The Chinese may look smaller and weaker, fragile than whites and blacks, but they built the Great Wall, and also the US Trans Continental Railroads west portion, through the grueling treacherous mountains, the hard part, the eastern portion through flat terrain being piece of cake comparatively. They are good at an love to build large projects with backbreaking work, and they have the stamina to accomplish them. They are like masochists when it comes to working, pervertedly getting off on the pain and suffering involved
Maybe NASA could start begging for money like PBS and Wikipedia do, and email photographs of latest captures to donors as thanks, and if lots of people donate a few dollars, that could add up to a few hundred million, and help keep stuff in operation, even if not enough to create and launch new telescopes.
A few little notes: a huge (I'm talking a whole building, possibly a stadium size) rotating (at the correct speed, 9.8 m2/s= g=omega^2 x r) metal cylinder could provide artificial gravity, by centrifugal force, when you walk on the inside surface. If it's triple walled steel or titanium, maybe some aluminum too, with many relatively small cylinder units connected, then when a tiny meteor hits going 20 miles per second, it won't leak suddenly if there are vacuum spacings between the walls that need to be filled and pressurized before they leak rapidly too, and there is time to evacuate to the next cylinder, while you lose air pressure, and then you can take like a week to patch the holes. The more layers and obstacles for the meteor, the more it can disintegrate, and possibly not penetrate the last layer, depending on size of course. Transparent glass domes as you imagine simply won't cut it from the gravity or meteorite resilience point of view. You have to have the spinning cylinder a certain large size before the gravity at your feet is not much greater than at the top of your head, and you don't get dizzy. Still, climbing up a huge ladder into the center of the cylinder lets you experience free floating, and maybe it'd be fun sleeping there, as long as you don't wander off slightly, then get blown by the rotating wind, then smack hard to the floor when you get very off center, so you might have to fasten yourself to a central metal bar if you go to sleep like that. A reality show could make such a thing profitable, especially with meteorite hits, losing air pressure in some units, losing power, losing recycling systems and running low on oxygen that has to be hauled up from the Moon or Earth, and the shit piles up because some systems failed, losing rotation by two opposingly rotating cylinders getting jammed and everything floating up into the air, there are lots of neat things to play with and make it interesting. It could be a cross between star trek and reality shows, possibly with a commander, and replicator-like food dispensers for no money, while on a small scale, or even like deep space 9, if it grows larger, with politics, deceit, trade and bribing.
Mars is too friggin far and not that much bigger than the Moon. Also solar power is less there. It's a waste of money going to Mars, it's called a planet, but it never held an atmosphere, and there was probably never any flowing water on it - ice maybe, subliming directly into vapor, and its gravity is not strong enough to hold water vapor from escape velocity at its temperature. The first priority should be setting up a Moon base, mining stuff on the moon and shooting the cargo with a cannon or rollercoaster into outer space orbit, to manufacture space stations from, including building size rotation cylinders. Long term we might be able to convert Venus into livable space, if we could get it to rotate by smacking artificial comets made out of stuff like Ganymede by smacking other artificial comets on a near collision course with Ganymede, into Ganymede, or if that's too dangerous, doing it little bit at a time, with small asteroids and comets. But it's really hard to catch a comet, install Tsar bomba explosives on it, and adjust its track to where it accurately collides into Venus, instead of a near collision, and such near collisions where a little change can compound into dramatic changes, may be very rare.
In order to live you have to kill, you have to destroy, if nothing else, murder a carrot on your lunch plate, and sometimes you have to kill another human in self defense so that you live, but may decide not to kill 2 others and instead die, or be a kamikaze or suicide bomber killing many but protecting even many more of your nation vs one life of your own, it gets complicated, especially if you follow things like trying to sustain genetic variety and then you have one native american with one kid vs. 100 whites all of the same blood, same genetics, or 100 blacks, and in such cases the 1 but rare native american would outweigh the 100 others, it gets really complicated and eerie if you try to apply algebra to genetics and rights of human beings. Also, I've said this before, in theory there is a way to use solar panels and chemical manufacturing pots to create sugars and proteins and all nutrition out of nuclear, wind or solar power, and live in the middle of a desert without any other lifeforms present in a completely sterile or super-vegetarian of uber-kosher way, not having to kill any lifeforms at all to survive, but there is something off, something of bad taste with that picture, and most people would prefer instead bringing a jungle to the desert and living amidst the jungle, hunting other lifeforms, stepping on bugs, but providing the other lifeforms a way to live too, including protecting species from extinction, even if the Universe, or the cruel and harsh reality, has decided they must go, we, humans, beg to differ, and will spend our hard earned resources to try to maintain variety of life around us, even when our national debt is out of control.
