..just thinking that if the local reported speed went from 40 to 300 then zero...might be a useful indicator of a twister there.;)
Weather data reporting appears to be skewed a lot anyway, for instance we had those reports of temp sensors sitting in extreme hot spots in cities, etc. Not sure how much more data could be inputted to the collection points before it just gets to be too much noise..but seems like they could handle some more now given the advances in cheap computing power.
It hit double your "most optimistic" figure in 2008 and is growing fast, with *plenty* of places to stick in new towers. They haven't hardly started yet, let alone hit some "peak production" level. The US now surpasses Germany in total installed capacity and there are plans to keep increasing this for the foreseeable future. It has been the fastest growing segment in the electricity production market for some years now. A recent article: http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/131110/
Ya, I was still thinking about that after I posted, that they simply must already have a turbine tach installed so they would know windspeed. And for sure they have power and must report various things to their control panel admins for monitoring. Seems not much of a stretch at all to have this info forwarded to the weather and radar folks. Probably useful data to have anyway, long term precise wind speeds and other sorts of weather information.
Put simple wind speed sensors (and other weather reporting gizmos) at each big wind tower, have them automatically update that info upstream so it can be cross referenced. If the remote radar says tornado in the direction of a tower, but the tower only reports a 40 mile an hour wind...you can nail the false positives easier. Turn a liability into thousands of new weather reporting assets.
As to GM and the UAW, been there, done that, quit, couldn't stand either side of that work equation and predicted they would eventually fail, and have been proven correct, and I saw it coming clearly years in advance. They technically did fail and by all that is capitalist holy they should have just gone to a sheriff's auction. I had just any number of arrogant 'brothers' tell me back in the day that "no one would ever buy those little japanese cars" when I said it would be soon and they would take the lunch money because of better mileage and better quality, and was forced to read bigshot pundit after expert in the wallstreet shilled "news" claim that GM was the heart and soul of the US and so on, here for eternity, "bluechip" etc. Utter pie in the sky rubbish and showed a severe lack of long term critical thinking skills and a complete absence of business analysis.
Just watching them create then destroy the EV1 when the folks leasing them BEGGED to be allowed to buy them outright, and have the suits override the engineers and fixate on short term goals instead of thinking decades in the future...meh...unuins going on strike for anything at all EXCEPT a demand to make the best quality and least expensive autos possible, to stay competititve...double meh..dinosaurs, arrogant dinosaurs, and "volt" isn't going to "save" GM.
Geez, they are taking bailout loaned money and "investing" in china, headlines today, screw the tax payers even more.
Well, two points: Alternate energy and electric vehicles could do it, either create or resurrect jobs. Tons more out there as well, how about really opening up the market for healthcare better instead of keeping it so restricted? Gee, it might actually get cheaper and better without adding in more layers of busywork bureaucracy.
As to basic investment, hell ya! GM and Chrysler shouldn't have been bailed out, they should have had all their factories go on the auction block and got sold for cheap on the dollar like any other bankrupt business, then perhaps some fresh new blood who could think past one quarter's profits could have come in and actually built 21st century autos in the now newly owned factories. Then those stock investors and swaggering union folks and legions of white collar managers would have received a humble pie lesson on keeping things real, as in price, quality and function. They kept kept this fantasy illusion going of trying to maintain like this was still the 60s or something, that was just crazy nuts.
We could also force a lot of manufacturing back into the US if we insisted that all this earth climate changes stuff they are pushing with environmental controls was forced on china and india as well as the US (and europe) through the WTO or something. I mean, WTF? If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. This atmosphere we all share knows no political boundaries, so it's stupid to pretend it does and let some areas skate on environmental regs while other areas got them up the wazoo with more coming.
Allowing near half the world's populations (just those two nations) to ignore air quality standards and then western businessmen can slide over there, take money they skimmed or got handed by the corrupt Fed and treasury to promote investment in manufacturing there is the main reason the US lost so many jobs in the first place. No safety regs, no pollution regs, no nuthin but cheapest possible labor to the point they don't care how many of their employees over there get wasted on the job or get sick or what happens to the environment. It was not only allowed to happen, it was encouraged with *tax breaks* for the longest time. More crazy crap.
That sort of stuff is what went wrong with jobs in the US, national scale "corporate raiding" and until those issues are addressed by reining in wallstreet and by insisting on a global even level playing field for this so called "free trade" which is anything but and "concern for the environment" which is nonsense lip service, we'll continue to lose jobs.
And speaking of those alleged businessmen, all those big casino banks should have been allowed to go bankrupt as well, it makes NO SENSE whatsoever to bail out convoluted derivatives gambling. Nuts. They should have gone on the bankruptcy auction block as well as the dinosaur car companies and we go back to where investing is really investing, not just playing quant derived paper financial pseudo products bingo. Thenthe "market' would have sorted out what all those stupid contracts are really worth, and here's a hint, they ain't worth no quadrillion dollars like they claim. Force them SOBs to eat their own capitalist dogfood, sort that crap out. There's trillions of taxpayer bucks and counting now that went to those leeches that could have gone to this basic research, instead of trying to keep the ultra stupid and destructive old fatcat dinosaurs alive so they can keep stomping around the planet smashing things and gobbling everything up in sight to get even bigger, fatter and more stupid.
Shoot, that's more than enough, just a fraction of that, to have offered totally free higher edcucation to our young folks, instead of dunning them for tens of thousands of bucks so they enter the workforce already broke and scared to even think about finding a job.
Support the repackaged derviatives gambling "industry", or fund the education for 100,000 new doctors and 500,000
I didn't necessarily say government and taxes had to do it, I just said wouldn't it be interesting and perhaps very useful tech to develop, to take advantage of a concentrated source of raw materials, albeit it was placed there by mankind. And that spinoffs from developing this tech might be useful elsewhere. And that was about it. And we both agree more useful jobs are needed, I am against busywork do-nothing but look semi alive and active mc jobs, or most instances of the forced redistribution of wealth based on state coercive force.
On your exact tax question analogy, I can't answer that in the affirmative for either of your theoretical either/or "answers", because I can make a fairly logical and convincing argument that income taxes are no longer necessary under the currency creation and fiscal governing system we have, and would definitely not be necessary at all, corporate or private, with a few simple-important but actually simple-reforms to the laws. So neither would be (IMO) the correct answer.
If you want my views on economics, both macro and personal, to better answer you in more depth, I write extensively on them under "the almighty buck" in my journal and you are welcome to join in any conversations there that still have active replying available. A lot of my stuff is also under other people's journals in the discussions.
I am pro real wealth creation (I am a farmer, so I practice what I preach) and for the producers of wealth, and pretty much against most governmental busywork bureaucracy and the corrupt casino bank wealth skimming against the wealth producers that goes on, which has really morphed from the old traditional view of investing into just high stakes phony paper financial products gambling which should be airgapped from the real economy before they do even more damage. (that's the cliff notes ultra short summary version of my views).
That's fairly easy to see on the mainstream new world order bilderberger news. Government press official being quoted..odds on to be lying, that would be anyone in the executive branch. It gets accepted as gospel and repuked back at you by the newsies, no matter how completely improbable or out to lunch sounding.
In the legislative branch, elected reps and so on, odds are..clueless and just drunkenly mumbling stuff they have no idea about whatsoever based on the lies some biz schmuck or lobbist/PR flack told them or their cheaply bribed off "aides" to say and that they sorta half remember. They just stick you with that stuff.
News reporter interviewing or quoting the big big biz schmuck..odds on lying, even if lie is suspected, reporter with blowdried hair just flashes the big smiles and repukes it back, sometimes with asinine "analysis" later one by a roundtable of previous and now much older blow dried and lacquered (and plastered) bilderberger re-pukers. They are now distinguished drunk old re-pukers.
All the odds of lying go up drastically if the subject has to do with a lot of money (the more the money amount is, the more are the odds of the principles involved lying about it somehow, current example: any dang thing whatsoever from the Fed or Treasury or casino bank) or some event or another which would prove to be an embarrassment or illegality committed.
