The energy released by burning hydrogen is sufficient to raise the resulting water to an altitude of more than 1600KM. Or, burning two grams of hydrogen is enough to raise 3 liters of water to the top of Mt. Everest.
Exactly as much energy as you get back by complete combustion of the octane, divided by the efficiency of the conversion. See 'Fischer-Tropsch' process.
This is basically what you do if you want oil and you don't want go to Mother Nature's Giant One-Time Only Sale (All coal and oil accumulated over the last 500000000 years is old inventory and must go now! This is a one-time offer, bound to end within 200 years of starting! Don't miss out! Extra discounts available for first 50% of supply, for details please inquire within. No warranty is implied; Buyer takes full responsibility for any mass extinctions, polar meltdowns, or disastrous climactic shifts resulting from use of product. No returns accepted, all sales are final.).
I read this whole thread waiting for someone to refer to the mountain-sized blocks of diamond in A Deepness In The Sky and you all fucking let me down.
When we look back in the year 3000 at what caused the stagnation, decline and eventual collapse of the United States, the year the progressive income tax was instituted will be clearly recognized as the year the US turned into a farce of itself. The fact that in the more than 100 years that followed it achieved some of the greatest scientific, technological and industrial breakthroughs ever, and for entire generations had a standard of living unprecedented in all of history, clearly can count for naught against the fact that there was a progressive income tax.
Nor will historians in New New York possibly identify the (well-meaning) decision of the Greatest Generation to shield their children from all the privation and pain they themselves endured, which has resulted in the current power-holders being a generation of self-centered pricks with no beliefs beyond "I got mine, fuck you", as planting the seed of the disaster we find ourselves in.
I don't mind paying taxes - they purchase civilization.
So, you propose we actively keep the people of Libya living in misery ("The ideal situation here is for this civil war to last as long as it can, and not end, so that by the time it's done, there is nothing left in Libya that's of use to anyone... Only dog we have is the fight itself. Feed that dog.") because if they ever have any power, they'll turn it against us because they hate us. Now why would they ever have cause to be angry at us?
You really haven't thought your brilliant plan out, have you...
The effect of the Internet on many people is described in John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
That being said, this did not originate on the Internet. Combine shockingly high unemployment among the poor, the belief that they have no voice in government or the media (recent peaceful protests, apparently, received zero coverage), the ned/chav/yob phenomenon and the reality that lot of lower-class people in Britain are furious that they are being told to bend over and take it because of the austerity measures "needed" to balance the budget while Parliament discusses how much to cut taxes on the rich... and you've got a powder keg. Some douchebag drug dealer getting shot dead was merely the "us vs them" trigger.
That being said, if you actually think that some random person off of Main Street, Wall Street or any other street in America would do what you have described, you need to seek the services of a professional psychiatrist.
If you're not constantly flipping back and forth to reference that equation, ur doin it wrong. No one can go over writing as dense as a theoretical paper just once and have more than the most superficial understanding of what was just read.
I'm in the process of writing a (real, not proof-of-concept toy) MHD code to run on GPUs that starts in Matlab. I really like that I get to do "stupid little things" in Matlab without having to allocate and deallocate every stupid little string and even more importantly that debugging as it runs is not only possible but easy and friendly.
Then when it's time to perform some complex operation involving a dozen 20 million element arrays in under a tenth of a second, I invoke the compiled CUDA C.
Then I run around my terminals in circles trying to decrypt the object-oriented horror that's not updating something right.
The next time your credit card or mortgage payment comes due, you should try telling them that you are refusing to pay the bill because you disagree with what your S.O. is spending on and see how far "But I'm being fiscally responsible by destroying our credit rating" goes. Nice try at a NO U, but it is a fact that defaulting on one's debt despite having the ability to pay it [America has no difficulty finding buyers for T-bills, which is what actually defines our credit limit] is the very definition of fiscal irresponsibility.
And dude, you can pretend all you want that the tea partiers aren't a marriage between the religious right and the conspiracy nutters but it won't fly. Not when the things that Palin and Bachmann, just for starters, have said are on record.
