I agree with you, but the problem is that the first usable satellites were all launched at roughly the same time - so you are stuck on a 20-year cycle. Having all satellites flying from the same generation probably makes support less complicated as well.
For what it's worth, my company has been incrementally improving the same platform since the early 90s, and it has been a pretty successful strategy. Every time some hot-shot manager flies in and tries to change things too much, he falls on his face and is gone in short order.
I will say that it has led to a very odd beast. Most stuff still sits on a very slow VME bus. This bus isn't really up to modern standards of communication, so now they are slowly adding ethernet to all the boards so they can all be daisy chained in some sort of serial over ethernet system. Eventually, they won't need the VME bus anymore, but in the meantime the system is a bit more expensive and complicated than it needs to be, and doesn't really resemble anything that you would create from scratch. Perhaps satellites, with their weight and power restrictions, wouldn't tolerate this sort of transitional design phase?
I'm not up on the current conspiracy theories, but my understanding was that the notion that Microsoft STOLE CP/M was debunked. It's pretty clearly patterned off of it, IMHO. At least the command line interface is superficially very similar.
If we weren't talking about China and Japan, I'd agree. Chinese companies make emotional decisions about Japanese products all the time, and to a limited extend the reciprocal occurs. Point is, Japanese companies are going to remember this particular lesson.
Well, diversification is not my goal - it's more of a side effect from my trading in ETFs. It happens to work a lot like a hedge in practice, so it is sufficient for my needs. If I had more time, I would absolutely pick individual stocks. Perhaps when I have more money invested I will be able to justify this, but at the moment I cannot.
Yeah, I realize I phrased the index/sector fund thing poorly. I meant that I'm not interested in general index funds (S&P, DJIA, NASDAQ Composite, etc). But I do like to invest in the index funds of particular sectors with money that would otherwise be sitting in cash waiting for me to find a good individual stock.
Well, I wouldn't really buy SPY... it's an index fund as opposed to a sector fund. Yeah, it's true that I'm probably giving up some gain and I'm paying fees, but it's much less work and I end up more diversified.
I mostly pick individual stocks, and may very well decide to buy a single stock in a particular fund. The ETFs are just a fun thing I do more on the side. This year it hasn't mattered much what I do - everything is up significantly. I'm easy to please and just try to stay modestly ahead of the S&P.
I don't think anyone is "happy" to bomb small children.
But sometimes there is a person or people who needs to be either captured or killed, hiding outside of the reach of any government. What is the solution, then? In the past, you either flew in a covert mission of helicopters or landed a special forces team to do a raid. Clinton liked to use cruise missiles. These solutions often miss the window of opportunity, and except for the cruise missiles, put your own troops' lives at risk.
what is the aim and how will we know if we've won?
That is something I would like answered as well. If we are truly at war, then I accept that you will have civilian casualties. If you (and by you I mean the administration) can't tell me what the endgame is, I'm not sure we are really at war.
It's not all the time, but every once in a while I just can't stand fingerprints right in the middle of that text I'm trying to edit. On a tablet or phone it's not a big bother unless I'm trying to use it as an e-reader. But on a computer fingerprints annoy me.
I guess only you know for sure what point you were trying to make.
Yes, if we were talking in person the sarcasm would have been more effective.
We lost our moral authority when we started bombing civilians in Germany in response to the Nazis.
I can't agree with you here. Cities have been sacked for as long as we have written and oral history. Sure, the technology improved, so there is more fire and less raping - but the result is still an utterly destroyed city and a bunch of dead people. Whole Empires were built on razing cities, and rape was considered a spoil of war.
I think we should avoid killing civilians. However, I think we should also avoid killing our own troops. I believe that war is a messy business, and if one of the antagonists is hiding among civilians, that antagonist is at least as responsible for their death as the other party or parties. If this were a conventional war between two states, and one of the states sited an anti-aircraft battery in a housing block, the whole housing block is fair game IMHO.
I don't really know if drones are being used carelessly. I am obviously against using them carelessly. I'm also against using them if it turns out that the use of the tool causes bigger problems than it solves. I'm not against drones on general principle, though. They are just another terrible weapon, really just a super-accurate version of artillery with a spotting balloon as was used in the 1800s to bombard cities under siege.
he financial sector either grows slower or shrinks faster than the rest of the market, and the ratio drops below 1.0.
