Though I haven't been motivated to actually add everything up, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the US spend close to 50% of it's GDP on war. Why do you think health care, social security, and public education is so embarrassingly gutted in the US?
Let's try this part. The government's budget for 2005 amounted to 16.6% of GDP. Add another 3.3% of GDP for off-budget items (both these figures from the appropriate documents found at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy06/hist.html). 19.9% of GDP. Which includes Health Care, Social Security, and Public Education.
In order to have ~50% of GDP be spent on war, we'd need to be spending 2.5 times as much as the admitted on/off budget items. Which amounts to ~5 trillion dollars per year. Or $25 trillion over the last five years. Oddly enough, our public debt (not deficit! that's a different thing entirely) is ~$8.7 trillion as of the beginning of the year. Do you have some evidence other than your idle speculations as to the nature of reality to support the opinion that the US Federal debt is really ~$30 trillion rather than the $8.7 trillion that is admitted to. Which latter is based on things like total value of T-Bills outstanding....
I should also note that we didn't spend 50% of our GDP on World War 2, the last war we were really serious about fighting.
As to the "embarrassingly gutted" Health Care, Social Security, and Public Education. I take it you are unaware that these items have NEVER had their budgets reduced. Not once. Not even under Bush (senior or junior).
Our public Health Care budget was increased rather dramatically under Bush for Medicare Part D.
Our Public Education budgets (yes, budgets - public education is mostly dealt with at local and State levels, with minor input at the Federal level, so there are thousands of public education budgets in the USA) are the highest in the world, on a per student basis ($7552 per student, plus more for "special education" students). With a growth rate over twice as high as inflation - 6% per year.
Social Security didn't get any major new largess under Bush (or at all under any President since they started adjusting Social Security for Cost of Living back in the seventies). But it didn't suffer, either. It wasn't reduced, either on a per person basis or as a lump sum. It didn't grow at rates less than inflation - rather more, in fact.
So, just where did you get the idea that these items had been "embarrassingly gutted"?
Re-read what I said about the US military budget. Most of the current military expenditure ( eg Iraq and Afghanistan ) is not counted.
Umm, no. The part that is counted is $400 billion. I seem to recall guesstimates of a total cost of $1 trillion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (total, over the last five years). If that entire $1 trillion were part of the THIS YEAR's military budget, then our budget for the year would be 1400 billion. Which is about 12% of our GNP. Please note that 12% is less than 25%.
Our military budget for the last five years, plus the trillion for Afghanistan and Iraq, total out at about $2700 billion. If that five year expenditure were all spent THIS YEAR, we'd be talking 22.5% of GNP. Which is still less than 25%.
So, to put things in perspective, the DPRK's PEACETIME military expenditures are more than five times as high as our WARTIME expenditures as a percentage of GNP.
Note, again, that 25% of the DPRK GNP isn't really all that much. It really is comparable to the NYPD budget. But it still indicates a level of militarism that is appalling beyond belief. Especially given that it hardly matters a hill of beans - there's nothing so expensive as the second-best military. And their's isn't even second-best in the region, much less the world. It may be better than the Japanese military, but it's certainly behind every other regional power (China, ROK, Russia) over that way.
It spends about 25% of its GNP on its military, by proportion, the most in the world.
1) 25% of almost fucking nothing is a very small amount indeed. A percentage figure in this case is meaningless. A dollar figure would paint a very different picture.
2) By proportion, 25% puts is at about 4th. The US comes in at No 1 place, but manages to avoid this ranking because of all the different ways their military budget is hidden.
Umm, the US military budget is about $400 billion. It's GNP is about 12,000 billion. 400/12000 is considerably less than 25%. Note that the 25% figure was NOT 25% of government budget, but 25% of GNP. That is, 25% of EVERYTHING made in your country. The USA would have to have a military budget more than seven times as high as it is to match that figure.
This is not to imply that DPRK's military budget is all that large by US standards. I think the NYPD has a bigger budget (that's only a slight exaggeration - the NYPD budget is nearly $4 billion. the DPRK GNP is less than $23 billion).
$16 million may be nothing to an oil company, but its a hell of a lot to the rest of us. I know a lot of people who would swear the sky was falling for a lot less money over 7 years. This is the problem when a group with an agenda funds a study.
$16 million over seven years spread over 43 organizations. Averages about $50 thousand per organization per year. It's peanuts.
I notice that the summary doesn't include the mention that during the same period, E-M donated about $900 million dollars to various causes. So they spent 2% of their budget for such things on groups that thought Global Warming wasn't real. Peanuts.
I expect that the biggest complaint that the UCS has is that Exxon Mobile didn't give THEM any of that $900 million. Or even part of that $16 million.
Regulus Black (Sirius' brother, probably the one that destroyed the amulet Dumbledore risked his life to get just before his death)
That amulet was not destroyed. If you reread the section where the kids are cleaning up Sirius' old home, you'll notice mention of an amulet - that's the one they'll be looking for next book, I think. The House Elf has it stashed away, or that old thief has it.
Then buy the power. There's nothing that says you have to generate on-site.
True. Of course, YOU started this discussion with the assumption that you would generate on site.
So. 130,000,000 joules per gallon-equivalent. Let's assume 40% efficiency in conversion. So you need 325,000,000 joules per gallon-equivalent of H2. Convert that to KW-hrs - about 90 KW-hr per gallon-equivalent. Let's assume you're paying average industrial rates for electricity - you won't be, since your fueling station isn't zoned industrial, but that's the most favourable - five cents per KW-hr or a bit less. So you break even on electricity if you charge $4.50 per gallon-equivalent.
Let's assume you pump 1000 gallons per day, on average. And a more reasonable 16 hours per day of operation. At $10 per hour. Ignoring rent, you need to charge $4.70 per gallon-equivalent. Increase that to pay your rent/mortgage on the physical plant - you still need high pressure tanks, pumps, electrolysis equipment, a building for your cashiers to stand in, that sort of thing.
But even without the little extras like a building and storage tanks, we're talking twice the price of gasoline. And 70% of the electricity you use comes from fossil fuels, if you're in the USA. So you're putting out even more CO2 than you would if you just sold regular unleaded...and for that extra CO2 you get the privilege of going out of business because you're selling something at twice the price of your competitors.