But who wants to live in a world like that, when you, or your nation is alone, with all the other variety RIP disappearing? It's extremely hard to maintain balance in Civilization, and to win via a spaceship, because the natural tendency is for 1 to overpower all the others and emerge as the winner, just like in the business world there is a tendency for monopolies to arise and exterminate all the competition, if nothing else, through mergers with them, but when you go out into nature, you learn that there is something good about the variety of life, about multiplicity of the jungle, compared to one single celled photosynthetic bacteria digesting everything else around it and emerging as a winner, something that may be happening on other planets where life has arisen, and it may be a matter of time before it happens on this planet too, which is why it's important to have a space program, and life in outer space, to at least have some isolated pockets of life should a global infection outbreak erase all higher lifeforms down here on Earth, especially one that's created out of curiosity in a DNA-tinkering biotech lab, and gets out of hand and out of control.
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By the way Zimbabwe had a currency between 1980 and 2009, called the Zimbabwean dollar, Z$, that hyperinflated through the roof by not having a sound monetary policy - the president of dictator or whatever you wanna call him, instead of collecting taxes and staying within the limits of available funds collected, he simply didn't collect taxes and started up the printing machines when it came time to pay any government dues, such as employee salaries, or weapons for his military people. You can see pictures of Z$500 and later Z$100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion Z$ banknotes) at the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z... and you can buy one of these notes on Ebay at http://www.ebay.com/itm/100-Tr... the bidding stands at US$5.50 with 3 days and 3 hrs left to bid, or $16.99 buy it now on other auctions. The Z$ went through three redenominations, dropping zeros at the end (ATM machines were started choking up and software had to be custom designed for Zimbabwe), According to the wikipedia article,
The third redenomination produced the "fourth dollar" (ZWL), which was worth 1 trillion ZWR (third dollar), or 10^25 ZWD (first dollar).
Despite attempts to control inflation by legislation, and three redenominations (in 2006, 2008 and 2009), use of the Zimbabwean dollar as an official currency was effectively abandoned on 12 April 2009 due to the skyrocketing inflation. According to some sources, a person would starve on just a billion Zimbabwe dollars.[3] This was a result of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe legalising use of foreign currencies for transactions in January 2009.[4]
That's 10^25 first dollars, or 25 zeros, or 4thZ$1 = 1st Z$10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 revaluation for the 4th generation in 2009 compared to the 1980 dollars. The result was legalizing foreign currencies, such as the stable US$ that the whole world uses where there are currency control issues, including China themselves used to peg their currency against the US$ and underwrite it's value with a tremedous amount of sweat. But once you remove the Chinese underwriting support, sending the US$ into an inflation spiral becomes easy, and inflating the heck out of our currency would be a great way to get rid of national debt, and create havoc in the whole world's economy. In theory holders of debt notes get paid an interest rate for the risk of inflation and other risks they assume in lending that money, but if inflation gets out of control, the winners are not the interest collectors but the debtors, because they have to pay back almost nothing, comparatively speaking.
George Carlin has a "Bigger dick" theory of why it's important to bomb people who are not like us. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... I think he did that gig before the war on Serbia, and we went to war with Serbia just to prove that white people are not racist, they can bomb white people too, with the same size dick, not just brown people, who have bigger dicks.
