They go WAY out of their way to protect wall street and the casino gambling industry and the offshoring industry. When have you EVER heard of an emergency need trillions of dollars no questions asked do it right now or else deal like they got? Where is all their capitalist free market rules where if you screw up, you go bankrupt, smarter people take over whatever assets you have, at a real fair true market price? It was strongarm *extortion*.
We got "protectionism" for wall street, with their socialized risk but private profits model, this non stop continual exploitation and ripoffs of main street to make the multi millionaires into billionaires while our trade deficits soar, while little guy bankruptcies continue, while evictions continue, while entire commuinities get wiped out when their manufacturing core base gets offshored, so that a few "investors" can squeeze even more short term profits out. Then when it is destroyed, They get bailed out with further golden parachute bonuses for all their "good work", and go get annointed to some other company to do the same thing, lather, rinse, repeat.
They just don't want to call it protectionism, but if it walks like a duck....
And look at china and their policies, how is that anything *but* national protectionism, where they are partners with those traitors on wall street who are ripping off the rest of the nation? And yes, I said *traitors*. They aren't just normal thieves and scumbags, they are traitors. Their employees have infested and infected government to make sure they get everything their way, they run the fed, the treasury, the sec, all of it, the most obvious and blatant revolving door "jobs" policy ever, the largest encouraged and tolerated and officially approved "conflict of interest" ever thought up.
I don't consider "protectionism" to be a bad word, it is *exactly* what I want government to do, that's is the contract we are supposed to have, to be MY government, protect me and my neighbors, else, what is the point of even having a government? The only thing they do now is make sure the top wealthiest 1% international globalists stay that way, no matter what else happens to everyone else. It's a globalist corporate kleptocracy hiding behind a very thin and transparent facade of "elected representational government" with the two completely corrupt major parties constantly selling their votes for cheap, to keep them fatcats happy. Blatantly obvious, everything from the top **AA stooges to the casino banksters to the international weapons industry to big pharma. FDA, revolving door back to big pharma, old fart retired political career military officers, revolving door to the military industrial blood profits establishment, USDA, revolving door to the terminator seed and spray everything toxic known to man dudes, and etc, you can go up and down and sideways of the list of this "necessary government" and see all the ripoffs occurring.
Just freakin blatant
They are bound and determined to wipeout the middle class here and turn the US into a two class masters/owners and serfs/renters/peons/economic always in debt for life to "them" feudalistic type society, something I call "technofeudalism". The old two class medieval model now with new and shiny better tech, including a more advanced command and surveillance and control police state apparatus, now being pushed on everyone due to "security" and "terrorism" boogieman stuff, their excuse that they go out of their way to create to "prove" these measures are needed, just like this last mind controlled zombie patsy airplane bomber. Eyewitness accounts, a handler got him on the plane, another one was filming the scene, another one got caught by low level security at the detroit airport..all of that has now poofed away down the regular rathole they always use and they are in denial and their controlled tame propaganda press is going along with it. Nuts, seen this before, their standard crap, Hegelian dialectic at work.
The best tried and true design with wheels for traveling, plus be able to pull or push yourself out if stuck, without getting out of the cab or needing outside assistance, plus do all sorts of useful work, is the backhoe with front end loader and levelers.
I bet if Nasa contracted some radio shack RC toy company, told them to build a super little backhoe design, it would work really well on martian terrain, and come in cheap. You can roll or "walk" with one of them.
I do like that idea of the convertible folding wheels though, go from all rolling to all insect type walking. That "bigdog" pack robot walks pretty good. This is one of the dang coolest machines ever built:
When it comes to not getting stuck in the first place though, over moderate terrain, like you see in most of the mars pics..tracks. I think using wheels there where they knew it was really dusty was a mistake.
Major obstacles terrain, lotsa boulders and so on to go over and around, something like that bigdog bot. I watched some linemen who had to get a heavy cable, seems it was a phone cable but don't remember now, through really rough steep mountainous terrain up in Vermont. They used a huge Belgian draft horse. Had to snake around trees and over rocks and all sorts of nasty stuff, no way with any machinery. That was a super point A to B "machine", that horse took off with that cable attached to a giant spool on the truck and just walked away with it like nuthin' and pulled it out, like half a mile or something.
The telcos* consider it a loss because they are fixated on next quarter's profits. they have never suffered a loss, going all the way back to when they got mandated to provide a step up from having to go to the local telegraph office. Never. They have bitched about it, but never a loss. Hundreds of billions in profits is more like it. Major global big league bucks. They still bitch though.
Investing in your base infrastructure yields profit a little farther down the road, and also helps the "general" economy as well, increasing the disposable income all your potential customers might be wanting to spend on your products.
Short range low brow thinking verus long range with a bit more skull sweat applied, choose *one*.
Look what our highway system did for commerce and the economy in general terms, everyone came out a winner. It was the main economic driver of the twentieth century in the US once all is said and done. Being able to move people and goods from any point A to any point B easily and cheaply *worked*. Granted, it brought more problems, that we are addressing now, but just like the clipper ships then the railroads increased trade, so did the good quality and widespread highway and automobile/truck system. It unlocked our geographical and human potential better than anything else.
We need a much better digital highway system. They don't want to do it, because it won't show immediate short term megaprofits. Wicked short sighted. Their idea of innovation is locking phones down and selling you *ringtones*.
These are not economic mastermind moves. This is short bus, wearing a helmet all the time action.
For example, they and the cable companies nailed the low hanging fruit, but refused to expand coverage past that point of the heaviest and densest population areas. As such, totally new competition came in and they missed all of that market for twenty years now, from wireless satellite TV service, and now somewhat more satellite internet. You look around, that's 50-100$ a month, that you can see most anyplace in the nation represented by dishes on millions of suburban and rural roofs, going to companies that *ain't them* because they refused to run some dang wires on poles that are already there, back when it was much cheaper to do so!
They are trying to make up for it now with cellphone coverage, but are still shooting themselves in the foot with restricted phones, etc, and not building their core business-supply a big fat pipe, and keep making it better-and bitching about stupid things like google taking money from them. Which is really a wtf? stance when you realize both google and the regular end users of google pay their bandwith as it is.
Lastly..they already DID get paid, 200 BILLION dollars in fees taken from everyone on their phone bill in the 90s, plus other goodies to roll out true high speed infrastructure all over, and failed to do so. Criminally in my view, as in RICO, fraud, theft by conversion, etc. As in some telco CEx whatevers should be doing hard time over this right now. This link has been provided many times over the years now on slashdot, but here it is again, for folks like you who continually spout the telco party line falsehood:
This has *never* been debunked. It HAS been ignored by the main stream controlled propaganda press, and also by "government".
As for selling ag at a loss, we did for over a full year during the big fuel and feed price run ups of '08, the vast bulk of which was perpetrated and profited by the big gambling investment casinos and speculator market, the non productive legalized urban NYC/DC axis of maximum profits skimming and theft crew, the ones who have their own employees running the Fed and the Treasury and who bribe off all the pols all the time. Drinking buddies with the telco execs no doubt..
If there was ever a big rural strike, to get straight wh
While I agree with your assessment that US schools and society should foster interest and acceptance of more hard science and engineering, and seek to reduce the attractiveness of careers like being the next basketball or hip hop star, using the Japanese method of schooling does have its own set of drawbacks.