Note that you can mitigate that extra CO2 if the electric companies switch to solar - but then the initial investments in solar that YOU don't have to make still have to be made by the electric company. And YOU still have to pay enough for the electricity to recover those costs.
So buying the power doesn't really make things any more bootstrappable - you won't be putting the competition out of business, you won't be quickly expanding, you won't be getting rich. If you're extremely lucky, you'll break even, perhaps. Most likely, you'll go broke at your first monthly electric bill (~$135,000).
Face it, if it was all that easy to make money with H2 fuels, the big oil companies would have switched to selling H2 - after all, they want to make as much money as possible, so they have an incentive to sell things with the highest possible profit margins. Right now, that's gasoline. And the profit margin is still too small to make a living off of without massive advantages of scale - back when Exxon was making its "obscene" profits post-Katrina it was only making 9.8% gross profit margin. Which is nothing to write home about, even if it IS better than most electric companies manage.
Of course, you conveniently ignore the more energy-efficient trombe wall idea. How much for a steam turbine? Certainly less than $4m. How much for a closed loop convection turbine? Still less than $4m, and doesn't require as much heat. Trombe walls can be built to generate steam, but it's easier to generate hot water.
On the bleeding edge, there are thermoelectric generators (basically, peltier coolers heated to produce electricity), which provide some hope of compact, solid-state generators becoming cost-effective. The two technologies could be combined, with a trombe wall gathering heat (very effective, even in overcast weather), and thermoelectric generators using that heat to make electricity. Don't expect this to happen any sooner than you would expect to see hydrogen-fuel cars, though.
Note that my fundamental assumption was that 1000 square meter area to work with. It's certainly bigger in some gas stations, but that's in the time zone for the ones I see around here. 1000 square meters gives you a maximum of 1MW solar, assuming near perfect use of the ambient energy.
So you won't get more than a gallon of gas equivalent out of the system every couple of minutes assuming 100% efficiency at all stages of the conversion process. With even "optimistic" estimates of real efficiencies, we're talking a gallon-equivalent every 10 minutes, maybe.
Now, perhaps you can get the cost of the physical plant required to make this down to something reasonable, but you're never going to make a filling station profitable when you can fill maybe 4-5 cars a day with H2 (or anything else) if everything is going perfectly. And remember that the sun doesn't shine on any given spot 12 hours every day - it rains from time to time. Even when it's not raining, you get cloudy days, and winter, and such.
So, let's assume you've got this physical plant in place, with a zero-percent government loan, payable in ten years. You have to pay yourself (if it doesn't make enough for you to eat, I doubt you'll bother doing it). Assume $10 per hour for your time (I wouldn't work for that, but you might consider that acceptable). Assume you work eight hours per day (no filling station is ever going to make money with hours that short either). So you need to sell your 53 gallons of gas-equivalent for $80 PLUS 1/3650th the cost of the physical plant. Regular gas costs about $2.40 per gallon where I filled up today, so if your physical plant costs less than $170,000, you can just about manage to repay the loan on time. With no interest, no clouds, no rain, and with a business model (filling station open eight hours per day, enough fuel to fill up four cars per day) that will leave you broke in a month.
More realistically, you're going to need a physical plant covering twenty times the area, at a cost of not more than a couple hundred thousand. Considering that the normal gas station costs more than that, and you're adding all sorts of interesting extras - high pressure tankage for both O2 and H2, the electrolysis equipment, the power generation equipment, etc., I'm not really seeig where you think such a thing can be profitable enough to be worth bothering with, much less good enough to put all the (currently profitable) competitors out of business.
Note finally, that a 1MW steam turbine will cost you in the vicinity of $500,000, assuming no scale efficiency. Given the actual scale efficiency of steam turbines, it's probably safe to assume it'll cost you rather more than one million dollars if you go that route. About six times what I just showed as barely sustainable....
There is a remote chance that some sort of Albatross (during a famine or something?) could have picked up a mouse and flown back.
Albatrosses eat fish, squid or crustaceans, depending on species of albatross. Mice aren't included.
Even more significant, you're assuming that ONE (dead) mouse was brought to New Zealand 16 million years ago, and it just happened to get fossilized, and we just happened to find its skull. Yah, amazingly lucky things happen, but finding the ONLY mouse skull that has ever been on New Zealand 16 million years after it was dropped there is something I consider unlikely enough that I'd not believe it until we sifted the entire country for mouse skulls without finding another.
The best thing I can come up with is that the fossil is that of a species that started to evolve but didn't get off the ground, possibly due to overcrowding, similar to the horse in North America.
First, lots and lots of mice (overcrowded) imply lots and lots of fossils.
Second, Horse BIG, mouse itty-bitty. They're not going to disappear completely from overcrowding, unless we hypothesize that they ate EVERYTHING in New Zealand in one night and then starved before something could grow back. If the population were to grow to near the carrying capacity of the island, there would be local die-offs, but it's extremely unlikely there would be a die-off encompassing the entire population. Unless the population were very small, of course. In which case, why is there a very small population of an animal that breeds as quickly as most mice do?
And third, I think the horse's die-off in North America was helped a bit by new arrivals with barbecue sauce - I don't think it's coincidence that they disappeared about the time the ancestors of the Amerinds moved into the neighborhood. So not at all comparable.
A hydrogen fuel station could be built with various electric generation systems on-site to generate hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for medical purposes, and even feed unneeded electricity back into the grid. Most gas stations in the USA (I don't know about other parts of the world, but I assume they're similar) have a huge canopy over the pumps. It's just a few girders holding up some fancy-looking sheet metal. There's nothing else up there except some wiring. That's a wasted platform. The girders could support many times the weight of what's up there. So put some solar electric panels up there. Or a trombe-wall-like surface. Something to capture solar energy. Use that energy (directly or converted) to perform electrolysis. Sell H2 as vehicle fuel. Sell O2 to local hospitals. Sell excess electricity to the power company. Tell the Teamsters (who are going to be pissed because your station makes them obsolete) to procreate with themselves. The same goes for the fuel brokers, centralized fuel suppliers, and the transport services they're in bed with. You'll be able to sell much cheaper than anyone else in the area due to a distinct lack of middlemen, and you'll soon be able to expand the business.