I'm all for engaging the Muslims to feel good about America. In America we have comparatively good racial harmony compared to the muslims bombing the fuck out of each other over being sunny or shia, or even not being related, they are so racist, even their names goes ibn, son of who, they track heredity very closely, and they got severe racism issues over it within their own kind, let alone with people that look different than them. A lot of them do live in the desert, and in the desert it's impossible to live without discipline, and islam provides them with that discipline, and the things we do in America, like watching porn, and wasting resources out of control, they severely criticize that, but wait til they get TV's and watch Pamela Anderson's tits jiggle around as she runs as a lifeguard in "Baywatch", which was the top program on Egyptian tv, because even Muslims are human beings, and like to see tits bounce around, and maybe even some naked Greek or Roman statues that I see on public buildings in the US, while they stick to towel wrapping their own women, like the discipline of islam teaches them. We let porn and even gay male gangbangs proliferate in our country, with criticism about it over here too, and music like https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Ms New Booty that tops our charts may be a bit too much for them now. To them women are not for "new booty" fun when you got bored of the same old same old, but to have children with and raise a family, actually raising their own kids and instead of having baby daddy's and baby mommas.
Jefferson had this idea that the "yeoman farmer" is the backbone of a democracy, and democracy cannot be trusted to city dwellers, because they are not self sufficient, not independent voters, their vote is controlled by those who can give them a job. A city, and urbanized population is undemocratic at its core, because of basic necessities, dependence on the elite for those basic necessities.
I think of whatever is left over after supporting the SS of elderly over 65 (that's a lot of baby boomers, and hospital charges are out of control), 80% of my taxes should be spent on military (and I include NASA with the military here), 5% on roads, with the remaining 15% on miscellaneous, while things like education can be done by private schools (I used to be a big fan of public education). Instead of welfare with people under 65 (optionally 60 for women) sitting home twirling their thumbs, everyone needs a plot of land of about 7 acres (which is not enough for a family of 4 with farming methods practiced by the Irish potato famine immigrants), with very low property tax, to grow their own food, and get off the back of the government, and be happy even in the absence of an economy. Then those who breed out of control then starve themselves, unlike in a city, where you can't really say to someone if nobody gives you a job you shouldn't have any kids, you can't sort of exterminate someone directly like that, but if they have a plot of land, they get some sense or idea of what even a resource limit looks like. The issue becomes how to fairly distribute land, and who to take it from, and how(gov't invest eminent domain money into land purchases hoping not to pay welfare later?) do we take the population levels of today as basis, tomorrow, or 20 years ago, or 100 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and then issues such as during slavery people couldn't really breed according to their abilities to take care of themselves, and their population might have been kept artificially low, so where is a fair balance of the competing racist populations of white, asian, black, hispanic, native american, muslim, and even inside white populations of jewish, irish, italian, hunky, german, slavic, etc., how you gonna allocate who gets what to make things fair? Btw urban farming is a joke - a 5 sq ft garden or a garden in a ceramic pot of 1/4 sq ft is not enough to feed a person for a whole year.
"space exploration just seems to drop right out of the equation, doesn't it?"
That is the crux of the argument. At this point in time, large portions of the population just do not care about space exploration or research because there are more tangible topics that dominate their thinking.
Such as having food on the table every day. That's a constant topic at the city kennel for animals, because there is always more animals than money to feed them. And animals that don't find an owner adopting them sooner or later get put to death. Those that do get adopted, do so being neutered. It's like the right to freely breed and the right to food on the table are human rights that should apply even to animals like cats, unfortunately there is no amount of money in the entire universe that's able to keep up with the ability of these cats to reproduce. With a government supported unlimited food supply two cats can very quickly grow to a population of 100 cats, and if there is still enough food and space, to 1000 cats, then 100,000, etc. The ability of lifeforms to breed is tremendous, and in absence of self control, or forced population control such as euthanasia and neutering, it's always the external lack of resources put a limiting factor on population size.