THOSE latter two are pretty much pure lies all the time, the easiest to see. As in, when is the last time anyone official just slap admitted to guilt or major screwup right off the bat? Never, ever, ever, nevah happens, goes from the simple small town cop being a sadist beast and the chief defending his actions automatically, while everyone can stare at the bloody videotape, all the way to lying about profound events with huge international repercussions like the "tonkin gulf attack" which never happened, or the "huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and saddam and osama both did 911 together honest we swear it they even bunk together on piles of yellowcake and the robot drone planes with biowarfare agents are warmed up ready to blast amerika in 45 minutes" type lies and so on.
The older I get the more cynical I get about this stuff because eventually the truth comes out about this or that big deal from the past, even if it takes decades, and you then realize how *much* you've been lied to in the past by the press, the controlled press I mean, the ones just that repuke the lies fed to them.
My default these days is..they are lying. Much safer to assume that than not.
Deliberate lies, or lies of omission, either or both mixed together. What they leave out that is important and DON'T report about is usually the very best stuff, the most important to know about. Or they get sorta sneaky about it, pump up some inane story about some drug addled celebrity hijinks (Britney pregnant with Michael's frozen sperm!! Wow! Some team scored some number that is a bigger number than this other team!! And that's a record!! that sorta drivel..), run with that for days, and stick the important stuff (if they cover it at all) with barely ten words to cover it buried in the newscast with a ten second low key soundbite or published on page 17, section D in the paper.
Modern news from all the big boys has about as much truth to it as big time rasslin'. It's controlled, orchestrated and scripted, designed to do anything BUT inform. At the best, cutting them tons of slack which they don't deserve, especially the public airwave hijack folks, it's designed to entertain and sell you little purple pills and soap flakes and over priced ego big dick shiny cars, at the worst, and what I think is the major reason it even continues in the form it is today, is it is deliberate propaganda to keep the serfs faked out, and to keep them occupied with each other and pointing fingers at each other for someone to blame for all their mostly self inflicted wo
Can you access NPR, ABC, (MS)NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox et al overseas for free? Or are they blocked? I really don't know, I just assumed they were available. Fox is the only one really talking about going to an all paid version online (which will be epic fail), haven't heard of any of the others saying that, and Fox hasn't started charging yet.
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say in cleaning up fresh water sources better, or to be part of waste water treatment plants. We already have filtration systems for this or that, but to develop something that could work on that sort of scale could very well be some important tech down the road. And like was pointed out, being plastic, this could help develop interest in larger scale energy plants that could use the stuff, including th..terraforming isn't the word, aquaforming? Huge floating energy conversion barges. Or just concentrate it back down so it could be used for..manufactured plastic goods. I don't see the need for plastics going away anytime soon, nor the need for more forms of energy. And we need *work* for millions and millions more people planet wide every year, something useful.
A lot of times I think we humans might be better off just with a 180 attitude adjustment, instead of always looking at things as problems, if we just looked at them as opportunities, it might make solutions appear easier and work better. The old saw of how to look at things, the glass half full or half empty deal. Turn the "Oh, noes!!" into the "Hot Damn!"s.
Never said the failures increased, just that they happen, and there have been some really large recalls of lithium based batteries and reports of people having pocket sized gadgets catch fire in their pockets and so forth. And no, a larger battery wouldn't necessarily be less safe, as they could engineer in better separation of the cells and protection circuitry and a stouter battery covering pack to them. If you want to look at a quick review, here is a simple search of slashdot here via google on battery recall.
I'm not saying batteries haven't gotten better, they have obviously, and I did say I liked new battery tech to clarify that again, just that they seem to not be keeping pace as well as the other miniaturization efforts. And as a separate issue, if they stuck to larger capacity batteries, they could have longer run times. That would of course necessitate larger/thicker/heavier batteries, which would *still* be lighter than the older NiMH styled or earlier lithium. And as one guy elsewhere in the thread who works doing repairs pointed out, a lot of these things have separate warranty provisions for the battery packs and chargers that are less inclusive than the actual gadget. There's a reason for that.
I said from just a few years ago, not the early 90s brickphone era. Bleeding edge small electronics are cool, less size and less power requirements for what they can do, which is "more" now, but bleeding edge battery tech today is not cool, it gets hot, and might asplode or catch fire. It just hasn't kept up adequately. We've had plenty of battery problems and recall stories from the last few years as proof of that. Until such a time as they can match the two techs on safety and reliability and function, they should be a scosh conservative on dropping the battery sizes and err on the side of caution. If that means the form factor has to stay slightly larger than possible, with a little more weight, in order to more insure better safety and to give device runtime longevity, it should be so. Your first gen is "barely tolerable", but a recent gen with a better battery would still be better than that first example, smaller and lighter, but more safe and better runtime. which means it would still be tolerable-enough.
How about the traditional car analogy? If the tires on your street screamer 150 mph Belchfire from 5 years ago got wonky at 90, and blew off the rims in shreds, would it make sense to have a newer Belchfire that could go 180, with even thinner and more questionable tires? Tires are *rather important* on performance cars, batteries are *rather important* with performance portable devices. No sense being cheap or stupid on either one.
That's all I am saying, these manufacturers of gadgets need to match that battery tech, because lithium batteries are inherently a lot more prone to failure with some pretty bad results if one little thing goes wrong with them. I really like new battery tech, I just don't want them to go off too extreme to the point of compromising safety and reliability, when there's no need, when devices now are already pretty small. They can back off that for a few years and let the two techs catch up with other better. If it takes fines and investigations and recalls and lost liability lawsuits and a lot of bad press and maybe some bureaucratic rulings, that's what it might take. Perhaps better battery standards might be in order here, then all the various vendors would be forced to operate from the same level so no one would have an unfair advantage.
We can't always leave these decisions to marketing, we long ago adopted safety standards for any number of products and obviously these safety standards need to be applied more vigorously to portable lithium battery powered devices, and having a better runtime would be a double plus good for most folks anyway.
Sometimes it is just a better idea to let the engineers have the final say on things.
Modern fashion with gadgets is ultra thin and light, which is dangerous when it comes to lithium batteries. They are *delicate* and dangerous. This marketing decision leads to being not as good from an engineering standpoint (on being safe I mean) in designing the batteries, they are too subject to being smashed/bent, or have design and manufacturing screwups, and that leads to simple failure or catastrophic failure.
This utter fixation on having the smallest most powerful batteries combined with their basic chemistry of heating and catching fire and having runaway reactions will inevitably lead to a lot of failures when you are making millions of units.
And look at all this constant kvetching about battery life on laptops and so on. Geez, what a freekin non problem theoretically. If people could be content to carry the same weight they did just a few years ago, as if their girly man muscles could even handle the strain, oh the horrors, they could have *bigger and longer lasting and safer batteries*, probably cheaper as well, but every generation of new gadgets they insist on shaving some ounces and inches off. Well, you can do that to excess it appears. Battery tech has not quite kept up with other electronics miniaturization tech here, so you get problems. They can make the batteries smaller plus more powerful at the same time, but obviously it raises the risk factor. They are pushing it too close to the exploding edge.
Small, powerful, safe, pick two
Form is not necessarily your friend always over function. Perhaps if they take a few tens of million$ in cost in recalls and lawsuits this lesson of marketing versus engineering quality standards will sink in better. And any company that did that could turn it around in the market, use their new designed safer and more powerful batteries, albeit larger and heavier, as a marketing edge over just smaller and lighter. There could be some rather humorous ads along these lines showing the victim of the teeniest gadget walking around on fire and all charred all the time, just so he can stupidly brag how cool his new.5 ounce and 1/64th inch thick iXploder is...
30 years for a driveway with cars on and constantly exposed to the weather? Doesn't seem all that terrible, and maybe got the owner to have a driveway, as opposed to a dirt rut. And I've done the same, both removal and new construction with a lot of variations on concrete/cement/block/brticks.stone. You see it all and then some. If it works well enough for the people there, i think that is good enough as long as it is disclosed and not an outright danger to the next guy there or the neighbors.
Now, a slab made with springs and frames with a rug or linoleum or tiles over it inside, and just people walking on it? meh...it'll last longer than the roof will most likely as long as the house isn't sitting on an artesian spring or something like that. And like I said, this was cheap construction by constantly broke folks and way back in the day when codes and such like didn't exist as much as today. It works well enough. It isn't perfect, but old springs and steel bedframes work a lot better than *nothing*. Heck, look what the palestinians are doing now for construction, back to their ancient roots, sun dried mud bricks reinforced with straw, stacked and plastered with more mud. They can't get cement or rebar, but are building decent enough homes for themselves.
