My question is, if it can be produced that cheaply, can we then further the process with a tax on the final product,
HINT: the more you tax it, the less people will use it. Which is why there are tax-subsidies on alternate energy source - because without the negative taxes, people wouldn't use the stuff.
or heck, maybe they're telepathic or don't have ears (or have primitive hearing) so radio is pointless.
You DO realize that there's nothing about "radio" that implies sound, right? That "radio" waves are electromagnetic in nature, and that we use machines (colloquially called "radios") to convert the EM signal into something that can be heard. Or seen, since "TV" is really just "radio" with both sound and images encoded in the EM.
For that matter, what we call "wifi" is also "radio", and carries information in digital formats understandable by our computers, but not by us either audibly or visibly?
In other words, radio is a useful means of transmitting information, not just a long ranged sound generator....
>>>"Also sounds pointless, since the President isn't bound by Congressional Resolutions."
You know that saying about "assuming" things? Yeah, well you're guilty of it. (wink). John Quincy Adams was a Congressman at the time (not president), and therefore forbidden from introducing legislation to curb or lesson slavery. The Southern "slave power" had effectively taken control of Congress and forbidden free speech.
You nailed me good! Yah, I'd assumed that JQ's Presidency was the time period in question, since noone ever talks about his time in Congress. My bad.
>>>"They had Free Speech too, and could use it to shout down people they disagree with"
Disagree. In a civil society, you show people the same courtesy you expect to receive. i.e. You shut your mouth and listen, just as they patiently listened to your ideas one hour earlier. To allow yourself freedom to speak, while denying others, is dishonorable.
Two things:
1) This is Congress you're talking about, NOT "a civil society". A Congressman beat another one to death with his walking stick on the Floor. Another was killed by a (are you ready for this?) thrown chair, when one of his congressional rivals got carried away.
2) I've never actually heard anyone suggest that "honourable" and "Congressman" belong in the same sentence. With the exception, of course, of Congressmen. Who seem to think that we actually believe their excuses for behaving like slime-lizards....
They even passed a resolution in the U.S. Congress forbidding the introduction of anti-slavery laws, much to the chagrin of John Quincy Adams who insisted he has a right to free speech. Mr. Adams kept trying to introduce new laws, but the Southern Congressmen would shout him down, and accuse him of violating Congressional rules.
Sounds like politics to me.
Also sounds pointless, since the President isn't bound by Congressional Resolutions. For that matter, if the Congress had made it against the law to introduce anti-slavery laws, it'd still be meaningless, since a later law automagically supersedes an earlier law (which is why balanced budget laws are meaningless - the budget is a law also, and supersedes the balanced budget law).
And the Southern Congressmen had every right to shout JQ Adams down. They had Free Speech too, and could use it to shout down people they disagree with, just like anyone else.\
Adams might have been better served by vetoing any legislation that hit his desk that would do anything helpful for the South. At least until the Southern Congressmen took the hint (which might have been never - they were a stubborn lot back then).
Mind you, I'm pretty indifferent to the Tibet issue, but...
To help the Tibetan people, then you work with China to improve China (which includes Tibet). Insurgencies, freedom fighters, riots, protests, arming Tibetans to fight for democracy, or sending in troops from other countries to free them.. is all that really the best thing ?
To help the Polish people, then you work with Germany to improve Germany (which includes Poland). Insurgencies, freedom fighters, riots, protests, arming Poles to fight for democracy, or sending in troops from other countries to free them.. is all that really the best thing ?
The other thing to remember is, even with your calculation at 415 mT, it's 415mT in ONE PLACE - you're not going to want to be ANYWHERE near that. If it hits an ocean, it will vapourise a massive amount of water and create a truly stunning tsunami.
415 MT is around 1.5E18 joules. At a couple thousand joules per gram of water vaporized, that translates to less than one cubic Km of water vaporized. Yah, that's a lot, especially in one place. But it's not in the same league as a Dinosaur Killer or anything. Embarrassing, but not a serious issue, really. Unless it lands in the Gulf of Mexico, in which case New Orleans and Houston are (soggy) toast.
Course, if may come down on Washington, in which case the Hot Air emitted by Congress will deflect it back into space.
it's still an interesting jurisdictional question.