Let's see. 125000 BTU per gallon for gasoline. Call if 130 MJ/gallon. Assume you have 1000 square meters of solar panel. Assume your solar panels are 40% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, and that your electrolysis process is also 40% efficient at converting electricity to H2. Assume sunlight 12 hours per day, every day.
So, you'll get an equivalent of 53 gallons of gasoline per day worth of H2. And we only required a few unreasonable assumptions to get you to the point where you can fill up four cars per day. Somehow, I suspect that this won't quite make the Teamsters obsolete,nor the fuel brokers, centralized fuel suppliers, and transport middlemen.
And considering the cost of the solar panels better than $4 per watt, as of today), and the million watt assumption I made, we're talking a $4,000,000 investment, to be repaid with sales of ~18,000 gallons (equivalent) of fuel per year. Assuming a subsidized interest-free loan from the government, with repayment over 40 years, you only have to charge $5.55 per gallon equivalent to break even. If you want to "soon be able to expand the business", we might want to repay that interest-free loan in only ten years - $22 per gallon equivalent.
So, no, you won't put anyone out of business except yourself.
While I don't really object to scenarios for decentralizing, it might behoove you to run a few numbers through your calculator before you say something that reduces to "I'm too stupid to count high enough to recognize a bad idea when I see one".
I must have missed the part where Pres Jefferson was a "Federalist". Washington was. Adams was. That's 1 and 2. Jefferson was a devout anti federalist.
Umm, he said "first three Presidential elections", not first three Presidents. Washington was elected twice. In fact, the custom (ignored by FDR for reasons that seemed good to him at the time, and may, in fact, have been good for the rest of us) of the President serving only two terms was a result of Wshington's precedent.
Note that after FDR, the Republicans (and Democrats who disliked FDR) pushed through an Amendment to the Constitution ensuring that noone else would ever violate Washington's precedent.
Let's put that event in perspective: if a similar event were to happen EVERY day between now and Jan 1, 2010, sea-level would rise about a foot.
I still think it's fair to say that we won't be seeing events causing a sudden, significant, sea-level rise without a considerable change in the status quo, and we will have plenty of time to deal with it when that significant change appears.
So even if such an event were to start - mammoth ice sheets breaking off from Antarctica on a daily basis - we'd have three years to make such preparations as might be required. Which preparations amount to a one foot sea-wall around really low-lying cities and farmland.
I think we can safely wait until we see two such events happen in the same week before we worry too much about it. And frankly I'd wait till we saw 10 in one month (at 10 per month, it would take nearly ten years to produce that 1 foot rise in sea-level) before I became concerned enough to even start thinking about budgetting for it, much less building for it.
In 2002, 3250 square km fell off the Larsen B Ice shelf over a 35 day period [nsidc.org]. That converts to about 1255 square miles while the thickness is hard to determine. Assuming there are 100 feet of ice above sea level, thats a little over half an inch in 35 days from a single ice shelf.
Umm...with 140,000,000 square miles of ocean, a 1250 square mile berg will only cause a 1/2 inch increase in sea-level if the berg extends 4000 feet above sea-level. That one didn't.
The problem that I see with legalizing firearm ownership with something like an open carry law is that for the first few years, the streets would be a war zone... even more so than they are right now.
Every time a state considers a Shall Issue law, the gun-control loons say that this will be the inevitable result of passage of Shall Issue.
So far, 38 or so states have passed Shall Issue laws. In NOT ONE case have the streets become a "war zone". As far as I can recall, crime rates have declined or remained the same in states that passed Shall Issue. Which does not imply that Shall Issue reduces crime, but argues rather strongly that it doesn't increase crime. And more freedom with no negative effects is a net positive.
Here's where I think you're wrong, and have shown evidence in other parts of this thread to explain that. If we are just talking about melting glaciers, then the 17 inch estimate might be right, but the issue isn't only about melting. Many of the glaciers (on shelves above the water) are breaking off and falling into the water, causing a much more sudden change (take a look at the Ross shelf and what happened to it lately). There are a lot of estimations out there that predict different scenarios.
certainly possible. We have what? 140,000,000 square miles of ocean? To raise the sea level by 1 foot suddenly means an event involving 28,000 cubic miles of surface ice falling into the ocean in a short timespan (a year or less, perhaps). Assuming a 100 foot thick ice sheet, we're talking 1,400,000 square miles. Somehow, I don't see that as a reasonable event, GIVEN CURRENT CONDITIONS.
Yes, the conditions will change. But they are unlikely to change in such as a way that a piece of ice 100 feet thick and half the area of CONUS (CONtinental US == USA minus Alaska and Hawaii) might fall from land to sea without a significant warning - decades, most likely. Which gives us the decades needed to do the planning required to deal with it.
And note that the extreme event I described is only a 1 foot sea-level change. Certainly noticeable, but a one foot seawall isn't that hard to build either, especially given years (if not decades) of warning.
Assuming 10 million people are displaced over a hundred years, that's 100,000 people a year. Looking at some of the estimates for areas in India that say hundreds of millions will be displaced, that's a million people a year. Again, that all depends on the estimations that you select. 17 inches is a very conservative estimate (according ot what I've read and cited in my other posts in this thread) and I'm not sure of exactly what that would do to the land ass over the years.
From what I saw in TFA, 17 inches isn't especially conservative, given that it's an extrapolation of current trends. It could be more, but isn't terribly likely to be much more, unless something like two billion more people start living at European/American standards of living between now and then.
And, again, we'll have time to notice the change and make plans to deal with it. Years, at least, decades more likely.
Editorial Commentary: frankly, I'm much more concerned that the changes in salinity caused by massive amounts of land-ice going into the oceans will cause - shutdown of the thermohaline conveyer is not totally impossible. And that will make things very unpleasant for Europe and Canada (and the northern USA eventually). Not sure what it'll do to the rest of the world, but it won't be pretty.
