No, Obama has spent more dollars, but Bush has spent more PERMANTE dollars.
By this I mean that Bush's policies amounted to taking tax money and burning it on the white house lawn.
While Obama has certainly done some of this as well, most of his most expensive policies have already or will recoup most if not all the money invested. What this means is that the long term impact is just the interest on the debt for the time the money was out.
There is an intersting article published a few days ago:
What I find amazing is that as far as I can tell, Regan, Bush junior and Obama all seem to have read '1984' and decided that it demonstrated a sound financial plan! Read the book. The key aspect of the financial system was making production disapear through war. This kept most of the population poor, reduced the availability of consumer good and had the fringe benefit of sparking patriotism...
I remember an article in PC World about the original pentium chips. The author suggested the ideal placement of the chip was on the outside of the case with the writting:
(5) You must use armored convoys or fly it in while paying hazard pay to the drivers to get the fuel to the isolated bases since placing the bases near population centers would incite additional strife in the local population plus the intense use of computers in the field requires cool temperatures and therefore LOTS of fuel for ACs
"Maybe it is so high that creatures have to move at peak times to avoid getting fried."
That is already the case for many plants on Earth, especially in desert regions. The plants develop thicker wax coverings and close all stoma to prevent water loss.
If you are thinking trully dramatic temperature differences (Chronicles of Riddick Prison World) than you are on a planet with no atmosphere.
"Or perhaps no light reaches the surface." "Perhaps deep water sulfur vents are the dominant source of energy."
While volcanic vents and the like CAN provide some energy for life as demonstrated by life on earth, it can't provide a lot and will be very geographically limited. Therefore if no light reached the surface than either the plants float in the air (possible) or there is no significant life.
"Assuming photosynthesis developed and had nearly the same efficiency as terrestrial plants."
There is no reason to assume that earth bound plants haven't optimized the system. The 5% efficiency to store energy as sugar is actually not far off from the efficiency of solar cells and electrolosys or other similar long term chemical storage system.
"The currently accepted theory is that photosynthesis developed some time after the origin of life on earth. If you accept that, then there was a period when life existed here with no plants."
Current theory says that photosynthesis was created very shortly after life itself. Certainly before it began to spread consistently. Now it IS true that photosynthesis exists outside of plants as algea and bacteria. However ALL multicellular photosynthesis happens in plants.
"My guess is that when we first encounter life on another world, we won't even recognize it as such."
Life on earth is so varied that I doubt alien life will be significantly different. The number of limbs may be different. The colors my be different. But I will be shocked if when we encounter alien life it can be categorized in a system almost identical to the current taxonomy system "Animal Kingdom, Plant Kingdom etc).
If we define a "plant" as a staionary living organism that captures energy through some form of photosynthesis then it is safe to assume that plants are common.
Or another question, why don't we photosynthesize in our skin? The answer is simple, light does not have enough energy to support movement.
Think about it, it takes a carrot 3-6 months to grow. You eat it and burn through it in 2 hours over walking.
Well, while "life" could be common, we might be one of the only "intelligent" species out there.
Intelligence is probably pretty rare because until it is very advanced it tends to be a detriment. Growing our brains is extremly energy intensive and needs many years. Even on earth life formed almost immediatly once the oceans formed but it took billions of years to get to us.
Plus, since both life and technology requier a wide variety of elements, it is unlikley that any star much older than the sun could have formed life. Every generation of star bumps up the concentration of higer elements, systems significantly younger will not have much material to work with.
Finally, we might actually be one of the smartest creatures out there simply because we have more energy available to us. Assuming that life needs liquid water, we can plot out the "Goldilocks" zone. When you map out Sols goldilocks zone you see that it extends from about 0.9 AU out to about 3 AU depending on the size of the planet (yes Mars could have water if it were larger). So we are just barely inside the Goldilocks zone which means we have more energy available to us than most habitable planets. This means that our ecology is likely to be more complex and more agressive than most.