Back in ye olden back to the land commune days, when we were building cabins and houses on the *extreme cheap*, we tried to scrounge as much building materials as possible, so we used old bed springs and steel bed frames from the dump for "rebar".
DANG I miss vent windows, don't you? And did you ever own and drive any vehicles with the over the windshield vent you could open up? I had a few, back in the day, sabre toothed badgers for pets, etc. Didn't need AC as long as you were moving a few miles an hour or better. I really liked those.
Right now, none of our vehicles has a functional AC, and it would cost more than they are worth to get them fixed, so meh. I completely tore all that crap out of my datsun and was thinking of sticking a nice generator in there instead, with an electric clutch...maybe anyway...plenty of room and some mount points and hangs right in place where you could slap a belt on it...
No vent windows is not the same as rolling down an all the way across the door window, you just don't get the same breeze from it. I bet there's a ton of younger guys here who have never even been in a vehicle with vent windows.
Corporations and wall street profits, etc. That's one of the reasons they just went to china, labor arbitrage, no pesky unions to be forced to pay a living wage, no environmental regs, easier to snag IP and get away with it, all that stuff. And that's why I was against kyoto and son of kyoto, they have no provisions to force that on china et al, and we aren't even considering any sort of protectionism with their imports. They can pollute all they want to, the air floats everywhere so all our environmental regs are diluted with crud, and wall street gets to continually profit from it. Heck, for a long time they got tax breaks for moving offshore!
I think some regs are good, others seem to be screwy, like the proposed cap and trade. That one looks pure profit motivated to me, skimming profit going to the non producers of wealth.
He is putting his *reputation* online, his name for whatever that has weight, for this, not that he did the studies, but like most engineers and scientists is willing to look at the evidence and by puting his name next to something say he has read it and it seems to be important and on topic enough that others should too. That's all. How is he less credible than al gore, lawyer and businessman?
And for that matter, people can be both generalists and specialists can't they? To be interested enough in both science research and engineering application that they like to look at stuff outside their exact professional expertise? I mean, thios is what we do here at/., aside from razzin' each other....
My opinion on this whole deal is we have *both* man made pollution that can impact climate and weather and other stuff (for another example, just constructing huge cities affects local weather patterns and over a long enough period of time, the climate I would imagine, the ripple effect), plus natural cycles. I don't see it as all one or the other.
I would say I am in favor of all forms of alternative energy for a variety of reasons, and would like to see the phase out of coal and petroleum fuels. But not "cap and trade" which is just another of the never ending wall street scam wealth skimming efforts. They never quit, always need to have their grubby little mitts in the middle of everyone else's plate.
And that's me speaking as a generalist with tech and science and geopolitical and macro economical enthusiasm and interest, but as a layman only, and I don't have the same name cred as rutan would of course, but I'll throw my little contribution in there. Mostly because as an outdoorsman and farmer I have always watched the seasons. Yep, somethings up. The air and water is dirty. The trees are just *wrong*. Clean air and water is a good idea. and if it helps to keep our long range climate to remain more moderate, so much the better.
If governments want to do social engineering, they can do it easily with tax credits, the anti-tax. Nothing else is needed to nudge this or that industry in any other direction they want or deem good for their peoples. The carrot method. Punitive taxes though (the stick method) just go right down the food chain and rip the consumer off and transfer huge sums upstream into fewer hands.
That's the part of this whole debate that really has me worried how much of it has been skewed on purpose, just too much money involved, and power. I am also worried about the EPA calling co2 a toxic pollutant..uhhh,this is a carbon based lifeforms planet, including us humans. We exhaust co2. Carbon in general is what we really need to live, declaring a war on carbon seems beyond silly into harmful land, like there is another rather nasty agenda behind all this besides climate change..
Of course going way way back when I was first into the environmental activism gig and listening to people talk about how they were going to use the environment as a tool to try and bring about some larger world government thing might also have influenced me to be more skeptical than not...ya that happened, many moons ago. Can't prove it..but I don't belong to any of those organizations either.
Just sayin' and lookin' down the road at other ways government things and business things have morphed and gotten more complex and costly...
More proof that as the west concentrates on pro sports, government mc busywork jobs and "paper financial products", China is going for the tangible wealth, the *real stuff*. In this case, they already own it, and are looking to maintain an "in house" monopoly on some critical 21st century metals.
I agree with you, both as to the space race and even moreso back here on earth, the chinese model.. Many years ago I did an analysis of the situation with globalization and demographics and came to the conclusion that china would *have* to go expansionist in a big way around 2012 to 2014, for a variety of reasons.
They will be needing farmland,*water* in a big way (they already don't have enough adequate water for tens of millions of their people and demand just keeps going up daily), access to energy sources, access to other sorts of raw materials, etc, plus they will need someplace to stick all their surplus young males. Their one child policy lead to them killing a lot of baby girls and now they have millions of males who..well, you know what young males want for the most part, and there just ain't enough to go around back home...so they will be needing to export those surplus males..millions of them..history shows what that means.
They would have developed their own internal infrastructure and markets by that time frame so they don't actually need the western market (very close now if not already surpassed that point), only their own and the rest of the developing world where they get their materials from..that is a sufficient market, that is around 2.5 to three billion people they can sell manufactured goods to and get practical and valuable resources back from, and this will be primarily in the still developing nations where those resources are, in Africa, South America, and central Asia, and possibly Canada, Australia and the far east in Russia. And if you look now, they are already in those areas in a big way, or trying to, with plans to go even heavier. Expansion.
And they no longer will be needing fancy repackaged IOUs being passed off as "money" from western nations they currently sell to, our printing press money and government bonds and treasuries, promissory notes backed by hot air buffoonery from the Fed and DC, they have enough of those things already and are getting rather spooked with what they might *not* be worth soon, so they will be needing and looking for the real mc coy, tangible wealth in some form, whether it is oil or natural gas or uranium or other metals or tens of millions of acres of farmland, etc., anything but more shaky IOUs.
And how I got to expansion is, if they *don't* expand, and I mean in a very large way, the rulers there will be risking massive "social unrest", way beyond what they get now which is large enough and not covered all that well in the west, maybe to the point they couldn't control it, therefore..they will expand, peacefully or otherwise. No rulers want to lose their cushy jobs. I would imagine it will be a blend of both ways.
And I think they will be strong enough at that point they can call anyone's bluff. Heck, little dipsquat north Korea has called everyone's bluff so far and got away with it. China is MUCH larger and more powerful across the board by every metric you can look at. So that means the Chinese model is going to take over huge areas of the planet, inevitable now I think.
We can and freeze a lot here. We grow our own beef and chickens and get some eggs, plus there's a big pond to fish from and we get bass from it. It's so close and easy to get fish from I don't bother with trying to can it, we eat it fresh when we want to or throw a few fillets in the freezer. But I hear ya, I could do that, should try it just for garnering another thing to learn to can I guess. And can't hardly keep up with the garden now, we've be canning and freezing a lot of the surplus. Running two stand alone chest freezers and the side freezer on a two door big freezer/fridge combo. Modest increase in electric bill for a huge decrease in grocery store bill, it is a good trade. Shelves full of home canned stuff, plus we store our own dried beans and so on. Here's a cool one, we have propane heat plus wood heat, but the last two winters we didn't use any propane at all, zilch. I just cut and split some extra wood, done. That saves a lot of cash right there, but the propane in the tank is still good for decades if we really need it for emergency use, and it is paid off.
The whole deal is to try and get what you would normally spend cash on, without needing the cash, and eliminating the middleman suckage. I haven't found replacements for every bill yet, like this internet connection, but we have done a lot so far. By going directly to the tangibles, it saves bunches and your hourly "pay" goes up in a sense. It is a way to "insure" both future availability of something you need, plus lock in a price better when you do all or most of it yourself. Independence rather than dependence.
Here's a direct figure for you: by growing our own beef, we pay moderately more for hamburger than you can get it at the store on sale..but all the other cuts of beef are the same "price" to us, so we save a ton. We eat ribeyes for barely hamburger price, and that is organic grass fed to boot. Price that in the store, heh. Same with our organic garden produce.
