NASA.
This isn't a conclusive listing of all the things in the Federal Budget that are larger than NASA. What is actually is is a list of all the things in the Federal Budget that would still be bigger than NASA if we doubled NASA's budget.
Do you understand that a T-bill is a loan from someone to the government?
Do you further understand that a T-bill held by the SSA is a loan from the government to itself?
Can you actually conceive of any situation where lending yourself money results in more money to spend? If not, then why do you believe that the government can lend itself money and result in more money to be spent?
Intragovernmental T-bills are IOU's written by the government to itself. Note that if you were to start a business claiming you had $100 million in backing, which backing consisted of $100 million of IOU's written by you to yourself, you would shortly find yourself up on fraud charges.
In short, there is no "Social Security Trust Fund", and never has been one. Which in no way implies that the Feds won't keep paying Social Security. They will, in fact, continue to do so in the same way they always have.
Which, incidently, is the same technique Bernie Madoff used. Except that the Feds have the option of imprisoning you if you won't invest in their Ponzi Scheme.
Oh, and note further that I refer to them as non-interest-bearing because intragovernmental T-bills are always non-interest-bearing, in spite of what the SSA might like to claim.
True.
But any felony that deserves probation should be downgraded to a misdemeanor.
So, basically, you're saying that this wouldn't suit you at all?
No, but it's probably fair to say that every $100,000 car ought to be general purpose.
Don't normally reply to myself, but I find it interesting that people automagically assume I'm saying rude things about the Democrats.
It is certainly true that in this particular case, the Democrats are the issue.
But...(there's always a "but")
We could change the name of the industry to one that favours the Republicans by a significant margin in campaign contributions, replace the current administration with any Republican one of the past (or hypothetical future one), and get EXACTLY THE SAME RESULT!
Neither Party spends a lot of time bringing antitrust charges against the people who hand them bucketloads of cash. Microsoft was brought up on antitrust charges back when they ignored the Washington game, then suddenly they started to contribute big money to the Parties...and the antitrust action pretty much evaporated.
In any other segment of society, it would be called "bribery" or "corruption". But we accept it as a matter of course in Congress (and in our State legislatures of course, which are, if anything, worse than the Feds).
Stop being partisan, and think about it seriously - it's bad when the other side does it, it's just as bad when your side does it.
Actually, the phrase you are looking for is "non-interest-bearing Treasury Bills".
SO, what does that really mean? Let's look at some of the possibilities.
1) We don't increase SS taxes and the non-interest-bearing-T-bills have real and actual value. After 2018 or so, we're taking in less SS taxes than we're spending on SS. At that point, those non-interest-bearing T-bills are redeemed. The Federal government then borrows some extra money to pay for those T-bills.
2) We don't increase SS taxes and the non-interest-bearing-T-bills are just scraps of paper. After 2018 or so, we're taking in less SS taxes than we're spending on SS. The federal government then borrows extra money to pay the difference.
3) We do increase SS taxes as needed. We continue issuing non-interest-bearing-T-bills to the SSA, since SS taxes are always greater than we're spending on SS. And the T-bills continue to stack up till doomsday.
Note that in scenarios (1) and (2), our responses to not having enough revenue are the same whether the IOU's are real or not. And in scenario (3), we never find out if the IOU's are real or not.
If there's no difference between the existence or non-existence of a thing, it can safely be assumed not to exist. And if there's no way to determine whether it actually exists or not, it can be safely assumed to not exist.
Which just about covers all the options as regards those non-interest-bearing-T-bills we're piling up in a safe in the SSA offices.
Note also, in spite of what wikipedia thinks, a "trust fund" exists if a pile of money is invested in order to pay for something in perpetuity. It would be no more valid for the government to call the non-interest-bearing-T-bills in the SSA offices a Trust Fund that it would be for you to borrow money from yourself to pay this month's bills, promising yourself that you'll set aside the IOU you just wrote to be redeemable by yourself at any future date to pay your bills.
You are now describing the way things worked pre-SS. Nowadays, since you can count on the SS, there's not so much need to set aside for a comfortable retirement.
Especially since things are now set up so that you basically lose everything to the government if you need a nursing home. Which everyone who doesn't die young will need, by and by.