You either don't work in America, or have failed to notice the #1 lobbying association for sending IT jobs to India and replacing all American IT workers with H-1b visa holders.
Private sector industries are not burdened by nearly as much red tape and stupid bureaucracy,
Bullshit. In my last private sector job, any project that failed to show a profit by the next quarterly report was considered to be a failure. At least in State Government, the cycle is the bienium, and we have two years to complete projects.
More likely, coming from the ITAA, he not only is for DRM, he wants to outsource development of it to India. Either that or get more H-1bs because "No American could be found with 26 years of experience in DRM".
Since you've actually met him- do you think his loyalty lies with the corporations, the American People, or Mexico?
I only ask because people I've met from the ITAA have all had an extremely anti-American-worker bias in their opinions and attitudes; and when somebody named Garcia comes from the ITAA and joins the "Department of Homeland Security" in any capacity, that makes me feel a LOT less secure than before.
It figures that a lobbyist, rather than an actual technologist or scientist, would be named to this post.
Worse yet, knowing the ITAA and their anti-American hiring standards, with the name Garcia you'd think they could have at least found an American Citizen to take the job.
With enough campaign contributions, you could get that body to rename the color Black, White. Congress is no obstacle when the voters are always presented with two equally bought-and-paid-for politicians who accepted bribes from the same companies.
unnecessary injects are nearly as bad as unnecessary surgery. It's a violation of person's body. Of course the argument is that you don't HAVE to come to the US.
Exactly right. As the word spreads, I'm sure there will be some who actually decide to avoid the US. Of course, the real point is that some people think that RULE OF LAW is such a basic American value that we simply don't want those who would break our laws in the United States at all. People who are habitual law followers, the type of people who stop for red lights at 2:00am even when they're the only ones on the road, would have no problem with this technology.
There's no rubber in a silicon crystal- and once crystalized, there's very little corrosion from liquids. A far bigger danger would be carbon nanotubes fouling the works.
For a gas turbine generating electricity- you don't need a range of throttle settings. You need a single throttle setting that expands and contracts with temperature.
Ah, but what if we purposely increase the plant life? Say several billion apple trees, so that in addition to scrubbing CO2 we're putting that carbon to use as food for the homeless?
Human mob mentality is not subject to mathematics, at least not until Hari Seldon is born.
In other words, with all the other attacks on Big Tobacco and their history with politics, they saw the fact that the political danger to their business from the scientific sector does not depend on their product being a *significant* contributer, only a contributer.
Having said that, given the relative size of dried tobacco leaves to the entire plant, I'm willing to bet that tobacco use is actually atomopheric carbon negative. Or at least, could be easily balanced by smoking under an apple tree.....
You forgot to mention the obvious: Burning cigarettes results (in part) in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide being released into the air. So does burning fossil fuels. Both have been linked to global warming trends.
Well, for that matter, given other aspects of Hezebollah's technology, security through difficulty might not be a half bad idea. Say, in addition to the encryption and frequency hopping you're already doing, hook up a 14.4kbaud accoustic modem, a palmtop of some sort, and use a low-sample-rate VOIP program that has been ROT 13'd.
RTFA- they've got a 10-Watt microgenerator already working! Plus, anything you can run of gasoline, with a little tweaking of the carbuerator, will run off of Whiskey. If this gets popular, I'm going to start looking for an old bar that has DSL access for an investment property.
Actually, since they're using a microcarburetor instead of a microfuel injector, I can see a whole new service industry coming from this: "Honey, I need to get some work done so I'm going down to the Internet Bar for a while". The same business could serve your Wi-Fi, your favorite microbrew, and run your laptop on shots of whiskey.
I'm certainly concerned about this stuff. (I'm reading this after returning from walking around the floor turning off lights in empty conference rooms.) But this "carbon-neutral" business, where those who can afford it can consume as much as they desire as long as they pay for it with offsets based on some extremely nebulous calculation, and those who can't have to do without -- reminds me of papal indulgences more than anything else. You can be a good person by sacrificing, or you can be a good person by giving money to a sanctioned recipient.