Now, do you have a solution? And don't blather about Kyoto - even if that had been approved by everyone, and actually implemented by everyone (it wasn't, and it hasn't been by the people who DID approve it), it would have negligible effects on future climate change. Let's talk about a Treaty binding on everyone that does NOT include the "we'll talk about what comes after XXXX date after we get the Treaty passed". I'd rather have one that says "reduce CO2 emissions by 1% per year everywhere, in perpetuity, and we'll discuss other requirements as they become issues", rather than a "reduce CO2 emissions this much, then stop until we negotiate the next round"
The Greater New Orlenas area had a population of 1.4 million.
GNO hadn't had a population of 1.4 million for a very long time - the population of the area had been in decline for decades.
I bet you're going to say that the looting caught on camera in the streets didn't happen, and neither did the pockets police corruption. Since the reports of rape in the Superdome were uncomfirmed, they probably weren't true either.
The looting caught on camera, eh? Did you notice that they played the same bits quite a lot? That's because there really wasn't that much to show. The rapes in the Superdome? Odd that no-one came forward afterward to charge rape, wasn't it? Frankly, the whole Superdome situation was blown out of all recognition by the newsies.
I do like how you focused on two of the more minor points of my post that are easy to argue about, while not touching on the main idea at all.
I responded to the parts I had information to contradict. Unlike most everyone who talks about Katrina on/., I was actually in New Orleans when the storm hit, and for the immediate aftermath.
Its about the issue on a larger scale where you have tens if not hundreds of millions of people displaced from their homes, which you failed to address.
However, if you want me to discuss this part, I will. Consider the expected effect of GCC (Global Climate Change) on sea-levels, as they are now expected to be - 17 inches (about 45cm for you people outside the USA). Spread over 100 years. Which is about 1/6 inch per year. Sure, it'll be a problem.
But it won't be a SUDDEN problem. It's not like everyone is going to go along, fat, dumb, and happy, and wake up one day with a foot of water in their neighborhood. It will be a glacially slow change, dealt with by individuals as it affects them. the guy living in the lowest spot is going to find his land never getting dry after the monsoons one year, and he'll be forced to move.
The guy next to him will have a similar effect - 20 years later. And so on.
Assuming, of course, that they don't build a two-foot high floodwall sometime in the next HUNDRED YEARS!
And raise that floodwall another couple-three feet every century thereafter. That might be a bit tough, don't you think? Maybe we can get a few Dutch engineers to give them pointers.
As to changes in growing seasons and such. Could be a problem. Not a SUDDEN problem, but a problem. Actually, potentially less of a problem than the sealevel thing - after all, you can switch crops to something else, unless your land turns to desert or tundra. If it does either of those, you're pretty much screwed. Well, we must concede that certain Amerind (native Americans they're not - they just got here 10000 years before the rest of us) types managed to get along quite well farming in deserts. irrigation is a wonderful thing, really.
So maybe it won't be the utter catastrophe some people like to think it will be. And even if it is an utter catastrophe, it'll be a glacially slow catastrophe. There won't be any part of the situation where we have to relocate tens of millions of people RIGHT NOW! More like thousands this year, and next year, and the next, and the next....
I hate to sound like a meanie, but poorer families might benefit by buying things other than luxury goods.
Once upon a time, the US government, in its nearly infinite wisdom, decided that a nice safe-to-pass tax was a luxury tax on yachts. It would only impact the Rich, since poor people couldn't afford to buy yachts.
It was repealed a few years later when it was noticed that it wasn't collecting any revenue, since the Rich were just buying their yachts (and registering them) overseas, where the tax didn't apply. Oddly enough, the main effect of the tax (other than requiring rich guys to buy their yachts overseas) was to put a bunch of poor guys out of work - their employers, who made yachts, didn't have any way to pay them when people stopped buying their yachts.
Why does the Government feel it needs to tax everything possible? Can the absense of tax, and rule of tax law for a given commodity exist in a free market? Is it so hard for economists, the IRS, and politicians to grasp that just because you can tax something, doesn't necessarily mean you should?
Because if they tax everything, it hides from the taxpayer (you) just how much you're paying in taxes. Everyone notices the Income Tax and Sales Tax (and VAT, if you have one of those). How many people know how much tax you're paying (and to whom) on every gallon of gasoline you buy? Or Milk?
Did you know, by the by, that just this year a tax was actually rescinded in the USA? It was a telephone tax, as I recall, and it was intended to pay for the Spanish-American War....
Then why doesn't the constitution say trained? They are not synonyms
Back then, "trained" applied to the direction you were pointing your weapon, not to what we would now consider the proper meaning of "trained".
Charles II of England, described St. Paul's Cathedral as "Awful, pompous, and artificial". At the time, those words were compliments. Awful being equivalent to modern awesome, pompous to "full of grandeur", and artificial meaning "ingenious and man-made".
Face it, words change their meaning. After all, "bad" means "good", right? Except when it means "really good". Or "tough". Though we must admit it still means "bad" sometimes.
As you brought up Katrina, there were 1.4 million people in New Orleans before the hurricane which displaced most of them.
Umm, no. New Orleans had a population of less than 500,000 before Katrina. About half have returned.
Jefferson Parish, right next door had comparable pre-Katrina population, and a much greater percentage have returned.
Those that remained or returned shortly after had to deal with a lot of social issues including crime and such, along with the destruction caused by the hurricane.
Umm, no. Crime wasn't much of an issue after Katrina, and didn't start picking up again for quite some time. The biggest post-Katrina issues were shortages of contractors and City Inspectors (amazing how hard it is to get 100,000 homes reoccupied when each of them requires an electrical inspection by one of the TWO (!!!) City Inspectors authorized to do such inspections.
Note, by the by, that the City government's refusal to allow people to return to some neighborhoods for months after the storm will likely have the effect of causing MORE people to stay in place during the next big storm (which we expect to see any decade now - they average about 40 years apart), since repairing and rebuilding is infinitely easier if you aren't forced to let all your stuff rot and mold for months before you take care of it.
You don't see a difference between a few dozen/hundreds nutcases and a country full of millions of nazis (in 1945) that a short time ago had the state under control and partly still functioning organizations?
Of course, the West German national government has only been sovereign since 1955, so the conditions in 1945 are less than relevant. In 1945, the Nazis had the US, UK, French, and Soviet Armies making sure things were under control.