I have to admit that sector trading is my one dirty little technical trading habit. In general I go with fundamentals (even looking at dividend sometimes! What am I, a senior?), but I keep about 1/3 of my funds in sector ETFs, balanced 2-4 times per year, simply because they have been so good to me. One of those sectors, by the way, is often "cash":)
So when a group of people get together and call themselves a "country" it is legitimate to kill them, whether they have attacked you or not. But when a group of people get together without calling themselves a "country" and try to kill you, you aren't allowed to fight back.
Makes sense.
Hell, how many have we killed just because somebody local that we consider an 'ally' has a grudge against somebody else and helpfully informed us that he's part of al-Queda.
I don't know, how many? How many did we kill just because they happened to live in Tokyo? The answer to that is around 100,000.
Are you sure? On the news they were interviewing some Pakistanis who claimed it would just circle overhead - I'm assuming it was a Predator. They were calling them "wasps" in their native language because of the noise.
I'm not trying to be blase about killing children - I'm trying to point out that the real argument should be: should we kill children? A dead child from a drone is exactly the same as a dead child from an incendiary bomb.
You are arguing that we shouldn't be killing the children, which is a good start in this discussion.
You might not agree, or be aware that this is the case - but people are using your same logic to justify the current strikes: the areas being targeted, and especially the individual houses or cars, are supporting the terrorists.
Of course, just because you lived in Dresden, that did not automatically mean that you supported Hitler. And just because your brother or neighbor is a terrorist, it does not mean you support terrorism.
At the end of the day, you are going to have a hard time morally justifying war. Drone or no drone. It depends on whether you think that you can be on the "right" side and also be on the winning side, for various definitions of winning. Personally, I don't mind drones as a tool - but I object to the lack of a clear purpose. That is, no one has said what conditions need to be met to cease hostilities. Obama is timeline oriented on wars, which is an improvement over having no goal whatsoever... but pulling out by some arbitrary date with no consideration for meeting a goal still makes the whole endeavor seem pointless.
At that price, it probably would have been more cost effective to pay for everyone to convert their cars to natural gas.
Assuming about a billion barrels a year from the Persian Gulf, and assuming a natural gas equivalent of about 5437 cubic feet per barrel of oil, you'd need 5.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to replace it. That sounds like a lot, but we currently pull almost that much out of the ground in two months.
I've long been an advocate of taxing gasoline to pay for our expenditures in the Mideast. Since we use about 134 billion gallons per year of gas in our cars, simply financing the direct costs of $757 billion for Iraq would have raised gas by about 51 cents per gallon. Figure a buck or so a gallon to pay for a more fair share. Unfortunately it's a pretty regressive tax, so it's probably not a great idea unless we improve the transportation and housing situation for the poor.
Sigh, I remember when it used to be that stories about watching DVDs on Linux would get hijacked by anti-Bush fanatics. Drones are the new Bush I guess.
The upstarts are actually restarts, and they were sure to sign long-term contracts before restarting. The commodity price certainly does affect them, but their operations are covered by the long-term contracts. Japan is a major importer of rare earths - I think something like 1/5 goes to Japan.
Subsidizing oil exploration won't do any good - there aren't enough domestic resources to wean off of OPEC. Even if the US threw a trillion dollars at the problem, we'd still need OPEC. Subsidizing rare earths is so inexpensive that the Japanese conglomerates did it themselves in 2010 (so it wasn't really "subsidizing", it was long-term contracting).
We do export finished petroleum products due to excess refining capacity, but nowhere near enough to account for the oil we import. Incidentally, we get most of our oil from the Americas. Mideast oil is under 20% of our imports - Europe buys most of it. Almost all of our Mideast imports are from the Saudis.
You don't think China can figure out a similar way to play the game as well as OPEC?
They actually have an advantage over OPEC in that they can actually control supply - OPEC members are notorious for "cheating".
That said, there are some pretty big differences here. First of all, the total market for rare earths is perhaps $1 billion/year... if the Chinese got really belligerent, you wouldn't even need a government - a few large companies could get together and establish a more dependable supply. Contrast this with oil, where just the PROFITS from the biggest oil companies total about half a trillion dollars.