The Fission powered Orion was possible with 1960's era tech and would be even easier now. Plus there is no reason to think that we won't eventually acheive useful fusion. For instance, Tri-Alpha is talking about breakeven energy within 2 years...
This tech is really the ONLY interstellar tech that is reasonable with our current understanding.
They didn't test the uranium device because they didn't have any extra U235. If they had tested it then it would have taken another 3 years to purify enough U235 for another bomb.
They wanted to test it but couldn't so they crossed their fingers and hit the button.
We really don't have a choice regardless. Oil IS running out. Wikileaks had some documents from Saudi Arabia showing that thier reserves are actually 40% smaller than publicly advertised. But even if they weren't, even if the oil reserves were infinite, Saudi Arabia is expected to become a net oil IMPORTER around 2040 or so.
There are only so many place you can drill for oil there and so they have a hard time increasing production while at the same time they are consuming more and more as they grow.
I read an article two days ago saying that if Algeria goes like Libya then oil will probably hit $220 a barrel by the end of the summer. Oil is no longer a stable energy source.
Now as the price goes up it will become economical to harvest more difficult sources like oil shale. However with the easy reserves we have right bnow it takes 1 barrell of oil to produce 4-5 barrells of final products. Easy oil shale sources are something like 1:1.5. This may improve a little with development but not by much.
We can recognize that climate change/global warming is a bad thing and that CO2 is a primary cause and gradually move to other sources OR we can not and be forced to move much more quickly causing much greater economic damage having had a extra 15-20 years of increasing prices.
Staple plants (like corn, rice, wheat and potatoes, etc) are an excellent source of fiber, vitamins some minerals and a moderate source of calories. They generally lack enough protein and fats. You must remember that a human being as essential Amino Acids AND essential fatty acids which must both be satisfied through diet.
Vegetarians generally have a difficult time fullfilling these requierments without very carefull diets. These diets include a wide range of species which is often difficult and expensive to maintain and well outside the budget of most developing nations. A healthy vegetarian diet can be more expensive and land/resource intensive than a diet with a few (say 6) ounces of meat a day. In addition, there are vitamins which are not available from any plant source (B12 and others) and must be provided in pill form which may be an impossibility for poor nations...
A true Vegan diet is a biologic impossibility
Finally, meat is much more calorically dense than almost any plant matter. If you have to SHIP food, it is acutally easier to ship calories as meat than almost any plant material.
Now the problem is, regardless of how much money you have you MUST eat and you MUST buy heat and you MUST have basic clothing and you MUST have many other things before you can hope to have anything extra to save or to buy an education or otherwise improve yourself.
40% off of 100K means you still have a little cash left over.
40% off of 35K means you can't even get all the necessaties.
Not true that the rich pay the lions share. Once you factor in ALL taxes, fees etc (like sales tax, property tax vehicle millage, excise taxes drivers license fees etc) than the actual burden of government is about 40.4% across ALL income levels.
The poor pay ~40%, the rich pay ~40% etc. Std of 5.3% There are a couple of outliers...like families making 150K are taxed at 54% while families making 50K are taxed at 25% but generally everyone pays about 47%
Now the big issue as I see it is that historically when you have anything BUT a progressive tax system (rich pay more) you gradually move to a feudal type system. A few rich lords (or CEOs) and everyone else is a serf. It makes sense since money is fungable and can be transfered between generations and since money tends to breed more money, unless you have a method for moving it around it will tend to accumulate to a few.
This is exactly what we have seen happen since Reagan... as the original article argued
1. You announce your intention to leave the train and the cars around you give you plenty of room before releasing control to you.
2. In modern cars, catastrophic mechanical failures are very rare. If one happens at highway speed in a train you will get the same result as you do now...a major accident. However mechanical failures are a very small fraction of the cause of accidents (mainly blown out tires) human error/inattention/drinking are the vast majority of accidents. Mechanical failure is an issue but not an issue that is significantly higher than the current standards... so don't worry about it.
