And don't forget that 91% [econop.org] of the taxes are paid by just the top 5% of the taxpayers. I know that our tax duties aren't philanthropic, but dammit, people want to act like the rich do _nothing_ but capitalize on those beneath them, and it just ain't true.
If you read the rest of that article for context you will realize that "the taxes" refers to estate taxes not aggragate federal state and local taxes.
I have degrees in EE and Physics, but I've been out of school a little longer so this may be even rustier. Your dissertation on electric bandgaps is quite nice, but this effect is one of photonic band gaps and black body curves.
Basically a perfect black body has to be a perfect absorber of light, ergo - a "black-body". Wherein enters the question, what if it is not a perfect absorber of light for some frequencies of light? In this case, the emmisivity of light is reduced in those ranges. From a cursory review of the article, the photonic gap is being used to block visible light (actually IR in the case of the experiment) and allow other frequencies to pass through. Thus we have a gray body which is nearly perfectly black for visible light and white for other spectrums of light. The question that arises is what happens to all the thermal energy that has been released within the filament by passing a current through a resistive element? How hot does the filament get before being able to emit as much heat as it generates? The apparent result is that it is able to emit enough heat in the visible band to make up for that which it cannot release in the IR band, all w/o melting the filament. It probably helps that tungsten has such a high melting point.
Umm, Having not seen the movie, you can take this with a grain of salt. However, Tobey Maguire's dry and wooden acting ruined, A Cider House Rules, for me. I hope he has improved a lot... he is one of the primary reasons I haven't bothered to go watch this one.
LabVIEW a little pricy, true. But the lab will be able to change their software and analysis on a whim. It is a very powerful programming suite and well suited for this type of application. If you ask, you will probably find that they already have copies of it around, or that half the labs in the building do.
We're talking physics so realistic that the holodeck might not be so far off!
Reality check calculation:
Alvogadro's constant:6x10^23
My body:80kg
Average grams per mol in my body: 16.5 (assuming 75% water, 25% carbon)
mol in my body:80kg/16.5g ~= 5000
Atoms in my body:5000*6x10^23 = 3x10^27
Atoms in the computer simulation:1x10^9
Difference in orders of magnitude:18
Years till simulation:92 (assuming doubling of processing power every 18 months.
Yup, I'd say holodeck's are just around the corner.
The IRS makes more money if most folks understand their forms.
I'm not so sure about that, as I understand it, the average tax payer could take out about 1k more in deductions each year than they do, b/c the simplified form doesn't explain all the deductions. Of course, to get most deductions you have to fill out other complex forms and read 100's of pages of tax documents (or hire an accountant.) Hence, the IRS gets more money each year by making things complicated.
So basically you think that the solar system began as a disorderly system and became more orderly. Isn't that contrary to the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy states that a system will only get more chaotic and less orderly. You may claim that the system in question is the universe and not the solar system but I disagree. I think it applies to any system.
parady on
I have a star; we'll call it sol. Over billions of years sol changes colors gets larger and then smaller and eventually fades into cold ash. "Isn't that contrary to the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy states that a system will only get more chaotic and less orderly. You may claim that the system in question is the universe and not the solar system but I disagree. I think it applies to any system" as well. parady off
The second law of themrodynamics assuredly applies to the "whole universe." Sometimes we are lucky enough to have a system that has so little interaction with the "whole universe" that we can apply the second law of thermodynamics to just that system as well. Usually we are not so lucky. In fact, I cannot think of any situation in which in there is precisely zero coupling between the local system and the universe at larger.
Ummm, yeah and North Korea is officially the DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea. Sure the Nazi's said they were socialist but that doesn't mean anything other than the fact that it was a buzz word during that time. BTW, from the merriam webster online dictionary, nazi: 1) a member of a German FASICIST party controlling Germany from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler
Re:Fermi's Paradox is bunk.
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
(Intergalactic travel is feasible too but we'll ignore that for now.)
Intergalactic travel may or may not be feasible. Hubble's constant (H) tells us that galaxies are moving away from one another on average as the product of distance (d) and H. So if d*H exceeds our maximum speed (.001c in your example), the other galaxy is moving away from us faster than we can approach it. Our local cluster of ~30 galaxies, including Andromeda, is gravitationally bound and will not present a problem. However, any intergalactic travel beyond our local cluster is in all likelyhood infeasible.
Just one minor little problem. Ahem, burning hydrogen creates H2O not CO2, hence all the trees in the world are not going to convert the spent oxygen back into O2.
