For a while - perhaps even a long while. But if this really takes off, and all new construction uses this technology, and a lot of existing structures are retrofitted, the power companies are going to see their market shrink drastically. Who do they sell all this power to when half the buildings in their market are putting power back into the grid, and half of the rest are power neutral? Presumably they'll then push for legislation to prop up their obsolete business model.
Yes, human greed will kick in - ie market forces. I don't know how you can say cost has nothing to do with it, because if you reduce the time that solar panels take to pay for themselves from (let's say) 15 years to 9 months (if this is both 1/10 the cost and works better on cloudy days) it's quite obvious that more people will buy them. I also don't know who this "they" is that will keep money out of our pockets. Barring patents, there will be competition in this market (and even if there are patents they'll expire). If company A can convert your roof to solar power for $X, and Company B can do it for $X/10, guess how much business Company A is going to get? "They" don't get to decide what the market price for the product is, the market does that. And if production costs drop by a factor of 10, that cannot help but affect the consumer price unless it's a monopoly market.
lol, not bad! It's from End of File, from the album Algorhythms by MC++ and the Empty Set. I say good guess because that track says it's "featuring Logic the Android and Vitamin Z".
It's an interesting idea, though. Seal the whole system - no vacuum, just seal it. And it doesn't even have to be a perfect seal, just close enough. Then have return ducts connected to the train tunnel/tube at both ends, with the same total air capacity as the tunnel itself. The air the train pushes in front of it would get pushed into the ducts at the other end of the tunnel, travel back to the starting end and back into the tunnel behind the train. You would have some frictional losses, but it seems like it would be a lot more efficient than just constantly pushing all that air out of the way, and cheaper than a vacuum tunnel because there's no vacuum to maintain and the train doesn't have to be airtight. I assume the reason this hasn't been done is that it's far cheaper to add a 25,000 hp motor than to build a sealed train tube.
At the very least most of us would be running laptops if electricity jumped to say $100 per KWH.
If electricity got a thousand times more expensive (I think $0.10/kWh is around the median price for electricity in the US), running computers would be the least of our concerns. First up would be the millions of Americans who can no longer afford to heat their homes. The economy would tank. Business would fail by the million (can't keep the lights on, literally). Unemployment would skyrocket. If electricity suddenly went to $100/kWh, it would not surprise me to find rioting in the streets of major cities. And that's just the US. So don't worry too much about switching to your laptop - the ISP can't afford to keep their switches turned on anyway.:-)
Unlike the Neuromancer fantasy, you can't just jack in, but if implanted early enough, you could adapt to the additional sensory input.
According to TFA, you can indeed just jack in. It was about external devices rather than surgical implants, but that doesn't change the fundamental mechanism. Adults can start using these and incorporate the additional sensory information, in some cases almost immediately, because adult brains are still plastic, just not as much as child brains. I'm not expecting much consumer electronics soon, but I think eventually (some number of decades) there will be some very cool products to come out of this type of work. And I would think specialized applications for the military and some industries will be out shortly if not already.
There are quite a few novels that I've read where the idea of addictive neuro-stimulus was discussed; off the top of my head I think it comes up in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
It's big in the Ringworld series as well. IIRC, in the second book Louis Wu is a current addict - they called it wirehead or something. In that case it's nothing more complicated than a trickle current applied to the pleasure center in the brain.
But if I write a ten-page paper criticizing the US, and don't mention any other countries, then all that means is I'm not talking about any other countries in that paper. Just because I say something about something doesn't mean I then have to say everything about everything at the same time. Maybe I criticize other countries in other papers. Maybe you could just read my paper and evaluate it based on its own merits. It's a serious logical fallacy to claim that if I don't criticize everything that is bad, then my criticism of one thing that is bad is invalid. That doesn't even address the issue of expecting everyone to know everything about everything, rather than just allowing people to express viewpoints abouts subjects they do know something about.