Half the reason the US was downgraded (one half being the lack of any revenues) was exactly because the prospect of the US defaulting is no longer completely impossible - The Republicans took the economy hostage, and the teabaggers were seemingly excited at the prospect of shooting it in the head (probably thinking that then they'd finally get to play Post-Apocalypse Survivalist, which I think a lot of them are bitter about never getting a chance to do ever since the USSR died).
You're probably right in that the Republican old guard aren't completely insane, though, which is why Boehner was between a rock and a hard place - if the Dems hadn't caved, he'd have been forced to give them some of what they want (an actual compromise) in order to get their votes instead of being held hostage himself by a small minority of his own party.
And I didn't really expect a default, no. I will admit I was completely unprepared for the overwhelmingly bad capitulation that came out, but that's a different story.
When you pry my actual keyboard and 30 inch display out of my cold, dead hands.
And this isn't a case of audiophile tube bullshit: Actual proper keyboards and large bright displays (that never wink out because your battery just died) are just two of the things that make desktop PCs objectively superior to handheld anything for many tasks (like anything involving text entry and interactive graphics editing).
Right, and the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy. And I'm a fool for deleting all those emails that promise me cheap, high-quality viagra - after all, it'll be cheap and high quality by definition, it's in the name.
[Poe's Law - the right wing has gone so far off the deep end it's impossible to distinguish between those satirizing them and those who actually believe this BS]
Let's list some of the defining characteristics of fascism: Powerful and Continuing Nationalism; Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause; Rampant Sexism; Obsession with National Security; Religion and Government are Intertwined; Corporate Power is Protected; Labor Power is Suppressed; Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts; Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
Are you seriously going to continue claiming that FDR was fascist?
Labels aside, the thing that the Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Castro and basically all other dictatorships (left or right) and religious theocrat movements like AQ have in common, and the thing that ties together all of the characteristics listed above, is Hofstader's "disorder in relation to authority:" the inability to find any mode of human relationship other than complete dominance or complete submission.
In what universe is openly being giddy at the prospect of forcing the US into default (because if we don't get absolutely everything we demand we'll burn it all down instead) fiscally responsible? In what universe is wanting the government to dictate what consenting adult I can marry and place religious monuments in courts and government buildings a reflection of limited government?
Words Mean Things, and claiming to be whatever Fox News says Republicans are does not, in fact, make it so.
After running the model, planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option.
Surely they must have discovered something that's both relevant and doesn't cause people to groan at how obvious it is?
Anyway, these kinds of models suffer from a fundamental problem that can never be solved. While a lot of the steady-state behaviors of a city may be amenable to being reduced to evolutionary (in the PDE sense) equations - things like traffic patterns or crime distribution - the driving forces that change and disrupt things on human timescales aren't continuous.
Try all you want to reduce society's evolution to a set of coupled ODEs or PDEs, but you'd never predict the occurence or path of the Civil Rights Movement because it was initiated by one single person's decision. Sure you can have a decent shot at modelling the probability of a civil rights movement occurring in a segregationist society in a given timespan, in the same way weather models tell you the year-averaged expectation values for things like cloud cover, insolation and rainfall... but whether it actually rains on any given day? Whether one little black lady will refuse to give up her seat? Forget it.
When it comes to society, not only are we talking about chaotic systems (like the weather) but now the very events that seed the chaos occur discretely and randomly.
The people who were literally starving to death as a result of the Great Depression might disagree with your assertion that deflation spirals aren't a really bad thing.
The period is generally overshadowed by later events, but there were 3 years and a bit between the crash and Roosevelt's inauguration. During this time, the government took essentially no action just as you advocate. When Roosevelt was inaugurated, the economy had contracted a full 40% and there was no end in sight. The collapse of faith in banks had brought the financial system to the brink of total destruction. It had been so bad for so long that people were starting to die of malnutrition, and there were serious rumblings of communism.