Mod up as informative, not funny. This is a very good explanation of the utter futility of this method of CO2 extraction. I'm glad some one had quick access to the CRC to put some real numbers behind this flaw. Frankly the above calculation is the best comment and first one that/. readers should look at, everythign else is just the usual drivel. I wish there was a way of modding to +6 so that the very few highly informed comments out there could get read first.
From the article we know we can move 50 tons per day. If the average person weighs 150 lbs. We can move 333 people per day per elevator. There are ~6.2 billion people on the earth and we are growing at 200,000 people per day. From this we can calculate that we would need ~600 elevators to maintain a constant population on the planet. (someone check my math)
A few hundred more elevators and we could all leave I suppose, although it could take a while. I don't feel like doing the diffyq for this but it is rather striaght-forward to solve for the time to empty the planet.
Whenever I look at the Towers of light and the enourmous hight which it rises into the atmosphere.. I wonder if this is what a space elevator will look like. One of the striking things about it is how far the light penetrates into the upper atmosphere. From my rooof, 2.5 miles away, I was able to get a fix on the angle to the top and place the highest point I could see at about 15 miles up!
For those of you who do not live out here, all I can say is that tv and photos simply do not do memorial any justice. It provides a humbling sense of scale when looking up into the infinity to which it rises.
The main problem with your plan is that most of the people living in most of the places desperate for food... do not know what to do with soy products. Frankly they would likely make them sick. Westerners have some incredibly hardy stomaches as we are accostommed to eating foods from all over the world. most populaces eat the same staple of food for their entire lives. Rice and Wheat are what is needed most places.
Unfortunately, for many parts of Africa and several other countries, ruling warlords do not allow food distributions to take place due to petty rivalries between clans. This is probably the primary cause of starvation in Africa. Sociopolitics is THE root of world hunger. We have the means to feed one another... we simply lack the ability to get along with each other enough to do it.
Your is certainly the well-reasoned and traditional stance. I agree with you in as much as the intention of a modern capitalist society. The original author's notions of grand conspiracies are not entirely justified nor are they entirely unfounded. The real issue is for how long can the current mechanism be maintained. The growth in combined government and private sector debt has spiralled out of control over the last 30 years, to a level that is quite simply unimaginable.
The original author states the problem quite succintly, where is the money to pay off the debt going to come from. The Fed cannot provide it because unfortunately, in order for it to increase the monetary supply it must first purchase government debt. Thus there is no net decrease in debt. The only real solution is that one day the Federal government is going to have to remove the Fed from its role as regulator of the moentary supply. The Federal goverment will have to issue dollars most of the outstanding Federal debt and possibly some of the private sector debt in the form of bailouts. This will be massively inflationary but it will pay down the 22TT dollars in combined debt that we now have and which we cannot possibly pay off in the current economic system due to the unfortunate status of the US dollar as monetized government debt.
Thats not quite true, The banks' books continue to balance as they create more debt than they have assets to cover... the reason is that the loans themselves serve as assets while the credit extended is debt.. the net is 0 so banks could give infinite debt without ever having a problem with balancing their books.
The issue is the cash flow... not the balance sheet. The Banks' cash reserves go down as the extended credit is used and goes into accounts at OTHER banks. For a large enough bank this isn't an issue as a roughly equal amount of credit money is coming in from accounts at those same OTHER banks... everything nets out. However your point about the reserve level is accurate.. banks must maintain reserves of cash or cash equivalents equal to a small fration (less than 10 percent) of their total extended credit. The Fed sets this fractional reserve rate.
You are also right about the interbank lending. When banks cash flows get to low (sometimes they are negative) they will borrow money from each other at the interbank lending rate. The lender of last resort for a bank is of course the Federal Reserve which will loan the bank money at the Fed Fund Rate. Furthermore, when money moves between bank accounts the ledgers are usually settled with the fractional reserves that each bank has sitting in accounts at the Federal Reserve. If these go negative at the end of the day, the Federal reserve requires that the bank borrow from another bank or the federal reserve. This is one of the reasons why the author is correct in saying that the fractional reserves are not necessarily met. Many banks do not have sufficient money in their Fed accounts from time to time... and the Fed is very very secretive about when this happens and to whom.
You are quite right that the Fed creates a lot of money as well. The Fed's method is even more complicated and definitely more devious. First, the Fed is a private bank (80% owned by European banks) and is not a part of the Federal government. The Fed is the official bank of the Federal government and maintains the US government accounts. From time ot time the US government wishes to have more money than is currently in its accounts so the Federal Treasury (part of the Federal government) issues Treasury securities: notes, bills or bonds, which it sells to the private sector.
