So then, the US should not allow investment in foreign companies, we should just exploit them for their natural resources?
England did that to the US up until, oh, about 1776. I can think of at least two times in the last century that they're glad the US didn't remain a colony comprised of illiterate dirt farmers. Do you think England's economy suffered because the US prospered? The global economy isn't a zero sum game.
Apparently you want to reap the benefits of living in a free market without taking the risks.
Here's a suggestion for you. Get a job in a defense company. They can't outsource that.
Those lousy mutinationals. If they keep doing that, one of these days there won't be any more third-world sh*thole countries left to exploit. *Then* who's going to work in the shoe factories?
You *do* realize, don't you, that the US started out as a colony exploited by England? How do you think Japan went from a country of burnt-out cities to the 2nd biggest economy in the world? They let themselves get exploited to the max.
I work in the US for a European country. In all fairness, why should Europeans profit from my labor?
The oil sold by Saudi is sold at market price. Actually, because of OPEC, that price is higher than what it would be in a real free market.
Western companies supply the capital equipment and perform most of the labor. The Saudis could build the equipment and do all the labor, but that would involve Saudis doing manual work.
The Saudi citizens are only being exploited by their govt. If the US refused to buy oil from SA, some other country would pick up the slack (the US doesn't import much oil from SA anyway).
If the Saudi citizens feel that they're being taken advantage of, they need to take it up with *their* leaders. SA is a sovereign country.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that you don't think the US was justified in going into Iraq. If you *do* feel that way, then you shouldn't have a problem with having a nation run by tyrants using the resources of their nation for their own advantage. So why should you have a problem with the situation in SA? At least the govt there isn't doing mass executions of its own citizenry.
Saudi exports 60, 70 billion dollars worth of oil a year. There's about 22 million Saudis. That's about $3000 each. And most of that money goes to just a few people. Most of the jobs are held by foreigners (few Saudis deign to lower themselves to perform manual labor). There's no other exports other than oil, no other industry. Much (most?) of their water comes from desalinization plants, which (I believe) run on natural gas purchased from Qatar. All their food is imported or grown at tremedous expense. Your average SA citizen is *not* abandoning his Rolls Royce on the side of the highway when it runs out of gas.
We "exploit" Russia, Mexico, Venezuala, Canada, etc. for oil and they're more than happy to keep the pumps running. The difference is they're not run by tyrants propped up by oil money, and the people in those countries know that it's *their* responsibility to get *their* govt to serve the general public. Something, apparently, the average SA citizen is to stupid to grasp.
Which is why the coalition should have kicked Saddam out of power in GW1. No long-term bases in Saudi, no years of sanctions pissing off the Arab world.
You're right, the USSR would have collapsed eventually. You can pretty much say that about any tyranny. Saddam's govt would have collapsed eventually. NK will collapse eventually. The bad part is it can take decades, with multiple generations living their entire life under oppression.
The cold war isn't very similar to the terror war at all. After all, as the Sting song goes, the Russians love their children too. Mutually Assured Destruction was able to work with them. There were *rules*. Not that way with the terrorists; if they had a nuke Manhattan would be a crater ASAP.
I was born in 1962, and while I was growing up, I never really thought the US/USSR would start lobbing around H-bombs unless somebody somewhere pushed the wrong button, and there were extraordinary safeguards put in place to keep that from happening.
Terrorists with WMDs would be a whole new level. No hype. Much worse than the cold war. The only long-term solution is to bring democracy to the Arab states. Well, that or kill them all and let Allah sort them out.
Funny, I've always noticed that when someone refers to North America, South America, and Central America as a composite, they refer to them as "The Americas". Kind of like "The Simpsons".
I am an American. I live in America I also live in the Americas.
But if you *really* want to know what country I live in, it's Texas:). Which, for Europeans and for people who live in the non-American parts of the Americas, is even worse than merely living in the American part of the Americas.
Please. Your state govt has to *force* gas stations to hire people to pump gas, so they can save money in insurance? Do you honestly think that the money they save on insurance comes close to paying those wages?
It's for job creation, paid for by your friendly motorist. Everywhere else in the country, people are more than willing to pump their own gas in order to save a buck or two (and, it seems, to do so at extreme risk to life and limb). They're so willing, in fact, that it's damn near impossible to find a full-service station or pump.