Why? Because the popping of the bubble directly created a recession and deflation by the destruction of wealth. The destruction of faith in the system, combined with negative inflation rates, caused a mass exodus from the investment cycle. Which caused more job loss and destruction of wealth. Which caused more deflation. Which caused more withdrawl from the investment cycle. Which made the economy even more depressed, further destroying faith... It's called negative feedback. The economy was trapped in a death spiral with no way out, until Roosevelt's Banking Holiday (which was in no small part a mere psychological ploy - "Close 1 in 5 of them, it doesn't matter which. People will assume the rest are healthy") finally interrupted the cycle.
I'm not even going to address this absurd "the government needs to be strangled in the bathtub so our corporate overlords can be free" nonsense.
Letting everyone do their own thing and no one is forced to do anything is one of those idea that sounds great on paper.
Then you start to realize that if people are going to live together in a society, there's going to be a price to be paid in terms of everyone can't just do whatever they want because it effects others. Part of that price is a government that does things (like bail out the banks, distasteful as that was. The manner in which they bailed them out, and that their boards of directors were not thrown out on their asses, stripped of their assets and left to suffer in the catastrophe they created is another problem) in order to mediate the highly oscillatory tendency of the economy. The benefits of cooperation (i.e. the existence of society and all that implies) are so overwhelming that this overhead is tolerated.
And why should not the rich pay a larger fraction? It is they who benefit. The richer you are, in the US, the more you owe the US government* (as the proxy of Society) for creating the background of infrastructure, stable laws, an educated workforce and providing the economic and military security and legal protection via contract and copyright/patent law that made your wealth possible in the first place. As Ben Franklin put it,
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
*offer may cease to be valid if GOP goes completely off the deep end
Except that there have been only two times since 1970 that the budget did not result in a deficit. Both occured under Democrats.
The deficit's growth has been interrupted once since Reagan started it... by Clinton. The Republicans actively took it upon themselves to destroy this rather than end the debt which is so horrible and will be the destruction of america^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w because Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
Without causing mass suffering due to major withdrawl of services during bad times, there is one thing that will reduce or even meaningfully dent the deficit today (other than passively waiting for recovery and the restoration of normal incomes and associated tax revenue): Raising tax rates. And the Republicans fanatically oppose it, while screaming like banshees about the deficit.
can we please have the <strike> tag so I don't have to count ctrl-w's?
Between 1800 and 1910, the United States suffered a banking panic an average of every 7.7 years.
There were 7 depressive episodes in this time:
The panic of 1819 was the first.
The panic of 1837 resulted from overextension of credit; There was a deflationary spiral, 5 year depression, and record unemployment.
The panic of 1857 was comparatively minor, and was shortcircuited by the Civil War.
The Long Depression lasted from 1873-1879; Heavy industrial output fell 25%, overall output fell 10%, and waged were mauled by 25% to as much as 50%.
This was followed by a boom, then the Depression of 1882-1885 and the banking panic of 1884.
The panic of 1983 was considered the worst depression in US history until the Great Depression; Unemployment was in the low teens for 6 years.
The Klondike gold rush initiated a boom, until the Panic of 1907 crashed the NYSE fifty percent year-over-year...
And are you seriously asserting that the government was responsible for the crash of 1929, other than by its failure to restrict wild speculation by bankers (sounds familiar)?
Pardon me? The Democrats refused cuts my ass. Boehner walked away from a package with over a trillion dollars in cuts because the President wanted a paltry $400B of revenue. They then refused bills with even more cuts than they originally asked for, including cuts to SocSec and Medicare because... well frankly I admit that's still got me baffled.
It's possible to talk about the Democrats also pushing a conflict, but to say they refused to cut spending is a goddamned prima facie lie. The President's original call was for balanced cuts and revenue, if you'll recall.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel sorry for your world... to have not only no colors, but not even shades of grey must get terribly boring for any sane mind.
The energy released by burning hydrogen is sufficient to raise the resulting water to an altitude of more than 1600KM. Or, burning two grams of hydrogen is enough to raise 3 liters of water to the top of Mt. Everest.
