heck I am waiting for the USA government to admit they screwed up once, then hell really will be frozen over.
Oh, please! The US government admits it screwed up regularly. Pretty much every time an new President is elected, he admits his predecessor screwed up.
Note that subsidies, at least long-term ones, are basically never the right answer. If there is a demand, the market will work it out, provided that you level the playing field. Not permitting companies to pollute inside our borders is a barrier to trade. In order to make it fair (as it is necessary, the limitation cannot simply be eliminated) it is necessary to place tariffs on imported goods which were made in a polluting fashion.
And the difference between a tariff on your competition and a subsidy for you is what, exactly?
You can't even say that the money is coming from a different place. American taxpayers pay for the subsidy, and American taxpayers pay the tariff.
Or did you really think that foreign companies hit with tariffs just wrote off the cost of the tariff as part of doing business?
Your characterization of athiests as "latching on" to this is either intentionally misleading or hopelessly clueless.
Let me put it this way. I've heard the figure mentioned more often by atheists THIS WEEK than I've heard it mentioned by Christians in my entire life.
Get a clue: most Christians don't believe it, and most of the ones who DO believe it would stop if it were more widely reported to be the work of an Anglican bishop, not something from the Bible.
And no, it's not from the Bible. Usher had to make some of the most astonishing leaps of faith to extract that date from the genealogies in the Bible. Including the most obvious one that it assumes that any age of death (or birth) given occurred on an exact number of years (i.e. Methuselah was 969 years old when he died. Was his death on his birthday, or did he live a few days (or months) longer? the Bible doesn't say, so even if you assume the genealogies are complete (they're not) and conclusive (even less so), then the hypothetical "date of Creation" is off by an average of six months per generation since the beginning.).
If this is true and the satellite reached escape velocity you have just demonstrated that Iran can drop a warhead on any city worldwide.
Escape speed ("velocity" is only relevant in that the direction vector cannot be pointed at the ground) is irrelevant to the ability to drop a warhead anywhere.
When firing a warhead at a target on Earth, one requires something less than orbital speed, which means rather less then sqrt(0.5) * (escape speed).
Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US.
Umm, no.
Aside from domestic political concerns (it's not terribly clear from the point of view of an American in 1939 that either Poland or Great Britain are worth wasting American lives on), there's the small matter of lack of military power.
It's frequently forgotten today (after 60 years of America as the premier military power in the world) that before WW2 we maintained a TINY Army, almost no Air Force (it wasn't even a large part of our tiny Army), and minimal industrial assets devoted to building military hardware.
Fact of the matter was that in 1939, the USA could have brought a decent Navy to WW2. Though not as much of one as one might think, since most of our Navy was deployed in the Pacific, and would have remained so, even if we'd joined in WW2. But it couldn't have brought much else to the effort - no Eighth Air Force (we didn't have enough planes to fill that large an organization, and none of the ones we had were modern enough to survive anyway), no Army, no LSTs (the one thing that was absolutely required to fight Germany, since we had to move enormous amounts of men and material across the oceans just to get to Germany), none of that good stuff.
Note also that we were bailing the Brits out before our entry into the War. Our own neutrality laws actually prevented us from doing some of the things we did from 1939-1941 (like selling the British airplanes, tanks, destroyers without cash on the barrelhead), but we did them anyway. We provided convoy escorts before we entered the war (illegally, of course), and we refused to sell to Germany (illegally).
Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy.
"I believe" is perhaps the most dangerous thing anyone can say. It suggests a lack of evidence, or a lack of desire to look for evidence for one's "belief".
Most of the "solar stuff" you see at the roof is not solar-power, it's "solar-thermie". To produce warm water while the sun is shining. cheers
And your point is? It reduces requirements for traditional power generation just as much as it would if it were enough solar-electric to do the same job.
The US could, I am quite sure, treble our current nuclear output. We might even be able to increase it by an order of magnitude to 1000 plants although we'd have to scrounge up some fuel that probably exists, but isn't currently in proven reserves. But every time I work the numbers, I get the same answer. US energy needs are so great that we need more like 5000 nuclear power plants just to replace oil.
Nuclear power accounts for 19% of our electricity right now.