I think something in the middle between the US methods and the Japanese methods of childhood education might hit the sweet spot a little better.
If that means some short attention span theater stockholder doesn't make enough this quarter..who cares...
I think it is far more important, for the longer range view of humanity in general, that the emphasis is more placed on just being happy and having enough, rather than the great race to see who can accumulate the most electronic digits in some server some place, to be at the top of an unhappy and dysfunctional dystopian society, by being the most strict and ruthless and to use your word, "demanding".
I, for one, to follow the meme and to use an example that everyone here would understand, have absolutely no desire to be part of a society of either extreme (which unfortunately both extremes exist today and ARE being pushed heavily towards); either some zombied/brainwashed out Borg "you as an individual have no worth, and must conform and do exactly as you are programmed to do for the collective" type society, nor a "profits above everything else" type individual greed is king no rules and get out of the way or you are dead Ferengi type society.
Got no use for either, but sadly, those are roughly the two main political tracks on the planet now. Kinda sucks.
And how much of that stuff is dependent today on Chinese supply of components? And how much is stagnating in the west, and just being shifted to China? How much is "assembled here" as opposed to really "made here"? And what have the trends been? That's the main point and is related to the entire topic.
Here's one example from your list, Caterpillar, two articles that should to to show what I am talking about
And you can go back and look, or remember, Cat was one of the primary lobbyest forces to restrict imported steel tariffs. Using them as an example of "all made in merika!" is just false. They use a lot of foreign sourced, and are gradually shifting production eastward, just like every other manufacturing industry has been doing. Of course not all the way yet, but this is the trend, and thousands and thousands of abandoned factories in the US prove this.
When I was a kid, and the US was the largest creditor nation, we really *did* have a lot of "all made here" things, heck, most everything was. As manufacturing keeps getting outright offshored or has become dependent on imported components so all there is is the last stage assembly, we have gradually replaced produced wealth from the "vertical stack" manufacturing model we used to have with *debt*, national and private, and running trade deficits, and have been sneaking up on economic collapse. This economic situation has exactly paralleled the shift in manufacturing.
Manufacturing is the big kahuna on producing wealth. You stop doing it, you start to go downhill. You increase doing it, you prosper. The more that is vertically integrated within your own area, the more those currency units get spent and respent and respent where they improve the over all local economy. The more you ship them out, the more the local economy goes sour and the more in debt you go.
There is going to come up a point where the manufacturing nations like china will no longer be interested in IOUs and will only want to do business with such areas as provide them with real wealth, the raw resources and energythey need, for their products (a few billion people, a good market size), and that combined with their own internal markets will be *large enough* for them to just say "thanks, but don't really need ya anymore as customers old western nations, see ya!" to the nations that previously made stuff..like the US.
Now I know this doesn't matter to the top 1%, they are globalists and can just move, they don't care. The rest of the people though..
This is the deal, is this economy, the "official" numbers, a reflection of the good deal for wall street, their economy, or of main street? Which is more important, making sure the top 1% keep getting richer, or trying to maintain a better balance, especially within your own middle class?
What "4 to 5 times of" do western industrialized nations produce more of (limited to manufactured articles), and of those, how many "things" that are still produced in the west are in at least part dependent on Chinese manufactured components? Remember it takes all of the parts to make a "whole". "Assembled in western nation" is not the same for the economy as "totally manufactured in western nation". Or just "rebadged and sold in western nation with a corporate name that reflects a contract in a drawer in Delaware" is not the same as totally manufactured and sold in western nation.
And within that ratio, how much of a percentage of various national economies does that really represent? Example,. if western nation A produces 4-5 times as many automated shoe lace tiers, is that really something to brag on? Ok here's one that still really exists, big commercial airplanes, still mostly made in the west, this is a gimmee, (although china's domestic airplane production is rapidly advancing), but how much of a big new airliner is dependent on chinese parts? How about autos? How about high tech new medical equipment? Stuff like that.
Or are you including such things as **AA "copies" being worth such and such according to their figures, along with casino banking paper financial theoretical products like those wonderful collateralized debt obligation pieces of paper, all of those non product products, and just printed up pictures of dead political leaders being passed off as real products?
There's this rosy picture wall street and DC talking heads "economy" that includes debt being called an asset, the same one that needed trillions in emergency inflationary pictures of dead political leaders to "keep afloat" (same in Europe), then there is the real no BS economy, so which are you referring to?
Hey, better late than never. Good link and submission. Goes with what I feel is one of the primary causes of economic woes, that quarterly outlook...when that is as far as they ever look.
They may have been a one trick pony, but dayum, that one trick sure was fun and *interesting* at the time. Especially when you had the option of taking your..err.. "research" snapshots to the drugstore for developing..or having it develop in the *privacy* of your own home %^)
Yes, I am aware of that and no I don't think it is always done. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The industry has also been having a hard time with sub par counterfeit parts, something they don't like to mention out loud much. Then you have examples like the above mentioned F-22 flight crossing the international date line. These are top of the line "new" extremely expensive and what might *think* really looked at designs..yet that snafu still occurred. And you still see fleet groundings when new unexpected problems show up, unfortunately usually after a crash.
When they *really* want to and they really do the work, and the original design was over built really smart and strong, yep, they can keep planes flying and working a long time, past their original estimated service life, like the buffs, by doing continual upgrades. Like I said though, it is all ludicrously expensive. Ain't a single dang thing cheap and easy on airplanes, and this includes very limited production runs of new model avionics.
So, I will stand by my prediction that just like y2k there will be a lot of last minute upgrades done.
Speaking of which, although I am not an IT guy, I was made aware of the y2k date thing in *85* by a friend of mine, an ex IBM mainframe guy. When it hit 97 and 98 and it surfaced in the popular press, I was certainly amazed that it was still a problem....some shops were still coding with the date bug in, while others were just starting to think about maybe looking at it and doing some remediation. Private business and government did in fact mostly wait until near the last minute to do repairs. I know a ton of computer guys were telling me this back then, even my state's head IT honcho told me this, that even though they as the engineers knew a lot of stuff needed fixing, they didn't get permission/funding until the suits started getting harangued by their spouses and customers and shareholders and the press in general, asking how their y2k repairs were going. "Last minute" more or less repairs took place then, at a higher cost than what was needed (due to what you guys call the mythical man month), precisely because they waited so long to do it. As it was, most stuff got fixed just swell, but it certainly cost them a lot extra to do it by waiting.
The one really good thing to come out of the y2k "last minute" fix scene was a huge surge in just "fuck it, we'll just buy new equipment", which really resulted in a well needed boost to the computer industry as a whole, and a radical dropping of prices across the board for computer-stuff because of a lot more competition and economies of scale efficiencies.
Planes are *ludicrous* expensive. They get milked out to the max before they are replaced. I imagine there will be a lot of last minute expensive and complex avionics swaps near to 2038, just like a lot of code and so on got fixed real close to Y2K and not before, it had to wait to hit near panic mode first before the suits took it seriously.
Business, like government, tends to be stupidly reactive just as much as pro active, pretty much a good mixed bag there. Witness hurricane Katrina and adequate level levee building. Everyone knew the problem existed, yet they "couldn't afford" to fix it in advance of failure. So then it cost a lot of lives and ten times the cost.
I can't believe you really *believe* that. heheheheh
Here's a hint, all those rural folks WERE ALREADY OUT THERE far from the cities before there were even telephones. Government mandated universal service had nothing to do with people moving rural. Of course you can keep believing that was the reason.