3. Performance is dictated by the weakest link. I assume there will be minimum requirements to join a train and if your vehicle can't do 80 mph and stop fast enough, it won't be allowed to join a train in the middle... maybe at the end though
4. What about road hazards now?
5. trains will only be in the left lane...problem solved. This actually follows since many areas already reserve the left lane for long distance travelers.
You are operating under the assumption that for a train system to work it must be flawless. This is not the case.
It must be significantly better than the current system and thats it. Removing humans from the controls for the long, boring sections will greatly reduce the accident rate and improve fuel efficiency. Of course you will still have mechanical failures...just like you do now, but that does not invalidate the system.
I just did a quick search on google and pulled up an Edmunds.com article on efficient driving. That article says that your personal driving habits can cost you up to a 37% reduction in milleage.
So take a few million drivers and reduce the fuel usage by 37% and tell me it doesn't matter...
Check your numbers again. The actual infection rate was estimated at 90% of people had measles by the age of 15.
Now you are right that around 1 in 100 suffer the severe form, encephalitis, develops. Thoes who don't die are typically left with neurological issues. Please not that this is roughly the same rate as autism.
So IF 100% of autism cases were caused by the vaccine, then and only then would it be a toss-up as to safer with or without the vaccine. Plus you also have Mumps and Rubella that are also prevented...
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No, Obama has spent more dollars, but Bush has spent more PERMANTE dollars.
By this I mean that Bush's policies amounted to taking tax money and burning it on the white house lawn.
While Obama has certainly done some of this as well, most of his most expensive policies have already or will recoup most if not all the money invested. What this means is that the long term impact is just the interest on the debt for the time the money was out.
There is an intersting article published a few days ago:
http://ezkool.com/2011/07/two-potus-spending-2/
What I find amazing is that as far as I can tell, Regan, Bush junior and Obama all seem to have read '1984' and decided that it demonstrated a sound financial plan! Read the book. The key aspect of the financial system was making production disapear through war. This kept most of the population poor, reduced the availability of consumer good and had the fringe benefit of sparking patriotism...
What I cna't believe
Absolution Gap is the one you want :)
Yeah but then if you get mad and kick the thing it will start icing up and continue to freeze the whole continent!
I remember an article in PC World about the original pentium chips. The author suggested the ideal placement of the chip was on the outside of the case with the writting:
"Place Coffee Here to Keep Warm"
(5) You must use armored convoys or fly it in while paying hazard pay to the drivers to get the fuel to the isolated bases since placing the bases near population centers would incite additional strife in the local population plus the intense use of computers in the field requires cool temperatures and therefore LOTS of fuel for ACs
"Maybe it is so high that creatures have to move at peak times to avoid getting fried."
That is already the case for many plants on Earth, especially in desert regions. The plants develop thicker wax coverings and close all stoma to prevent water loss.
If you are thinking trully dramatic temperature differences (Chronicles of Riddick Prison World) than you are on a planet with no atmosphere.
"Or perhaps no light reaches the surface."
"Perhaps deep water sulfur vents are the dominant source of energy."
While volcanic vents and the like CAN provide some energy for life as demonstrated by life on earth, it can't provide a lot and will be very geographically limited. Therefore if no light reached the surface than either the plants float in the air (possible) or there is no significant life.
"Assuming photosynthesis developed and had nearly the same efficiency as terrestrial plants."
There is no reason to assume that earth bound plants haven't optimized the system. The 5% efficiency to store energy as sugar is actually not far off from the efficiency of solar cells and electrolosys or other similar long term chemical storage system.
"The currently accepted theory is that photosynthesis developed some time after the origin
of life on earth. If you accept that, then there was a period when life existed here with
no plants."