I don't do my own butchering on a whole beef, just too big and no walk in fridge/cooler for the required hanging and aging, so that's the biggest expense, just the slaughterhouse fee, which isn't that bad overall. I find someone to take one half, we take the other half. Chickens I do myself, I can knock one out pretty fast now. In a pinch though I can butcher a whole beef, I mean if I *really* have to, I have done it before twice, but I will admit I am not as good or fast as a pro butcher who does it all day long as a biz and is set up for it with huge meat saws and electric grinders, etc.
And then there's the normal thrifty action, hit the thrift stores/ yard sales for good used clothing, all that stuff you can imagine. I try to avoid buying anything brand new unless necessary. Even my tools, if there is something I need that I don't already have, I'll hit the pawnshops first before shelling out the full price scratch. My computer desk here is just an old platform bed I built and used for years, no longer needed, so now it sets across a bureau for my precious gadget junk (has to go someplace..I am a nerd, can't throw out old gadgets;) ) and my file cabinets. Done, "free" executive sized desk. My computer is built from cheap parts mailorder from tiger, then recycled hard drives and optical drives, and I only did that because the last one was broken, physically broken, stopped booting and it was an old 200 mghz pentium pro! I was using that until two years ago or so (I think around fedora core 8 maybe? Don't remember, around then). We don't do cable TV(not even available here) or satellite, but get by with an old regular TV and one of the perverter boxes and over the air signals. Movies we buy used tapes or disks or I download free to copy documentaries and so forth (I don't peg leg anything, but am in favor of serious copyright law reform there). Books I buy used and ye aulde ladee hits the library. We have some *really* nice and expensive carpeting here, I got it for free for tearing it out at some rich folks house, they didn't
..just realistic. I saw the crash coming a long time ago and set out to become as independent as possible, including dropping demand for having to have so much of my life connected through the federal reserve note. I think I was accurate in the face of events over the last ten years. Way more than the bulk of wall street economists (the shills I mean) and especially the government who have lowballed the effects near constantly. Even with cooking the books, changing the way they count unemployment, changing how they create what it costs to live (dropping food and energy prices from their calculations) etc, it has still been worse than what they predicted. Near every quarter they have to readjust this or that. (I have a lot of journal entries on economics if you want to look, under "the almighty buck" but most of my other writings on the subject are gone now because they were on sites that are defunct)
Now not all big name economists got it wrong, the ones who also predicted it correctly are still saying that we haven't hit bottom yet, so I'll tend to believe those guys.
The biggest clue that the Feds were getting concerned that they had screwed up was when they stopped releasing all the money stats, the M3, which helped them push massive inflation easier.
As to living cheap, well one, I just am not doing apartments and random roomates, I am near retirement age and.well, just ain't gonna. My apartment days are long over. My GF and I share a small cabin and live on a farm. We3 have dogs and cats anf chickens and cows and a large garden, and that's jibe with apartment and roomate living. No mastter how cheap you get in an apartment, you are still 100% dependent on the whole system staying intact, which is a risk I simply will not take at this time..because I think it's near nuts to do that. If you do that you are relying on the biggest crooks and conmen in the world to have your best interests at heart..I just can't buy that being a smooth move.
I determined that moving to the the semi stix and being directly involved with food production and also we get a lot of our normal energy here directly onsite using firewood and having our own well, etc would be the best future proofing method. To get independent. Trying to eliminate the middleman as much as possible, we even have a modest solar array now and so on. We have little to no debt as well, a big help. Yes we buy in bulk and also grow in bulk ourselves, example we have enough stored food to last well over an entire year, even without having our garden, etc. Took awhile but I got there. I believe in wealth creation, just not filtering it through what I see as the dropping in value fed reserve note, so I switched to dealing in tangibles as much as possible..
We'll see what happens, but my prediction is it will get a lot worse here in the US and might take generations to recover, not just years or even decades.
The dominance of the fed reserve note as the international reserve currency is clearly in peril now, which is by far and away the big kahuna when it comes to quality of life in the US since we have offshored the bulk of wealth creation manufacturing. We need to import manufactured stuff now, and have been doing it with printed up pieces of paper. IOUs in other words (a "note" is a legal term for a debt instrument), and we we try to get them back to finance government, we just issue another form of IOU to these foreigners who hold our debt and they are getting *antsy* over that now and are slowing this effect and practice. It's slow, but the trend is steady and what you can read about it is it is a clear pattern and will continue. The fed note is medium term doomed right now, and as it goes, bye bye middle class USA.
We started out having our own manufactured items being exchangeable for imported oil (the petrodollar rise and the dominace of the fed reserve note after Nixon's move), but seeing as how that is not so much the case anymore, all these various outside nations now are questionin
...is falling apart, daily. Entire states are broke, even our richest state California is broke. They are having to close down a lot of infrastructure, give public employees furloughs, dump prisoners, consolidate prisons, etc, and it keeps getting worse. Local hospitals and local school systems are broke all over the nation *now* and it is getting worse. Thousands of local governments are broke or near broke. Millions of people are facing foreclosure and one estimate is half of all homes will be "underwater" in terms of what they owe as opposed to what they will really be worth within a few years now. Daily we hear about more and more jobs going poof, just like in this article. States and local governments get taxes to pay for your civilized infrastructure, and we have half a million jobs a month going poof. People who can't afford their house note are not going to be paying local property tax, and if they lose their job, not be paying any state or federal tax either.
Your quote, then, in my opinion, "We are never going to drop to their level of poverty because we have things like running water, a strong infrastructure, and plentiful high quality housing. These are things that won't go away, just because of outsourcing."..is *wishful thinking* to the extreme, because there's nothing whatsoever stopping all this civilization we have developed for generations now here from further deteriorating as long as we are losing 100 jobs to one gained, whatever the lopsided figure is, and government tax payer jobs are not the answer there either.
Government jobs cost the nation wealth, they don't create wealth. We need real civilian sector middle class wealth creation jobs, not mc jobs or telephone sanitizing "service" jobs or government busywork bureaucracy jobs (or all those ludicrous "homeland insecurity" paramilitary jobs), and those are the type of jobs we have been losing, the wealth creation jobs. You have to have wealth creation jobs, period. Lose them, your civilization will collapse.
And it can and most likely will get a lot worse here than it is now, and it is precisely from the last couple of decades of heavy offshoring for fast cheap labor arbitrage designed to make wall street richer and everyone else poorer (in this nation).
Your attitude (anyone you) changes fast once you lose your home and job, etc. It stops being theory.
Not sure how far you are willing to drop down in lifestyle, but to match a lot of the developing world, you should be using a privy out back, be walking a few miles to the town well and carrying the water back, raising a lot of your own food immediately around your house, etc. Plus working 16 hour shifts in some dismal and highly dangerous factory for a few bucks a day..but still be forced to pay all US costs.
That's what you are saying, so I'll counter it and say it can't be done in the US, hence why I said wishful thinking.
I know I live as cheap and mean as possible here, probably a lot closer to developing world status that most people on this board, my income is slightly less than ten grand a *year*, and I couldn't live on 5 bucks a day, it just isn't possible unless you are out living totally wild and scrounging your food mostly. Any sort of shelter with electricity and running water, etc costs a lot more than that. I think I am at the bare minimum now, and we grow a lot of our own food, drive ancient vehicles and those only once a week, spend zip money on entertainment or restaurants, etc. Cheap, not third world, but second world status and you STILL need to have some decent cash coming in to exist here.
No job..then what, what do you tell people who just lost their middle class job to offshoring? "Tough crap, sucks to be you friend, just magically exist somehow...just think how cheap the goods at walmart are though!!"
Really, what are you willing to say to someone *in person*, face to face, who lost their job to offshoring, haven't found another job
Maybe it is in there but I missed it, but having an FM receiver would be good as well. I saw the transmitter, presumably to stream tunes to your car radio. Besides that...ultimate portable pocket computer. For around a thousand bucks...guess I'll have to wait a few years before they are on the used market, but still..nice. Thanks for the URL.