It is that. If I were the Korean captain (or shipowner), I'd think twice before I docked at any of the places that MIGHT have a legal claim relating to the breaks. I doubt the Iraqi captain (or shipowner) has that option, since he's registered in one such country.
seeing as you can just about pick out people on Google earth I wouldn't imagine it was too much of a challenge being able to see big god damn ships.
I haven't looked recently, but last time I looked at N'Awlins with Google Earth, you could see the ships along the industrial canal quite clearly. They are, after all, considerably large than your average house.
I would think (and with no actual knowledge of maritime law nor particular interest in obtaining it at the moment), that it would take a court of some jurisdiction to handle this before handing over the cash. Curiouser and Curiouser.
A ship isn't a high margin operation. It usually, if you'll pardon the pun, barely makes enough to stay afloat. Hiring lawyers to defend against lawsuits in several countries is WAAAAAAY more expensive that 60K. Or 350K.
Sometimes (actually, almost all the time), it's cheaper to pay the legal blackmail than to contest it and win.
And it doesn't matter much whether you did it or not, when making the calculations - getting off when you're guilty is more expensive than paying the fines, proving you're innocent when you're innocent is more expensive than paying the fines.
And in this case, NOT KNOWING whether you're innocent or guilty (I'm betting neither captain/owner actually knows whether he broke the cable or not, just that he was in the area, and dropped anchor at about the right time) makes paying the fine way cheaper than defending against the lawsuit.
It is, eh? So, is serving bacon and eggs for breakfast torture? Or not? It arguably is, if you're a Muslim or Jew, but isn't if you're a Christian.
And does its "torture" status change depending on how you cook the eggs? Eggs fried in bacon grease - yummy! Unless you're a Muslim or Jew. And not knowing - what does that do to the torture status of breakfast?
Unless you're a Vegan, of course, in which case it might always be torture.
Is serving "mystery meat" torture? Again, for some people, knowing what they're eating is essential, to others it's not so important.
In other words, while there are some things that are probably clearly torture, there are a LOT of things that MAY be torture. Or not. Depending....
If they were doing their job right they'd only need to tax income only tax sales.
No. The hodge-podge of taxes serves more than a single purpose.
Imprimus - many of the taxes exist only at certain levels of government. Sales tax is not a Federal Tax, for instance.
Secundus - the more different taxes you pay, the less obvious the TOTAL amount of taxes you pay is. Very easy to look at one income (or sales) tax rate, and decide that that's too high. Much harder, when you have 37 different taxes, each of which is below your pain threshold, but collectively, they're higher than the single tax could ever be without a tax revolt.
It is precisely because rich people are utilizing loopholes to avoid taxation like purchasing land and such which gives tax breaks and/or functions as an efficient tax shelter, swiss bank accounts, investments, etc.
It has little, if anything to do with the "rich" and tax shelters. It has a lot to do with keeping the middle class blind to the total level of taxation they pay. Hint: if you divide your income by GNP, the taxes you pay are about that percentage of the total city/state/federal taxes.
Note that with the current 3 trillion dollar budget, each person's share of the federal budget is $10000 per year. So $30,000 just for my family of three...
I did not know the pilgrims ordered their canned cranberries from catalogs from outside of their "states".
George Washington used to order a great many things from Great Britain, before there was a United States. He'd provide a list to his broker every year, and the broker would see that the stuff was on the next ship heading toward Virginia.
Pretty common among the colonial "aristocracy" (note that the British Aristocracy didn't consider Colonials to be Aristocrats.) actually - pretty much every plantation owner did it as a matter of course.
You learn something new everyday I guess.
I do. Hopefully you do. But I'm not betting much on the prospect.
You mean the guy who got tried for calling his friend the Pope a simpleton?
The one who believed that comets were optical illusions?
The one who, after being found guilty, was sentenced to go home and stay there?
Note that while the trial was nominally about Copernican Theories of astronomy, it was actually about being rude to the Pope.
Note further that Galileo's work on Copernican Astronomy was written in ITALIAN (which, in that day, was roughly equivalent to writing a paper on Quantum Mechanics in Ebonics), not LATIN (the language of Science in the day).
And note finally that Copernicus was a Catholic Priest....
Giordano Bruno....
Wasn't convicted of Copernicanism, actually. But of believing in Aliens. And if he was anything like the guys who believe in ETs today, they should have burned him longer. Face it, this guy was the Very First Wearer of the Tinfoil Hat in History....
Note also that he was a Catholic Priest also. A loony one, but a Priest, nonetheless.