Even more importantly, we're talking about NOW. Two generations later than WW2. Isn't it about time to quit worrying about a resurgence of Nazism? Or do you really believe the German people today are just biding their time until they can start a new Reich, only to be held in check by laws prohibiting them from talking about certain subjects?
If the laws are sufficient to save you from a return to Nazism, then a simple change should suffice: make it legal to talk about Nazism, but make it expressly illegal for Nazis to overthrow the government. See, Freedom of Speech and freedom from the Nazis at the same time.
Does the phrase "I hate Illinois Nazis" have any meaning for you?
We have Nazis in the USA too. They have even, on occasion, paraded in the streets (through Black or Jewish neighborhoods, in fact), protected by police from hecklers.
For the most part, they are laughed at. It doesn't take a legal ban to render them harmless - letting them spout their doctrine on TV seems to make them objects of ridicule in and of itself.
How quickly do you thinkg someone would end up in jail who voiced his opinion publicly that the prez oughta die ?
I've heard it said in public quite a lot. None of the people who said it (qualifier: that subset of the people who said it that I knew well enough to notice if they were jailed) have been jailed.
Now, actually trying to do it is another thing entirely. On the other hand, trying to kill ME is a crime too.
think your original argument was that it's so unfair that sometimes the rich don't pay taxes
You've obviously confused me with the person I originally replied to.
All I was pointing out was that we didn't tax based on "wealth", we tax based on "income". And demonstrating it by providing an absurd example.
Personally, I don't much care how much someone else is paying in taxes. I care quite a lot about how much *I* am paying in taxes, of course. And theoretically, if someone else pays more, I don't have to pay as much, so perhaps I should care.
However, historically, my taxes haven't been lowered when someone else's taxes were raised. Not once. Generally, when other people's taxes (the rich, the poor, whomever) are raised, so are mine! Which is why I'm against most tax increases.
Yah, we can argue about whether it is better to "borrow and spend" or "tax and spend". Since noone is going to lower the "spend" side of either formula, I won't get what I want either way, so it makes little difference to me.
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Let's try this part. The government's budget for 2005 amounted to 16.6% of GDP. Add another 3.3% of GDP for off-budget items (both these figures from the appropriate documents found at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy06/hist.html). 19.9% of GDP. Which includes Health Care, Social Security, and Public Education.
In order to have ~50% of GDP be spent on war, we'd need to be spending 2.5 times as much as the admitted on/off budget items. Which amounts to ~5 trillion dollars per year. Or $25 trillion over the last five years. Oddly enough, our public debt (not deficit! that's a different thing entirely) is ~$8.7 trillion as of the beginning of the year. Do you have some evidence other than your idle speculations as to the nature of reality to support the opinion that the US Federal debt is really ~$30 trillion rather than the $8.7 trillion that is admitted to. Which latter is based on things like total value of T-Bills outstanding....
I should also note that we didn't spend 50% of our GDP on World War 2, the last war we were really serious about fighting.
As to the "embarrassingly gutted" Health Care, Social Security, and Public Education. I take it you are unaware that these items have NEVER had their budgets reduced. Not once. Not even under Bush (senior or junior).
Our public Health Care budget was increased rather dramatically under Bush for Medicare Part D.
Our Public Education budgets (yes, budgets - public education is mostly dealt with at local and State levels, with minor input at the Federal level, so there are thousands of public education budgets in the USA) are the highest in the world, on a per student basis ($7552 per student, plus more for "special education" students). With a growth rate over twice as high as inflation - 6% per year.
Social Security didn't get any major new largess under Bush (or at all under any President since they started adjusting Social Security for Cost of Living back in the seventies). But it didn't suffer, either. It wasn't reduced, either on a per person basis or as a lump sum. It didn't grow at rates less than inflation - rather more, in fact.
So, just where did you get the idea that these items had been "embarrassingly gutted"?
Umm, no. The part that is counted is $400 billion. I seem to recall guesstimates of a total cost of $1 trillion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (total, over the last five years). If that entire $1 trillion were part of the THIS YEAR's military budget, then our budget for the year would be 1400 billion. Which is about 12% of our GNP. Please note that 12% is less than 25%.
Our military budget for the last five years, plus the trillion for Afghanistan and Iraq, total out at about $2700 billion. If that five year expenditure were all spent THIS YEAR, we'd be talking 22.5% of GNP. Which is still less than 25%.
So, to put things in perspective, the DPRK's PEACETIME military expenditures are more than five times as high as our WARTIME expenditures as a percentage of GNP.
Note, again, that 25% of the DPRK GNP isn't really all that much. It really is comparable to the NYPD budget. But it still indicates a level of militarism that is appalling beyond belief. Especially given that it hardly matters a hill of beans - there's nothing so expensive as the second-best military. And their's isn't even second-best in the region, much less the world. It may be better than the Japanese military, but it's certainly behind every other regional power (China, ROK, Russia) over that way.
1) 25% of almost fucking nothing is a very small amount indeed. A percentage figure in this case is meaningless. A dollar figure would paint a very different picture.
2) By proportion, 25% puts is at about 4th. The US comes in at No 1 place, but manages to avoid this ranking because of all the different ways their military budget is hidden.
Umm, the US military budget is about $400 billion. It's GNP is about 12,000 billion. 400/12000 is considerably less than 25%. Note that the 25% figure was NOT 25% of government budget, but 25% of GNP. That is, 25% of EVERYTHING made in your country. The USA would have to have a military budget more than seven times as high as it is to match that figure.
This is not to imply that DPRK's military budget is all that large by US standards. I think the NYPD has a bigger budget (that's only a slight exaggeration - the NYPD budget is nearly $4 billion. the DPRK GNP is less than $23 billion).
$16 million over seven years spread over 43 organizations. Averages about $50 thousand per organization per year. It's peanuts.
I notice that the summary doesn't include the mention that during the same period, E-M donated about $900 million dollars to various causes. So they spent 2% of their budget for such things on groups that thought Global Warming wasn't real. Peanuts.
I expect that the biggest complaint that the UCS has is that Exxon Mobile didn't give THEM any of that $900 million. Or even part of that $16 million.
That amulet was not destroyed. If you reread the section where the kids are cleaning up Sirius' old home, you'll notice mention of an amulet - that's the one they'll be looking for next book, I think. The House Elf has it stashed away, or that old thief has it.