As to subsidies, hell ya, let's end all of them! All for it! I agree! Total complete nothing eliminated free market! Let's have all private toll roads, and folks in the cities can also now go shopping around and pay full open market price for such things as pipeline delivered water, which is taken from the rural areas now, with no recompense to the actual owners, and given at chump change nearly fully subsidized prices to the urban areas. Yee hah let's do it! Let's have totally unregulated electricity markets, oooh, how about unregulated natural gas markets, and all these private corporations have to negotiate *individual* right of way transit fee contracts with all the rural landowners for those water pipelines, roads to carry coal or uranium, roads to carry food, natural gas pipelines, all of it. Backbones? Why yes, we'll negotiate with you to run your "backbones" across our properties for your broadband internet, same as we do for the water sellers and the natural gas sellers.
So, we are agreed, we do this and then see what shit REALLY costs, and who gets more "subsidies" and government help in order to enjoy their "lifestyle".
Nifty experiment, I can't wait, please urban folks, lobby as hard as you can, demand, march in demonstrations, flood the switchboards, fax, do flash mobs, all of the above, use your overwhelming Blue state and Blue urban area vote, end *all* subsidies, let's go all private, free market rules, for every-single-thing.
Demand to pay free market full competition price, demand to end all the "commons", because there is no "common good" now with all them pesky demanding hicks, why all them dad blamed rural folks is just sucking down all our monies! Wah! We support them, we subsidize all their life, it ain't fair, we shouldn't have to pay anything for them! How dare they want to live out there with all our lektricity we gives them and so on!
Oh man that would be sweet! Let's try it for say..a full year, see how that goes.
I'm serious, let's do it, like to see it happen once and for all so we can get this urban versus rural stuff sorted out better, to see what is really worth what, to see what the real free market, no government subsidy or coerced takings price is of things.
Everything, hold nothing back, all free market, you in the cities pay what the market will bear, no subsidy, no government intervention, no Public Utility Commissions, no municipal water, all of it, and we do exactly the same. End all subsidies and government takings. No more "eminent domain" and all aspects of private property go back to said owners of private property. You want access and rural stuff, you pay what is demanded from the private property owners, and that's it, no government intervention to keep your prices lower or give you unfettered access at greatly reduced rates. Just the free market. Wall Street free market rules, your glorious biggest city, the crown jewel or urban existence, the very bluest of the blue, the hippest and most modern, the home of all that it urban-holy, the epicenter of the anti-rural.
Oh, by the way...just in case you guys really do this..most likely we rural folks aren't going to be taking your printed up pieces of nonsense paper "money", we will want something really *worth* something. Time to start thinking about that.
So not sure exactly how you plan on paying for our stuff, if we even decide to sell it that is, but we'll just sit on it under free market urban rules until you come up with something better than your phony baloney "urban money" you create out of nothing. We want real stuff of worth from you for our real stuff, and little sheets of paper..sorry, but no...we got our own kindling, thanks anyway.
...as long as it is a fair trade, rural versus heavy urban. I'll take no broadband while living in the log cabin because it doesn't exist out in the sticks as long as the big cities, those folks living in a more "sensible" heavily packed high rise apartment means they get no food, because it doesn't exist there and has to be trucked in, which we will cut out then.
Fair enough? You keep your 50 meg down high speed connection, we keep the food, seems totally fair to me, no reason to push one product or the other one way or the other when it doesn't exist there, just let folks live with what they have locally and be done with it. No need for commie subsidized and shared roads, nor commie subsidized and shared wires on poles then, everyone is happy, no urbanite pays for anything from or for the rural areas, no rural folks pay for anything from or for the urban areas. Even steven, complete split there. You got yours, we got ours, no one pays for the other guy's life in any manner.
err..good luck man, hope you like those tasty electrons....
Some enterprising company could come out with the dual bulb traffic light, or even just replacement dual bulb modules. Most of the time it runs LED, whenever the weather gets icy snowy inclement it gets a signal from the traffic control overlords and switches to normal hot incandescent. I've seen flashlights like this already, so it can be done.
I have the privilege of being able to inspect a lot of cessnas (couple dozen or so) from fully complete up to date and functional to a hangar fulla parts, and every stage in between, including one crashed one where the bonehead decided to fly his groceries with him instead of buying them where he was going, and didn't estimate his weight correctly and didn't make it. He lived through it, but the plane is chunky style now spread out and he needed a lot of re-constructive surgery from what I hear. (old airport where I live, besides being a big farm, I maintain the grounds and fences and do the mowing, etc)
There has GOT to be a better way to build affordable airplanes. What that might be I don't know, but this old traditional way needs some serious rethinking. Those things are *ridiculous*, and absolutely no wonder why they are expensive and need a lot of reliability insurance, etc. They are made of one zillion tiny pieces of aluminum held together with 100 zillion rivets. Even the ones in good shape aren't capable of keeping their own doors shut if they aren't keylocked, I have to go around and reclose them all the time. I can't see how they keep from getting recalled, rube goldberg doesn't come close to what they are. It's no wonder they need massive inspections and certifications and insurance, etc. and cost so much.
I have no idea on the quality of other brands and makes, but if one were given to me I'd sell it pronto and look around some more.
Mopeds sold fairly well back in the 70s - 80s when we had the oil/fuel price hikes. After the prices dropped way down, they stopped selling as well. Today those cheap 50cc scooters with no pretense of pedaling are fairly common. Technically not a moped, but I see a lot of them, and I live in pickup/suv country so I know they must be way more common in the cities now.
I've had both kinds of "moped", the motor assist real bicycle (Aquabug/Tanaka/Sears) and the "you can sort of pedal it, too, but it is stupid" small motorcycle kind (Puch/Sears), and I think the assisted bicycle route was a better idea for this sort of transportation, way more of a true "hybrid" human-engine. The one I used to have was a front mounted (on about any bicycle at all, had mine on an older steel framed 10 speed) small engine that was easy to bump start on and off so you really could pedal most of the time and just bump it for like hill climbing or serious cargo hauling, etc. It was light weight enough so you could still hoist your bike on your shoulders and bring it inside upstairs say if you lived in an apartment and had no garage, etc. That was dang spiffy and helped with "moped retention security". Those things were great and got 200 MPG. That was a gas engine two stroke I believe around 22cc. I tried some electric assist versions back then as well (talking 70s again) but the battery tech just wasn't there to make them useful, they were neither fast enough nor had any sort of credible range, they used like sealed lead acid battery tech, like the original bagphones had or like you see in home UPS systems still. Just not enough oomph there.
I think a true three way multi-hybrid (fuel engine/electric assist to the drive train/batteries/still a normal bicycle you could pedal) could be built today and come in even more efficient because of lighter weight materials, etc., and even make use of regen braking, or perhaps even hydraulic/pneumatic regen tech for take off boost using in-the-frame compressed air storage.
I bet a lot of folks said similar to that when it went from live theater to silent film, then from visual film plus audio, the "talkies". And so on. Whether it is good or bad, meh, it just becomes different.
A real movie with no effects at all would be shot entirely live, like videoing a theater presentation. Shoot, just use a static camera that covers the whole stage, that would be "more pure".
I haven't seen Avatar yet, holding out for the feelies with sensurround smellovision.