Trebling our capacity will push it to ~60% of our electrical requirements. 1000 plants should make it 200% of our electrical capacity.
Somehow, I doubt seriously we'd need 1000% of our current electrical generation capacity to replace oil alone....
Look at our little planet. Billions of years passed by with HUGE lumbering dinosaurs roaming around. Who knows how many civilizations stopped by for a Bronto Burger or 10. But, for Billions of years, the most intelligent life on the planet either had HUGE teeth and spent it's time chasing smaller tidbits, or ate leaves peacefully and waited for the next predator. Mammals and man have been around and in some kind of dominant position for what... 100,000 years? Maybe 150k? A blip in the eye of galactic life... a blip in the eye of our planet's history with life.
One) Dinosaurs were roaming around for about 200 million years, not billions.
Two) Mammals have been around for better than 100 million years, not 100,000.
Three) Man has been a dominant position for maybe 10,000 years, not 100,000+.
Four) If you want to talk billions of years, the only life forms that need apply are single-celled organisms....
Why supposedly intelligent people still think that an Anglican Bishop actually had a clue what he was talking about when he proposed that date is beyond me.
And I'm not just talking to the Christians. The atheists who latch onto that date like it meant anything other than the maundering of an Anglican Bishop are as pathetic as the Christians who believe it.
Note, by the way, that most Christians aren't Anglican. And most Christians aren't especially fond of the Anglicans (especially in America).
The process you are seeking is making parents accountable and making sure their children actually go to school.
It would probably work better if you did NOT require children to go to school. Get the disruptive little swine out on the streets, and let the kids who want to learn do it in peace.
Also, "mandatory" equals "not fun" to almost every kid I've ever met. "Optional" has a much better chance of being perceived as desirable.
Those 85,000 are spread across different industries, diluting the impact in one particular area. Toronto receives more new immigrants per year than this (maybe 50% more), and it has a 1/60th the population or less.
I find it preposterous that a bank was unable to find qualified Sales agents within the US.
Given that a Sales agent needs to be able to read and write clearly, I'd not be surprised at all.
Last week, there was a TEACHER on/. posting something about how hard-working American teachers are, and he/she misspelled "you're" as "your". A teacher...
If even teachers can't spell as well as an average eight year old of 40 years ago, then it's very possible that finding qualified sales agents is a problem.
While most might not remember this, since it happened four months ago, those big banks that got the $150 billion bailout were ORDERED by the Treasury Secretary to take a bailout. Most of them didn't even want it. I recall reading in the paper at the time that the Secretary had to basically lock them into a meeting and tell them they weren't leaving till they'd accepted a bailout. Apparently, someone was afraid that bankers who really needed a bailout would be afraid to admit it if everyone wasn't getting a bailout.
Note also that this H1B thing isn't something that's happened recently. It happened over the last 6+ years, BEFORE the banks were bailed out (at the next best thing to gunpoint).
It doesn't "shorten" the trip for the passengers. Time is what passes slower. So the trip may take 50 years from the point of view of observers, and the passengers only perceive a 5 year trip. So the passengers age five years while the observers age 50. Meaning that while the passengers could do a round trip in 10 years, everyone they know would likely be dead, or really old, by the time they got back.
This is an accurate description of what it does.
Of course, in English, "shorten a trip" generally means either that the trip is physically shorter (we take the famous "short cut"), or it takes less time.
It's a peculiarity of relativity that BOTH those definitions apply to the passengers of a vehicle moving at a significant fraction of lightspeed (or any speed, really, but not enough to get excited about at interplanetary speeds) - the trip takes less time for the passengers than the observers at home, and the trip is shorter in distance covered to the passengers than to the observers at home. Thus, the trip is "shortened".
We've evolved to survive in the PRESESNT ecosystem.
Are you sure we didn't evolve to survive in the ecosystem that existed, oh, 30,000 years ago? That wasn't too different than now, other than the mile thick glaciers over Europe and North America.
Or how about the one that existed 300,000 years ago? That wasn't too unlike the current one. Except for the glaciers, of course.
Or even the one that existed 3,000,000 years ago? That was, well, a hothouse. Pretty much like we expect to see by the end of the century....