The problem is, the govt will go bankrupt and the economy will collapse if the government follows through on their "obligation". Twenty years ago would have been a good time to go to a investment based social security system; the demographic bulge of the boomers makes that impossible now. Maybe after they all die off.
The longer the govt puts off raising the retirement age, the worse it will get. Since they're all irresponsible imbeciles, it'll get bad. And since only 30% of the people even bother to invest for their retirement, they'll get the shaft.
It sucks that the govt won't fix the problem until it's pretty much unfixable.
It sucks that the main way they'll fix it is by screwing over the citizens that are responsible and save for their retirement (like me). Of course, that won't even compare to the screwing the current 20 year olds will get.
And it reeks of hypocrisy that the Dems won't even consider going to a partially stock based system, when every Democratic congressman, and almost every member of one of their main constituencies (teachers) *already* participate in a stock based system instead of social security.
The only bright side to the whole thing is, as bad as it'll be in the US, it'll be an order of magnitude worse in Europe:).
The amount of He-3 in lunar soil is at incredibly low concentrations, and even then only in soil that's been exposed to solar wind for 100's of millions of years. And think about how to get it out: Put *huge* quantities of soil into a container, heat it up till the He-3 comes out, then pump out all the gas and move the rock out. Incredibly energy intensive. Then you still have to seperate the helium from all the other volatiles that came out of the soil, and *then* seperate the He-3 isotope out.
Whereas the gas giants, the extractor would hang from a balloon. He-3 is available in *much* higher concentration in the atmosphere of the gas giants. Keep a steady stream of satellites going out and back, and once the pipeline is full it doesn't matter how long the travel time is.
Would probably start with Uranus; couldn't really use Jupiter or Saturn until high power fusion rockets are perfected.
Besides, since it'll take fifty years for fusion to be commercially viable (it was fifty years away in 1970, too), there's plenty of time to start getting the He-3.
There were two types of disks/players. One used a stylus, the other used a laser. Both were analag encoded; the laser one was comprised of a sequence of variable-length pits; the laser reflection would go through a low-pass filter to get audio/video signal. It then just mixed it with Channel 3 video frequency and put it out to the TV (I think).
My parents have a laser disk player. The disks are about the size of LPs and hold about 45 minutes on a side. "Star Wars" was 1 2-sided disk; "Bridge Over The River Kwai" was 2 2-sided disks. 4:3 aspect ration, though, and some of the disks would start to skip and stutter when you get near the end of a side (the Star Wars one did that; could hardly watch the end of the movie).
With China and India both aborting all their baby girls for the last decade or so, in about 10, 20 years they'll have a big surplus of horny guys with nobody to date. Expect a good ground war in that part of the world to get rid of the surplus male population around that time.
Nah, what'll happen is that they'll allow vouchers for education, then all the bornagains will put their kids in their own schools and there won't be any more pressure to force prayer or teaching creationism in the other schools.
Twenty years later, the US workforce will be highly stratified, with the lower portion good for nothing but ministering and manual labor.
There was no race? Ah, that would explain the N-1 Russian moon rocket that blew up on the launch pad in the late sixties, killing dozens (or was it hundreds?) of people.
First off, not 8%, it's 16%. You need to count the part the company puts in too.
And they won't fix social security by raising taxes. It'll be done by:
1) Increasing the retirement age
2) Not inflation-adjusting the levels where income starts affecting your social security benefits. 25, 30 years from now anybody stupid enough to actually try to work or withdraw from 401K or investments while collecting social security will get hit *big* time on their benefits.
Yet another example of the government punishing socially responsible behavior. I'm surprised they don't have commercials encouraging people to smoke, so they can collect more taxes and pay out less in social security.
Oh, and if their was no social security, and people were forced to put 15% of their take-home into an S&P index fund, retirees would be *much* better off. Even slackers drudging away their whole lives at minimum wage jobs. Don't believe me? Take a look at the what senators, representatives, and teachers get for retirement benefits. *They're* not paying social security.
Usually, the whole point of a gas tax is to pay for road construction and maintenance. The amount of wear a vehicle places on the road is related to miles driven *and* weight, and weight corresponds roughly to gas mileage.
What they're proposing is idiotic. Of course, what should you expect from a state that doesn't even let you pump your own gas.