From time to time the Fed wishes to effect the US monetary supply; let's say it wants to expand it... also known as increasing liquidity, which is what it has been up to for most of the last 89 years. When this happens the Fed purchases Treasury securities from the private sector with dollars. Thus the private sector has more dollars than it had before and since most of the purchasing is done by banks, the fractional reserve lending practices allow the money to be lent at a mupltiple of about 10. So then the Fed buys say 10BB in securities and 50-100BB of new credit ends up being extended, thus increasing the monetary supply.
The interestig part is the slight of hand that the Fed now pulls. The Fed requests that the Treasury issues new Federal reserve notes, aka dollars, which the Treasury sells to the Fed for the cost of printing them. The Treasury only requires that the Fed have matching assets to cover all the Federal Reserve Notes outstanding in the private sector. The Fed therefore uses the securities it just purchased as the collateral for the new dollars and now has cash to buy more securities. In other words, the Fed buys the securities off the market for the cost of printing the dollars. Meanwhile the Federal government keeps paying 5% per year to the holders of those securities... which now happens to be the Federal Reserve Bank.... Hmmmmm!
I assume you are referring to 2000 SG344, in which case the cummulative probability of impact is.18% for a hit. You missed a decimal in there. Further inspection will show that it has a 7.4e-04 or.074% chance of a hit in 2071 which would yield a 1 mega ton explossion.
in other words 888 thousand bits per second, which would be the relevent metric.. not bytes. To sustain that across 3 students, would require a pipe with more bandwidth than a single T1.
The disturbing thing isn't so much that a/.'er had no concept of the vastness of interstellar and intergalactic distances... Any large population is going to have a few people who feel the need to speak up whether they know anything or not. What is horrifying is that the comment was modded up to +3 interesting... this points to the real problem, that the general population isn't qualified to modify comments for relevance, but they do it anyway. The only solution is a revised mod system but that is never going to happen... so unfortunately/. is lousy board for anything other that CS topics.
Slashdot Mirror
and I'll trade you your Pt for an equal amount of Rh :)
And don't forget that 91% [econop.org] of the taxes are paid by just the top 5% of the taxpayers. I know that our tax duties aren't philanthropic, but dammit, people want to act like the rich do _nothing_ but capitalize on those beneath them, and it just ain't true.
If you read the rest of that article for context you will realize that "the taxes" refers to estate taxes not aggragate federal state and local taxes.
I have degrees in EE and Physics, but I've been out of school a little longer so this may be even rustier. Your dissertation on electric bandgaps is quite nice, but this effect is one of photonic band gaps and black body curves.
Basically a perfect black body has to be a perfect absorber of light, ergo - a "black-body". Wherein enters the question, what if it is not a perfect absorber of light for some frequencies of light? In this case, the emmisivity of light is reduced in those ranges. From a cursory review of the article, the photonic gap is being used to block visible light (actually IR in the case of the experiment) and allow other frequencies to pass through. Thus we have a gray body which is nearly perfectly black for visible light and white for other spectrums of light. The question that arises is what happens to all the thermal energy that has been released within the filament by passing a current through a resistive element? How hot does the filament get before being able to emit as much heat as it generates? The apparent result is that it is able to emit enough heat in the visible band to make up for that which it cannot release in the IR band, all w/o melting the filament. It probably helps that tungsten has such a high melting point.
don't you mean extrapolation?
Umm, Having not seen the movie, you can take this with a grain of salt. However, Tobey Maguire's dry and wooden acting ruined, A Cider House Rules, for me. I hope he has improved a lot... he is one of the primary reasons I haven't bothered to go watch this one.
After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again.
I could give up a lot but for me giving up Tums would be like giving up jalepeno peppers... just not worth it.
Man, you must have a stomache of iron.
LabVIEW a little pricy, true. But the lab will be able to change their software and analysis on a whim. It is a very powerful programming suite and well suited for this type of application. If you ask, you will probably find that they already have copies of it around, or that half the labs in the building do.
I like the bit about public debt not exceeding 19 years, by TJ. Kind of makes the recent death of the long bond seem more reasonable.
We're talking physics so realistic that the holodeck might not be so far off!
Reality check calculation:
Alvogadro's constant:6x10^23
My body:80kg
Average grams per mol in my body: 16.5 (assuming 75% water, 25% carbon)
mol in my body:80kg/16.5g ~= 5000
Atoms in my body:5000*6x10^23 = 3x10^27
Atoms in the computer simulation:1x10^9
Difference in orders of magnitude:18
Years till simulation:92 (assuming doubling of processing power every 18 months.