Exactly as much energy as you get back by complete combustion of the octane, divided by the efficiency of the conversion. See 'Fischer-Tropsch' process.
This is basically what you do if you want oil and you don't want go to Mother Nature's Giant One-Time Only Sale (All coal and oil accumulated over the last 500000000 years is old inventory and must go now! This is a one-time offer, bound to end within 200 years of starting! Don't miss out! Extra discounts available for first 50% of supply, for details please inquire within. No warranty is implied; Buyer takes full responsibility for any mass extinctions, polar meltdowns, or disastrous climactic shifts resulting from use of product. No returns accepted, all sales are final.).
I read this whole thread waiting for someone to refer to the mountain-sized blocks of diamond in A Deepness In The Sky and you all fucking let me down.
When we look back in the year 3000 at what caused the stagnation, decline and eventual collapse of the United States, the year the progressive income tax was instituted will be clearly recognized as the year the US turned into a farce of itself. The fact that in the more than 100 years that followed it achieved some of the greatest scientific, technological and industrial breakthroughs ever, and for entire generations had a standard of living unprecedented in all of history, clearly can count for naught against the fact that there was a progressive income tax.
Nor will historians in New New York possibly identify the (well-meaning) decision of the Greatest Generation to shield their children from all the privation and pain they themselves endured, which has resulted in the current power-holders being a generation of self-centered pricks with no beliefs beyond "I got mine, fuck you", as planting the seed of the disaster we find ourselves in.
I don't mind paying taxes - they purchase civilization.
So, you propose we actively keep the people of Libya living in misery ("The ideal situation here is for this civil war to last as long as it can, and not end, so that by the time it's done, there is nothing left in Libya that's of use to anyone... Only dog we have is the fight itself. Feed that dog.") because if they ever have any power, they'll turn it against us because they hate us. Now why would they ever have cause to be angry at us?
You really haven't thought your brilliant plan out, have you...
The effect of the Internet on many people is described in John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
That being said, this did not originate on the Internet. Combine shockingly high unemployment among the poor, the belief that they have no voice in government or the media (recent peaceful protests, apparently, received zero coverage), the ned/chav/yob phenomenon and the reality that lot of lower-class people in Britain are furious that they are being told to bend over and take it because of the austerity measures "needed" to balance the budget while Parliament discusses how much to cut taxes on the rich... and you've got a powder keg. Some douchebag drug dealer getting shot dead was merely the "us vs them" trigger.
It is the openly stated goal of professional troll and attention whore Andrew Brietbart to do exactly what you have described... to Democrats. He has done exactly this to an innocent woman and an entire organization.
That being said, if you actually think that some random person off of Main Street, Wall Street or any other street in America would do what you have described, you need to seek the services of a professional psychiatrist.
If you're not constantly flipping back and forth to reference that equation, ur doin it wrong. No one can go over writing as dense as a theoretical paper just once and have more than the most superficial understanding of what was just read.
There's a place for both.
I'm in the process of writing a (real, not proof-of-concept toy) MHD code to run on GPUs that starts in Matlab. I really like that I get to do "stupid little things" in Matlab without having to allocate and deallocate every stupid little string and even more importantly that debugging as it runs is not only possible but easy and friendly.
Then when it's time to perform some complex operation involving a dozen 20 million element arrays in under a tenth of a second, I invoke the compiled CUDA C.
Then I run around my terminals in circles trying to decrypt the object-oriented horror that's not updating something right.
The next time your credit card or mortgage payment comes due, you should try telling them that you are refusing to pay the bill because you disagree with what your S.O. is spending on and see how far "But I'm being fiscally responsible by destroying our credit rating" goes. Nice try at a NO U, but it is a fact that defaulting on one's debt despite having the ability to pay it [America has no difficulty finding buyers for T-bills, which is what actually defines our credit limit] is the very definition of fiscal irresponsibility.