The second big difference is that ample reserves exist, well, almost everywhere. There's a big mine ramping up in the US, and even Eastern Europe is getting in on the game. Oil is not like that at all - almost all known reserves are being exploited.
Anyway, this conversation is academic I think - China appears to be cutting supply just as alternative sources are ramping up. If they wanted to kill the upstarts, they would be ramping supply up to cut the price. I find it hard to believe that China would go to all of this trouble for a few billion dollars in revenue - it seems much more likely that they are trying to use the rare earth supply as a political weapon. Problem with that (for China) is, Japan seemed to recognize it as such and has treated it as a national security issue rather than an economic issue. Now that their supply is more diversified, that political weapon lost its effectiveness.
The market will pay them a premium for a stable supply, and they'd be foolish to operate without long-term contracts. I'm not pulling this out of my ass - this is exactly what happened in 2010. Did you even read my link? The US-based mine is ramping up right now, operating on long-term contracts that were signed with Japanese corporations who felt they needed a steady supply rather than a rock-bottom price.
Well, most of us aren't smart enough to pick the bottom of the market. When it comes to equities, I'm old-fashioned and still look at fundamentals. MCP made some questionable acquisitions and their profits are almost zero. The shorts are very strong ahead of their Nov 8 earnings. If they miss expectations (which are only 1 cent per share), I think you'll see single digits.
I didn't have time to fully look into the company, is there some reason I should keep digging? Where is the hope?
Businesses are as concerned about supply as they are price. If China plays games with a commodity, other players will step in offering long term contracts at stable - if higher - prices. The Japanese conglomerates aren't stupid, and have already signed contracts with American and Eastern European suppliers. They are still getting ramped up, so it's a little early but my suspicion is that any excess capacity will just get dumped on the markets and these companies will mostly live off of their long-term contracts. Chinese firms won't have the credibility to sign long-term contracts and will be stuck competing with the glut pricing. This might even be happening now, which is why they are scaling back production... it's not a terribly lucrative business.
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That's true, but there's something more unnerving about losing the entire human race.
I agree with you, but the problem is that the first usable satellites were all launched at roughly the same time - so you are stuck on a 20-year cycle. Having all satellites flying from the same generation probably makes support less complicated as well.
For what it's worth, my company has been incrementally improving the same platform since the early 90s, and it has been a pretty successful strategy. Every time some hot-shot manager flies in and tries to change things too much, he falls on his face and is gone in short order.
I will say that it has led to a very odd beast. Most stuff still sits on a very slow VME bus. This bus isn't really up to modern standards of communication, so now they are slowly adding ethernet to all the boards so they can all be daisy chained in some sort of serial over ethernet system. Eventually, they won't need the VME bus anymore, but in the meantime the system is a bit more expensive and complicated than it needs to be, and doesn't really resemble anything that you would create from scratch. Perhaps satellites, with their weight and power restrictions, wouldn't tolerate this sort of transitional design phase?
I'm not up on the current conspiracy theories, but my understanding was that the notion that Microsoft STOLE CP/M was debunked. It's pretty clearly patterned off of it, IMHO. At least the command line interface is superficially very similar.
If we weren't talking about China and Japan, I'd agree. Chinese companies make emotional decisions about Japanese products all the time, and to a limited extend the reciprocal occurs. Point is, Japanese companies are going to remember this particular lesson.
Well, diversification is not my goal - it's more of a side effect from my trading in ETFs. It happens to work a lot like a hedge in practice, so it is sufficient for my needs. If I had more time, I would absolutely pick individual stocks. Perhaps when I have more money invested I will be able to justify this, but at the moment I cannot.
Yeah, I realize I phrased the index/sector fund thing poorly. I meant that I'm not interested in general index funds (S&P, DJIA, NASDAQ Composite, etc). But I do like to invest in the index funds of particular sectors with money that would otherwise be sitting in cash waiting for me to find a good individual stock.
Well, I wouldn't really buy SPY... it's an index fund as opposed to a sector fund. Yeah, it's true that I'm probably giving up some gain and I'm paying fees, but it's much less work and I end up more diversified.
I mostly pick individual stocks, and may very well decide to buy a single stock in a particular fund. The ETFs are just a fun thing I do more on the side. This year it hasn't mattered much what I do - everything is up significantly. I'm easy to please and just try to stay modestly ahead of the S&P.