1) The rotational speed of the earth at the equator is 24,000 miles per day or 1000 mph.
2) The moon is near the edge of the earth's gravity well; something falling from that far up will come real close to escape velocity (25,000 mph)
3) It's not going 25,000 mph the whole way from the moon. It's accelerating, and most of the acceleration is when it gets close to the earth. Gravitational pull drops off with the square of the distance. Earth's radius is 4000 miles, so 4000 miles up earth's gravity is 1/4 surface gravity. 8000 miles up, 1/9. At the moon, 240,000 miles, is 60 radii, so earth's pull is only 1/3600 surface gravity.
Because of tidal drag, earth's rotation is slowing. To conserve rotational momentum, the moon is moving further away. Eventually, it'll break free from Earth's orbit.
So we'll have a moon-sized body wandering around in an earth-orbit crossing orbit. Real estate prices will plummet.
Maybe we *should* store a bunch of nuclear waste on the far side of the moon and hope it explodes, hurling the moon into interstellar space.
Figure out the amount of energy that takes, chief.
Let's go with a little rock, the size of the one that caused Meteor Crater. 200,000 metric tons or so. Much smaller than 1/2 km.
1/2 * 200,000,000 * 2414^2 is about 6 * 10^14 joules. The output of a good-sized power plant (1 million kw) for 600,000 seconds (about 1 week).
Now you tell me how to save up all that juice and dump it into a 200,000 ton rock in a few seconds. You're going to build a mass-driver on the moon that can accelerate a rock with the mass of a full oil tanker up to Mach 9 in matter of seconds?
Oh, and that's assuming 100% efficiency. And it'll hit at 25,000 mph, not the 40,000 mph the rock that made Meteor Crater hit at, so it'll have about 40% the impact energy.
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So then, the US should not allow investment in foreign companies, we should just exploit them for their natural resources?
England did that to the US up until, oh, about 1776. I can think of at least two times in the last century that they're glad the US didn't remain a colony comprised of illiterate dirt farmers. Do you think England's economy suffered because the US prospered? The global economy isn't a zero sum game.
Apparently you want to reap the benefits of living in a free market without taking the risks.
Here's a suggestion for you. Get a job in a defense company. They can't outsource that.
Those lousy mutinationals. If they keep doing that, one of these days there won't be any more third-world sh*thole countries left to exploit. *Then* who's going to work in the shoe factories?
You *do* realize, don't you, that the US started out as a colony exploited by England? How do you think Japan went from a country of burnt-out cities to the 2nd biggest economy in the world? They let themselves get exploited to the max.
I work in the US for a European country. In all fairness, why should Europeans profit from my labor?
The oil sold by Saudi is sold at market price. Actually, because of OPEC, that price is higher than what it would be in a real free market.
Western companies supply the capital equipment and perform most of the labor. The Saudis could build the equipment and do all the labor, but that would involve Saudis doing manual work.
The Saudi citizens are only being exploited by their govt. If the US refused to buy oil from SA, some other country would pick up the slack (the US doesn't import much oil from SA anyway).
If the Saudi citizens feel that they're being taken advantage of, they need to take it up with *their* leaders. SA is a sovereign country.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that you don't think the US was justified in going into Iraq. If you *do* feel that way, then you shouldn't have a problem with having a nation run by tyrants using the resources of their nation for their own advantage. So why should you have a problem with the situation in SA? At least the govt there isn't doing mass executions of its own citizenry.
Saudi exports 60, 70 billion dollars worth of oil a year. There's about 22 million Saudis. That's about $3000 each. And most of that money goes to just a few people. Most of the jobs are held by foreigners (few Saudis deign to lower themselves to perform manual labor). There's no other exports other than oil, no other industry. Much (most?) of their water comes from desalinization plants, which (I believe) run on natural gas purchased from Qatar. All their food is imported or grown at tremedous expense. Your average SA citizen is *not* abandoning his Rolls Royce on the side of the highway when it runs out of gas.
We "exploit" Russia, Mexico, Venezuala, Canada, etc. for oil and they're more than happy to keep the pumps running. The difference is they're not run by tyrants propped up by oil money, and the people in those countries know that it's *their* responsibility to get *their* govt to serve the general public. Something, apparently, the average SA citizen is to stupid to grasp.