Slashdot Mirror
..just thinking that if the local reported speed went from 40 to 300 then zero...might be a useful indicator of a twister there. ;)
Weather data reporting appears to be skewed a lot anyway, for instance we had those reports of temp sensors sitting in extreme hot spots in cities, etc. Not sure how much more data could be inputted to the collection points before it just gets to be too much noise..but seems like they could handle some more now given the advances in cheap computing power.
Recent advances in giant batteries for wind power load balancing: http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE57P4PJ20090826
It hit double your "most optimistic" figure in 2008 and is growing fast, with *plenty* of places to stick in new towers. They haven't hardly started yet, let alone hit some "peak production" level. The US now surpasses Germany in total installed capacity and there are plans to keep increasing this for the foreseeable future. It has been the fastest growing segment in the electricity production market for some years now. A recent article: http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/131110/
Ya, I was still thinking about that after I posted, that they simply must already have a turbine tach installed so they would know windspeed. And for sure they have power and must report various things to their control panel admins for monitoring. Seems not much of a stretch at all to have this info forwarded to the weather and radar folks. Probably useful data to have anyway, long term precise wind speeds and other sorts of weather information.
Put simple wind speed sensors (and other weather reporting gizmos) at each big wind tower, have them automatically update that info upstream so it can be cross referenced. If the remote radar says tornado in the direction of a tower, but the tower only reports a 40 mile an hour wind...you can nail the false positives easier. Turn a liability into thousands of new weather reporting assets.
It doesn't need to be in just one industry.
As to GM and the UAW, been there, done that, quit, couldn't stand either side of that work equation and predicted they would eventually fail, and have been proven correct, and I saw it coming clearly years in advance. They technically did fail and by all that is capitalist holy they should have just gone to a sheriff's auction. I had just any number of arrogant 'brothers' tell me back in the day that "no one would ever buy those little japanese cars" when I said it would be soon and they would take the lunch money because of better mileage and better quality, and was forced to read bigshot pundit after expert in the wallstreet shilled "news" claim that GM was the heart and soul of the US and so on, here for eternity, "bluechip" etc. Utter pie in the sky rubbish and showed a severe lack of long term critical thinking skills and a complete absence of business analysis.
Just watching them create then destroy the EV1 when the folks leasing them BEGGED to be allowed to buy them outright, and have the suits override the engineers and fixate on short term goals instead of thinking decades in the future...meh...unuins going on strike for anything at all EXCEPT a demand to make the best quality and least expensive autos possible, to stay competititve...double meh..dinosaurs, arrogant dinosaurs, and "volt" isn't going to "save" GM.
Geez, they are taking bailout loaned money and "investing" in china, headlines today, screw the tax payers even more.
Well, two points: Alternate energy and electric vehicles could do it, either create or resurrect jobs. Tons more out there as well, how about really opening up the market for healthcare better instead of keeping it so restricted? Gee, it might actually get cheaper and better without adding in more layers of busywork bureaucracy.
As to basic investment, hell ya! GM and Chrysler shouldn't have been bailed out, they should have had all their factories go on the auction block and got sold for cheap on the dollar like any other bankrupt business, then perhaps some fresh new blood who could think past one quarter's profits could have come in and actually built 21st century autos in the now newly owned factories. Then those stock investors and swaggering union folks and legions of white collar managers would have received a humble pie lesson on keeping things real, as in price, quality and function. They kept kept this fantasy illusion going of trying to maintain like this was still the 60s or something, that was just crazy nuts.
We could also force a lot of manufacturing back into the US if we insisted that all this earth climate changes stuff they are pushing with environmental controls was forced on china and india as well as the US (and europe) through the WTO or something. I mean, WTF? If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. This atmosphere we all share knows no political boundaries, so it's stupid to pretend it does and let some areas skate on environmental regs while other areas got them up the wazoo with more coming.
Allowing near half the world's populations (just those two nations) to ignore air quality standards and then western businessmen can slide over there, take money they skimmed or got handed by the corrupt Fed and treasury to promote investment in manufacturing there is the main reason the US lost so many jobs in the first place. No safety regs, no pollution regs, no nuthin but cheapest possible labor to the point they don't care how many of their employees over there get wasted on the job or get sick or what happens to the environment. It was not only allowed to happen, it was encouraged with *tax breaks* for the longest time. More crazy crap.
That sort of stuff is what went wrong with jobs in the US, national scale "corporate raiding" and until those issues are addressed by reining in wallstreet and by insisting on a global even level playing field for this so called "free trade" which is anything but and "concern for the environment" which is nonsense lip service, we'll continue to lose jobs.
And speaking of those alleged businessmen, all those big casino banks should have been allowed to go bankrupt as well, it makes NO SENSE whatsoever to bail out convoluted derivatives gambling. Nuts. They should have gone on the bankruptcy auction block as well as the dinosaur car companies and we go back to where investing is really investing, not just playing quant derived paper financial pseudo products bingo. Thenthe "market' would have sorted out what all those stupid contracts are really worth, and here's a hint, they ain't worth no quadrillion dollars like they claim. Force them SOBs to eat their own capitalist dogfood, sort that crap out. There's trillions of taxpayer bucks and counting now that went to those leeches that could have gone to this basic research, instead of trying to keep the ultra stupid and destructive old fatcat dinosaurs alive so they can keep stomping around the planet smashing things and gobbling everything up in sight to get even bigger, fatter and more stupid.
Shoot, that's more than enough, just a fraction of that, to have offered totally free higher edcucation to our young folks, instead of dunning them for tens of thousands of bucks so they enter the workforce already broke and scared to even think about finding a job.
Support the repackaged derviatives gambling "industry", or fund the education for 100,000 new doctors and 500,000
I didn't necessarily say government and taxes had to do it, I just said wouldn't it be interesting and perhaps very useful tech to develop, to take advantage of a concentrated source of raw materials, albeit it was placed there by mankind. And that spinoffs from developing this tech might be useful elsewhere. And that was about it. And we both agree more useful jobs are needed, I am against busywork do-nothing but look semi alive and active mc jobs, or most instances of the forced redistribution of wealth based on state coercive force.
On your exact tax question analogy, I can't answer that in the affirmative for either of your theoretical either/or "answers", because I can make a fairly logical and convincing argument that income taxes are no longer necessary under the currency creation and fiscal governing system we have, and would definitely not be necessary at all, corporate or private, with a few simple-important but actually simple-reforms to the laws. So neither would be (IMO) the correct answer.
If you want my views on economics, both macro and personal, to better answer you in more depth, I write extensively on them under "the almighty buck" in my journal and you are welcome to join in any conversations there that still have active replying available. A lot of my stuff is also under other people's journals in the discussions.
I am pro real wealth creation (I am a farmer, so I practice what I preach) and for the producers of wealth, and pretty much against most governmental busywork bureaucracy and the corrupt casino bank wealth skimming against the wealth producers that goes on, which has really morphed from the old traditional view of investing into just high stakes phony paper financial products gambling which should be airgapped from the real economy before they do even more damage. (that's the cliff notes ultra short summary version of my views).
If that helps to answer your questions.
That's fairly easy to see on the mainstream new world order bilderberger news. Government press official being quoted..odds on to be lying, that would be anyone in the executive branch. It gets accepted as gospel and repuked back at you by the newsies, no matter how completely improbable or out to lunch sounding.
In the legislative branch, elected reps and so on, odds are..clueless and just drunkenly mumbling stuff they have no idea about whatsoever based on the lies some biz schmuck or lobbist/PR flack told them or their cheaply bribed off "aides" to say and that they sorta half remember. They just stick you with that stuff.
News reporter interviewing or quoting the big big biz schmuck..odds on lying, even if lie is suspected, reporter with blowdried hair just flashes the big smiles and repukes it back, sometimes with asinine "analysis" later one by a roundtable of previous and now much older blow dried and lacquered (and plastered) bilderberger re-pukers. They are now distinguished drunk old re-pukers.
All the odds of lying go up drastically if the subject has to do with a lot of money (the more the money amount is, the more are the odds of the principles involved lying about it somehow, current example: any dang thing whatsoever from the Fed or Treasury or casino bank) or some event or another which would prove to be an embarrassment or illegality committed.