That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.
So, how many nuclear reactors in this country have been sabotaged or the object of terrorist attacks? Zero? There is little basis for the assumption that they are especially vulnerable (I'd worry more about being in the local Mall when someone with a dynamite vest decided to REALLY terrorize us).
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
Yah, too bad the only "anomalies" that nuclear power suffered under were Chernobyl (not a stupid design, but the test being run there that caused the problem was definitely an idiotic test) and TMI (where, basically, noone was injured, or even exposed to enough radioactivity to be harmed - I could wish the four traffic accidents I've seen so far this AM had produced so few injuries).
Fact is, nuclear power is still safe as houses (safer, if New Orleans is any guideline - did you know that there are two reactors within the area of effect of Katrina? Nothing happened to them, they didn't even bother shutting down).
I concede the point, if your "local paper" is the New York Times. My local paper is the Times-Picayune (dumb name, not sure why they still care about Picayune), and the only thing I know about the Obit columnist is that he (or she) has a name.
The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse - the fissionables have zero chance of exploding.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
and can use his established reputation to help reduce the threat they pose,
Which "established reputation" is that? Fact is, 99.9% of America has never heard of him, and will never hear of him without wondering "who the hell is this guy?".
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
As long as carrying an RFID tag is 100% opt-in and semi-passive or active RFID tags are used so that the user could switch it off at any time if privacy is desired. This would be a good way to make RFID tracking analogous to social networking(as stated in the summary) -- that is, I can choose not to "install" the "software". If I choose to "install" the "software", then I should also be able to set it to "privacy" or "stealth" mode so that nobody could track or bother me while I'm coding.
A corollary of this should be that you cannot track other people unless your own tracking tag is enabled. Being able to spy on others (even with their tacit consent) should be forbidden if you, yourself, are refusing to allow others to monitor you.
The interpretations are what the physical evidence points to, it was almost certainly a religious structure after all.
Not that I disagree with you...
But this statement reminds me of things said when we first started investigating ancient writing - that writing was used almost exclusively for religious purposes.
Or so we thought until we started translating the stuff - then we found it was mostly tax records....
No US soldier ever died of hostile fire during the Germany or Japan occupations.
This is true. Note, however, that in 1945 this was not the expected result. The Army fully expected that Germans and Japanese would be killing American soldiers for years to come.
And we occupied them anyway. And based on what my father has said on the subject, the only reason we're having problems that way in Iraq is that the Rules of Engagement we're operating under give every advantage to the enemy.
That got a lot of news coverage, but didn't really happen. Any more than the rapes in the Superdome happened.
I was in Slidell (just across the Lake from N'Awlins) for Katrina. Eye went right over the house, in fact. Morning after Katrina, I talked to one of the guys responsible for dealing with this sort of thing in St. Tammany (he lived down the street, and came home to check out his house after the storm). Based on what he said, I packed up and headed north.
I encountered my first National Guardsmen dealing with the storm damage about an hour later.
Given that Katrina was pointed at Florida three days before it hit (I was in Florida the Thursday before Katrina hit New Orleans, and people were preparing for the storm then), it's hard to justify the statement that the response was laggard, when the responders were moving as soon as the storm got out of the way.
And that's ignoring the fact that the responders had to cut away 75 miles of pine trees fallen across the Interstate (and more on back roads) just to get to New Orleans....
Alas, while felons generally lose the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, they don't generally lose the Right to Vote. And even the ones who do lose the Right to Vote can get that Right reinstated by behaving for a reasonable period.
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HINT: the more you tax it, the less people will use it. Which is why there are tax-subsidies on alternate energy source - because without the negative taxes, people wouldn't use the stuff.
You DO realize that there's nothing about "radio" that implies sound, right? That "radio" waves are electromagnetic in nature, and that we use machines (colloquially called "radios") to convert the EM signal into something that can be heard. Or seen, since "TV" is really just "radio" with both sound and images encoded in the EM.
For that matter, what we call "wifi" is also "radio", and carries information in digital formats understandable by our computers, but not by us either audibly or visibly?
In other words, radio is a useful means of transmitting information, not just a long ranged sound generator....
"Orphans of the Sky", by RAH. Comprising "Universe" and "Commonsense".
You nailed me good! Yah, I'd assumed that JQ's Presidency was the time period in question, since noone ever talks about his time in Congress. My bad.