True- but as long as those sanctioned recipients are reasonable (papal indulgence money, for instance, often fed the poor), I don't really see a problem with it. We can always use more fruit trees planted in third world nations, the United States Midwest "flyover" states, the poor sections of town, etc.
Ok, I'm very late on this- but I want to know your reasoning here:
1) You're asserting a) as though it's a fact. Global warming is hardly well-enough understood that a computer can be clearly balanced out by some number of trees on the other side of the world.
Why isn't it? We know the carbon absorption of different types of trees. We know the carbon emmission level of burning fossil fuels to get energy. We know the amount of energy needed to create the computer, as well as the energy needed to run the computer for a given number of years (the expected useful lifetime of the hardware) in a worst case scenario. Well, I personally may not- but it's not like any of the above numbers are unavailable entirely, some of them are a bit fuzzy. So why can't we just overcompensate and plant X trees + 1 and sell the computer as being net carbon negative?
2) But let's say it could be done. If we're telling people who can't afford "carbon-neutral" that they have to do without or the world will come to an end, don't you see something creepy about eco-celebrities bragging about how they're spending extra to break even on their private jets? On the CPU level it's harmless, if a little silly (you could buy an Intel and plant your own damn trees), but as a societal value, it's disturbing.
I'm not so sure about that anymore. To me, it's the societal value answer to Gore's complaint: Plant more trees. This actually does give us immediate benefits for a ton of stuff we've been told is due to global warming: Temperate Zone Rain Forests can be found at the headwaters of just about every river and creek in the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere such plantings can reverse drought. On the gulf coast, large forested parks can slow or even disapate a hurricane- spending the energy of the hurricane harmlessly and far from human habitation. In more flat & snowy areas, extra trees can be welcome as natural lightning rods and a tree canopy can keep enough snow off your roof to keep it from collapsing.
In other words, I don't exactly see planting extra trees as a negative, anywhere in the world- and if we can get a few movie stars to balance out their Hummers with say, planting an orchard of apple trees in the poor section of town, that would be a damned good thing.
I'm thinking about buying this as a part of my (currently 3 years old) son's first computer setup. In an effort to start him out on the right foot with OOPS- tell me, is Lego Logo still availabe and compatible with Mindstorms? And what will I need to do to get it running under Linspire or Edubuntu?
I think you've confused comparative advantage with absolute advantage.
Close. What I'm saying is that comparative advantage doesn't exist anymore- it has been REPLACED by absolute advantage.
Sure, if one country has such a lower standard of living that they can produce items more cheaply (or in larger quantity) than a country with a higher standard of living, that country will have absolute advantage in terms of pricing.
And the situation is NOW that EVERY other country than the United States has such an absolute advantage.
In an extremely simplified example (trade is never simple): (all numbers in US dollars) let's say the United States can produce wine for $15/bottle and can produce bread for $1/loaf and Argentina can produce wine for $10/bottle and bread for $.50/loaf. In both cases Argentina has the absolute advantage over the US. However, if Argentina were to focus its energy on the more expensive item and forego bread (produce wine exclusively) and the US foregoes producing wine and instead only produces bread, then each country can trade wine-for-bread.
Yes, but that's not what happens. Instead, since the third world in general has a thousand to one advantage in labor surplus, Argentina produces wine for $10/bottle, and Chile produces bread for $.10/loaf, and the US has nothing left to produce at all, so borrows money from China to buy bread and wine from Argentina and Chile.
We don't live in a world where comparative advantage exists in all trade (or even most trade), but it does exist and is the future of a world economy.
I no longer believe that. I don't believe comparative advantage CAN exist anymore- shipping prices have fallen so low that the only way the US will ever return to being a net manufacturer is if our standard of living falls below that of China.
Each country would produce those items which is best/easiest for them to produce and leave other countries to produce those items that they produce best/easiest. Then it is trade of one needed good for another. Trade imbalances work themselves out... if in the above example, Argentina needs 10-loaves of bread for every person and the US requires 1 bottle of wine for every person, then the trade will naturally "price" itself so there is no surplus nor shortage.