Criticizing a US action does not preclude criticizing any other country. Criticizing the US does not indicate endorsement of any other country or its actions. Criticizing the US does not imply that it is worse than all other countries. It is not necessary to restrict criticism to only the single most egregious wrong in the world. Criticizing one country does necessitate immediately listing all criticisms of all countries in order to be balanced.
Got any complaints about this thread that actually make sense?
The WTO is a very scary organization, when you consider it can lawfully violate the will of the people.
If that's so, then every branch of US government is scary in the exact same way. Our lawfully elected (assuming they didn't get there via fraud) representatives ratified the WTO treaty. If Congress decides the US is no longer served by it, we can leave the WTO and then feel free to ignore everything they say. The problem is, we haven't left it, and yet we still feel free to ignore everything they say when it suits us. Clearly our leaders have not yet figured out what it is that has lost us so much respect in the world.
Money isn't inherently a symbol of value, the symbolisation of it in that way is something people add, and are encouraged to add by governments and banks. It's basic nature is that of a commodity;
I have a feeling you cannot be convinced, but I'll give it a shot. The nature of currency is its representation of value. Money is nothing else but that. What reason can you assign to valuing money other than as a means of purchasing goods or services? It has no intrinsic value - its only use is to exchange it for something else. This does not, however, imply that money is not subject to forces of supply and demand. And the fact that it is subject to those forces does not mean it is qualitatively in the same category as coffee or labor.
I have no idea what you're trying to demonstrate with the wine thing.
Virtual Value is very similar, but in the case of the QQ it is a currency that itself doesn't really exist, as there are no coins or bills that exist in reality.
I already replied to someone else along the same vein, but what the heck. US banks don't have to have physical money to back up 100% of their deposits. The Fed sets a fraction of reserves that they must hold. So this means there's more money in the US economy than paper and coins to represent it. So would you say some of that money exists (because it's backed by physical stuff) and some doesn't? If so, which dollars exist and which don't? If it all exists despite not being all backed by physical currency, how is that different from QQ?
As soon as the QQ bank issues a certificate that represents a certain amount of QQ and that certificate can buy real items (eg a soda or a burger), it moves from the realm of virtual to Fiat currency.
If a merchant is willing to accept QQ for a burger, and there is a means of exchanging them, there's nothing preventing that. What's so special about using a piece of paper to exchange value, rather than some other technique? So I guess QQ is fiat money, rather than virtual?
The distinction is that FIAT currency has standard values based upon real products/services.
Where do you get that? There are no standard values, only values set by markets (as someone else pointed out). In the same way, QQ has a value set by markets.
A virtual currency only exists in virtual worlds.
As I said earlier, much of our money only exists in virtual worlds. The difference between US dollars and QQ is not that one is made of paper. It's that one is issued and backed by the United States, and the other is issued and backed (if backed at all) by a video game company.
I think regulation is a much more fundamental difference between the two types of currency. Whether I have physical pieces of paper or just numbers in a bank account, they're still the same dollars. And if I were told I was no longer allowed to exchange my numbers for pieces of paper, it would make very little difference in my life. Especially if the office vending machine started taking ATM cards. The big difference between dollars and QQ or WoW gold (IMO) is that one is issued by a government, and the other by a video game company.
Did you read his whole comment, or stop there? If you think upselling customers on crap they don't need is good personal service, I hope I don't try to buy anything from you.:-)
I think any other country knows that for the US to destroy them with nuclear weapons would have extremely high costs for everyone, not least the US. It's not as though we would just nuke them and then leave their whole (surviving) population to fend for themselves in a radioactive wasteland. I would guess the cost of reconstruction after such an event, which we would be expected to primarily bear, would be at least comparable to the cost of invading and occupying. Then there's the problem of being known as the President (Congress, etc) that nuked another country out of existence. That and the inevitable domestic problems that would arise are costs as well. Pushing the big red button would be the beginning of the problems, not the end.