Deep cycle lead acid can last a lot longer than that with shallow cycling, intelligent charging and the use of a desulphator. Mine are over ten years old now, work fine. They've lasted that long because I never beat on them.
Telco exchanges had/have big aquarium looking lead acid backup batteries that lasted twenty years then tons got sold off cheap to enthusiasts where they were put into service for the earlier adopter off grid solar guys. This is *old* mother earth news and home power magazine info, and the battery subject has been looked at in depth by literally hundreds of people, and year after decade lead acid still rules for the cash involved for large applications, until you get to utility scale, where it is pumped water storage and turbines, etc.
Lead acid is still the king for stationary storage purposes when it comes to amp hours/dollars, for home use. I seriously doubt that lithium ion will come close for a long time, I mean, look at what replacement cellphone and laptop batteries cost.
And how many just car starter batteries do we see at whatever*mart or the auto parts stores that use lithium tech yet? Yep, about zilch, people don't want to spend a thousand bucks for a starter battery. There are still some advances in lead acid out there, the most common you see for cars is the spiral system from Optima http://www.optimabatteries.com/home.php , and the Firefly company http://www.fireflyenergy.com/ is allegedly going to start having more fleet sales "soon" with their lead "sponge" tech, and perhaps eventually normal retail.
The cheapest locally sourced way to get lead acid today that I have found is to look around at forklift stores and get an electric traction battery pack @ 12 to 48 VDC (probably other voltages as well, haven't looked for awhile now).
They are *heavy* and come in steel cases with lifting points and welded bus bars.
They suggest using an industrial "pick and place" machine to assemble the tiny cells onto a substrate for making the panel, at a cost of 1/10th a penny a "glitter", and you can also add a concentrator above each cell
So I don't know with government work like this, do they license patents, is it automatically open (it should be) or what? Seems like a nice breakthrough, but it still just adds to the list of other incredible breakthroughs that have lead to not much at all for reducing watts per dollar at the retail level with solar PV in general. If some one company gets it and it is locked up in a for profit patent for years and years, they will just reduce their own costs then charge the normal global prices we have seen for the past long time, around ~ five bucks per watt. None of these dozens of breakthroughs we have seen are going to be all that useful until that situation changes.
Energy independence is a national security and economic recovery issue, (along with all this climate change jazz they keep going on about) so maybe this tech will be freely licensed to drop prices and actually get this stuff to the end consumer in mass quantities.
This equilibrium is what they hard sell to the populations, as the justification for their policies, but no way do they ever want to achieve that.
The globalist fatcats will *always* make sure there is a great imbalance in wages (a lack of equilibrium) so they can take advantage of wage arbitrage, plus get paid to destroy any approaching equilibrium, then get paid again to start to reconstruct it..but they will never let it actually get there. It isn't nearly as profitable for them after that point of equilibrium, nor would they be able to maintain so much political power, which is even more of a lust for the uber rich than just the mere accumulation of currency units. The dig on that ultimate control over other humans, that is theior primary goal and lust, that is why so many political and economic top people appear to be so sociopathic at times..it is because *they are*.
They have done this construction/deconstruction, keep the people divided and conquered repeatedly over the years, and that is by the use of war, external or internal and frequently both, by destroying the infrastructure and a lot of the population in other areas that are approaching parity with them (and in their own areas frequently as a blow-by). In many instances, at the tippy top of capitalism, (WW2 is a prime example) they fund all the warring sides *at the same time*, destroying a lot of what had been built up, which therefore needs another infusion of the people's capital (their labor and most of their wealth, overtly or through other political controls) to them so they can rebuild..what they engineered to destroy in the first place. They get *rewarded* for being high level criminals. Over and over again.
It's pretty easy to wipe out a productive middle class during a war phase and reduce them back down to serf/peon class, to be exploitable in the normal kingly manner, your own people or those folks over yonder, it doesn't matter to that class of exploiters.
It is very wasteful and downright painful for the global populations as a whole that they keep on doing this, that we can't achieve a fair and balanced natural economic equilibrium, but it serves the purpose quite well (for them) by maintaining these top 1% crooks and predators in their positions at all times.
The aristocracy was never abolished in practice, just in a lot of cases they dropped that public "royal blood" stuff and started wearing more "normal" attire so they would not appear to be as such. Just a camouflage maneuver and so they can continue to fake out their herds of slaves by telling them they now live in some sort of "elected by the people" government, when it has always been these same fatcats calling the shots and doing the most in the way of profiting from other's work.
They are *wolves* and will always act in a predatory manner. They may even war on some other of their fellow wolves now and then, but the wolves as a class are always united in that they need to keep the wolves and prey animals/herds separate and cowed.
Here's an obvious example of wolf class versus their prey animals, so they can keep feeding on them and make it look like they aren't. All this war on carbon and new taxes and permits and credits and treaties and schemes and laws and so on. Well, the serfs and peons (and I include any alleged "middle class" that exists anyplace, they are still the property of the wolves, they are temporarily allowed a few more toys in exchange for perpetual lifetime indebtedness and subservience to the wolves) will be paying for that, because there ain't a singe fatcat wolf predator out there who is going to drive less, fly less, eat less, stop living in multiple mansions, etc.
All the ones "negotiating" all this nonsense...whatever they negotiate is NOT going to apply to them or impact their lifestyles in any practical measurable manner. The wolves will remain wolves and their sheep will be eaten just as much and be shorn a little closer to the hide, that's all.
Your state obviously doesn't have any problem paying cash money for the closed source software you use, the precedent is set, so you *could* pay at least some directly to the open source/free developers for customization, bug fixing and consultation services, for the stuff you get from them.
Just because it is offered free as in beer, doesn't mean you have to be a complete cheapskate about it, you'd still be saving a lot over closed source, always must pay the big bucks software, so I can't see your bosses beef here. You don't donate, you *contract for services*. In your entire budget, they couldn't come up with a grand or two to offer for those contracted services, directly to the devs? I mean, hire them, real part time. Figure out how much using the FOSS stuff is saving you, a ballpark, and even 5 or 10% there would be a lot more than zero to those devs, plus get their stuff working a lot better for you (and everyone else).
Cash money is a spiffy motivator it is
With that side..side issue..there are a thousand linux distros out there, but I have yet to see the one I want. I haven't seen a really *fair* one yet.
I would like a once a year to every three years release distro, with a smallish but reasonable amount of apps, (as in, please not 15 media players, like pick one and stick to it, etc) and pay for that sucker, so it *works*. Cash money is a good inducement for bug fixes over yet more eyecandy, for human non nerd readable actually helpful documentation over cryptic man pages first written in punch card days and barely updated since then. And etc. Take it professional in other words.
Not a huge sum, but above free like it is now and below what microsoft and apple charge, call it maybe 50 bucks per release, and no way every six months, that just leads to perpetual betaware, stuff breaks as much as it gets enhanced every time that way. The distro maintainers/releasers would do profit sharing with the devs for the included apps, say half and half.
This gets rid of the lame "micropayments" problem, so that people could help support that which they really like and use.
Slashdot Mirror
They go WAY out of their way to protect wall street and the casino gambling industry and the offshoring industry. When have you EVER heard of an emergency need trillions of dollars no questions asked do it right now or else deal like they got? Where is all their capitalist free market rules where if you screw up, you go bankrupt, smarter people take over whatever assets you have, at a real fair true market price? It was strongarm *extortion*.