Except for it doesn't. Hasn't in the last 30 years, and baring a worldwide depression, won't. David Ricardo was just another stooge selling you a fairy tale so that you can be exploited more easily (which seems to be the case with most economic theory today).
It isn't what we have today... but it is the direction of global trade.
Too bad the last 30 years statistics for the United States shows that the direction of global trade is actually going the other way- towards ever increasing trade imbalances, not shrinking ones. There's a reason for that- it comes down to the fact that the United States is neither a free market nor a democracy, and hasn't been since 1896 when the coprorations became first class citizens and regulated everybody else to second class slavery.
I'm convinced the only way that will change is if the United States citizens rob the corporations of the power of international trade- either by using fair trade small-scale person-to-person trading, or by merely closing the borders entirely. Otherwise, the money will just pool up in New York, Washington DC, and LA, and those will be the places the lobbyists come from. Everybody else will be scratching for food once the current bubble of Baby Boomer Health Care bursts into a cloud of funerals for people who abused their own bodies.
If you want to get specific, the current trade situation between the US and China is astonishing. I do not understand what the Chinese are doing. They are selling the US a huge amount of goods. But, at the same time they are holding their currency at an artificially high value and buying huge amounts of US government debt. In effect, China, and also Japan, are financing our wars and our obscene balance of trade. I do not understand why they are doing that. They are not stupid, they have a reason for doing it.
I personally think the reason is obvious- they've recognized that the US Republic is now more a Corporatocracy than a Democracy, and they're doing the logical thing that puts them at a strategic advantage over the United States. (They're doing the same thing in East Africa, India, Australia, and Europe, BTW, don't feel like the US is alone in this). It's the logical lesson of WWII- if you can't win on the battlefield, win in the banks.
When you look at the rest of the US trade balance you see the largest part of it is spent on oil. This actually makes sense if you take the long view and assume that the world will continue to use hydrocarbons for fuels and industrial feed stocks.
That's a rather stupid long view if you ask me- I personally think that we will no longer be using hydrocarbons for fuel or industrial feed stock by 2070. Or rather we will- but those hydrocarbons will NOT come from natural sources.
Oil costs less to extract and its extraction does less environmental damage than any other source of hydrocarbons.
So far, that's true, but I'm aware of at least 8 separate research projects that will reverse that in the next 10-20 years.
OTOH, the US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than just about anybody else. It is estimated that we have enough coal and oil shale to power our society with it for 500 to 1000 years (estimates from the '70s, probably shorter time now). It makes sense to buy cheap oil now and sell expensive coal later. The US also has large supplies of uranium and thorium and we have potential sources of geothermal power that are large enough to power the world. Just look at what is sitting under Yellowstone or the magma upwelling about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
True enough- in fact, I think that's where the real future lies for the United States- ambient energy farming.
What is going on now is not sustainable. OTOH, in the long run it does set the US up as one of the worlds major suppliers of hydrocarbons and energy. You have to take a long view and assume that when things get bad enough people will do what is needed to correct the problems. The situation in the US is going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. We have a huge older generation who are... not rational is the best way to say it. They are old, they vote, and they are dying off. Things will change as voiting power moves from the old rural population to the younger urban population.
That's scary- because to me it's the old urban population that are the irrational ones, and I don't see anything better in the young urban population. In fact, urban population centers in general seems pretty irrational to me- too much putting all the eggs in one basket.
The way things are going in China I have to wonder how long it is until there is a revolution that completely disrupts their economy. The other major concern is the current terror war. I do not believe that the world understands how the US feels about that right now. I believe the terrorists really to not understand what they are dealing with. They have missed the lesson of flight 93. They clearly have not read any US history.
Actually, I think they've read the last 50 years of US History pretty well- by and large the United States has lost any wish to actually finish a war victorious, and even the one time in the last 60 years that we did so, we spent a lot of money insuring that our former enemies would
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Never heard of it.
You either don't work in America, or have failed to notice the #1 lobbying association for sending IT jobs to India and replacing all American IT workers with H-1b visa holders.
Private sector industries are not burdened by nearly as much red tape and stupid bureaucracy,
Bullshit. In my last private sector job, any project that failed to show a profit by the next quarterly report was considered to be a failure. At least in State Government, the cycle is the bienium, and we have two years to complete projects.