Current theory says that photosynthesis was created very shortly after life itself. Certainly before it began to spread consistently. Now it IS true that photosynthesis exists outside of plants as algea and bacteria. However ALL multicellular photosynthesis happens in plants.
"My guess is that when we first encounter life on another world, we won't even recognize
it as such."
Life on earth is so varied that I doubt alien life will be significantly different. The number of limbs may be different. The colors my be different. But I will be shocked if when we encounter alien life it can be categorized in a system almost identical to the current taxonomy system "Animal Kingdom, Plant Kingdom etc).
Average efficiency of photosynthesis: 1-5%
Available energy: 20W at noon
If we define a "plant" as a staionary living organism that captures energy through some form of photosynthesis then it is safe to assume that plants are common.
Or another question, why don't we photosynthesize in our skin? The answer is simple, light does not have enough energy to support movement.
Think about it, it takes a carrot 3-6 months to grow. You eat it and burn through it in 2 hours over walking.
No, I don't think we are the only ones that could or will exist. But I do think we stand a solid chance of being the first intelligent species.
This is because we have a very good energy balance on earth and it is unlikely that a planet like ours could have formed much before we did.
Well, while "life" could be common, we might be one of the only "intelligent" species out there.
Intelligence is probably pretty rare because until it is very advanced it tends to be a detriment. Growing our brains is extremly energy intensive and needs many years. Even on earth life formed almost immediatly once the oceans formed but it took billions of years to get to us.
Plus, since both life and technology requier a wide variety of elements, it is unlikley that any star much older than the sun could have formed life. Every generation of star bumps up the concentration of higer elements, systems significantly younger will not have much material to work with.
Finally, we might actually be one of the smartest creatures out there simply because we have more energy available to us. Assuming that life needs liquid water, we can plot out the "Goldilocks" zone. When you map out Sols goldilocks zone you see that it extends from about 0.9 AU out to about 3 AU depending on the size of the planet (yes Mars could have water if it were larger). So we are just barely inside the Goldilocks zone which means we have more energy available to us than most habitable planets. This means that our ecology is likely to be more complex and more agressive than most.
The Fission powered Orion was possible with 1960's era tech and would be even easier now. Plus there is no reason to think that we won't eventually acheive useful fusion. For instance, Tri-Alpha is talking about breakeven energy within 2 years...
This tech is really the ONLY interstellar tech that is reasonable with our current understanding.
They didn't test the uranium device because they didn't have any extra U235. If they had tested it then it would have taken another 3 years to purify enough U235 for another bomb.
They wanted to test it but couldn't so they crossed their fingers and hit the button.
We really don't have a choice regardless. Oil IS running out. Wikileaks had some documents from Saudi Arabia showing that thier reserves are actually 40% smaller than publicly advertised. But even if they weren't, even if the oil reserves were infinite, Saudi Arabia is expected to become a net oil IMPORTER around 2040 or so.
There are only so many place you can drill for oil there and so they have a hard time increasing production while at the same time they are consuming more and more as they grow.
I read an article two days ago saying that if Algeria goes like Libya then oil will probably hit $220 a barrel by the end of the summer. Oil is no longer a stable energy source.
Now as the price goes up it will become economical to harvest more difficult sources like oil shale. However with the easy reserves we have right bnow it takes 1 barrell of oil to produce 4-5 barrells of final products. Easy oil shale sources are something like 1:1.5. This may improve a little with development but not by much.
We can recognize that climate change/global warming is a bad thing and that CO2 is a primary cause and gradually move to other sources OR we can not and be forced to move much more quickly causing much greater economic damage having had a extra 15-20 years of increasing prices.
What do you think is better?
That really defeats the purpose of a strike....
We are talking about black holes NOT black pillars...
The main office on the top floor, take a right past the pearly gates...
Staple plants (like corn, rice, wheat and potatoes, etc) are an excellent source of fiber, vitamins some minerals and a moderate source of calories. They generally lack enough protein and fats. You must remember that a human being as essential Amino Acids AND essential fatty acids which must both be satisfied through diet.