We got "protectionism" for wall street, with their socialized risk but private profits model, this non stop continual exploitation and ripoffs of main street to make the multi millionaires into billionaires while our trade deficits soar, while little guy bankruptcies continue, while evictions continue, while entire commuinities get wiped out when their manufacturing core base gets offshored, so that a few "investors" can squeeze even more short term profits out. Then when it is destroyed, They get bailed out with further golden parachute bonuses for all their "good work", and go get annointed to some other company to do the same thing, lather, rinse, repeat.
They just don't want to call it protectionism, but if it walks like a duck....
And look at china and their policies, how is that anything *but* national protectionism, where they are partners with those traitors on wall street who are ripping off the rest of the nation? And yes, I said *traitors*. They aren't just normal thieves and scumbags, they are traitors. Their employees have infested and infected government to make sure they get everything their way, they run the fed, the treasury, the sec, all of it, the most obvious and blatant revolving door "jobs" policy ever, the largest encouraged and tolerated and officially approved "conflict of interest" ever thought up.
I don't consider "protectionism" to be a bad word, it is *exactly* what I want government to do, that's is the contract we are supposed to have, to be MY government, protect me and my neighbors, else, what is the point of even having a government? The only thing they do now is make sure the top wealthiest 1% international globalists stay that way, no matter what else happens to everyone else. It's a globalist corporate kleptocracy hiding behind a very thin and transparent facade of "elected representational government" with the two completely corrupt major parties constantly selling their votes for cheap, to keep them fatcats happy. Blatantly obvious, everything from the top **AA stooges to the casino banksters to the international weapons industry to big pharma. FDA, revolving door back to big pharma, old fart retired political career military officers, revolving door to the military industrial blood profits establishment, USDA, revolving door to the terminator seed and spray everything toxic known to man dudes, and etc, you can go up and down and sideways of the list of this "necessary government" and see all the ripoffs occurring.
Just freakin blatant
They are bound and determined to wipeout the middle class here and turn the US into a two class masters/owners and serfs/renters/peons/economic always in debt for life to "them" feudalistic type society, something I call "technofeudalism". The old two class medieval model now with new and shiny better tech, including a more advanced command and surveillance and control police state apparatus, now being pushed on everyone due to "security" and "terrorism" boogieman stuff, their excuse that they go out of their way to create to "prove" these measures are needed, just like this last mind controlled zombie patsy airplane bomber. Eyewitness accounts, a handler got him on the plane, another one was filming the scene, another one got caught by low level security at the detroit airport..all of that has now poofed away down the regular rathole they always use and they are in denial and their controlled tame propaganda press is going along with it. Nuts, seen this before, their standard crap, Hegelian dialectic at work.
This is why those skunks just love china, th
The best tried and true design with wheels for traveling, plus be able to pull or push yourself out if stuck, without getting out of the cab or needing outside assistance, plus do all sorts of useful work, is the backhoe with front end loader and levelers.
I bet if Nasa contracted some radio shack RC toy company, told them to build a super little backhoe design, it would work really well on martian terrain, and come in cheap. You can roll or "walk" with one of them.
I do like that idea of the convertible folding wheels though, go from all rolling to all insect type walking. That "bigdog" pack robot walks pretty good. This is one of the dang coolest machines ever built:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI#
When it comes to not getting stuck in the first place though, over moderate terrain, like you see in most of the mars pics..tracks. I think using wheels there where they knew it was really dusty was a mistake.
Major obstacles terrain, lotsa boulders and so on to go over and around, something like that bigdog bot. I watched some linemen who had to get a heavy cable, seems it was a phone cable but don't remember now, through really rough steep mountainous terrain up in Vermont. They used a huge Belgian draft horse. Had to snake around trees and over rocks and all sorts of nasty stuff, no way with any machinery. That was a super point A to B "machine", that horse took off with that cable attached to a giant spool on the truck and just walked away with it like nuthin' and pulled it out, like half a mile or something.
The telcos* consider it a loss because they are fixated on next quarter's profits. they have never suffered a loss, going all the way back to when they got mandated to provide a step up from having to go to the local telegraph office. Never. They have bitched about it, but never a loss. Hundreds of billions in profits is more like it. Major global big league bucks. They still bitch though.
Investing in your base infrastructure yields profit a little farther down the road, and also helps the "general" economy as well, increasing the disposable income all your potential customers might be wanting to spend on your products.
Short range low brow thinking verus long range with a bit more skull sweat applied, choose *one*.
Look what our highway system did for commerce and the economy in general terms, everyone came out a winner. It was the main economic driver of the twentieth century in the US once all is said and done. Being able to move people and goods from any point A to any point B easily and cheaply *worked*. Granted, it brought more problems, that we are addressing now, but just like the clipper ships then the railroads increased trade, so did the good quality and widespread highway and automobile/truck system. It unlocked our geographical and human potential better than anything else.
We need a much better digital highway system. They don't want to do it, because it won't show immediate short term megaprofits. Wicked short sighted. Their idea of innovation is locking phones down and selling you *ringtones*.
These are not economic mastermind moves. This is short bus, wearing a helmet all the time action.
For example, they and the cable companies nailed the low hanging fruit, but refused to expand coverage past that point of the heaviest and densest population areas. As such, totally new competition came in and they missed all of that market for twenty years now, from wireless satellite TV service, and now somewhat more satellite internet. You look around, that's 50-100$ a month, that you can see most anyplace in the nation represented by dishes on millions of suburban and rural roofs, going to companies that *ain't them* because they refused to run some dang wires on poles that are already there, back when it was much cheaper to do so!
They are trying to make up for it now with cellphone coverage, but are still shooting themselves in the foot with restricted phones, etc, and not building their core business-supply a big fat pipe, and keep making it better-and bitching about stupid things like google taking money from them. Which is really a wtf? stance when you realize both google and the regular end users of google pay their bandwith as it is.
Lastly..they already DID get paid, 200 BILLION dollars in fees taken from everyone on their phone bill in the 90s, plus other goodies to roll out true high speed infrastructure all over, and failed to do so. Criminally in my view, as in RICO, fraud, theft by conversion, etc. As in some telco CEx whatevers should be doing hard time over this right now. This link has been provided many times over the years now on slashdot, but here it is again, for folks like you who continually spout the telco party line falsehood:
http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
This has *never* been debunked. It HAS been ignored by the main stream controlled propaganda press, and also by "government".
As for selling ag at a loss, we did for over a full year during the big fuel and feed price run ups of '08, the vast bulk of which was perpetrated and profited by the big gambling investment casinos and speculator market, the non productive legalized urban NYC/DC axis of maximum profits skimming and theft crew, the ones who have their own employees running the Fed and the Treasury and who bribe off all the pols all the time. Drinking buddies with the telco execs no doubt..
If there was ever a big rural strike, to get straight wh
While I agree with your assessment that US schools and society should foster interest and acceptance of more hard science and engineering, and seek to reduce the attractiveness of careers like being the next basketball or hip hop star, using the Japanese method of schooling does have its own set of drawbacks.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/childrens-depression-and-suicide-a-worsening-problem
I think something in the middle between the US methods and the Japanese methods of childhood education might hit the sweet spot a little better.
If that means some short attention span theater stockholder doesn't make enough this quarter..who cares...