Which is why the coalition should have kicked Saddam out of power in GW1. No long-term bases in Saudi, no years of sanctions pissing off the Arab world.
You're right, the USSR would have collapsed eventually. You can pretty much say that about any tyranny. Saddam's govt would have collapsed eventually. NK will collapse eventually. The bad part is it can take decades, with multiple generations living their entire life under oppression.
The cold war isn't very similar to the terror war at all. After all, as the Sting song goes, the Russians love their children too. Mutually Assured Destruction was able to work with them. There were *rules*. Not that way with the terrorists; if they had a nuke Manhattan would be a crater ASAP.
I was born in 1962, and while I was growing up, I never really thought the US/USSR would start lobbing around H-bombs unless somebody somewhere pushed the wrong button, and there were extraordinary safeguards put in place to keep that from happening.
Terrorists with WMDs would be a whole new level. No hype. Much worse than the cold war. The only long-term solution is to bring democracy to the Arab states. Well, that or kill them all and let Allah sort them out.
Funny, I've always noticed that when someone refers to North America, South America, and Central America as a composite, they refer to them as "The Americas". Kind of like "The Simpsons".
:). Which, for Europeans and for people who live in the non-American parts of the Americas, is even worse than merely living in the American part of the Americas.
I am an American.
I live in America
I also live in the Americas.
But if you *really* want to know what country I live in, it's Texas
We bypass the middleman and pass the savings on to YOU !!
Please. Your state govt has to *force* gas stations to hire people to pump gas, so they can save money in insurance? Do you honestly think that the money they save on insurance comes close to paying those wages?
It's for job creation, paid for by your friendly motorist. Everywhere else in the country, people are more than willing to pump their own gas in order to save a buck or two (and, it seems, to do so at extreme risk to life and limb). They're so willing, in fact, that it's damn near impossible to find a full-service station or pump.
The problem is, the govt will go bankrupt and the economy will collapse if the government follows through on their "obligation". Twenty years ago would have been a good time to go to a investment based social security system; the demographic bulge of the boomers makes that impossible now. Maybe after they all die off.
:).
The longer the govt puts off raising the retirement age, the worse it will get. Since they're all irresponsible imbeciles, it'll get bad. And since only 30% of the people even bother to invest for their retirement, they'll get the shaft.
It sucks that the govt won't fix the problem until it's pretty much unfixable.
It sucks that the main way they'll fix it is by screwing over the citizens that are responsible and save for their retirement (like me). Of course, that won't even compare to the screwing the current 20 year olds will get.
And it reeks of hypocrisy that the Dems won't even consider going to a partially stock based system, when every Democratic congressman, and almost every member of one of their main constituencies (teachers) *already* participate in a stock based system instead of social security.
The only bright side to the whole thing is, as bad as it'll be in the US, it'll be an order of magnitude worse in Europe
The amount of He-3 in lunar soil is at incredibly low concentrations, and even then only in soil that's been exposed to solar wind for 100's of millions of years. And think about how to get it out: Put *huge* quantities of soil into a container, heat it up till the He-3 comes out, then pump out all the gas and move the rock out. Incredibly energy intensive. Then you still have to seperate the helium from all the other volatiles that came out of the soil, and *then* seperate the He-3 isotope out.
Whereas the gas giants, the extractor would hang from a balloon. He-3 is available in *much* higher concentration in the atmosphere of the gas giants. Keep a steady stream of satellites going out and back, and once the pipeline is full it doesn't matter how long the travel time is.
Would probably start with Uranus; couldn't really use Jupiter or Saturn until high power fusion rockets are perfected.
Besides, since it'll take fifty years for fusion to be commercially viable (it was fifty years away in 1970, too), there's plenty of time to start getting the He-3.
You must have watched Michael Richards (well before he was Kramer) on "Fridays" in the late 80's . . .
Hey kids, it's Steven Spielberg. If you run a movie studio, you don't piss off Steven Spielberg by doing something that will give him bad press.
plugh
There were two types of disks/players. One used a stylus, the other used a laser. Both were analag encoded; the laser one was comprised of a sequence of variable-length pits; the laser reflection would go through a low-pass filter to get audio/video signal. It then just mixed it with Channel 3 video frequency and put it out to the TV (I think).