Two things:
1) This is Congress you're talking about, NOT "a civil society". A Congressman beat another one to death with his walking stick on the Floor. Another was killed by a (are you ready for this?) thrown chair, when one of his congressional rivals got carried away.
2) I've never actually heard anyone suggest that "honourable" and "Congressman" belong in the same sentence. With the exception, of course, of Congressmen. Who seem to think that we actually believe their excuses for behaving like slime-lizards....
Didn't a town in France do that recently?
Seems they couldn't get a permit to expand their local cemetery (which was full), so they banned dying within town limits.
Sounds like politics to me.
Also sounds pointless, since the President isn't bound by Congressional Resolutions. For that matter, if the Congress had made it against the law to introduce anti-slavery laws, it'd still be meaningless, since a later law automagically supersedes an earlier law (which is why balanced budget laws are meaningless - the budget is a law also, and supersedes the balanced budget law).
And the Southern Congressmen had every right to shout JQ Adams down. They had Free Speech too, and could use it to shout down people they disagree with, just like anyone else.\
Adams might have been better served by vetoing any legislation that hit his desk that would do anything helpful for the South. At least until the Southern Congressmen took the hint (which might have been never - they were a stubborn lot back then).
To help the Polish people, then you work with Germany to improve Germany (which includes Poland). Insurgencies, freedom fighters, riots, protests, arming Poles to fight for democracy, or sending in troops from other countries to free them.. is all that really the best thing ?
Sound familiar?
What kind of idiot actually thinks there is some sort of "sanctity" to tech, or anything tech-related?
415 MT is around 1.5E18 joules. At a couple thousand joules per gram of water vaporized, that translates to less than one cubic Km of water vaporized. Yah, that's a lot, especially in one place. But it's not in the same league as a Dinosaur Killer or anything. Embarrassing, but not a serious issue, really. Unless it lands in the Gulf of Mexico, in which case New Orleans and Houston are (soggy) toast.
Course, if may come down on Washington, in which case the Hot Air emitted by Congress will deflect it back into space.
It is that. If I were the Korean captain (or shipowner), I'd think twice before I docked at any of the places that MIGHT have a legal claim relating to the breaks. I doubt the Iraqi captain (or shipowner) has that option, since he's registered in one such country.
I haven't looked recently, but last time I looked at N'Awlins with Google Earth, you could see the ships along the industrial canal quite clearly. They are, after all, considerably large than your average house.
A ship isn't a high margin operation. It usually, if you'll pardon the pun, barely makes enough to stay afloat. Hiring lawyers to defend against lawsuits in several countries is WAAAAAAY more expensive that 60K. Or 350K.
Sometimes (actually, almost all the time), it's cheaper to pay the legal blackmail than to contest it and win.
And it doesn't matter much whether you did it or not, when making the calculations - getting off when you're guilty is more expensive than paying the fines, proving you're innocent when you're innocent is more expensive than paying the fines.
And in this case, NOT KNOWING whether you're innocent or guilty (I'm betting neither captain/owner actually knows whether he broke the cable or not, just that he was in the area, and dropped anchor at about the right time) makes paying the fine way cheaper than defending against the lawsuit.
It is, eh? So, is serving bacon and eggs for breakfast torture? Or not? It arguably is, if you're a Muslim or Jew, but isn't if you're a Christian.
And does its "torture" status change depending on how you cook the eggs? Eggs fried in bacon grease - yummy! Unless you're a Muslim or Jew. And not knowing - what does that do to the torture status of breakfast?
Unless you're a Vegan, of course, in which case it might always be torture.
Is serving "mystery meat" torture? Again, for some people, knowing what they're eating is essential, to others it's not so important.
In other words, while there are some things that are probably clearly torture, there are a LOT of things that MAY be torture. Or not. Depending....
No. The hodge-podge of taxes serves more than a single purpose.
Imprimus - many of the taxes exist only at certain levels of government. Sales tax is not a Federal Tax, for instance.
Secundus - the more different taxes you pay, the less obvious the TOTAL amount of taxes you pay is. Very easy to look at one income (or sales) tax rate, and decide that that's too high. Much harder, when you have 37 different taxes, each of which is below your pain threshold, but collectively, they're higher than the single tax could ever be without a tax revolt.
It has little, if anything to do with the "rich" and tax shelters. It has a lot to do with keeping the middle class blind to the total level of taxation they pay. Hint: if you divide your income by GNP, the taxes you pay are about that percentage of the total city/state/federal taxes.