I think it is far more important, for the longer range view of humanity in general, that the emphasis is more placed on just being happy and having enough, rather than the great race to see who can accumulate the most electronic digits in some server some place, to be at the top of an unhappy and dysfunctional dystopian society, by being the most strict and ruthless and to use your word, "demanding".
I, for one, to follow the meme and to use an example that everyone here would understand, have absolutely no desire to be part of a society of either extreme (which unfortunately both extremes exist today and ARE being pushed heavily towards); either some zombied/brainwashed out Borg "you as an individual have no worth, and must conform and do exactly as you are programmed to do for the collective" type society, nor a "profits above everything else" type individual greed is king no rules and get out of the way or you are dead Ferengi type society.
Got no use for either, but sadly, those are roughly the two main political tracks on the planet now. Kinda sucks.
And how much of that stuff is dependent today on Chinese supply of components? And how much is stagnating in the west, and just being shifted to China? How much is "assembled here" as opposed to really "made here"? And what have the trends been? That's the main point and is related to the entire topic.
Here's one example from your list, Caterpillar, two articles that should to to show what I am talking about
http://www.chinasourcingnews.com/2008/08/29/12503-caterpiller-expands-its-global-business-model-in-china/
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/CG24504.htm
And you can go back and look, or remember, Cat was one of the primary lobbyest forces to restrict imported steel tariffs. Using them as an example of "all made in merika!" is just false. They use a lot of foreign sourced, and are gradually shifting production eastward, just like every other manufacturing industry has been doing. Of course not all the way yet, but this is the trend, and thousands and thousands of abandoned factories in the US prove this.
When I was a kid, and the US was the largest creditor nation, we really *did* have a lot of "all made here" things, heck, most everything was. As manufacturing keeps getting outright offshored or has become dependent on imported components so all there is is the last stage assembly, we have gradually replaced produced wealth from the "vertical stack" manufacturing model we used to have with *debt*, national and private, and running trade deficits, and have been sneaking up on economic collapse. This economic situation has exactly paralleled the shift in manufacturing.
Manufacturing is the big kahuna on producing wealth. You stop doing it, you start to go downhill. You increase doing it, you prosper. The more that is vertically integrated within your own area, the more those currency units get spent and respent and respent where they improve the over all local economy. The more you ship them out, the more the local economy goes sour and the more in debt you go.
There is going to come up a point where the manufacturing nations like china will no longer be interested in IOUs and will only want to do business with such areas as provide them with real wealth, the raw resources and energythey need, for their products (a few billion people, a good market size), and that combined with their own internal markets will be *large enough* for them to just say "thanks, but don't really need ya anymore as customers old western nations, see ya!" to the nations that previously made stuff..like the US.
Now I know this doesn't matter to the top 1%, they are globalists and can just move, they don't care. The rest of the people though..
This is the deal, is this economy, the "official" numbers, a reflection of the good deal for wall street, their economy, or of main street? Which is more important, making sure the top 1% keep getting richer, or trying to maintain a better balance, especially within your own middle class?
What "4 to 5 times of" do western industrialized nations produce more of (limited to manufactured articles), and of those, how many "things" that are still produced in the west are in at least part dependent on Chinese manufactured components? Remember it takes all of the parts to make a "whole". "Assembled in western nation" is not the same for the economy as "totally manufactured in western nation". Or just "rebadged and sold in western nation with a corporate name that reflects a contract in a drawer in Delaware" is not the same as totally manufactured and sold in western nation.
And within that ratio, how much of a percentage of various national economies does that really represent? Example,. if western nation A produces 4-5 times as many automated shoe lace tiers, is that really something to brag on? Ok here's one that still really exists, big commercial airplanes, still mostly made in the west, this is a gimmee, (although china's domestic airplane production is rapidly advancing), but how much of a big new airliner is dependent on chinese parts? How about autos? How about high tech new medical equipment? Stuff like that.
Or are you including such things as **AA "copies" being worth such and such according to their figures, along with casino banking paper financial theoretical products like those wonderful collateralized debt obligation pieces of paper, all of those non product products, and just printed up pictures of dead political leaders being passed off as real products?
There's this rosy picture wall street and DC talking heads "economy" that includes debt being called an asset, the same one that needed trillions in emergency inflationary pictures of dead political leaders to "keep afloat" (same in Europe), then there is the real no BS economy, so which are you referring to?
Hey, better late than never. Good link and submission. Goes with what I feel is one of the primary causes of economic woes, that quarterly outlook...when that is as far as they ever look.
They may have been a one trick pony, but dayum, that one trick sure was fun and *interesting* at the time. Especially when you had the option of taking your ..err.. "research" snapshots to the drugstore for developing..or having it develop in the *privacy* of your own home %^)
Yes, I am aware of that and no I don't think it is always done. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The industry has also been having a hard time with sub par counterfeit parts, something they don't like to mention out loud much. Then you have examples like the above mentioned F-22 flight crossing the international date line. These are top of the line "new" extremely expensive and what might *think* really looked at designs..yet that snafu still occurred. And you still see fleet groundings when new unexpected problems show up, unfortunately usually after a crash.
When they *really* want to and they really do the work, and the original design was over built really smart and strong, yep, they can keep planes flying and working a long time, past their original estimated service life, like the buffs, by doing continual upgrades. Like I said though, it is all ludicrously expensive. Ain't a single dang thing cheap and easy on airplanes, and this includes very limited production runs of new model avionics.
So, I will stand by my prediction that just like y2k there will be a lot of last minute upgrades done.
Speaking of which, although I am not an IT guy, I was made aware of the y2k date thing in *85* by a friend of mine, an ex IBM mainframe guy. When it hit 97 and 98 and it surfaced in the popular press, I was certainly amazed that it was still a problem....some shops were still coding with the date bug in, while others were just starting to think about maybe looking at it and doing some remediation. Private business and government did in fact mostly wait until near the last minute to do repairs. I know a ton of computer guys were telling me this back then, even my state's head IT honcho told me this, that even though they as the engineers knew a lot of stuff needed fixing, they didn't get permission/funding until the suits started getting harangued by their spouses and customers and shareholders and the press in general, asking how their y2k repairs were going. "Last minute" more or less repairs took place then, at a higher cost than what was needed (due to what you guys call the mythical man month), precisely because they waited so long to do it. As it was, most stuff got fixed just swell, but it certainly cost them a lot extra to do it by waiting.
The one really good thing to come out of the y2k "last minute" fix scene was a huge surge in just "fuck it, we'll just buy new equipment", which really resulted in a well needed boost to the computer industry as a whole, and a radical dropping of prices across the board for computer-stuff because of a lot more competition and economies of scale efficiencies.
Planes are *ludicrous* expensive. They get milked out to the max before they are replaced. I imagine there will be a lot of last minute expensive and complex avionics swaps near to 2038, just like a lot of code and so on got fixed real close to Y2K and not before, it had to wait to hit near panic mode first before the suits took it seriously.
Business, like government, tends to be stupidly reactive just as much as pro active, pretty much a good mixed bag there. Witness hurricane Katrina and adequate level levee building. Everyone knew the problem existed, yet they "couldn't afford" to fix it in advance of failure. So then it cost a lot of lives and ten times the cost.
Let's dance!
At least you are consistent! HAHAHAH1
I can't believe you really *believe* that. heheheheh
Here's a hint, all those rural folks WERE ALREADY OUT THERE far from the cities before there were even telephones. Government mandated universal service had nothing to do with people moving rural. Of course you can keep believing that was the reason.