I knew somebody was going to do that. I'm not saying there is nothing I can do. I'm not even saying there's nothing I can do that won't cost too much or cause too much of a dent in my lifestyle. What I'm saying is the statement "you can halve your energy use without significantly affecting your standard of living" is overly broad. Some people can certainly do so, and others cannot, for various reasons. The most you can say is that very nearly everyone is capable of doing something to reduce their energy consumption without undue suffering.
I have taken some of those steps. Others I hadn't heard of, been meaning to do, or are too expensive, impractical, or time-consuming.
Yes, MAD worked - against the Soviet Union. We are facing a totally different situation now, one in which I think MAD will not work, or at best will have a much lower likelihood of success. What I mean is, the most likely perpetrators of an attack on us with WMDs are not susceptible to MAD. The weapons we are designing now are not for space travel or asteroid defense, they are for nuclear deterrence. But I can't figure out who we're going to deter with them.
Because we have nukes? Not to mention the largest navy and air force, and one of the largest armies?
That may work. But either way, I think we should get rid of all of ours. The point of them is to deter nuclear attack, which depends on the other side (whoever the heck that is these days) both 1) believing that you will use them and 2) caring. Terrorist organizations certainly don't care if we use our nukes. The chances of taking out Al Qaeda with nuclear weapons are not even worth considering. So that leaves other governments. During the cold war, the USSR certainly believed we would use them, and they were right. Now? I don't know. If North Korea managed to launch a nuke at us, would we really launch a nuclear counterattack? Maybe we would, but I would think there is some doubt. Which makes deterrence less effective. If Iran nuked Israel, would we nuke Iran? I have no doubt Israel would, but I'm talking about the US stockpile. Would the leaders of Iran be too bothered by the whole region going up in a big nuclear mushroom cloud? Maybe not. It just seems to me the whole reason to have these horrible things is vanishing.
I already have one. It's normally set at 68 during the day, and 64 at night. Since my appliances are about nine years old, they shouldn't break anytime soon. In fact, I expect to move before they break.
I'm not talking about the bunker busters, I'm talking about brand-new strategic nuclear weapons to replace the old ones. A design hasn't been chosen yet, so it's in the very early stages. A Google search should bring some info if you ignore the Iran results.
There is also a life extension program, this is needed because as you reduce your total stockpile, due to warhead aging you have to rebuild some of those to keep the reduced stockpile effective.
As I said before (not to you), it's the bold part I don't like. We should not have nuclear weapons.
By building modern reliable nuclear weapons, we can eliminate the redundancy and just maintain X nukes.
I'm fully aware of the purpose of the program. It's the bolded part of your reply I have a problem with. We cannot be taken seriously as an anti-proliferation advocate when we're actively preserving our own nuclear capabilities. Our hypocrisy becomes obvious. We're clearly not against nuclear weapons, we're just against other people having nuclear weapons. Why should anybody pay attention to us when we ask them to stop making nukes?
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For a while - perhaps even a long while. But if this really takes off, and all new construction uses this technology, and a lot of existing structures are retrofitted, the power companies are going to see their market shrink drastically. Who do they sell all this power to when half the buildings in their market are putting power back into the grid, and half of the rest are power neutral? Presumably they'll then push for legislation to prop up their obsolete business model.
Yes, human greed will kick in - ie market forces. I don't know how you can say cost has nothing to do with it, because if you reduce the time that solar panels take to pay for themselves from (let's say) 15 years to 9 months (if this is both 1/10 the cost and works better on cloudy days) it's quite obvious that more people will buy them. I also don't know who this "they" is that will keep money out of our pockets. Barring patents, there will be competition in this market (and even if there are patents they'll expire). If company A can convert your roof to solar power for $X, and Company B can do it for $X/10, guess how much business Company A is going to get? "They" don't get to decide what the market price for the product is, the market does that. And if production costs drop by a factor of 10, that cannot help but affect the consumer price unless it's a monopoly market.
lol, not bad! It's from End of File, from the album Algorhythms by MC++ and the Empty Set. I say good guess because that track says it's "featuring Logic the Android and Vitamin Z".