First, as an object approaches C the time dilation effect becomes such that from a frame of reference of the origin, the object never in fact can reach its destination. Would it not become in essence stuck in time? Secondly there must be some point at which if an object is travelling at x*C, there must be a speed y*C such that another object could reach its destination before the first object, even though the second object is travelling at a lower velocity relative to C. Or maybe not since both objects do experience time dilation.
Please read up on Relativity sometime. There are a number of decent resources on the subject.
As is, you've just lowered the IQ of everyone who read this post....
Specifically...
The time dilation effect on an object is irrelevant to an observer at its point or origin. It WILL reach its destination, unless it's aimed wrong, or hits something really hard.
No, there is no such speed as you propose in your second conjecture.
Time dilation is a wonderful thing. It helps to shorten trips from the point of view of the traveller. But it doesn't change the trip at all from the point of view of an observer back at the start point.
Unless, of course, you're carrying one end of a wormhole with you on the voyage. Still doesn't change the voyage from the point of view of the observer back home, but can have some interesting effects later (if, that is, you consider time travel interesting, of course).
Who really cares that it's lower bandwidth, since we watch cable anyway? Even if we watched over the air TV, how does the station using less bandwidth help the viewer?
1) Lower bandwidth means better quality and/or more content per 6 MHz tv channel. Some stations can now carry more than one network. P.B.S. stations can do things like have kids programs, regular adult informative shows, foreign language programming, and some reruns all going at once.
The average viewer doesn't get any meaningful benefit from this. Most of them have their own list of shows they watch, and adding more channels full of shows they're not interested in is meaningless.
2) Giving up some of the spectrum (channels 52-69) makes 102 MHz available for other uses.
a) more frequencies for emergency services etc (claimed needed after 9/11)
b) other commercial/public use. Spectrum was auctioned off. Plenty of lobbying there I'm sure.
Will it bring us some wonderful fast (cheap? free???) wireless services? Time will tell.
Wonderful news, indeed. Of course, the average viewer (you DID notice I was talking about the viewers, NOT the government, right?) doesn't really care about more frequencies for emergency services (claimed needed, but not proved), or which lobbyist will make out like a bandit.
Your arguments are cogent, thoughtful, and utterly irrelevant to the question of "benefit for the average viewer".
It has no obligation to compensate anyone for hardware that has become obsolete or useless due to new laws and regulations.
Actually, it generally is so obligated in the USA. Which is why most such laws have "grandfather clauses" which allow the use of the old hardware, even if it no longer meets the requirements of the law.
In this case, however, the old hardware becomes immediately useless, since the government has required TV stations to no longer broadcast analog signals. So it's the government's problem to deal with it.
Honestly, I can't understand how you guys in the promised land of TV can be so far behind in this matter. What the hell is taking you so long?
Mostly, it's because digital doesn't really do much for the average consumer.
Who really cares that it's lower bandwidth, since we watch cable anyway? Even if we watched over the air TV, how does the station using less bandwidth help the viewer?
Yah, it doesn't do snow, but it has its own annoying responses to partial loss of signal.
So, basically, it's something that the vast American public really doesn't give a rat's hind leg about. Which is why it's easy for a politician to make hay out of delaying the issue, or forcing the issue, whichever is fashionable in any given week.
Obviously he can't stay in the water for 50+ days. Seems like there were a lot of very bad engineering decisions made on this thing. In addition, I can't believe he'd suggest going under water only a meter or two in the ocean. Does he now how large the waves get, and what will happen if he hits any type of real weather out there?
What I'm curious about is how he's going to keep his skin from dissolving after being in salt water for almost two months.
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Oh, please! The US government admits it screwed up regularly. Pretty much every time an new President is elected, he admits his predecessor screwed up.
And the difference between a tariff on your competition and a subsidy for you is what, exactly?
You can't even say that the money is coming from a different place. American taxpayers pay for the subsidy, and American taxpayers pay the tariff.
Or did you really think that foreign companies hit with tariffs just wrote off the cost of the tariff as part of doing business?
You're not the only one.