As to subsidies, hell ya, let's end all of them! All for it! I agree! Total complete nothing eliminated free market! Let's have all private toll roads, and folks in the cities can also now go shopping around and pay full open market price for such things as pipeline delivered water, which is taken from the rural areas now, with no recompense to the actual owners, and given at chump change nearly fully subsidized prices to the urban areas. Yee hah let's do it! Let's have totally unregulated electricity markets, oooh, how about unregulated natural gas markets, and all these private corporations have to negotiate *individual* right of way transit fee contracts with all the rural landowners for those water pipelines, roads to carry coal or uranium, roads to carry food, natural gas pipelines, all of it. Backbones? Why yes, we'll negotiate with you to run your "backbones" across our properties for your broadband internet, same as we do for the water sellers and the natural gas sellers.
So, we are agreed, we do this and then see what shit REALLY costs, and who gets more "subsidies" and government help in order to enjoy their "lifestyle".
Nifty experiment, I can't wait, please urban folks, lobby as hard as you can, demand, march in demonstrations, flood the switchboards, fax, do flash mobs, all of the above, use your overwhelming Blue state and Blue urban area vote, end *all* subsidies, let's go all private, free market rules, for every-single-thing.
Demand to pay free market full competition price, demand to end all the "commons", because there is no "common good" now with all them pesky demanding hicks, why all them dad blamed rural folks is just sucking down all our monies! Wah! We support them, we subsidize all their life, it ain't fair, we shouldn't have to pay anything for them! How dare they want to live out there with all our lektricity we gives them and so on!
Oh man that would be sweet! Let's try it for say..a full year, see how that goes.
I'm serious, let's do it, like to see it happen once and for all so we can get this urban versus rural stuff sorted out better, to see what is really worth what, to see what the real free market, no government subsidy or coerced takings price is of things.
Everything, hold nothing back, all free market, you in the cities pay what the market will bear, no subsidy, no government intervention, no Public Utility Commissions, no municipal water, all of it, and we do exactly the same. End all subsidies and government takings. No more "eminent domain" and all aspects of private property go back to said owners of private property. You want access and rural stuff, you pay what is demanded from the private property owners, and that's it, no government intervention to keep your prices lower or give you unfettered access at greatly reduced rates. Just the free market. Wall Street free market rules, your glorious biggest city, the crown jewel or urban existence, the very bluest of the blue, the hippest and most modern, the home of all that it urban-holy, the epicenter of the anti-rural.
Oh, by the way...just in case you guys really do this..most likely we rural folks aren't going to be taking your printed up pieces of nonsense paper "money", we will want something really *worth* something. Time to start thinking about that.
So not sure exactly how you plan on paying for our stuff, if we even decide to sell it that is, but we'll just sit on it under free market urban rules until you come up with something better than your phony baloney "urban money" you create out of nothing. We want real stuff of worth from you for our real stuff, and little sheets of paper..sorry, but no...we got our own kindling, thanks anyway.
Tasty electrons!
...as long as it is a fair trade, rural versus heavy urban. I'll take no broadband while living in the log cabin because it doesn't exist out in the sticks as long as the big cities, those folks living in a more "sensible" heavily packed high rise apartment means they get no food, because it doesn't exist there and has to be trucked in, which we will cut out then.
Fair enough? You keep your 50 meg down high speed connection, we keep the food, seems totally fair to me, no reason to push one product or the other one way or the other when it doesn't exist there, just let folks live with what they have locally and be done with it. No need for commie subsidized and shared roads, nor commie subsidized and shared wires on poles then, everyone is happy, no urbanite pays for anything from or for the rural areas, no rural folks pay for anything from or for the urban areas. Even steven, complete split there. You got yours, we got ours, no one pays for the other guy's life in any manner.
err..good luck man, hope you like those tasty electrons....
It came late in the year but I would nominate this linked article as the best of slashdot, 2009.
Some enterprising company could come out with the dual bulb traffic light, or even just replacement dual bulb modules. Most of the time it runs LED, whenever the weather gets icy snowy inclement it gets a signal from the traffic control overlords and switches to normal hot incandescent. I've seen flashlights like this already, so it can be done.
I have the privilege of being able to inspect a lot of cessnas (couple dozen or so) from fully complete up to date and functional to a hangar fulla parts, and every stage in between, including one crashed one where the bonehead decided to fly his groceries with him instead of buying them where he was going, and didn't estimate his weight correctly and didn't make it. He lived through it, but the plane is chunky style now spread out and he needed a lot of re-constructive surgery from what I hear. (old airport where I live, besides being a big farm, I maintain the grounds and fences and do the mowing, etc)
There has GOT to be a better way to build affordable airplanes. What that might be I don't know, but this old traditional way needs some serious rethinking. Those things are *ridiculous*, and absolutely no wonder why they are expensive and need a lot of reliability insurance, etc. They are made of one zillion tiny pieces of aluminum held together with 100 zillion rivets. Even the ones in good shape aren't capable of keeping their own doors shut if they aren't keylocked, I have to go around and reclose them all the time. I can't see how they keep from getting recalled, rube goldberg doesn't come close to what they are. It's no wonder they need massive inspections and certifications and insurance, etc. and cost so much.
I have no idea on the quality of other brands and makes, but if one were given to me I'd sell it pronto and look around some more.
Mopeds sold fairly well back in the 70s - 80s when we had the oil/fuel price hikes. After the prices dropped way down, they stopped selling as well. Today those cheap 50cc scooters with no pretense of pedaling are fairly common. Technically not a moped, but I see a lot of them, and I live in pickup/suv country so I know they must be way more common in the cities now.
I've had both kinds of "moped", the motor assist real bicycle (Aquabug/Tanaka/Sears) and the "you can sort of pedal it, too, but it is stupid" small motorcycle kind (Puch/Sears), and I think the assisted bicycle route was a better idea for this sort of transportation, way more of a true "hybrid" human-engine. The one I used to have was a front mounted (on about any bicycle at all, had mine on an older steel framed 10 speed) small engine that was easy to bump start on and off so you really could pedal most of the time and just bump it for like hill climbing or serious cargo hauling, etc. It was light weight enough so you could still hoist your bike on your shoulders and bring it inside upstairs say if you lived in an apartment and had no garage, etc. That was dang spiffy and helped with "moped retention security". Those things were great and got 200 MPG. That was a gas engine two stroke I believe around 22cc. I tried some electric assist versions back then as well (talking 70s again) but the battery tech just wasn't there to make them useful, they were neither fast enough nor had any sort of credible range, they used like sealed lead acid battery tech, like the original bagphones had or like you see in home UPS systems still. Just not enough oomph there.
I think a true three way multi-hybrid (fuel engine/electric assist to the drive train/batteries/still a normal bicycle you could pedal) could be built today and come in even more efficient because of lighter weight materials, etc., and even make use of regen braking, or perhaps even hydraulic/pneumatic regen tech for take off boost using in-the-frame compressed air storage.
....the commercial works. It makes you want one...of each....
I bet a lot of folks said similar to that when it went from live theater to silent film, then from visual film plus audio, the "talkies". And so on. Whether it is good or bad, meh, it just becomes different.
A real movie with no effects at all would be shot entirely live, like videoing a theater presentation. Shoot, just use a static camera that covers the whole stage, that would be "more pure".