And dude, you can pretend all you want that the tea partiers aren't a marriage between the religious right and the conspiracy nutters but it won't fly. Not when the things that Palin and Bachmann, just for starters, have said are on record.
Half the reason the US was downgraded (one half being the lack of any revenues) was exactly because the prospect of the US defaulting is no longer completely impossible - The Republicans took the economy hostage, and the teabaggers were seemingly excited at the prospect of shooting it in the head (probably thinking that then they'd finally get to play Post-Apocalypse Survivalist, which I think a lot of them are bitter about never getting a chance to do ever since the USSR died).
You're probably right in that the Republican old guard aren't completely insane, though, which is why Boehner was between a rock and a hard place - if the Dems hadn't caved, he'd have been forced to give them some of what they want (an actual compromise) in order to get their votes instead of being held hostage himself by a small minority of his own party.
And I didn't really expect a default, no. I will admit I was completely unprepared for the overwhelmingly bad capitulation that came out, but that's a different story.
When you pry my actual keyboard and 30 inch display out of my cold, dead hands.
And this isn't a case of audiophile tube bullshit: Actual proper keyboards and large bright displays (that never wink out because your battery just died) are just two of the things that make desktop PCs objectively superior to handheld anything for many tasks (like anything involving text entry and interactive graphics editing).
Right, and the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy. And I'm a fool for deleting all those emails that promise me cheap, high-quality viagra - after all, it'll be cheap and high quality by definition, it's in the name.
[Poe's Law - the right wing has gone so far off the deep end it's impossible to distinguish between those satirizing them and those who actually believe this BS]
Let's list some of the defining characteristics of fascism: Powerful and Continuing Nationalism; Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause; Rampant Sexism; Obsession with National Security; Religion and Government are Intertwined; Corporate Power is Protected; Labor Power is Suppressed; Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts; Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
Are you seriously going to continue claiming that FDR was fascist?
Labels aside, the thing that the Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Castro and basically all other dictatorships (left or right) and religious theocrat movements like AQ have in common, and the thing that ties together all of the characteristics listed above, is Hofstader's "disorder in relation to authority:" the inability to find any mode of human relationship other than complete dominance or complete submission.
In what universe is openly being giddy at the prospect of forcing the US into default (because if we don't get absolutely everything we demand we'll burn it all down instead) fiscally responsible? In what universe is wanting the government to dictate what consenting adult I can marry and place religious monuments in courts and government buildings a reflection of limited government?
Words Mean Things, and claiming to be whatever Fox News says Republicans are does not, in fact, make it so.
Grey goo already happened: Every part of earth that has access to an energy gradient is covered in self-replicating carbon-based nanites.
Surely they must have discovered something that's both relevant and doesn't cause people to groan at how obvious it is?
Anyway, these kinds of models suffer from a fundamental problem that can never be solved. While a lot of the steady-state behaviors of a city may be amenable to being reduced to evolutionary (in the PDE sense) equations - things like traffic patterns or crime distribution - the driving forces that change and disrupt things on human timescales aren't continuous.
Try all you want to reduce society's evolution to a set of coupled ODEs or PDEs, but you'd never predict the occurence or path of the Civil Rights Movement because it was initiated by one single person's decision. Sure you can have a decent shot at modelling the probability of a civil rights movement occurring in a segregationist society in a given timespan, in the same way weather models tell you the year-averaged expectation values for things like cloud cover, insolation and rainfall... but whether it actually rains on any given day? Whether one little black lady will refuse to give up her seat? Forget it.
When it comes to society, not only are we talking about chaotic systems (like the weather) but now the very events that seed the chaos occur discretely and randomly.
The people who were literally starving to death as a result of the Great Depression might disagree with your assertion that deflation spirals aren't a really bad thing.
The period is generally overshadowed by later events, but there were 3 years and a bit between the crash and Roosevelt's inauguration. During this time, the government took essentially no action just as you advocate. When Roosevelt was inaugurated, the economy had contracted a full 40% and there was no end in sight. The collapse of faith in banks had brought the financial system to the brink of total destruction. It had been so bad for so long that people were starting to die of malnutrition, and there were serious rumblings of communism.