My parents have a laser disk player. The disks are about the size of LPs and hold about 45 minutes on a side. "Star Wars" was 1 2-sided disk; "Bridge Over The River Kwai" was 2 2-sided disks. 4:3 aspect ration, though, and some of the disks would start to skip and stutter when you get near the end of a side (the Star Wars one did that; could hardly watch the end of the movie).
Yeah, and the sad thing is that the eastern European countries, the ones that have a chance at prospering, see joining the EU as a *good* thing.
You'd think that they'd at least know that socialism sucks.
With China and India both aborting all their baby girls for the last decade or so, in about 10, 20 years they'll have a big surplus of horny guys with nobody to date. Expect a good ground war in that part of the world to get rid of the surplus male population around that time.
Nah, what'll happen is that they'll allow vouchers for education, then all the bornagains will put their kids in their own schools and there won't be any more pressure to force prayer or teaching creationism in the other schools.
Twenty years later, the US workforce will be highly stratified, with the lower portion good for nothing but ministering and manual labor.
There was no race? Ah, that would explain the N-1 Russian moon rocket that blew up on the launch pad in the late sixties, killing dozens (or was it hundreds?) of people.
First off, not 8%, it's 16%. You need to count the part the company puts in too.
And they won't fix social security by raising taxes. It'll be done by:
1) Increasing the retirement age
2) Not inflation-adjusting the levels where income starts affecting your social security benefits. 25, 30 years from now anybody stupid enough to actually try to work or withdraw from 401K or investments while collecting social security will get hit *big* time on their benefits.
Yet another example of the government punishing socially responsible behavior. I'm surprised they don't have commercials encouraging people to smoke, so they can collect more taxes and pay out less in social security.
Oh, and if their was no social security, and people were forced to put 15% of their take-home into an S&P index fund, retirees would be *much* better off. Even slackers drudging away their whole lives at minimum wage jobs. Don't believe me? Take a look at the what senators, representatives, and teachers get for retirement benefits. *They're* not paying social security.
Usually, the whole point of a gas tax is to pay for road construction and maintenance. The amount of wear a vehicle places on the road is related to miles driven *and* weight, and weight corresponds roughly to gas mileage.
What they're proposing is idiotic. Of course, what should you expect from a state that doesn't even let you pump your own gas.
Somebody already replied, but:
1) The rotational speed of the earth at the equator is 24,000 miles per day or 1000 mph.
2) The moon is near the edge of the earth's gravity well; something falling from that far up will come real close to escape velocity (25,000 mph)
3) It's not going 25,000 mph the whole way from the moon. It's accelerating, and most of the acceleration is when it gets close to the earth. Gravitational pull drops off with the square of the distance. Earth's radius is 4000 miles, so 4000 miles up earth's gravity is 1/4 surface gravity. 8000 miles up, 1/9. At the moon, 240,000 miles, is 60 radii, so earth's pull is only 1/3600 surface gravity.
Just wait a few hundred million years.
Because of tidal drag, earth's rotation is slowing. To conserve rotational momentum, the moon is moving further away. Eventually, it'll break free from Earth's orbit.
So we'll have a moon-sized body wandering around in an earth-orbit crossing orbit. Real estate prices will plummet.
Maybe we *should* store a bunch of nuclear waste on the far side of the moon and hope it explodes, hurling the moon into interstellar space.
FWIW, the gas giants would probably be a *much* more useful source of Helium 3.
Figure out the amount of energy that takes, chief.
Let's go with a little rock, the size of the one that caused Meteor Crater. 200,000 metric tons or so. Much smaller than 1/2 km.
1/2 * 200,000,000 * 2414^2 is about 6 * 10^14 joules. The output of a good-sized power plant (1 million kw) for 600,000 seconds (about 1 week).
Now you tell me how to save up all that juice and dump it into a 200,000 ton rock in a few seconds. You're going to build a mass-driver on the moon that can accelerate a rock with the mass of a full oil tanker up to Mach 9 in matter of seconds?
Oh, and that's assuming 100% efficiency. And it'll hit at 25,000 mph, not the 40,000 mph the rock that made Meteor Crater hit at, so it'll have about 40% the impact energy.
And after that, the US nukes China into oblivion.