I haven't seen Avatar yet, holding out for the feelies with sensurround smellovision.
Deep cycle lead acid can last a lot longer than that with shallow cycling, intelligent charging and the use of a desulphator. Mine are over ten years old now, work fine. They've lasted that long because I never beat on them.
Telco exchanges had/have big aquarium looking lead acid backup batteries that lasted twenty years then tons got sold off cheap to enthusiasts where they were put into service for the earlier adopter off grid solar guys. This is *old* mother earth news and home power magazine info, and the battery subject has been looked at in depth by literally hundreds of people, and year after decade lead acid still rules for the cash involved for large applications, until you get to utility scale, where it is pumped water storage and turbines, etc.
Lead acid is still the king for stationary storage purposes when it comes to amp hours/dollars, for home use. I seriously doubt that lithium ion will come close for a long time, I mean, look at what replacement cellphone and laptop batteries cost.
And how many just car starter batteries do we see at whatever*mart or the auto parts stores that use lithium tech yet? Yep, about zilch, people don't want to spend a thousand bucks for a starter battery. There are still some advances in lead acid out there, the most common you see for cars is the spiral system from Optima http://www.optimabatteries.com/home.php , and the Firefly company http://www.fireflyenergy.com/ is allegedly going to start having more fleet sales "soon" with their lead "sponge" tech, and perhaps eventually normal retail.
The cheapest locally sourced way to get lead acid today that I have found is to look around at forklift stores and get an electric traction battery pack @ 12 to 48 VDC (probably other voltages as well, haven't looked for awhile now).
They are *heavy* and come in steel cases with lifting points and welded bus bars.
Here is the real sandia labs press release with more detail
http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/glitter-sized-solar-photovoltaics-produce-competitive-results/
They suggest using an industrial "pick and place" machine to assemble the tiny cells onto a substrate for making the panel, at a cost of 1/10th a penny a "glitter", and you can also add a concentrator above each cell
So I don't know with government work like this, do they license patents, is it automatically open (it should be) or what? Seems like a nice breakthrough, but it still just adds to the list of other incredible breakthroughs that have lead to not much at all for reducing watts per dollar at the retail level with solar PV in general. If some one company gets it and it is locked up in a for profit patent for years and years, they will just reduce their own costs then charge the normal global prices we have seen for the past long time, around ~ five bucks per watt. None of these dozens of breakthroughs we have seen are going to be all that useful until that situation changes.
Energy independence is a national security and economic recovery issue, (along with all this climate change jazz they keep going on about) so maybe this tech will be freely licensed to drop prices and actually get this stuff to the end consumer in mass quantities.
Those defortunate wooshers must have disirregarded all previal sarcatically full replitations yoused hear. I agreed, be-shortened bus haul of flaim.
This equilibrium is what they hard sell to the populations, as the justification for their policies, but no way do they ever want to achieve that.
The globalist fatcats will *always* make sure there is a great imbalance in wages (a lack of equilibrium) so they can take advantage of wage arbitrage, plus get paid to destroy any approaching equilibrium, then get paid again to start to reconstruct it..but they will never let it actually get there. It isn't nearly as profitable for them after that point of equilibrium, nor would they be able to maintain so much political power, which is even more of a lust for the uber rich than just the mere accumulation of currency units. The dig on that ultimate control over other humans, that is theior primary goal and lust, that is why so many political and economic top people appear to be so sociopathic at times..it is because *they are*.
They have done this construction/deconstruction, keep the people divided and conquered repeatedly over the years, and that is by the use of war, external or internal and frequently both, by destroying the infrastructure and a lot of the population in other areas that are approaching parity with them (and in their own areas frequently as a blow-by). In many instances, at the tippy top of capitalism, (WW2 is a prime example) they fund all the warring sides *at the same time*, destroying a lot of what had been built up, which therefore needs another infusion of the people's capital (their labor and most of their wealth, overtly or through other political controls) to them so they can rebuild..what they engineered to destroy in the first place. They get *rewarded* for being high level criminals. Over and over again.
It's pretty easy to wipe out a productive middle class during a war phase and reduce them back down to serf/peon class, to be exploitable in the normal kingly manner, your own people or those folks over yonder, it doesn't matter to that class of exploiters.
It is very wasteful and downright painful for the global populations as a whole that they keep on doing this, that we can't achieve a fair and balanced natural economic equilibrium, but it serves the purpose quite well (for them) by maintaining these top 1% crooks and predators in their positions at all times.
The aristocracy was never abolished in practice, just in a lot of cases they dropped that public "royal blood" stuff and started wearing more "normal" attire so they would not appear to be as such. Just a camouflage maneuver and so they can continue to fake out their herds of slaves by telling them they now live in some sort of "elected by the people" government, when it has always been these same fatcats calling the shots and doing the most in the way of profiting from other's work.
They are *wolves* and will always act in a predatory manner. They may even war on some other of their fellow wolves now and then, but the wolves as a class are always united in that they need to keep the wolves and prey animals/herds separate and cowed.
Here's an obvious example of wolf class versus their prey animals, so they can keep feeding on them and make it look like they aren't. All this war on carbon and new taxes and permits and credits and treaties and schemes and laws and so on. Well, the serfs and peons (and I include any alleged "middle class" that exists anyplace, they are still the property of the wolves, they are temporarily allowed a few more toys in exchange for perpetual lifetime indebtedness and subservience to the wolves) will be paying for that, because there ain't a singe fatcat wolf predator out there who is going to drive less, fly less, eat less, stop living in multiple mansions, etc.
All the ones "negotiating" all this nonsense...whatever they negotiate is NOT going to apply to them or impact their lifestyles in any practical measurable manner. The wolves will remain wolves and their sheep will be eaten just as much and be shorn a little closer to the hide, that's all.
Your state obviously doesn't have any problem paying cash money for the closed source software you use, the precedent is set, so you *could* pay at least some directly to the open source/free developers for customization, bug fixing and consultation services, for the stuff you get from them.
Just because it is offered free as in beer, doesn't mean you have to be a complete cheapskate about it, you'd still be saving a lot over closed source, always must pay the big bucks software, so I can't see your bosses beef here. You don't donate, you *contract for services*. In your entire budget, they couldn't come up with a grand or two to offer for those contracted services, directly to the devs? I mean, hire them, real part time. Figure out how much using the FOSS stuff is saving you, a ballpark, and even 5 or 10% there would be a lot more than zero to those devs, plus get their stuff working a lot better for you (and everyone else).
Cash money is a spiffy motivator it is
With that side..side issue..there are a thousand linux distros out there, but I have yet to see the one I want. I haven't seen a really *fair* one yet.
I would like a once a year to every three years release distro, with a smallish but reasonable amount of apps, (as in, please not 15 media players, like pick one and stick to it, etc) and pay for that sucker, so it *works*. Cash money is a good inducement for bug fixes over yet more eyecandy, for human non nerd readable actually helpful documentation over cryptic man pages first written in punch card days and barely updated since then. And etc. Take it professional in other words.
Not a huge sum, but above free like it is now and below what microsoft and apple charge, call it maybe 50 bucks per release, and no way every six months, that just leads to perpetual betaware, stuff breaks as much as it gets enhanced every time that way. The distro maintainers/releasers would do profit sharing with the devs for the included apps, say half and half.
This gets rid of the lame "micropayments" problem, so that people could help support that which they really like and use.