Having food on the table is a constant topic with people on welfare too, but when it comes to humans, you cannot apply euthanasia and neutering to control the population, so instead you have to support an ever increasing government debt, so the welfare manna falling from the sky keeps falling. You cannot tell people to not have kids. You cannot allow people to starve. What you can do is let people freely breed out of control, and keep increasing the government debt over it. Eventually this leads to cutting other things such as NASA or the military, to keep up with the ever increasing load, but eventually the whole system collapses financially. You can have things like China injecting more money into our economy, increasing our debt even further, but that's like instead of having 100,000 cats from 2 cats, now you'll have 1 million, then 10 million, then 100 million, you're simply postponing the problem and making it worse, the fundamental question being the setup of unlimited resources provided to unlimited breeding capacity. It's hard to preach self control to people, as whoever practices self control gets quickly drowned out and outvoted by those who don't, in a democracy, so instead you have territorial struggles in jobs by those who maintain some kind of self control sense, and try to keep those who'll breed out of control irregardless of available resources and sooner or later outvote them in their localities, away, and those who're kept away keep shouting no fair, I demand a job, it's a human right to have a job, it's a human right to have food on the table, it's a human right to breed out of control irregardless of available resources. In places like India there is still a struggle between the muslim and hindu population, and AIDS is not that prevalent because both stay monogamous but with huge family sizes, playing chicken against overpopulation issues, and neither one can relent, because the other one will outvote them in elections if they let the other ones get ahead. Instead there is a lot of fingerpointing and criticizing of how some people have over 10 kids and they are miserably poor, by those who don't, while they too are trying to get over 10 kids to "stay in the game", to retain their voting power. See under a monarchy those who disrespect resource limits don't end up automatically dominating those who try to keep things in balance, like it happens in a democracy. The royalists know this very well, and they are actively working to exacerbate the problems even further, until people realize how many different things are wrong with a democracy, and how right nobility and serfdom, masters and slavery, or bourgeoisie and proletariat, are. They are also actively exterminating the middle class, now that we no longer have to worry
Re:Never used this keystroke
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Correction (above): I had to see = I hate to see (everybody's saved money going to waste.)
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The idea is that you're not supposed to save anything on local disk, everything should be on the cloud, and you get to get blackmailed for access to it. Or at least intellectual property is fully contained, as there is a single copy of it anywhere on the web, and no 500 million copies on everybody's local harddrives. Then you pay for access, pay per view, and copyright fair use issues are simpler. Which is why I seriously started investing in oldschool tech, including old software, old computers, or old tv's, that can record and playback without asking for permission each time from authorities, authorities that may not be there after a government financial collapse and apocalypse ensuing after it. Have you checked the national debt lately? In how many years are we predicted to pay it off? 50? More? Even if it's more, that means a gradual decrease of the debt, and instead all I hear is disagreements about raising the debt ceiling even further. If they tell me inflation is outpacing the rate of indebtedness of the government, so that the whole debt will be minuscule once minimum wage rises to 10 trillion dollars per hr, then I'll say, aha, they've got a plan. But I had to see everybody's money savings go to waste, and a destabilized currency makes life hell. Something eventually gotta give, and I'd pick an inflation out of control but the gov't maintaining control of the situation and still feeding everybody vs. an apocalypse and anarchy where people start eating each other. Without a guarantee of the internet available 20 or 50 years from now, and webpages doing the authentication and approval of what I'm buying today still up and in business 50 years from now, I'm keepin my save button, and prefer nonauthenticated, non"activated" software and files.
Of course Borg-like implants that can read her thoughts would have a much higher value. However, I don't know about brain researchers and cybernetic implant researchers, but I'd be unwilling to work on such implants, to create such implants, in the present state of general human affairs, as the powers that be might be using them to read the thoughts of the general population. The freedom of speech is guaranteed by the first amendment, but under severe attack these days, like all the other amendments, by the royalist/nobility forces, but the freedom of thought is guaranteed by the status quo until mind reading things become available, so that unspoken thought can be recorded, as it needs to be, before it can be criminalized. Only the Lord Almighty and his angels have the technology to read everybody's thoughts, and that should be sufficient, we can leave it up to them to make the decisions, including mindreading and communication decisions. If they really want to they can make her do telepathy with someone else, but most likely they don't want to. And that's that. Quod est.