Yup, I'd say holodeck's are just around the corner.
The IRS makes more money if most folks understand their forms.
I'm not so sure about that, as I understand it, the average tax payer could take out about 1k more in deductions each year than they do, b/c the simplified form doesn't explain all the deductions. Of course, to get most deductions you have to fill out other complex forms and read 100's of pages of tax documents (or hire an accountant.) Hence, the IRS gets more money each year by making things complicated.
So basically you think that the solar system began as a disorderly system and became more orderly. Isn't that contrary to the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy states that a system will only get more chaotic and less orderly. You may claim that the system in question is the universe and not the solar system but I disagree. I think it applies to any system.
parady on
I have a star; we'll call it sol. Over billions of years sol changes colors gets larger and then smaller and eventually fades into cold ash. "Isn't that contrary to the second law of thermodynamics? Entropy states that a system will only get more chaotic and less orderly. You may claim that the system in question is the universe and not the solar system but I disagree. I think it applies to any system" as well.
parady off
The second law of themrodynamics assuredly applies to the "whole universe." Sometimes we are lucky enough to have a system that has so little interaction with the "whole universe" that we can apply the second law of thermodynamics to just that system as well. Usually we are not so lucky. In fact, I cannot think of any situation in which in there is precisely zero coupling between the local system and the universe at larger.
Ummm, yeah and North Korea is officially the DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea. Sure the Nazi's said they were socialist but that doesn't mean anything other than the fact that it was a buzz word during that time. BTW, from the merriam webster online dictionary, nazi: 1) a member of a German FASICIST party controlling Germany from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler
(Intergalactic travel is feasible too but we'll ignore that for now.)
Intergalactic travel may or may not be feasible. Hubble's constant (H) tells us that galaxies are moving away from one another on average as the product of distance (d) and H. So if d*H exceeds our maximum speed (.001c in your example), the other galaxy is moving away from us faster than we can approach it. Our local cluster of ~30 galaxies, including Andromeda, is gravitationally bound and will not present a problem. However, any intergalactic travel beyond our local cluster is in all likelyhood infeasible.
Just one minor little problem. Ahem, burning hydrogen creates H2O not CO2, hence all the trees in the world are not going to convert the spent oxygen back into O2.
Mod up as informative, not funny. This is a very good explanation of the utter futility of this method of CO2 extraction. I'm glad some one had quick access to the CRC to put some real numbers behind this flaw. Frankly the above calculation is the best comment and first one that /. readers should look at, everythign else is just the usual drivel. I wish there was a way of modding to +6 so that the very few highly informed comments out there could get read first.
From the article we know we can move 50 tons per day. If the average person weighs 150 lbs. We can move 333 people per day per elevator. There are ~6.2 billion people on the earth and we are growing at 200,000 people per day. From this we can calculate that we would need ~600 elevators to maintain a constant population on the planet. (someone check my math)
A few hundred more elevators and we could all leave I suppose, although it could take a while. I don't feel like doing the diffyq for this but it is rather striaght-forward to solve for the time to empty the planet.
Whenever I look at the Towers of light and the enourmous hight which it rises into the atmosphere.. I wonder if this is what a space elevator will look like. One of the striking things about it is how far the light penetrates into the upper atmosphere. From my rooof, 2.5 miles away, I was able to get a fix on the angle to the top and place the highest point I could see at about 15 miles up!
For those of you who do not live out here, all I can say is that tv and photos simply do not do memorial any justice. It provides a humbling sense of scale when looking up into the infinity to which it rises.
Absolutely, in fact diamond has the highest heat capacity of any naturally occuring solid, while at the same time being a good insulator when undoped.
The main problem with your plan is that most of the people living in most of the places desperate for food... do not know what to do with soy products. Frankly they would likely make them sick. Westerners have some incredibly hardy stomaches as we are accostommed to eating foods from all over the world. most populaces eat the same staple of food for their entire lives. Rice and Wheat are what is needed most places.
Unfortunately, for many parts of Africa and several other countries, ruling warlords do not allow food distributions to take place due to petty rivalries between clans. This is probably the primary cause of starvation in Africa. Sociopolitics is THE root of world hunger. We have the means to feed one another... we simply lack the ability to get along with each other enough to do it.
Your is certainly the well-reasoned and traditional stance. I agree with you in as much as the intention of a modern capitalist society. The original author's notions of grand conspiracies are not entirely justified nor are they entirely unfounded. The real issue is for how long can the current mechanism be maintained. The growth in combined government and private sector debt has spiralled out of control over the last 30 years, to a level that is quite simply unimaginable.