I'll bite. Who provided the "massive backup" in dealing with Japan? I must have missed that part.
True. Of course, YOU started this discussion with the assumption that you would generate on site.
So. 130,000,000 joules per gallon-equivalent. Let's assume 40% efficiency in conversion. So you need 325,000,000 joules per gallon-equivalent of H2. Convert that to KW-hrs - about 90 KW-hr per gallon-equivalent. Let's assume you're paying average industrial rates for electricity - you won't be, since your fueling station isn't zoned industrial, but that's the most favourable - five cents per KW-hr or a bit less. So you break even on electricity if you charge $4.50 per gallon-equivalent.
Let's assume you pump 1000 gallons per day, on average. And a more reasonable 16 hours per day of operation. At $10 per hour. Ignoring rent, you need to charge $4.70 per gallon-equivalent. Increase that to pay your rent/mortgage on the physical plant - you still need high pressure tanks, pumps, electrolysis equipment, a building for your cashiers to stand in, that sort of thing.
But even without the little extras like a building and storage tanks, we're talking twice the price of gasoline. And 70% of the electricity you use comes from fossil fuels, if you're in the USA. So you're putting out even more CO2 than you would if you just sold regular unleaded...and for that extra CO2 you get the privilege of going out of business because you're selling something at twice the price of your competitors.
Note that you can mitigate that extra CO2 if the electric companies switch to solar - but then the initial investments in solar that YOU don't have to make still have to be made by the electric company. And YOU still have to pay enough for the electricity to recover those costs.
So buying the power doesn't really make things any more bootstrappable - you won't be putting the competition out of business, you won't be quickly expanding, you won't be getting rich. If you're extremely lucky, you'll break even, perhaps. Most likely, you'll go broke at your first monthly electric bill (~$135,000).
Face it, if it was all that easy to make money with H2 fuels, the big oil companies would have switched to selling H2 - after all, they want to make as much money as possible, so they have an incentive to sell things with the highest possible profit margins. Right now, that's gasoline. And the profit margin is still too small to make a living off of without massive advantages of scale - back when Exxon was making its "obscene" profits post-Katrina it was only making 9.8% gross profit margin. Which is nothing to write home about, even if it IS better than most electric companies manage.
On the bleeding edge, there are thermoelectric generators (basically, peltier coolers heated to produce electricity), which provide some hope of compact, solid-state generators becoming cost-effective. The two technologies could be combined, with a trombe wall gathering heat (very effective, even in overcast weather), and thermoelectric generators using that heat to make electricity. Don't expect this to happen any sooner than you would expect to see hydrogen-fuel cars, though.
Note that my fundamental assumption was that 1000 square meter area to work with. It's certainly bigger in some gas stations, but that's in the time zone for the ones I see around here. 1000 square meters gives you a maximum of 1MW solar, assuming near perfect use of the ambient energy.
So you won't get more than a gallon of gas equivalent out of the system every couple of minutes assuming 100% efficiency at all stages of the conversion process. With even "optimistic" estimates of real efficiencies, we're talking a gallon-equivalent every 10 minutes, maybe.
Now, perhaps you can get the cost of the physical plant required to make this down to something reasonable, but you're never going to make a filling station profitable when you can fill maybe 4-5 cars a day with H2 (or anything else) if everything is going perfectly. And remember that the sun doesn't shine on any given spot 12 hours every day - it rains from time to time. Even when it's not raining, you get cloudy days, and winter, and such.
So, let's assume you've got this physical plant in place, with a zero-percent government loan, payable in ten years. You have to pay yourself (if it doesn't make enough for you to eat, I doubt you'll bother doing it). Assume $10 per hour for your time (I wouldn't work for that, but you might consider that acceptable). Assume you work eight hours per day (no filling station is ever going to make money with hours that short either). So you need to sell your 53 gallons of gas-equivalent for $80 PLUS 1/3650th the cost of the physical plant. Regular gas costs about $2.40 per gallon where I filled up today, so if your physical plant costs less than $170,000, you can just about manage to repay the loan on time. With no interest, no clouds, no rain, and with a business model (filling station open eight hours per day, enough fuel to fill up four cars per day) that will leave you broke in a month.
More realistically, you're going to need a physical plant covering twenty times the area, at a cost of not more than a couple hundred thousand. Considering that the normal gas station costs more than that, and you're adding all sorts of interesting extras - high pressure tankage for both O2 and H2, the electrolysis equipment, the power generation equipment, etc., I'm not really seeig where you think such a thing can be profitable enough to be worth bothering with, much less good enough to put all the (currently profitable) competitors out of business.
Note finally, that a 1MW steam turbine will cost you in the vicinity of $500,000, assuming no scale efficiency. Given the actual scale efficiency of steam turbines, it's probably safe to assume it'll cost you rather more than one million dollars if you go that route. About six times what I just showed as barely sustainable....
Albatrosses eat fish, squid or crustaceans, depending on species of albatross. Mice aren't included.
Even more significant, you're assuming that ONE (dead) mouse was brought to New Zealand 16 million years ago, and it just happened to get fossilized, and we just happened to find its skull. Yah, amazingly lucky things happen, but finding the ONLY mouse skull that has ever been on New Zealand 16 million years after it was dropped there is something I consider unlikely enough that I'd not believe it until we sifted the entire country for mouse skulls without finding another.
The best thing I can come up with is that the fossil is that of a species that started to evolve but didn't get off the ground, possibly due to overcrowding, similar to the horse in North America.
First, lots and lots of mice (overcrowded) imply lots and lots of fossils.
Second, Horse BIG, mouse itty-bitty. They're not going to disappear completely from overcrowding, unless we hypothesize that they ate EVERYTHING in New Zealand in one night and then starved before something could grow back. If the population were to grow to near the carrying capacity of the island, there would be local die-offs, but it's extremely unlikely there would be a die-off encompassing the entire population. Unless the population were very small, of course. In which case, why is there a very small population of an animal that breeds as quickly as most mice do?
And third, I think the horse's die-off in North America was helped a bit by new arrivals with barbecue sauce - I don't think it's coincidence that they disappeared about the time the ancestors of the Amerinds moved into the neighborhood. So not at all comparable.