I don't think anyone is "happy" to bomb small children.
But sometimes there is a person or people who needs to be either captured or killed, hiding outside of the reach of any government. What is the solution, then? In the past, you either flew in a covert mission of helicopters or landed a special forces team to do a raid. Clinton liked to use cruise missiles. These solutions often miss the window of opportunity, and except for the cruise missiles, put your own troops' lives at risk.
what is the aim and how will we know if we've won?
That is something I would like answered as well. If we are truly at war, then I accept that you will have civilian casualties. If you (and by you I mean the administration) can't tell me what the endgame is, I'm not sure we are really at war.
It's not all the time, but every once in a while I just can't stand fingerprints right in the middle of that text I'm trying to edit. On a tablet or phone it's not a big bother unless I'm trying to use it as an e-reader. But on a computer fingerprints annoy me.
I guess only you know for sure what point you were trying to make.
Yes, if we were talking in person the sarcasm would have been more effective.
We lost our moral authority when we started bombing civilians in Germany in response to the Nazis.
I can't agree with you here. Cities have been sacked for as long as we have written and oral history. Sure, the technology improved, so there is more fire and less raping - but the result is still an utterly destroyed city and a bunch of dead people. Whole Empires were built on razing cities, and rape was considered a spoil of war.
I think we should avoid killing civilians. However, I think we should also avoid killing our own troops. I believe that war is a messy business, and if one of the antagonists is hiding among civilians, that antagonist is at least as responsible for their death as the other party or parties. If this were a conventional war between two states, and one of the states sited an anti-aircraft battery in a housing block, the whole housing block is fair game IMHO.
I don't really know if drones are being used carelessly. I am obviously against using them carelessly. I'm also against using them if it turns out that the use of the tool causes bigger problems than it solves. I'm not against drones on general principle, though. They are just another terrible weapon, really just a super-accurate version of artillery with a spotting balloon as was used in the 1800s to bombard cities under siege.
he financial sector either grows slower or shrinks faster than the rest of the market, and the ratio drops below 1.0.
I have to admit that sector trading is my one dirty little technical trading habit. In general I go with fundamentals (even looking at dividend sometimes! What am I, a senior?), but I keep about 1/3 of my funds in sector ETFs, balanced 2-4 times per year, simply because they have been so good to me. One of those sectors, by the way, is often "cash" :)
So when a group of people get together and call themselves a "country" it is legitimate to kill them, whether they have attacked you or not. But when a group of people get together without calling themselves a "country" and try to kill you, you aren't allowed to fight back.
Makes sense.
Hell, how many have we killed just because somebody local that we consider an 'ally' has a grudge against somebody else and helpfully informed us that he's part of al-Queda.
I don't know, how many? How many did we kill just because they happened to live in Tokyo? The answer to that is around 100,000.
Are you sure? On the news they were interviewing some Pakistanis who claimed it would just circle overhead - I'm assuming it was a Predator. They were calling them "wasps" in their native language because of the noise.
I'm not trying to be blase about killing children - I'm trying to point out that the real argument should be: should we kill children? A dead child from a drone is exactly the same as a dead child from an incendiary bomb.
You are arguing that we shouldn't be killing the children, which is a good start in this discussion.
You might not agree, or be aware that this is the case - but people are using your same logic to justify the current strikes: the areas being targeted, and especially the individual houses or cars, are supporting the terrorists.
Of course, just because you lived in Dresden, that did not automatically mean that you supported Hitler. And just because your brother or neighbor is a terrorist, it does not mean you support terrorism.
At the end of the day, you are going to have a hard time morally justifying war. Drone or no drone. It depends on whether you think that you can be on the "right" side and also be on the winning side, for various definitions of winning. Personally, I don't mind drones as a tool - but I object to the lack of a clear purpose. That is, no one has said what conditions need to be met to cease hostilities. Obama is timeline oriented on wars, which is an improvement over having no goal whatsoever... but pulling out by some arbitrary date with no consideration for meeting a goal still makes the whole endeavor seem pointless.
At that price, it probably would have been more cost effective to pay for everyone to convert their cars to natural gas.
Assuming about a billion barrels a year from the Persian Gulf, and assuming a natural gas equivalent of about 5437 cubic feet per barrel of oil, you'd need 5.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to replace it. That sounds like a lot, but we currently pull almost that much out of the ground in two months.