It's an interesting idea, though. Seal the whole system - no vacuum, just seal it. And it doesn't even have to be a perfect seal, just close enough. Then have return ducts connected to the train tunnel/tube at both ends, with the same total air capacity as the tunnel itself. The air the train pushes in front of it would get pushed into the ducts at the other end of the tunnel, travel back to the starting end and back into the tunnel behind the train. You would have some frictional losses, but it seems like it would be a lot more efficient than just constantly pushing all that air out of the way, and cheaper than a vacuum tunnel because there's no vacuum to maintain and the train doesn't have to be airtight. I assume the reason this hasn't been done is that it's far cheaper to add a 25,000 hp motor than to build a sealed train tube.
But if I write a ten-page paper criticizing the US, and don't mention any other countries, then all that means is I'm not talking about any other countries in that paper. Just because I say something about something doesn't mean I then have to say everything about everything at the same time. Maybe I criticize other countries in other papers. Maybe you could just read my paper and evaluate it based on its own merits. It's a serious logical fallacy to claim that if I don't criticize everything that is bad, then my criticism of one thing that is bad is invalid. That doesn't even address the issue of expecting everyone to know everything about everything, rather than just allowing people to express viewpoints abouts subjects they do know something about.
Criticizing a US action does not preclude criticizing any other country. Criticizing the US does not indicate endorsement of any other country or its actions. Criticizing the US does not imply that it is worse than all other countries. It is not necessary to restrict criticism to only the single most egregious wrong in the world. Criticizing one country does necessitate immediately listing all criticisms of all countries in order to be balanced.
Got any complaints about this thread that actually make sense?
How is that not about keeping money from leaving the country? They want the gambling revenue inside the US, not outside of it.
I have no idea what you're trying to demonstrate with the wine thing.
I think regulation is a much more fundamental difference between the two types of currency. Whether I have physical pieces of paper or just numbers in a bank account, they're still the same dollars. And if I were told I was no longer allowed to exchange my numbers for pieces of paper, it would make very little difference in my life. Especially if the office vending machine started taking ATM cards. The big difference between dollars and QQ or WoW gold (IMO) is that one is issued by a government, and the other by a video game company.
Did you read his whole comment, or stop there? If you think upselling customers on crap they don't need is good personal service, I hope I don't try to buy anything from you. :-)
I think any other country knows that for the US to destroy them with nuclear weapons would have extremely high costs for everyone, not least the US. It's not as though we would just nuke them and then leave their whole (surviving) population to fend for themselves in a radioactive wasteland. I would guess the cost of reconstruction after such an event, which we would be expected to primarily bear, would be at least comparable to the cost of invading and occupying. Then there's the problem of being known as the President (Congress, etc) that nuked another country out of existence. That and the inevitable domestic problems that would arise are costs as well. Pushing the big red button would be the beginning of the problems, not the end.
I knew somebody was going to do that. I'm not saying there is nothing I can do. I'm not even saying there's nothing I can do that won't cost too much or cause too much of a dent in my lifestyle. What I'm saying is the statement "you can halve your energy use without significantly affecting your standard of living" is overly broad. Some people can certainly do so, and others cannot, for various reasons. The most you can say is that very nearly everyone is capable of doing something to reduce their energy consumption without undue suffering.
I have taken some of those steps. Others I hadn't heard of, been meaning to do, or are too expensive, impractical, or time-consuming.
Yes, MAD worked - against the Soviet Union. We are facing a totally different situation now, one in which I think MAD will not work, or at best will have a much lower likelihood of success. What I mean is, the most likely perpetrators of an attack on us with WMDs are not susceptible to MAD. The weapons we are designing now are not for space travel or asteroid defense, they are for nuclear deterrence. But I can't figure out who we're going to deter with them.
I already have one. It's normally set at 68 during the day, and 64 at night. Since my appliances are about nine years old, they shouldn't break anytime soon. In fact, I expect to move before they break.