Vegetarians generally have a difficult time fullfilling these requierments without very carefull diets. These diets include a wide range of species which is often difficult and expensive to maintain and well outside the budget of most developing nations. A healthy vegetarian diet can be more expensive and land/resource intensive than a diet with a few (say 6) ounces of meat a day. In addition, there are vitamins which are not available from any plant source (B12 and others) and must be provided in pill form which may be an impossibility for poor nations...
A true Vegan diet is a biologic impossibility
Finally, meat is much more calorically dense than almost any plant matter. If you have to SHIP food, it is acutally easier to ship calories as meat than almost any plant material.
Solar sails can't get up to 12% C.
Therefore we could get near continuous observations in 10,000 years instead of 50....
Over all the actual tax burden is right around 40% regardless of who you are:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTaxRate40.aspx
Now the problem is, regardless of how much money you have you MUST eat and you MUST buy heat and you MUST have basic clothing and you MUST have many other things before you can hope to have anything extra to save or to buy an education or otherwise improve yourself.
40% off of 100K means you still have a little cash left over.
40% off of 35K means you can't even get all the necessaties.
Not true that the rich pay the lions share. Once you factor in ALL taxes, fees etc (like sales tax, property tax vehicle millage, excise taxes drivers license fees etc) than the actual burden of government is about 40.4% across ALL income levels.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTaxRate40.aspx
The poor pay ~40%, the rich pay ~40% etc. Std of 5.3% There are a couple of outliers...like families making 150K are taxed at 54% while families making 50K are taxed at 25% but generally everyone pays about 47%
Now the big issue as I see it is that historically when you have anything BUT a progressive tax system (rich pay more) you gradually move to a feudal type system. A few rich lords (or CEOs) and everyone else is a serf. It makes sense since money is fungable and can be transfered between generations and since money tends to breed more money, unless you have a method for moving it around it will tend to accumulate to a few.
This is exactly what we have seen happen since Reagan... as the original article argued
The article said it had a 15% conversion rate.
You are better off using compressed air and turn a turbine.
1. You announce your intention to leave the train and the cars around you give you plenty of room before releasing control to you.
2. In modern cars, catastrophic mechanical failures are very rare. If one happens at highway speed in a train you will get the same result as you do now...a major accident. However mechanical failures are a very small fraction of the cause of accidents (mainly blown out tires) human error/inattention/drinking are the vast majority of accidents. Mechanical failure is an issue but not an issue that is significantly higher than the current standards... so don't worry about it.
3. Performance is dictated by the weakest link. I assume there will be minimum requirements to join a train and if your vehicle can't do 80 mph and stop fast enough, it won't be allowed to join a train in the middle... maybe at the end though
4. What about road hazards now?
5. trains will only be in the left lane...problem solved. This actually follows since many areas already reserve the left lane for long distance travelers.
You are operating under the assumption that for a train system to work it must be flawless. This is not the case.
It must be significantly better than the current system and thats it. Removing humans from the controls for the long, boring sections will greatly reduce the accident rate and improve fuel efficiency. Of course you will still have mechanical failures...just like you do now, but that does not invalidate the system.
I just did a quick search on google and pulled up an Edmunds.com article on efficient driving. That article says that your personal driving habits can cost you up to a 37% reduction in milleage. So take a few million drivers and reduce the fuel usage by 37% and tell me it doesn't matter...
Check your numbers again. The actual infection rate was estimated at 90% of people had measles by the age of 15.
Now you are right that around 1 in 100 suffer the severe form, encephalitis, develops. Thoes who don't die are typically left with neurological issues. Please not that this is roughly the same rate as autism.
So IF 100% of autism cases were caused by the vaccine, then and only then would it be a toss-up as to safer with or without the vaccine. Plus you also have Mumps and Rubella that are also prevented...
Already do