Note that with the current 3 trillion dollar budget, each person's share of the federal budget is $10000 per year. So $30,000 just for my family of three...
George Washington used to order a great many things from Great Britain, before there was a United States. He'd provide a list to his broker every year, and the broker would see that the stuff was on the next ship heading toward Virginia.
Pretty common among the colonial "aristocracy" (note that the British Aristocracy didn't consider Colonials to be Aristocrats.) actually - pretty much every plantation owner did it as a matter of course.
I do. Hopefully you do. But I'm not betting much on the prospect.
You mean the guy who got tried for calling his friend the Pope a simpleton?
The one who believed that comets were optical illusions?
The one who, after being found guilty, was sentenced to go home and stay there?
Note that while the trial was nominally about Copernican Theories of astronomy, it was actually about being rude to the Pope.
Note further that Galileo's work on Copernican Astronomy was written in ITALIAN (which, in that day, was roughly equivalent to writing a paper on Quantum Mechanics in Ebonics), not LATIN (the language of Science in the day).
And note finally that Copernicus was a Catholic Priest....
Giordano Bruno....
Wasn't convicted of Copernicanism, actually. But of believing in Aliens. And if he was anything like the guys who believe in ETs today, they should have burned him longer. Face it, this guy was the Very First Wearer of the Tinfoil Hat in History....
Note also that he was a Catholic Priest also. A loony one, but a Priest, nonetheless.
So, how many nuclear reactors in this country have been sabotaged or the object of terrorist attacks? Zero? There is little basis for the assumption that they are especially vulnerable (I'd worry more about being in the local Mall when someone with a dynamite vest decided to REALLY terrorize us).
Yah, too bad the only "anomalies" that nuclear power suffered under were Chernobyl (not a stupid design, but the test being run there that caused the problem was definitely an idiotic test) and TMI (where, basically, noone was injured, or even exposed to enough radioactivity to be harmed - I could wish the four traffic accidents I've seen so far this AM had produced so few injuries).
Fact is, nuclear power is still safe as houses (safer, if New Orleans is any guideline - did you know that there are two reactors within the area of effect of Katrina? Nothing happened to them, they didn't even bother shutting down).
I concede the point, if your "local paper" is the New York Times. My local paper is the Times-Picayune (dumb name, not sure why they still care about Picayune), and the only thing I know about the Obit columnist is that he (or she) has a name.
The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse - the fissionables have zero chance of exploding.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
Which "established reputation" is that? Fact is, 99.9% of America has never heard of him, and will never hear of him without wondering "who the hell is this guy?".
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
A corollary of this should be that you cannot track other people unless your own tracking tag is enabled. Being able to spy on others (even with their tacit consent) should be forbidden if you, yourself, are refusing to allow others to monitor you.
Not that I disagree with you...
But this statement reminds me of things said when we first started investigating ancient writing - that writing was used almost exclusively for religious purposes.
Or so we thought until we started translating the stuff - then we found it was mostly tax records....
This is true. Note, however, that in 1945 this was not the expected result. The Army fully expected that Germans and Japanese would be killing American soldiers for years to come.
And we occupied them anyway. And based on what my father has said on the subject, the only reason we're having problems that way in Iraq is that the Rules of Engagement we're operating under give every advantage to the enemy.
That got a lot of news coverage, but didn't really happen. Any more than the rapes in the Superdome happened.
I was in Slidell (just across the Lake from N'Awlins) for Katrina. Eye went right over the house, in fact. Morning after Katrina, I talked to one of the guys responsible for dealing with this sort of thing in St. Tammany (he lived down the street, and came home to check out his house after the storm). Based on what he said, I packed up and headed north.
I encountered my first National Guardsmen dealing with the storm damage about an hour later.
Given that Katrina was pointed at Florida three days before it hit (I was in Florida the Thursday before Katrina hit New Orleans, and people were preparing for the storm then), it's hard to justify the statement that the response was laggard, when the responders were moving as soon as the storm got out of the way.
And that's ignoring the fact that the responders had to cut away 75 miles of pine trees fallen across the Interstate (and more on back roads) just to get to New Orleans....
Alas, while felons generally lose the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, they don't generally lose the Right to Vote. And even the ones who do lose the Right to Vote can get that Right reinstated by behaving for a reasonable period.