More likely, coming from the ITAA, he not only is for DRM, he wants to outsource development of it to India. Either that or get more H-1bs because "No American could be found with 26 years of experience in DRM".
Since you've actually met him- do you think his loyalty lies with the corporations, the American People, or Mexico?
I only ask because people I've met from the ITAA have all had an extremely anti-American-worker bias in their opinions and attitudes; and when somebody named Garcia comes from the ITAA and joins the "Department of Homeland Security" in any capacity, that makes me feel a LOT less secure than before.
Given his last name, swab them out for less than $2/hr. Isn't that what illegal immigrants do?
The few of us who still have one Win98 system around, do so for a reason, and haven't given a shit about Microsoft Support in the last 8 years anyway.
It figures that a lobbyist, rather than an actual technologist or scientist, would be named to this post.
Worse yet, knowing the ITAA and their anti-American hiring standards, with the name Garcia you'd think they could have at least found an American Citizen to take the job.
but you gotta ram crap through Congress first.
With enough campaign contributions, you could get that body to rename the color Black, White. Congress is no obstacle when the voters are always presented with two equally bought-and-paid-for politicians who accepted bribes from the same companies.
unnecessary injects are nearly as bad as unnecessary surgery. It's a violation of person's body. Of course the argument is that you don't HAVE to come to the US.
Exactly right. As the word spreads, I'm sure there will be some who actually decide to avoid the US. Of course, the real point is that some people think that RULE OF LAW is such a basic American value that we simply don't want those who would break our laws in the United States at all. People who are habitual law followers, the type of people who stop for red lights at 2:00am even when they're the only ones on the road, would have no problem with this technology.
There's no rubber in a silicon crystal- and once crystalized, there's very little corrosion from liquids. A far bigger danger would be carbon nanotubes fouling the works.
Correct- but at least you took me seriously- that's more than I can say for many others.
For a gas turbine generating electricity- you don't need a range of throttle settings. You need a single throttle setting that expands and contracts with temperature.
Ah, but what if we purposely increase the plant life? Say several billion apple trees, so that in addition to scrubbing CO2 we're putting that carbon to use as food for the homeless?
Human mob mentality is not subject to mathematics, at least not until Hari Seldon is born.
In other words, with all the other attacks on Big Tobacco and their history with politics, they saw the fact that the political danger to their business from the scientific sector does not depend on their product being a *significant* contributer, only a contributer.
Having said that, given the relative size of dried tobacco leaves to the entire plant, I'm willing to bet that tobacco use is actually atomopheric carbon negative. Or at least, could be easily balanced by smoking under an apple tree.....
You forgot to mention the obvious: Burning cigarettes results (in part) in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide being released into the air. So does burning fossil fuels. Both have been linked to global warming trends.
Ok, so modern cars this doesn't work for. Instead, you have to tweak the computer. A conversion to E85 Flex Fuel or even E100 is available for most cars for about $100. But given the price of whiskey, I'd much rather run my little battery generator off of it than my car....
Well, for that matter, given other aspects of Hezebollah's technology, security through difficulty might not be a half bad idea. Say, in addition to the encryption and frequency hopping you're already doing, hook up a 14.4kbaud accoustic modem, a palmtop of some sort, and use a low-sample-rate VOIP program that has been ROT 13'd.
RTFA- they've got a 10-Watt microgenerator already working! Plus, anything you can run of gasoline, with a little tweaking of the carbuerator, will run off of Whiskey. If this gets popular, I'm going to start looking for an old bar that has DSL access for an investment property.
Actually, since they're using a microcarburetor instead of a microfuel injector, I can see a whole new service industry coming from this: "Honey, I need to get some work done so I'm going down to the Internet Bar for a while". The same business could serve your Wi-Fi, your favorite microbrew, and run your laptop on shots of whiskey.
I'm certainly concerned about this stuff. (I'm reading this after returning from walking around the floor turning off lights in empty conference rooms.) But this "carbon-neutral" business, where those who can afford it can consume as much as they desire as long as they pay for it with offsets based on some extremely nebulous calculation, and those who can't have to do without -- reminds me of papal indulgences more than anything else. You can be a good person by sacrificing, or you can be a good person by giving money to a sanctioned recipient.