I've long been an advocate of taxing gasoline to pay for our expenditures in the Mideast. Since we use about 134 billion gallons per year of gas in our cars, simply financing the direct costs of $757 billion for Iraq would have raised gas by about 51 cents per gallon. Figure a buck or so a gallon to pay for a more fair share. Unfortunately it's a pretty regressive tax, so it's probably not a great idea unless we improve the transportation and housing situation for the poor.
Sigh, I remember when it used to be that stories about watching DVDs on Linux would get hijacked by anti-Bush fanatics. Drones are the new Bush I guess.
This isn't a US government endeavor - it's a private company that re-opened an old mine.
The upstarts are actually restarts, and they were sure to sign long-term contracts before restarting. The commodity price certainly does affect them, but their operations are covered by the long-term contracts. Japan is a major importer of rare earths - I think something like 1/5 goes to Japan.
Subsidizing oil exploration won't do any good - there aren't enough domestic resources to wean off of OPEC. Even if the US threw a trillion dollars at the problem, we'd still need OPEC. Subsidizing rare earths is so inexpensive that the Japanese conglomerates did it themselves in 2010 (so it wasn't really "subsidizing", it was long-term contracting).
What if you get the entry-level job and realize your peers are retarded and worst of all lazy?
I've never worked in government or academia ;p
We do export finished petroleum products due to excess refining capacity, but nowhere near enough to account for the oil we import. Incidentally, we get most of our oil from the Americas. Mideast oil is under 20% of our imports - Europe buys most of it. Almost all of our Mideast imports are from the Saudis.
You don't think China can figure out a similar way to play the game as well as OPEC?
They actually have an advantage over OPEC in that they can actually control supply - OPEC members are notorious for "cheating".
That said, there are some pretty big differences here. First of all, the total market for rare earths is perhaps $1 billion/year... if the Chinese got really belligerent, you wouldn't even need a government - a few large companies could get together and establish a more dependable supply. Contrast this with oil, where just the PROFITS from the biggest oil companies total about half a trillion dollars.
The second big difference is that ample reserves exist, well, almost everywhere. There's a big mine ramping up in the US, and even Eastern Europe is getting in on the game. Oil is not like that at all - almost all known reserves are being exploited.
Anyway, this conversation is academic I think - China appears to be cutting supply just as alternative sources are ramping up. If they wanted to kill the upstarts, they would be ramping supply up to cut the price. I find it hard to believe that China would go to all of this trouble for a few billion dollars in revenue - it seems much more likely that they are trying to use the rare earth supply as a political weapon. Problem with that (for China) is, Japan seemed to recognize it as such and has treated it as a national security issue rather than an economic issue. Now that their supply is more diversified, that political weapon lost its effectiveness.
As for environmental concerns - sorry but that's just laughable.
Yes, if the US mine can operate in - of all places - California, then obviously there is some way to do this without nuking the environment.
The market will pay them a premium for a stable supply, and they'd be foolish to operate without long-term contracts. I'm not pulling this out of my ass - this is exactly what happened in 2010. Did you even read my link? The US-based mine is ramping up right now, operating on long-term contracts that were signed with Japanese corporations who felt they needed a steady supply rather than a rock-bottom price.
Well, most of us aren't smart enough to pick the bottom of the market. When it comes to equities, I'm old-fashioned and still look at fundamentals. MCP made some questionable acquisitions and their profits are almost zero. The shorts are very strong ahead of their Nov 8 earnings. If they miss expectations (which are only 1 cent per share), I think you'll see single digits.
I didn't have time to fully look into the company, is there some reason I should keep digging? Where is the hope?
Businesses are as concerned about supply as they are price. If China plays games with a commodity, other players will step in offering long term contracts at stable - if higher - prices. The Japanese conglomerates aren't stupid, and have already signed contracts with American and Eastern European suppliers. They are still getting ramped up, so it's a little early but my suspicion is that any excess capacity will just get dumped on the markets and these companies will mostly live off of their long-term contracts. Chinese firms won't have the credibility to sign long-term contracts and will be stuck competing with the glut pricing. This might even be happening now, which is why they are scaling back production... it's not a terribly lucrative business.