THOSE latter two are pretty much pure lies all the time, the easiest to see. As in, when is the last time anyone official just slap admitted to guilt or major screwup right off the bat? Never, ever, ever, nevah happens, goes from the simple small town cop being a sadist beast and the chief defending his actions automatically, while everyone can stare at the bloody videotape, all the way to lying about profound events with huge international repercussions like the "tonkin gulf attack" which never happened, or the "huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and saddam and osama both did 911 together honest we swear it they even bunk together on piles of yellowcake and the robot drone planes with biowarfare agents are warmed up ready to blast amerika in 45 minutes" type lies and so on.
The older I get the more cynical I get about this stuff because eventually the truth comes out about this or that big deal from the past, even if it takes decades, and you then realize how *much* you've been lied to in the past by the press, the controlled press I mean, the ones just that repuke the lies fed to them.
My default these days is..they are lying. Much safer to assume that than not.
Deliberate lies, or lies of omission, either or both mixed together. What they leave out that is important and DON'T report about is usually the very best stuff, the most important to know about. Or they get sorta sneaky about it, pump up some inane story about some drug addled celebrity hijinks (Britney pregnant with Michael's frozen sperm!! Wow! Some team scored some number that is a bigger number than this other team!! And that's a record!! that sorta drivel..), run with that for days, and stick the important stuff (if they cover it at all) with barely ten words to cover it buried in the newscast with a ten second low key soundbite or published on page 17, section D in the paper.
Modern news from all the big boys has about as much truth to it as big time rasslin'. It's controlled, orchestrated and scripted, designed to do anything BUT inform. At the best, cutting them tons of slack which they don't deserve, especially the public airwave hijack folks, it's designed to entertain and sell you little purple pills and soap flakes and over priced ego big dick shiny cars, at the worst, and what I think is the major reason it even continues in the form it is today, is it is deliberate propaganda to keep the serfs faked out, and to keep them occupied with each other and pointing fingers at each other for someone to blame for all their mostly self inflicted wo
Can you access NPR, ABC, (MS)NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox et al overseas for free? Or are they blocked? I really don't know, I just assumed they were available. Fox is the only one really talking about going to an all paid version online (which will be epic fail), haven't heard of any of the others saying that, and Fox hasn't started charging yet.
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say in cleaning up fresh water sources better, or to be part of waste water treatment plants. We already have filtration systems for this or that, but to develop something that could work on that sort of scale could very well be some important tech down the road. And like was pointed out, being plastic, this could help develop interest in larger scale energy plants that could use the stuff, including th..terraforming isn't the word, aquaforming? Huge floating energy conversion barges. Or just concentrate it back down so it could be used for..manufactured plastic goods. I don't see the need for plastics going away anytime soon, nor the need for more forms of energy. And we need *work* for millions and millions more people planet wide every year, something useful.
A lot of times I think we humans might be better off just with a 180 attitude adjustment, instead of always looking at things as problems, if we just looked at them as opportunities, it might make solutions appear easier and work better. The old saw of how to look at things, the glass half full or half empty deal. Turn the "Oh, noes!!" into the "Hot Damn!"s.
Never said the failures increased, just that they happen, and there have been some really large recalls of lithium based batteries and reports of people having pocket sized gadgets catch fire in their pockets and so forth. And no, a larger battery wouldn't necessarily be less safe, as they could engineer in better separation of the cells and protection circuitry and a stouter battery covering pack to them. If you want to look at a quick review, here is a simple search of slashdot here via google on battery recall.
I'm not saying batteries haven't gotten better, they have obviously, and I did say I liked new battery tech to clarify that again, just that they seem to not be keeping pace as well as the other miniaturization efforts. And as a separate issue, if they stuck to larger capacity batteries, they could have longer run times. That would of course necessitate larger/thicker/heavier batteries, which would *still* be lighter than the older NiMH styled or earlier lithium. And as one guy elsewhere in the thread who works doing repairs pointed out, a lot of these things have separate warranty provisions for the battery packs and chargers that are less inclusive than the actual gadget. There's a reason for that.
I said from just a few years ago, not the early 90s brickphone era. Bleeding edge small electronics are cool, less size and less power requirements for what they can do, which is "more" now, but bleeding edge battery tech today is not cool, it gets hot, and might asplode or catch fire. It just hasn't kept up adequately. We've had plenty of battery problems and recall stories from the last few years as proof of that. Until such a time as they can match the two techs on safety and reliability and function, they should be a scosh conservative on dropping the battery sizes and err on the side of caution. If that means the form factor has to stay slightly larger than possible, with a little more weight, in order to more insure better safety and to give device runtime longevity, it should be so. Your first gen is "barely tolerable", but a recent gen with a better battery would still be better than that first example, smaller and lighter, but more safe and better runtime. which means it would still be tolerable-enough.
How about the traditional car analogy? If the tires on your street screamer 150 mph Belchfire from 5 years ago got wonky at 90, and blew off the rims in shreds, would it make sense to have a newer Belchfire that could go 180, with even thinner and more questionable tires? Tires are *rather important* on performance cars, batteries are *rather important* with performance portable devices. No sense being cheap or stupid on either one.
That's all I am saying, these manufacturers of gadgets need to match that battery tech, because lithium batteries are inherently a lot more prone to failure with some pretty bad results if one little thing goes wrong with them. I really like new battery tech, I just don't want them to go off too extreme to the point of compromising safety and reliability, when there's no need, when devices now are already pretty small. They can back off that for a few years and let the two techs catch up with other better. If it takes fines and investigations and recalls and lost liability lawsuits and a lot of bad press and maybe some bureaucratic rulings, that's what it might take. Perhaps better battery standards might be in order here, then all the various vendors would be forced to operate from the same level so no one would have an unfair advantage.
We can't always leave these decisions to marketing, we long ago adopted safety standards for any number of products and obviously these safety standards need to be applied more vigorously to portable lithium battery powered devices, and having a better runtime would be a double plus good for most folks anyway.
Sometimes it is just a better idea to let the engineers have the final say on things.
Modern fashion with gadgets is ultra thin and light, which is dangerous when it comes to lithium batteries. They are *delicate* and dangerous. This marketing decision leads to being not as good from an engineering standpoint (on being safe I mean) in designing the batteries, they are too subject to being smashed/bent, or have design and manufacturing screwups, and that leads to simple failure or catastrophic failure.
This utter fixation on having the smallest most powerful batteries combined with their basic chemistry of heating and catching fire and having runaway reactions will inevitably lead to a lot of failures when you are making millions of units.
And look at all this constant kvetching about battery life on laptops and so on. Geez, what a freekin non problem theoretically. If people could be content to carry the same weight they did just a few years ago, as if their girly man muscles could even handle the strain, oh the horrors, they could have *bigger and longer lasting and safer batteries*, probably cheaper as well, but every generation of new gadgets they insist on shaving some ounces and inches off. Well, you can do that to excess it appears. Battery tech has not quite kept up with other electronics miniaturization tech here, so you get problems. They can make the batteries smaller plus more powerful at the same time, but obviously it raises the risk factor. They are pushing it too close to the exploding edge.
Small, powerful, safe, pick two
Form is not necessarily your friend always over function. Perhaps if they take a few tens of million$ in cost in recalls and lawsuits this lesson of marketing versus engineering quality standards will sink in better. And any company that did that could turn it around in the market, use their new designed safer and more powerful batteries, albeit larger and heavier, as a marketing edge over just smaller and lighter. There could be some rather humorous ads along these lines showing the victim of the teeniest gadget walking around on fire and all charred all the time, just so he can stupidly brag how cool his new .5 ounce and 1/64th inch thick iXploder is...
30 years for a driveway with cars on and constantly exposed to the weather? Doesn't seem all that terrible, and maybe got the owner to have a driveway, as opposed to a dirt rut. And I've done the same, both removal and new construction with a lot of variations on concrete/cement/block/brticks.stone. You see it all and then some. If it works well enough for the people there, i think that is good enough as long as it is disclosed and not an outright danger to the next guy there or the neighbors.
Now, a slab made with springs and frames with a rug or linoleum or tiles over it inside, and just people walking on it? meh...it'll last longer than the roof will most likely as long as the house isn't sitting on an artesian spring or something like that. And like I said, this was cheap construction by constantly broke folks and way back in the day when codes and such like didn't exist as much as today. It works well enough. It isn't perfect, but old springs and steel bedframes work a lot better than *nothing*. Heck, look what the palestinians are doing now for construction, back to their ancient roots, sun dried mud bricks reinforced with straw, stacked and plastered with more mud. They can't get cement or rebar, but are building decent enough homes for themselves.