Umm, New Zealand is about 1000 miles from Australia last time I checked.
Hardly a short flight for anything but an albatross.
Let's see. 125000 BTU per gallon for gasoline. Call if 130 MJ/gallon. Assume you have 1000 square meters of solar panel. Assume your solar panels are 40% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, and that your electrolysis process is also 40% efficient at converting electricity to H2. Assume sunlight 12 hours per day, every day.
So, you'll get an equivalent of 53 gallons of gasoline per day worth of H2. And we only required a few unreasonable assumptions to get you to the point where you can fill up four cars per day. Somehow, I suspect that this won't quite make the Teamsters obsolete,nor the fuel brokers, centralized fuel suppliers, and transport middlemen.
And considering the cost of the solar panels better than $4 per watt, as of today), and the million watt assumption I made, we're talking a $4,000,000 investment, to be repaid with sales of ~18,000 gallons (equivalent) of fuel per year. Assuming a subsidized interest-free loan from the government, with repayment over 40 years, you only have to charge $5.55 per gallon equivalent to break even. If you want to "soon be able to expand the business", we might want to repay that interest-free loan in only ten years - $22 per gallon equivalent.
So, no, you won't put anyone out of business except yourself.
While I don't really object to scenarios for decentralizing, it might behoove you to run a few numbers through your calculator before you say something that reduces to "I'm too stupid to count high enough to recognize a bad idea when I see one".
Umm, he said "first three Presidential elections", not first three Presidents. Washington was elected twice. In fact, the custom (ignored by FDR for reasons that seemed good to him at the time, and may, in fact, have been good for the rest of us) of the President serving only two terms was a result of Wshington's precedent.
Note that after FDR, the Republicans (and Democrats who disliked FDR) pushed through an Amendment to the Constitution ensuring that noone else would ever violate Washington's precedent.
I still think it's fair to say that we won't be seeing events causing a sudden, significant, sea-level rise without a considerable change in the status quo, and we will have plenty of time to deal with it when that significant change appears.
So even if such an event were to start - mammoth ice sheets breaking off from Antarctica on a daily basis - we'd have three years to make such preparations as might be required. Which preparations amount to a one foot sea-wall around really low-lying cities and farmland.
I think we can safely wait until we see two such events happen in the same week before we worry too much about it. And frankly I'd wait till we saw 10 in one month (at 10 per month, it would take nearly ten years to produce that 1 foot rise in sea-level) before I became concerned enough to even start thinking about budgetting for it, much less building for it.
Umm...with 140,000,000 square miles of ocean, a 1250 square mile berg will only cause a 1/2 inch increase in sea-level if the berg extends 4000 feet above sea-level. That one didn't.
Every time a state considers a Shall Issue law, the gun-control loons say that this will be the inevitable result of passage of Shall Issue.
So far, 38 or so states have passed Shall Issue laws. In NOT ONE case have the streets become a "war zone". As far as I can recall, crime rates have declined or remained the same in states that passed Shall Issue. Which does not imply that Shall Issue reduces crime, but argues rather strongly that it doesn't increase crime. And more freedom with no negative effects is a net positive.
certainly possible. We have what? 140,000,000 square miles of ocean? To raise the sea level by 1 foot suddenly means an event involving 28,000 cubic miles of surface ice falling into the ocean in a short timespan (a year or less, perhaps). Assuming a 100 foot thick ice sheet, we're talking 1,400,000 square miles. Somehow, I don't see that as a reasonable event, GIVEN CURRENT CONDITIONS.
Yes, the conditions will change. But they are unlikely to change in such as a way that a piece of ice 100 feet thick and half the area of CONUS (CONtinental US == USA minus Alaska and Hawaii) might fall from land to sea without a significant warning - decades, most likely. Which gives us the decades needed to do the planning required to deal with it.
And note that the extreme event I described is only a 1 foot sea-level change. Certainly noticeable, but a one foot seawall isn't that hard to build either, especially given years (if not decades) of warning.
Assuming 10 million people are displaced over a hundred years, that's 100,000 people a year. Looking at some of the estimates for areas in India that say hundreds of millions will be displaced, that's a million people a year. Again, that all depends on the estimations that you select. 17 inches is a very conservative estimate (according ot what I've read and cited in my other posts in this thread) and I'm not sure of exactly what that would do to the land ass over the years.
From what I saw in TFA, 17 inches isn't especially conservative, given that it's an extrapolation of current trends. It could be more, but isn't terribly likely to be much more, unless something like two billion more people start living at European/American standards of living between now and then.
And, again, we'll have time to notice the change and make plans to deal with it. Years, at least, decades more likely.
Editorial Commentary: frankly, I'm much more concerned that the changes in salinity caused by massive amounts of land-ice going into the oceans will cause - shutdown of the thermohaline conveyer is not totally impossible. And that will make things very unpleasant for Europe and Canada (and the northern USA eventually). Not sure what it'll do to the rest of the world, but it won't be pretty.
Now, do you have a solution? And don't blather about Kyoto - even if that had been approved by everyone, and actually implemented by everyone (it wasn't, and it hasn't been by the people who DID approve it), it would have negligible effects on future climate change. Let's talk about a Treaty binding on everyone that does NOT include the "we'll talk about what comes after XXXX date after we get the Treaty passed". I'd rather have one that says "reduce CO2 emissions by 1% per year everywhere, in perpetuity, and we'll discuss other requirements as they become issues", rather than a "reduce CO2 emissions this much, then stop until we negotiate the next round"
GNO hadn't had a population of 1.4 million for a very long time - the population of the area had been in decline for decades.
I bet you're going to say that the looting caught on camera in the streets didn't happen, and neither did the pockets police corruption. Since the reports of rape in the Superdome were uncomfirmed, they probably weren't true either.
The looting caught on camera, eh? Did you notice that they played the same bits quite a lot? That's because there really wasn't that much to show. The rapes in the Superdome? Odd that no-one came forward afterward to charge rape, wasn't it? Frankly, the whole Superdome situation was blown out of all recognition by the newsies.
I do like how you focused on two of the more minor points of my post that are easy to argue about, while not touching on the main idea at all.