The original author states the problem quite succintly, where is the money to pay off the debt going to come from. The Fed cannot provide it because unfortunately, in order for it to increase the monetary supply it must first purchase government debt. Thus there is no net decrease in debt. The only real solution is that one day the Federal government is going to have to remove the Fed from its role as regulator of the moentary supply. The Federal goverment will have to issue dollars most of the outstanding Federal debt and possibly some of the private sector debt in the form of bailouts. This will be massively inflationary but it will pay down the 22TT dollars in combined debt that we now have and which we cannot possibly pay off in the current economic system due to the unfortunate status of the US dollar as monetized government debt.
Thats not quite true, The banks' books continue to balance as they create more debt than they have assets to cover... the reason is that the loans themselves serve as assets while the credit extended is debt.. the net is 0 so banks could give infinite debt without ever having a problem with balancing their books.
The issue is the cash flow... not the balance sheet. The Banks' cash reserves go down as the extended credit is used and goes into accounts at OTHER banks. For a large enough bank this isn't an issue as a roughly equal amount of credit money is coming in from accounts at those same OTHER banks... everything nets out. However your point about the reserve level is accurate.. banks must maintain reserves of cash or cash equivalents equal to a small fration (less than 10 percent) of their total extended credit. The Fed sets this fractional reserve rate.
You are also right about the interbank lending. When banks cash flows get to low (sometimes they are negative) they will borrow money from each other at the interbank lending rate. The lender of last resort for a bank is of course the Federal Reserve which will loan the bank money at the Fed Fund Rate. Furthermore, when money moves between bank accounts the ledgers are usually settled with the fractional reserves that each bank has sitting in accounts at the Federal Reserve. If these go negative at the end of the day, the Federal reserve requires that the bank borrow from another bank or the federal reserve. This is one of the reasons why the author is correct in saying that the fractional reserves are not necessarily met. Many banks do not have sufficient money in their Fed accounts from time to time... and the Fed is very very secretive about when this happens and to whom.
You are quite right that the Fed creates a lot of money as well. The Fed's method is even more complicated and definitely more devious. First, the Fed is a private bank (80% owned by European banks) and is not a part of the Federal government. The Fed is the official bank of the Federal government and maintains the US government accounts. From time ot time the US government wishes to have more money than is currently in its accounts so the Federal Treasury (part of the Federal government) issues Treasury securities: notes, bills or bonds, which it sells to the private sector.
From time to time the Fed wishes to effect the US monetary supply; let's say it wants to expand it... also known as increasing liquidity, which is what it has been up to for most of the last 89 years. When this happens the Fed purchases Treasury securities from the private sector with dollars. Thus the private sector has more dollars than it had before and since most of the purchasing is done by banks, the fractional reserve lending practices allow the money to be lent at a mupltiple of about 10. So then the Fed buys say 10BB in securities and 50-100BB of new credit ends up being extended, thus increasing the monetary supply.
The interestig part is the slight of hand that the Fed now pulls. The Fed requests that the Treasury issues new Federal reserve notes, aka dollars, which the Treasury sells to the Fed for the cost of printing them. The Treasury only requires that the Fed have matching assets to cover all the Federal Reserve Notes outstanding in the private sector. The Fed therefore uses the securities it just purchased as the collateral for the new dollars and now has cash to buy more securities. In other words, the Fed buys the securities off the market for the cost of printing the dollars. Meanwhile the Federal government keeps paying 5% per year to the holders of those securities... which now happens to be the Federal Reserve Bank.... Hmmmmm!
I assume you are referring to 2000 SG344, in which case the cummulative probability of impact is .18% for a hit. You missed a decimal in there. Further inspection will show that it has a 7.4e-04 or .074% chance of a hit in 2071 which would yield a 1 mega ton explossion.
in other words 888 thousand bits per second, which would be the relevent metric.. not bytes. To sustain that across 3 students, would require a pipe with more bandwidth than a single T1.
The disturbing thing isn't so much that a /.'er had no concept of the vastness of interstellar and intergalactic distances... Any large population is going to have a few people who feel the need to speak up whether they know anything or not. What is horrifying is that the comment was modded up to +3 interesting... this points to the real problem, that the general population isn't qualified to modify comments for relevance, but they do it anyway. The only solution is a revised mod system but that is never going to happen... so unfortunately /. is lousy board for anything other that CS topics.