Why? Because the popping of the bubble directly created a recession and deflation by the destruction of wealth. The destruction of faith in the system, combined with negative inflation rates, caused a mass exodus from the investment cycle. Which caused more job loss and destruction of wealth. Which caused more deflation. Which caused more withdrawl from the investment cycle. Which made the economy even more depressed, further destroying faith... It's called negative feedback. The economy was trapped in a death spiral with no way out, until Roosevelt's Banking Holiday (which was in no small part a mere psychological ploy - "Close 1 in 5 of them, it doesn't matter which. People will assume the rest are healthy") finally interrupted the cycle.
I'm not even going to address this absurd "the government needs to be strangled in the bathtub so our corporate overlords can be free" nonsense.
Personally, I get a snooty upper-class British vibe, so yeah it's sort of weird.
:P
I assumed/thought English "one" was a rarely-used cognate to French "on" so I'm not exactly an authority on linguistics
Then you start to realize that if people are going to live together in a society, there's going to be a price to be paid in terms of everyone can't just do whatever they want because it effects others. Part of that price is a government that does things (like bail out the banks, distasteful as that was. The manner in which they bailed them out, and that their boards of directors were not thrown out on their asses, stripped of their assets and left to suffer in the catastrophe they created is another problem) in order to mediate the highly oscillatory tendency of the economy. The benefits of cooperation (i.e. the existence of society and all that implies) are so overwhelming that this overhead is tolerated.
And why should not the rich pay a larger fraction? It is they who benefit. The richer you are, in the US, the more you owe the US government* (as the proxy of Society) for creating the background of infrastructure, stable laws, an educated workforce and providing the economic and military security and legal protection via contract and copyright/patent law that made your wealth possible in the first place. As Ben Franklin put it,
*offer may cease to be valid if GOP goes completely off the deep end
Except that there have been only two times since 1970 that the budget did not result in a deficit. Both occured under Democrats.
The deficit's growth has been interrupted once since Reagan started it... by Clinton. The Republicans actively took it upon themselves to destroy this rather than end the debt which is so horrible and will be the destruction of america^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w^w because Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
Without causing mass suffering due to major withdrawl of services during bad times, there is one thing that will reduce or even meaningfully dent the deficit today (other than passively waiting for recovery and the restoration of normal incomes and associated tax revenue): Raising tax rates. And the Republicans fanatically oppose it, while screaming like banshees about the deficit.
can we please have the <strike> tag so I don't have to count ctrl-w's?
Between 1800 and 1910, the United States suffered a banking panic an average of every 7.7 years.
There were 7 depressive episodes in this time:
The panic of 1819 was the first.
The panic of 1837 resulted from overextension of credit; There was a deflationary spiral, 5 year depression, and record unemployment.
The panic of 1857 was comparatively minor, and was shortcircuited by the Civil War.
The Long Depression lasted from 1873-1879; Heavy industrial output fell 25%, overall output fell 10%, and waged were mauled by 25% to as much as 50%.
This was followed by a boom, then the Depression of 1882-1885 and the banking panic of 1884.
The panic of 1983 was considered the worst depression in US history until the Great Depression; Unemployment was in the low teens for 6 years.
The Klondike gold rush initiated a boom, until the Panic of 1907 crashed the NYSE fifty percent year-over-year...
And are you seriously asserting that the government was responsible for the crash of 1929, other than by its failure to restrict wild speculation by bankers (sounds familiar)?
One rang?
Pardon me? The Democrats refused cuts my ass. Boehner walked away from a package with over a trillion dollars in cuts because the President wanted a paltry $400B of revenue. They then refused bills with even more cuts than they originally asked for, including cuts to SocSec and Medicare because... well frankly I admit that's still got me baffled.
It's possible to talk about the Democrats also pushing a conflict, but to say they refused to cut spending is a goddamned prima facie lie. The President's original call was for balanced cuts and revenue, if you'll recall.