Let me put it this way. I've heard the figure mentioned more often by atheists THIS WEEK than I've heard it mentioned by Christians in my entire life.
Get a clue: most Christians don't believe it, and most of the ones who DO believe it would stop if it were more widely reported to be the work of an Anglican bishop, not something from the Bible.
And no, it's not from the Bible. Usher had to make some of the most astonishing leaps of faith to extract that date from the genealogies in the Bible. Including the most obvious one that it assumes that any age of death (or birth) given occurred on an exact number of years (i.e. Methuselah was 969 years old when he died. Was his death on his birthday, or did he live a few days (or months) longer? the Bible doesn't say, so even if you assume the genealogies are complete (they're not) and conclusive (even less so), then the hypothetical "date of Creation" is off by an average of six months per generation since the beginning.).
Escape speed ("velocity" is only relevant in that the direction vector cannot be pointed at the ground) is irrelevant to the ability to drop a warhead anywhere.
When firing a warhead at a target on Earth, one requires something less than orbital speed, which means rather less then sqrt(0.5) * (escape speed).
Umm, no.
Aside from domestic political concerns (it's not terribly clear from the point of view of an American in 1939 that either Poland or Great Britain are worth wasting American lives on), there's the small matter of lack of military power.
It's frequently forgotten today (after 60 years of America as the premier military power in the world) that before WW2 we maintained a TINY Army, almost no Air Force (it wasn't even a large part of our tiny Army), and minimal industrial assets devoted to building military hardware.
Fact of the matter was that in 1939, the USA could have brought a decent Navy to WW2. Though not as much of one as one might think, since most of our Navy was deployed in the Pacific, and would have remained so, even if we'd joined in WW2. But it couldn't have brought much else to the effort - no Eighth Air Force (we didn't have enough planes to fill that large an organization, and none of the ones we had were modern enough to survive anyway), no Army, no LSTs (the one thing that was absolutely required to fight Germany, since we had to move enormous amounts of men and material across the oceans just to get to Germany), none of that good stuff.
Note also that we were bailing the Brits out before our entry into the War. Our own neutrality laws actually prevented us from doing some of the things we did from 1939-1941 (like selling the British airplanes, tanks, destroyers without cash on the barrelhead), but we did them anyway. We provided convoy escorts before we entered the war (illegally, of course), and we refused to sell to Germany (illegally).
"I believe" is perhaps the most dangerous thing anyone can say. It suggests a lack of evidence, or a lack of desire to look for evidence for one's "belief".
And your point is? It reduces requirements for traditional power generation just as much as it would if it were enough solar-electric to do the same job.
Nuclear power accounts for 19% of our electricity right now.
Trebling our capacity will push it to ~60% of our electrical requirements. 1000 plants should make it 200% of our electrical capacity.
Somehow, I doubt seriously we'd need 1000% of our current electrical generation capacity to replace oil alone....
Which ones were those? And please spare me the "noble savages" crap. There weren't any in out past, and there won't be any in our future.
One) Dinosaurs were roaming around for about 200 million years, not billions.
Two) Mammals have been around for better than 100 million years, not 100,000.
Three) Man has been a dominant position for maybe 10,000 years, not 100,000+.
Four) If you want to talk billions of years, the only life forms that need apply are single-celled organisms....
Why supposedly intelligent people still think that an Anglican Bishop actually had a clue what he was talking about when he proposed that date is beyond me.
And I'm not just talking to the Christians. The atheists who latch onto that date like it meant anything other than the maundering of an Anglican Bishop are as pathetic as the Christians who believe it.
Note, by the way, that most Christians aren't Anglican. And most Christians aren't especially fond of the Anglicans (especially in America).
It would probably work better if you did NOT require children to go to school. Get the disruptive little swine out on the streets, and let the kids who want to learn do it in peace.
Also, "mandatory" equals "not fun" to almost every kid I've ever met. "Optional" has a much better chance of being perceived as desirable.
I stand corrected.
Well, somewhat corrected, anyway. Numbers I found showed about 60,000 per year average over the last 20-odd years. Or about half what the OP asserted.
Still, I find myself surprised that Toronto has anywhere near that many immigrants.
Toronto gets 130,000 new immigrant per year??