True- but as long as those sanctioned recipients are reasonable (papal indulgence money, for instance, often fed the poor), I don't really see a problem with it. We can always use more fruit trees planted in third world nations, the United States Midwest "flyover" states, the poor sections of town, etc.
Ok, I'm very late on this- but I want to know your reasoning here:
1) You're asserting a) as though it's a fact. Global warming is hardly well-enough understood that a computer can be clearly balanced out by some number of trees on the other side of the world.
Why isn't it? We know the carbon absorption of different types of trees. We know the carbon emmission level of burning fossil fuels to get energy. We know the amount of energy needed to create the computer, as well as the energy needed to run the computer for a given number of years (the expected useful lifetime of the hardware) in a worst case scenario. Well, I personally may not- but it's not like any of the above numbers are unavailable entirely, some of them are a bit fuzzy. So why can't we just overcompensate and plant X trees + 1 and sell the computer as being net carbon negative?
2) But let's say it could be done. If we're telling people who can't afford "carbon-neutral" that they have to do without or the world will come to an end, don't you see something creepy about eco-celebrities bragging about how they're spending extra to break even on their private jets? On the CPU level it's harmless, if a little silly (you could buy an Intel and plant your own damn trees), but as a societal value, it's disturbing.
I'm not so sure about that anymore. To me, it's the societal value answer to Gore's complaint: Plant more trees. This actually does give us immediate benefits for a ton of stuff we've been told is due to global warming: Temperate Zone Rain Forests can be found at the headwaters of just about every river and creek in the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere such plantings can reverse drought. On the gulf coast, large forested parks can slow or even disapate a hurricane- spending the energy of the hurricane harmlessly and far from human habitation. In more flat & snowy areas, extra trees can be welcome as natural lightning rods and a tree canopy can keep enough snow off your roof to keep it from collapsing.
In other words, I don't exactly see planting extra trees as a negative, anywhere in the world- and if we can get a few movie stars to balance out their Hummers with say, planting an orchard of apple trees in the poor section of town, that would be a damned good thing.
I'm thinking about buying this as a part of my (currently 3 years old) son's first computer setup. In an effort to start him out on the right foot with OOPS- tell me, is Lego Logo still availabe and compatible with Mindstorms? And what will I need to do to get it running under Linspire or Edubuntu?
You're making one classic mistake many economists make: Profits are rarely spent. Payroll is spent, but not profit, which is usually hoarded instead.
I think you've confused comparative advantage with absolute advantage.
Close. What I'm saying is that comparative advantage doesn't exist anymore- it has been REPLACED by absolute advantage.
Sure, if one country has such a lower standard of living that they can produce items more cheaply (or in larger quantity) than a country with a higher standard of living, that country will have absolute advantage in terms of pricing.
And the situation is NOW that EVERY other country than the United States has such an absolute advantage.
In an extremely simplified example (trade is never simple): (all numbers in US dollars) let's say the United States can produce wine for $15/bottle and can produce bread for $1/loaf and Argentina can produce wine for $10/bottle and bread for $.50/loaf. In both cases Argentina has the absolute advantage over the US. However, if Argentina were to focus its energy on the more expensive item and forego bread (produce wine exclusively) and the US foregoes producing wine and instead only produces bread, then each country can trade wine-for-bread.
Yes, but that's not what happens. Instead, since the third world in general has a thousand to one advantage in labor surplus, Argentina produces wine for $10/bottle, and Chile produces bread for $.10/loaf, and the US has nothing left to produce at all, so borrows money from China to buy bread and wine from Argentina and Chile.
We don't live in a world where comparative advantage exists in all trade (or even most trade), but it does exist and is the future of a world economy.
I no longer believe that. I don't believe comparative advantage CAN exist anymore- shipping prices have fallen so low that the only way the US will ever return to being a net manufacturer is if our standard of living falls below that of China.