Just because she's conscious and has a means to convey her wishes, it does not mean that other people around her will respect her wishes. For instance, they could declare her mentally challenged, unable to make correct decisions under the duress and stress of the situation, and she might be overly emotional(like all women are), and the community might make a decision for her different than what she would make for herself. Also, it's unlikely that she'd opt for suicide (unless she's Korean or Japanese), as women are the survivors of the species and males are the discardable ones, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... , so the issue of the community wanting to keep her alive and her wanting to die instead should not arise. The issue of her wanting to live and the community wanting her to die is a weird one, as she's not a criminal, and communities spend a shitload of money on sustaining criminals, and only the gravest criminals will be put to death by the community against the individual's wish to live, and if they run out of money, they should take it from the non-selfsustaining private profit prisons that are government funded, and put it to supporting people like her. Although most of the slashdot folks here seem unversed in the topics of Borg-like brain-computer implants and interfaces http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net... (as none of us really know how the brain works, or even what sleep is), we deteriorate into this ethical discussion of cost to society and worth to live. And it's a valid discussion, as healthy prison inmates with some bogus charges of drug abuse, or even framed people for murders (Shawshank redemption is a movie about the wrong guy going to jail, and truck drivers are the most frequent serial killers, not because they have higher tendencies, but because they are so easy to frame - anyone on the shitlist of the powers to be will be herded toward a truckdriver job, given a route they have no control over, and the morgues are full of dead bodies of people with no relatives looking for them who can be used as murder framing dummies, and it's easy to frame anyone into being a murderer, especially if they are also willing to read some murder-mystery novels like "the perfect crime" or Agatha Christie type stuff, stuff that the general population loves to read anyway) might have a more valid reason to be kept alive than someone who lost brain function to the point of unable to control her lung, if we'd have to choose because of cost. But it shouldn't be a matter of cost considering the wealth of the society we live in. I'd be willing to skip eating every other day and instead give the money to supporting both the criminal and the sick on life support, and of the two the criminal is the cheaper to support, but has less value as a moral human being in being supported compared to a law abiding sick patient without lung function. By the way food is so cheap, it wouldn't be that much money. Especially the food I eat.
It's often all just a matter of money. Often people will be kept artificially on the machines until the insurance is willing to pay, and as soon as it runs out, they are "relocated" and such relocation involves getting permanently unplugged too, if nothing else, unplugged in a mild sense from the superhigh-quality support to a mediocre but "acceptable" support, with unfortunate consequences when such "acceptable" support is not enough, especially when the "superhigh-quality support" was barely letting the person hang in there. Having no insurance qualifies you for the mediocre support very fast, and sometimes that's what you want for yourself, lower cost to you or lower burden to society.
In dire straits religion, and in that, monotheistic religion, can pull your ass out of trouble. In a sense religion is a patchwork of the weakness of human psyche. There is this picture of who they call Prometheus, as a pilot, http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XBXL..., alone, under infection, with his face getting chewed off, just like the alien's female's face, http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jxym... , but he is hanging in there, and the only way he can do that is if he's a monotheist, with a personal God, not just a nirvana impersonless Universe that awaits him to become one with it. Whether there is any tangible reality to religion as interpreted to the letter, well, time and time again people come and go who point out inconsistencies, faults and mistakes in religions, also corruption and abuses of power by the clergy, and religion may not have anything to do with reality at all, but it has a tremendous value as an effect on the human psyche, as a patchwork to the defects of almost any intelligent psyche. Which is why these nonomnipotent beings of the Milky Way galaxy, managing other beings, promote religion to humans, and themselves pretend to be omnipotent sometimes. By the way they are seldom active, but in some cases, like people dwelling in the dire deserts, or the Jews acting in the ways of the Lord under Egyptian captivity, they will do things, including splitting of the Red Sea, which goes far beyond mere hallucinations, that almost every other thing can be ascribed to, such as Moses receiving the 10 commandments, seeing a burning bush - he might have been just hallucinating. Btw 9/11 was mostly Muslims against Jews, the Lord's people against the Lord's people, and there must have been some things going on not in accordance with the ways of the Lord in those buildings. Perhaps people lost faith, they've stopped being true believers, and that's how they wandered off the path. There is this saying that the Jews control the world, and they do a pretty good job at it, much better than the Romans did, or would have, but sometimes they make mistakes, especially when they forget about their religion. Again, religion may not have anything to do with reality at all, when it comes to interpreting it by the letter, such as Noah's Ark issues, but it has a tremendous value as an effect on the human psyche. This Slashdot post asked for what can they do under such circumstances, and I wrote what I thought could help.