I responded to the parts I had information to contradict. Unlike most everyone who talks about Katrina on /., I was actually in New Orleans when the storm hit, and for the immediate aftermath.
Its about the issue on a larger scale where you have tens if not hundreds of millions of people displaced from their homes, which you failed to address.
However, if you want me to discuss this part, I will. Consider the expected effect of GCC (Global Climate Change) on sea-levels, as they are now expected to be - 17 inches (about 45cm for you people outside the USA). Spread over 100 years. Which is about 1/6 inch per year. Sure, it'll be a problem.
But it won't be a SUDDEN problem. It's not like everyone is going to go along, fat, dumb, and happy, and wake up one day with a foot of water in their neighborhood. It will be a glacially slow change, dealt with by individuals as it affects them. the guy living in the lowest spot is going to find his land never getting dry after the monsoons one year, and he'll be forced to move.
The guy next to him will have a similar effect - 20 years later. And so on.
Assuming, of course, that they don't build a two-foot high floodwall sometime in the next HUNDRED YEARS!
And raise that floodwall another couple-three feet every century thereafter. That might be a bit tough, don't you think? Maybe we can get a few Dutch engineers to give them pointers.
As to changes in growing seasons and such. Could be a problem. Not a SUDDEN problem, but a problem. Actually, potentially less of a problem than the sealevel thing - after all, you can switch crops to something else, unless your land turns to desert or tundra. If it does either of those, you're pretty much screwed. Well, we must concede that certain Amerind (native Americans they're not - they just got here 10000 years before the rest of us) types managed to get along quite well farming in deserts. irrigation is a wonderful thing, really.
So maybe it won't be the utter catastrophe some people like to think it will be. And even if it is an utter catastrophe, it'll be a glacially slow catastrophe. There won't be any part of the situation where we have to relocate tens of millions of people RIGHT NOW! More like thousands this year, and next year, and the next, and the next....
Once upon a time, the US government, in its nearly infinite wisdom, decided that a nice safe-to-pass tax was a luxury tax on yachts. It would only impact the Rich, since poor people couldn't afford to buy yachts.
It was repealed a few years later when it was noticed that it wasn't collecting any revenue, since the Rich were just buying their yachts (and registering them) overseas, where the tax didn't apply. Oddly enough, the main effect of the tax (other than requiring rich guys to buy their yachts overseas) was to put a bunch of poor guys out of work - their employers, who made yachts, didn't have any way to pay them when people stopped buying their yachts.
Because if they tax everything, it hides from the taxpayer (you) just how much you're paying in taxes. Everyone notices the Income Tax and Sales Tax (and VAT, if you have one of those). How many people know how much tax you're paying (and to whom) on every gallon of gasoline you buy? Or Milk?
Did you know, by the by, that just this year a tax was actually rescinded in the USA? It was a telephone tax, as I recall, and it was intended to pay for the Spanish-American War....
Back then, "trained" applied to the direction you were pointing your weapon, not to what we would now consider the proper meaning of "trained".
Charles II of England, described St. Paul's Cathedral as "Awful, pompous, and artificial". At the time, those words were compliments. Awful being equivalent to modern awesome, pompous to "full of grandeur", and artificial meaning "ingenious and man-made".
Face it, words change their meaning. After all, "bad" means "good", right? Except when it means "really good". Or "tough". Though we must admit it still means "bad" sometimes.
Umm, no. New Orleans had a population of less than 500,000 before Katrina. About half have returned.
Jefferson Parish, right next door had comparable pre-Katrina population, and a much greater percentage have returned.
Those that remained or returned shortly after had to deal with a lot of social issues including crime and such, along with the destruction caused by the hurricane.
Umm, no. Crime wasn't much of an issue after Katrina, and didn't start picking up again for quite some time. The biggest post-Katrina issues were shortages of contractors and City Inspectors (amazing how hard it is to get 100,000 homes reoccupied when each of them requires an electrical inspection by one of the TWO (!!!) City Inspectors authorized to do such inspections.
Note, by the by, that the City government's refusal to allow people to return to some neighborhoods for months after the storm will likely have the effect of causing MORE people to stay in place during the next big storm (which we expect to see any decade now - they average about 40 years apart), since repairing and rebuilding is infinitely easier if you aren't forced to let all your stuff rot and mold for months before you take care of it.
Of course, the West German national government has only been sovereign since 1955, so the conditions in 1945 are less than relevant. In 1945, the Nazis had the US, UK, French, and Soviet Armies making sure things were under control.
Even more importantly, we're talking about NOW. Two generations later than WW2. Isn't it about time to quit worrying about a resurgence of Nazism? Or do you really believe the German people today are just biding their time until they can start a new Reich, only to be held in check by laws prohibiting them from talking about certain subjects?
If the laws are sufficient to save you from a return to Nazism, then a simple change should suffice: make it legal to talk about Nazism, but make it expressly illegal for Nazis to overthrow the government. See, Freedom of Speech and freedom from the Nazis at the same time.
We have Nazis in the USA too. They have even, on occasion, paraded in the streets (through Black or Jewish neighborhoods, in fact), protected by police from hecklers.
For the most part, they are laughed at. It doesn't take a legal ban to render them harmless - letting them spout their doctrine on TV seems to make them objects of ridicule in and of itself.
I've heard it said in public quite a lot. None of the people who said it (qualifier: that subset of the people who said it that I knew well enough to notice if they were jailed) have been jailed.
Now, actually trying to do it is another thing entirely. On the other hand, trying to kill ME is a crime too.
You've obviously confused me with the person I originally replied to.
All I was pointing out was that we didn't tax based on "wealth", we tax based on "income". And demonstrating it by providing an absurd example.
Personally, I don't much care how much someone else is paying in taxes. I care quite a lot about how much *I* am paying in taxes, of course. And theoretically, if someone else pays more, I don't have to pay as much, so perhaps I should care.
However, historically, my taxes haven't been lowered when someone else's taxes were raised. Not once. Generally, when other people's taxes (the rich, the poor, whomever) are raised, so are mine! Which is why I'm against most tax increases.
Yah, we can argue about whether it is better to "borrow and spend" or "tax and spend". Since noone is going to lower the "spend" side of either formula, I won't get what I want either way, so it makes little difference to me.