I think not.
Given that a Sales agent needs to be able to read and write clearly, I'd not be surprised at all.
Last week, there was a TEACHER on /. posting something about how hard-working American teachers are, and he/she misspelled "you're" as "your". A teacher...
If even teachers can't spell as well as an average eight year old of 40 years ago, then it's very possible that finding qualified sales agents is a problem.
Umm, no.
While most might not remember this, since it happened four months ago, those big banks that got the $150 billion bailout were ORDERED by the Treasury Secretary to take a bailout. Most of them didn't even want it. I recall reading in the paper at the time that the Secretary had to basically lock them into a meeting and tell them they weren't leaving till they'd accepted a bailout. Apparently, someone was afraid that bankers who really needed a bailout would be afraid to admit it if everyone wasn't getting a bailout.
Note also that this H1B thing isn't something that's happened recently. It happened over the last 6+ years, BEFORE the banks were bailed out (at the next best thing to gunpoint).
Good point. I propose, therefore, a single solution to all our economic problems. We should raise the Minimum Wage to $500 per hour.
That'll fix things, right?
This is an accurate description of what it does.
Of course, in English, "shorten a trip" generally means either that the trip is physically shorter (we take the famous "short cut"), or it takes less time.
It's a peculiarity of relativity that BOTH those definitions apply to the passengers of a vehicle moving at a significant fraction of lightspeed (or any speed, really, but not enough to get excited about at interplanetary speeds) - the trip takes less time for the passengers than the observers at home, and the trip is shorter in distance covered to the passengers than to the observers at home. Thus, the trip is "shortened".
Are you sure we didn't evolve to survive in the ecosystem that existed, oh, 30,000 years ago? That wasn't too different than now, other than the mile thick glaciers over Europe and North America.
Or how about the one that existed 300,000 years ago? That wasn't too unlike the current one. Except for the glaciers, of course.
Or even the one that existed 3,000,000 years ago? That was, well, a hothouse. Pretty much like we expect to see by the end of the century....
Please read up on Relativity sometime. There are a number of decent resources on the subject.
As is, you've just lowered the IQ of everyone who read this post....
Specifically...
The time dilation effect on an object is irrelevant to an observer at its point or origin. It WILL reach its destination, unless it's aimed wrong, or hits something really hard.
No, there is no such speed as you propose in your second conjecture.
Time dilation is a wonderful thing. It helps to shorten trips from the point of view of the traveller. But it doesn't change the trip at all from the point of view of an observer back at the start point.
Unless, of course, you're carrying one end of a wormhole with you on the voyage. Still doesn't change the voyage from the point of view of the observer back home, but can have some interesting effects later (if, that is, you consider time travel interesting, of course).
The average viewer doesn't get any meaningful benefit from this. Most of them have their own list of shows they watch, and adding more channels full of shows they're not interested in is meaningless.
Wonderful news, indeed. Of course, the average viewer (you DID notice I was talking about the viewers, NOT the government, right?) doesn't really care about more frequencies for emergency services (claimed needed, but not proved), or which lobbyist will make out like a bandit.
Your arguments are cogent, thoughtful, and utterly irrelevant to the question of "benefit for the average viewer".
Actually, it generally is so obligated in the USA. Which is why most such laws have "grandfather clauses" which allow the use of the old hardware, even if it no longer meets the requirements of the law.
In this case, however, the old hardware becomes immediately useless, since the government has required TV stations to no longer broadcast analog signals. So it's the government's problem to deal with it.
Mostly, it's because digital doesn't really do much for the average consumer.
Who really cares that it's lower bandwidth, since we watch cable anyway? Even if we watched over the air TV, how does the station using less bandwidth help the viewer?
Yah, it doesn't do snow, but it has its own annoying responses to partial loss of signal.
So, basically, it's something that the vast American public really doesn't give a rat's hind leg about. Which is why it's easy for a politician to make hay out of delaying the issue, or forcing the issue, whichever is fashionable in any given week.
While I agree that most of our States are odd, it's not quite fair to call them all odd.
What I'm curious about is how he's going to keep his skin from dissolving after being in salt water for almost two months.