Btw, the brits at Trafalgar saved every single Spanish soldier from the water, from the sunken ships (no longer possible to practice with the advent of submarines and obsolescence of battleships), and treated them well. That is in accordance with the ways of the Lord, unlike the stuff that went down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...örgy_Dózsa rebellions, and during http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... during the 100 year war. Throughout history and even to these days the treatment of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... is often not in accordance with the ways of the Lord. In particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... shows some exceptional deathrates:
German POWs in British hands 0.03%[90]
German POWs in American hands 0.15%[90]
German POWs in French hands 2.58%[90]
Japanese POWs held by U.S.: relatively low, mainly suicides according to James D. Morrow.
Since Abraham and Isaac, the Lord no longer asks for human sacrifices, so a goat sacrifice will do. In fact the great civilizations of Central and South America were at one time the most advanced in the world in such things as math and computing astronomical orbits, the Lord propelled them to such heights, but they could never get over, progress past the stage of human sacrifices. That is not the ways of the Lord. The Lord asks for the sacrifice to see how people react internally, to see what they think, but the Lord told Abraham to stop, sacrifice a ram instead. The Lord can read your thinking, and it is the thinking that matters more than what actually happens. Those who stray far from the ways of the Lord, in thinking, get punished. Even if they are Jews, with whom the Lord made a covenant, if they stop believing in the Lord internally, which might be forgivable, but when they start thinking and behaving in ways not in accordance with the ways of the Lord, they will be punished. David taking Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, was not in accordance with the ways of the Lord. Thou shalt not covent thy neighbors wife. For which he was punished, as his first born son from her had to die. But David got up from his hunger strike as soon as it happened, and showered, and went to lay with Bathsheba. This pleased the Lord.
I think in such situation religion helps. In a sense the Lord made her be in this state, to see how she reacts, how she thinks. Maybe she knows what kind of incorrect thoughts she thought in the past that would trigger this. The Quran, in which the Lord speaks in the plural, as we, is full of lines such as 41:51, one of the translations being: "When We show favour unto man, he withdraweth and turneth aside(from his Lord), but when ill toucheth him then he aboundeth in prayer." The Lord knows what you think, and he is, or more like "they are" reading her thoughts in her present state.
By the way Mohamed was the last prophet of the Lord, because even "they" are not omnipotent, they pretend to be to help humans through this pretense, but prophecies take way too much effort to fulfill, and the practice has been abandoned starting with Mohamed. Though "they" can predict the future way beyond our abilities, they, or he, can't predict it completely, and prophecies since Mohamed should be taken as guidelines, with the understanding that life has to adapt to new circumstances and some prophecies will be abandoned because it's not worth fulfilling them. Nobody knows the distant future in exact detail, though "they" are pretty good at it. "They" are of this galaxy. "Their" biggest fear is an intergalactic invasion by an unbenign, unkind intellect, or kind intellect slave to unkind beings, which is why they would like humans and all other lifeforms in this galaxy to be well versed in the affairs of warfare and defense. Such is a thing is increasingly difficult in face of nuclear weapons, in face of artificial intelligence, but even with computing new ways of practice arise through lots of virtual reality wargames, and even real thing viruses and virus scanners, things that could come in handy knowing about under an invasion, if the invaders run computer systems. The decrease and simplification of computing technology to a 1 menu 2 item feature list and one button thing (inside a 5 GB piece of software) as a solution to security and computer warfare issues is not welcome by "they." It is a way to stray from the ways of the Lord. Things are starting to turn into very Mac-like appliances - back in the old days Mac's came with a single mouse button. That's not what the Lord wants, the Lord wants skill, variety, dynamics, even if it's too hard to fight, drop the footprint if you need more security, to DOS-like hardiness from Windows 8.1-like bloatness, and maintain the richness and features and possibilities, and fight the fights you have to fight, be good at defense, strategy, attack. In a sense you could say terrorist attacks are caused by Allah, to create skill, strategy and tactics in dealing w
Yeah, radioactive waste is worth more than gold, ounce to ounce, for the people wise enough to know how to use it. It's like plastic, paper and wood trash, that people pay to get rid of, instead of asking money for it, that can be burned to get energy out of - like Sweden can't import enough trash for their energy to fuel schemes.