Back in ye olden back to the land commune days, when we were building cabins and houses on the *extreme cheap*, we tried to scrounge as much building materials as possible, so we used old bed springs and steel bed frames from the dump for "rebar".
DANG I miss vent windows, don't you? And did you ever own and drive any vehicles with the over the windshield vent you could open up? I had a few, back in the day, sabre toothed badgers for pets, etc. Didn't need AC as long as you were moving a few miles an hour or better. I really liked those.
Right now, none of our vehicles has a functional AC, and it would cost more than they are worth to get them fixed, so meh. I completely tore all that crap out of my datsun and was thinking of sticking a nice generator in there instead, with an electric clutch...maybe anyway...plenty of room and some mount points and hangs right in place where you could slap a belt on it...
No vent windows is not the same as rolling down an all the way across the door window, you just don't get the same breeze from it. I bet there's a ton of younger guys here who have never even been in a vehicle with vent windows.
Corporations and wall street profits, etc. That's one of the reasons they just went to china, labor arbitrage, no pesky unions to be forced to pay a living wage, no environmental regs, easier to snag IP and get away with it, all that stuff. And that's why I was against kyoto and son of kyoto, they have no provisions to force that on china et al, and we aren't even considering any sort of protectionism with their imports. They can pollute all they want to, the air floats everywhere so all our environmental regs are diluted with crud, and wall street gets to continually profit from it. Heck, for a long time they got tax breaks for moving offshore!
I think some regs are good, others seem to be screwy, like the proposed cap and trade. That one looks pure profit motivated to me, skimming profit going to the non producers of wealth.
He is putting his *reputation* online, his name for whatever that has weight, for this, not that he did the studies, but like most engineers and scientists is willing to look at the evidence and by puting his name next to something say he has read it and it seems to be important and on topic enough that others should too. That's all. How is he less credible than al gore, lawyer and businessman?
And for that matter, people can be both generalists and specialists can't they? To be interested enough in both science research and engineering application that they like to look at stuff outside their exact professional expertise? I mean, thios is what we do here at /., aside from razzin' each other....
My opinion on this whole deal is we have *both* man made pollution that can impact climate and weather and other stuff (for another example, just constructing huge cities affects local weather patterns and over a long enough period of time, the climate I would imagine, the ripple effect), plus natural cycles. I don't see it as all one or the other.
I would say I am in favor of all forms of alternative energy for a variety of reasons, and would like to see the phase out of coal and petroleum fuels. But not "cap and trade" which is just another of the never ending wall street scam wealth skimming efforts. They never quit, always need to have their grubby little mitts in the middle of everyone else's plate.
And that's me speaking as a generalist with tech and science and geopolitical and macro economical enthusiasm and interest, but as a layman only, and I don't have the same name cred as rutan would of course, but I'll throw my little contribution in there. Mostly because as an outdoorsman and farmer I have always watched the seasons. Yep, somethings up. The air and water is dirty. The trees are just *wrong*. Clean air and water is a good idea. and if it helps to keep our long range climate to remain more moderate, so much the better.
If governments want to do social engineering, they can do it easily with tax credits, the anti-tax. Nothing else is needed to nudge this or that industry in any other direction they want or deem good for their peoples. The carrot method. Punitive taxes though (the stick method) just go right down the food chain and rip the consumer off and transfer huge sums upstream into fewer hands.
That's the part of this whole debate that really has me worried how much of it has been skewed on purpose, just too much money involved, and power. I am also worried about the EPA calling co2 a toxic pollutant..uhhh,this is a carbon based lifeforms planet, including us humans. We exhaust co2. Carbon in general is what we really need to live, declaring a war on carbon seems beyond silly into harmful land, like there is another rather nasty agenda behind all this besides climate change..
Of course going way way back when I was first into the environmental activism gig and listening to people talk about how they were going to use the environment as a tool to try and bring about some larger world government thing might also have influenced me to be more skeptical than not...ya that happened, many moons ago. Can't prove it..but I don't belong to any of those organizations either.
Just sayin' and lookin' down the road at other ways government things and business things have morphed and gotten more complex and costly...
More proof that as the west concentrates on pro sports, government mc busywork jobs and "paper financial products", China is going for the tangible wealth, the *real stuff*. In this case, they already own it, and are looking to maintain an "in house" monopoly on some critical 21st century metals.
I agree with you, both as to the space race and even moreso back here on earth, the chinese model.. Many years ago I did an analysis of the situation with globalization and demographics and came to the conclusion that china would *have* to go expansionist in a big way around 2012 to 2014, for a variety of reasons.
They will be needing farmland,*water* in a big way (they already don't have enough adequate water for tens of millions of their people and demand just keeps going up daily), access to energy sources, access to other sorts of raw materials, etc, plus they will need someplace to stick all their surplus young males. Their one child policy lead to them killing a lot of baby girls and now they have millions of males who..well, you know what young males want for the most part, and there just ain't enough to go around back home...so they will be needing to export those surplus males..millions of them..history shows what that means.
They would have developed their own internal infrastructure and markets by that time frame so they don't actually need the western market (very close now if not already surpassed that point), only their own and the rest of the developing world where they get their materials from..that is a sufficient market, that is around 2.5 to three billion people they can sell manufactured goods to and get practical and valuable resources back from, and this will be primarily in the still developing nations where those resources are, in Africa, South America, and central Asia, and possibly Canada, Australia and the far east in Russia. And if you look now, they are already in those areas in a big way, or trying to, with plans to go even heavier. Expansion.
And they no longer will be needing fancy repackaged IOUs being passed off as "money" from western nations they currently sell to, our printing press money and government bonds and treasuries, promissory notes backed by hot air buffoonery from the Fed and DC, they have enough of those things already and are getting rather spooked with what they might *not* be worth soon, so they will be needing and looking for the real mc coy, tangible wealth in some form, whether it is oil or natural gas or uranium or other metals or tens of millions of acres of farmland, etc., anything but more shaky IOUs.
And how I got to expansion is, if they *don't* expand, and I mean in a very large way, the rulers there will be risking massive "social unrest", way beyond what they get now which is large enough and not covered all that well in the west, maybe to the point they couldn't control it, therefore..they will expand, peacefully or otherwise. No rulers want to lose their cushy jobs. I would imagine it will be a blend of both ways.
And I think they will be strong enough at that point they can call anyone's bluff. Heck, little dipsquat north Korea has called everyone's bluff so far and got away with it. China is MUCH larger and more powerful across the board by every metric you can look at. So that means the Chinese model is going to take over huge areas of the planet, inevitable now I think.
We can and freeze a lot here. We grow our own beef and chickens and get some eggs, plus there's a big pond to fish from and we get bass from it. It's so close and easy to get fish from I don't bother with trying to can it, we eat it fresh when we want to or throw a few fillets in the freezer. But I hear ya, I could do that, should try it just for garnering another thing to learn to can I guess. And can't hardly keep up with the garden now, we've be canning and freezing a lot of the surplus. Running two stand alone chest freezers and the side freezer on a two door big freezer/fridge combo. Modest increase in electric bill for a huge decrease in grocery store bill, it is a good trade. Shelves full of home canned stuff, plus we store our own dried beans and so on. Here's a cool one, we have propane heat plus wood heat, but the last two winters we didn't use any propane at all, zilch. I just cut and split some extra wood, done. That saves a lot of cash right there, but the propane in the tank is still good for decades if we really need it for emergency use, and it is paid off.
The whole deal is to try and get what you would normally spend cash on, without needing the cash, and eliminating the middleman suckage. I haven't found replacements for every bill yet, like this internet connection, but we have done a lot so far. By going directly to the tangibles, it saves bunches and your hourly "pay" goes up in a sense. It is a way to "insure" both future availability of something you need, plus lock in a price better when you do all or most of it yourself. Independence rather than dependence.