Each country would produce those items which is best/easiest for them to produce and leave other countries to produce those items that they produce best/easiest. Then it is trade of one needed good for another. Trade imbalances work themselves out... if in the above example, Argentina needs 10-loaves of bread for every person and the US requires 1 bottle of wine for every person, then the trade will naturally "price" itself so there is no surplus nor shortage.
Except for it doesn't. Hasn't in the last 30 years, and baring a worldwide depression, won't. David Ricardo was just another stooge selling you a fairy tale so that you can be exploited more easily (which seems to be the case with most economic theory today).
It isn't what we have today... but it is the direction of global trade.
Too bad the last 30 years statistics for the United States shows that the direction of global trade is actually going the other way- towards ever increasing trade imbalances, not shrinking ones. There's a reason for that- it comes down to the fact that the United States is neither a free market nor a democracy, and hasn't been since 1896 when the coprorations became first class citizens and regulated everybody else to second class slavery.
I'm convinced the only way that will change is if the United States citizens rob the corporations of the power of international trade- either by using fair trade small-scale person-to-person trading, or by merely closing the borders entirely. Otherwise, the money will just pool up in New York, Washington DC, and LA, and those will be the places the lobbyists come from. Everybody else will be scratching for food once the current bubble of Baby Boomer Health Care bursts into a cloud of funerals for people who abused their own bodies.
If you want to get specific, the current trade situation between the US and China is astonishing. I do not understand what the Chinese are doing. They are selling the US a huge amount of goods. But, at the same time they are holding their currency at an artificially high value and buying huge amounts of US government debt. In effect, China, and also Japan, are financing our wars and our obscene balance of trade. I do not understand why they are doing that. They are not stupid, they have a reason for doing it.
I personally think the reason is obvious- they've recognized that the US Republic is now more a Corporatocracy than a Democracy, and they're doing the logical thing that puts them at a strategic advantage over the United States. (They're doing the same thing in East Africa, India, Australia, and Europe, BTW, don't feel like the US is alone in this). It's the logical lesson of WWII- if you can't win on the battlefield, win in the banks.
When you look at the rest of the US trade balance you see the largest part of it is spent on oil. This actually makes sense if you take the long view and assume that the world will continue to use hydrocarbons for fuels and industrial feed stocks.
That's a rather stupid long view if you ask me- I personally think that we will no longer be using hydrocarbons for fuel or industrial feed stock by 2070. Or rather we will- but those hydrocarbons will NOT come from natural sources.
Oil costs less to extract and its extraction does less environmental damage than any other source of hydrocarbons.
So far, that's true, but I'm aware of at least 8 separate research projects that will reverse that in the next 10-20 years.
OTOH, the US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than just about anybody else. It is estimated that we have enough coal and oil shale to power our society with it for 500 to 1000 years (estimates from the '70s, probably shorter time now). It makes sense to buy cheap oil now and sell expensive coal later. The US also has large supplies of uranium and thorium and we have potential sources of geothermal power that are large enough to power the world. Just look at what is sitting under Yellowstone or the magma upwelling about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
True enough- in fact, I think that's where the real future lies for the United States- ambient energy farming.
What is going on now is not sustainable. OTOH, in the long run it does set the US up as one of the worlds major suppliers of hydrocarbons and energy. You have to take a long view and assume that when things get bad enough people will do what is needed to correct the problems. The situation in the US is going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. We have a huge older generation who are... not rational is the best way to say it. They are old, they vote, and they are dying off. Things will change as voiting power moves from the old rural population to the younger urban population.
That's scary- because to me it's the old urban population that are the irrational ones, and I don't see anything better in the young urban population. In fact, urban population centers in general seems pretty irrational to me- too much putting all the eggs in one basket.
The way things are going in China I have to wonder how long it is until there is a revolution that completely disrupts their economy. The other major concern is the current terror war. I do not believe that the world understands how the US feels about that right now. I believe the terrorists really to not understand what they are dealing with. They have missed the lesson of flight 93. They clearly have not read any US history.
Actually, I think they've read the last 50 years of US History pretty well- by and large the United States has lost any wish to actually finish a war victorious, and even the one time in the last 60 years that we did so, we spent a lot of money insuring that our former enemies would