Here's a direct figure for you: by growing our own beef, we pay moderately more for hamburger than you can get it at the store on sale..but all the other cuts of beef are the same "price" to us, so we save a ton. We eat ribeyes for barely hamburger price, and that is organic grass fed to boot. Price that in the store, heh. Same with our organic garden produce.
I don't do my own butchering on a whole beef, just too big and no walk in fridge/cooler for the required hanging and aging, so that's the biggest expense, just the slaughterhouse fee, which isn't that bad overall. I find someone to take one half, we take the other half. Chickens I do myself, I can knock one out pretty fast now. In a pinch though I can butcher a whole beef, I mean if I *really* have to, I have done it before twice, but I will admit I am not as good or fast as a pro butcher who does it all day long as a biz and is set up for it with huge meat saws and electric grinders, etc.
And then there's the normal thrifty action, hit the thrift stores/ yard sales for good used clothing, all that stuff you can imagine. I try to avoid buying anything brand new unless necessary. Even my tools, if there is something I need that I don't already have, I'll hit the pawnshops first before shelling out the full price scratch. My computer desk here is just an old platform bed I built and used for years, no longer needed, so now it sets across a bureau for my precious gadget junk (has to go someplace..I am a nerd, can't throw out old gadgets;) ) and my file cabinets. Done, "free" executive sized desk. My computer is built from cheap parts mailorder from tiger, then recycled hard drives and optical drives, and I only did that because the last one was broken, physically broken, stopped booting and it was an old 200 mghz pentium pro! I was using that until two years ago or so (I think around fedora core 8 maybe? Don't remember, around then). We don't do cable TV(not even available here) or satellite, but get by with an old regular TV and one of the perverter boxes and over the air signals. Movies we buy used tapes or disks or I download free to copy documentaries and so forth (I don't peg leg anything, but am in favor of serious copyright law reform there). Books I buy used and ye aulde ladee hits the library. We have some *really* nice and expensive carpeting here, I got it for free for tearing it out at some rich folks house, they didn't
..just realistic. I saw the crash coming a long time ago and set out to become as independent as possible, including dropping demand for having to have so much of my life connected through the federal reserve note. I think I was accurate in the face of events over the last ten years. Way more than the bulk of wall street economists (the shills I mean) and especially the government who have lowballed the effects near constantly. Even with cooking the books, changing the way they count unemployment, changing how they create what it costs to live (dropping food and energy prices from their calculations) etc, it has still been worse than what they predicted. Near every quarter they have to readjust this or that. (I have a lot of journal entries on economics if you want to look, under "the almighty buck" but most of my other writings on the subject are gone now because they were on sites that are defunct)
Now not all big name economists got it wrong, the ones who also predicted it correctly are still saying that we haven't hit bottom yet, so I'll tend to believe those guys.
The biggest clue that the Feds were getting concerned that they had screwed up was when they stopped releasing all the money stats, the M3, which helped them push massive inflation easier.
As to living cheap, well one, I just am not doing apartments and random roomates, I am near retirement age and.well, just ain't gonna. My apartment days are long over. My GF and I share a small cabin and live on a farm. We3 have dogs and cats anf chickens and cows and a large garden, and that's jibe with apartment and roomate living. No mastter how cheap you get in an apartment, you are still 100% dependent on the whole system staying intact, which is a risk I simply will not take at this time..because I think it's near nuts to do that. If you do that you are relying on the biggest crooks and conmen in the world to have your best interests at heart..I just can't buy that being a smooth move.
I determined that moving to the the semi stix and being directly involved with food production and also we get a lot of our normal energy here directly onsite using firewood and having our own well, etc would be the best future proofing method. To get independent. Trying to eliminate the middleman as much as possible, we even have a modest solar array now and so on. We have little to no debt as well, a big help. Yes we buy in bulk and also grow in bulk ourselves, example we have enough stored food to last well over an entire year, even without having our garden, etc. Took awhile but I got there. I believe in wealth creation, just not filtering it through what I see as the dropping in value fed reserve note, so I switched to dealing in tangibles as much as possible..
We'll see what happens, but my prediction is it will get a lot worse here in the US and might take generations to recover, not just years or even decades.
The dominance of the fed reserve note as the international reserve currency is clearly in peril now, which is by far and away the big kahuna when it comes to quality of life in the US since we have offshored the bulk of wealth creation manufacturing. We need to import manufactured stuff now, and have been doing it with printed up pieces of paper. IOUs in other words (a "note" is a legal term for a debt instrument), and we we try to get them back to finance government, we just issue another form of IOU to these foreigners who hold our debt and they are getting *antsy* over that now and are slowing this effect and practice. It's slow, but the trend is steady and what you can read about it is it is a clear pattern and will continue. The fed note is medium term doomed right now, and as it goes, bye bye middle class USA.
We started out having our own manufactured items being exchangeable for imported oil (the petrodollar rise and the dominace of the fed reserve note after Nixon's move), but seeing as how that is not so much the case anymore, all these various outside nations now are questionin
...is falling apart, daily. Entire states are broke, even our richest state California is broke. They are having to close down a lot of infrastructure, give public employees furloughs, dump prisoners, consolidate prisons, etc, and it keeps getting worse. Local hospitals and local school systems are broke all over the nation *now* and it is getting worse. Thousands of local governments are broke or near broke. Millions of people are facing foreclosure and one estimate is half of all homes will be "underwater" in terms of what they owe as opposed to what they will really be worth within a few years now. Daily we hear about more and more jobs going poof, just like in this article. States and local governments get taxes to pay for your civilized infrastructure, and we have half a million jobs a month going poof. People who can't afford their house note are not going to be paying local property tax, and if they lose their job, not be paying any state or federal tax either.
Your quote, then, in my opinion, "We are never going to drop to their level of poverty because we have things like running water, a strong infrastructure, and plentiful high quality housing. These are things that won't go away, just because of outsourcing."..is *wishful thinking* to the extreme, because there's nothing whatsoever stopping all this civilization we have developed for generations now here from further deteriorating as long as we are losing 100 jobs to one gained, whatever the lopsided figure is, and government tax payer jobs are not the answer there either.
Government jobs cost the nation wealth, they don't create wealth. We need real civilian sector middle class wealth creation jobs, not mc jobs or telephone sanitizing "service" jobs or government busywork bureaucracy jobs (or all those ludicrous "homeland insecurity" paramilitary jobs), and those are the type of jobs we have been losing, the wealth creation jobs. You have to have wealth creation jobs, period. Lose them, your civilization will collapse.
And it can and most likely will get a lot worse here than it is now, and it is precisely from the last couple of decades of heavy offshoring for fast cheap labor arbitrage designed to make wall street richer and everyone else poorer (in this nation).
Your attitude (anyone you) changes fast once you lose your home and job, etc. It stops being theory.
Not sure how far you are willing to drop down in lifestyle, but to match a lot of the developing world, you should be using a privy out back, be walking a few miles to the town well and carrying the water back, raising a lot of your own food immediately around your house, etc. Plus working 16 hour shifts in some dismal and highly dangerous factory for a few bucks a day..but still be forced to pay all US costs.
That's what you are saying, so I'll counter it and say it can't be done in the US, hence why I said wishful thinking.
I know I live as cheap and mean as possible here, probably a lot closer to developing world status that most people on this board, my income is slightly less than ten grand a *year*, and I couldn't live on 5 bucks a day, it just isn't possible unless you are out living totally wild and scrounging your food mostly. Any sort of shelter with electricity and running water, etc costs a lot more than that. I think I am at the bare minimum now, and we grow a lot of our own food, drive ancient vehicles and those only once a week, spend zip money on entertainment or restaurants, etc. Cheap, not third world, but second world status and you STILL need to have some decent cash coming in to exist here.
No job..then what, what do you tell people who just lost their middle class job to offshoring? "Tough crap, sucks to be you friend, just magically exist somehow...just think how cheap the goods at walmart are though!!"
Really, what are you willing to say to someone *in person*, face to face, who lost their job to offshoring, haven't found another job
The Swiss also make some good goose gear ;)
Maybe it is in there but I missed it, but having an FM receiver would be good as well. I saw the transmitter, presumably to stream tunes to your car radio. Besides that...ultimate portable pocket computer. For around a thousand bucks...guess I'll have to wait a few years before they are on the used market, but still..nice. Thanks for the URL.