Also the calcium-thermite reaction may or may not suffer from the high volatility of calcium metal, unlike aluminum thermite where the liquid aluminum has a very high boiling point, So the calcium reduction may not proceed as violently as the aluminum thermite reaction, never exceeding the boiling point of calcium, quenching reaction temperatures, and then a protracted reduction in a possibly externally heated vessel may be needed, similar to the Kroll process of titanium manufacture from TiCl4 by Mg metal reduction. The Kroll process takes days to proceed, but the Mg is easily distilled out of the final metal. One wonders if it worked faster with Ca metal instead of Mg, and Ca might still be distillable enough. It would be less energy efficient, but, with a higher driving force, more time efficient, and time is money. Both the Kroll process and the lunar oxygen "calcium reduction" reaction, in absence of an efficient thermite self-reaction might benefit from the FFC Cambridge salt-dissolved calcium-reduction, with the salt periodically regenerated by venting oxides from it via HCl bubbling, venting as H2O vapor. However Mg is much more volatile than Ca, and there is documented evidence of Mg doing a thermite reaction with SiO2, ignitable with a Mg-strip, and forming some Mg2Si silicide which hydrolyzes to SiH4 silane, which is one of the easiest methods to get silane, so if the very volatile Mg works fine, Ca should have no problems.
Also, on the surface of the Moon, as there is no atmosphere, a ramp-like shooting into orbit accelerating on a track might work, not a cannon-fire, as the acceleration is too sudden, but a gradual acceleration on rollercoaster-like maglev or similar track, long enough to reach escape velocity (which is much lower on the Moon, and there is no air-drag), might be the cheapest way to launch anything into orbit. However it requires a preconstructed site, as opposed to the nailgun propulsion/gaseous steering, which can land and takeoff from any uninhabited spots on the Moon, and leave the ejected material back on the surface, later reusable, unlike a gas-emission propulsion that almost-forever wastes the material into the vacuum of outer space. By the way any forever lost to vacuum material such as gases or even vaporized metal chunks should be accelerated as high a velocity as possible before ejection, through a cyclotron or similar device, and then some ICP (inductively coupled plasma) metal vapors might be preferable propulsion agents compared to others (ie. Mg, Al, Fe, Si, K, Na - some of these might be easier to accelerate/gasify than the others). In theory it's possible to create a completely matterless propulsion, to collect light through solar panels, then form a high energy laser beam and shoot it off in a direction, and as any energy is mass, there is a momentum gained by shooting it off, but the momentum gain vs. energy expended is very low from a laser, compared to using the same energy on tangible matter harvested on the Moon's surface, and accelerating that up to very high speed and ejecting it in a direction. As long as it's in a vapor form, it should be disperse and safe enough to accidentally hit some other space station object, even if it's a condensed metal vapor flying at high speed, so you could use even the metallic gas "stuff" from the surface of the Moon for propulsion purposes, not just the gaseous oxygen, though as a first step, we are after oxygen, to combine it with cheaply lifted lightweight hydrogen, and get gaseous propulsion out of the whole thing that way.
I recently had the chance to work with a "farmer boy." He never gets tired, he used to work 18's. On a hogfarm. Only people who have been around a real farm can appreciate that statement, because chicken shit is bad, but it's not that bad, cow shit is almost pleasant, but working in pig shit is just awful. A vegetable farm is a whole lot more enjoyable than most livestock farms, that is closed quarter livestock where the shit piles up deep, not open wild roaming cattle ranches, or other free range chicken places, those are pretty nice. Working all day. That's a farmer's life even today, in the US, work from sunup to sundown, and make like 7000 a year on a small farm if you're lucky(at much less than minimum wage if you count the hours), from which you have to pay $20 special farming property tax on an at least 10 acre lot (unless you can figure out how to make some astronomical amount of money farming on less land, astronomical in terms of farm incomes, something like $5000/yr farming on 5 acres, then you can get the farming property tax discount on smaller lots too). If you have more land, you may be able to afford machinery, but maintenance and repair is often impossible if they are fuel injected or just computerized and chipped in any way, as you don't know what a chip does, you can't get the full spec and description, or protocols used, the manufacturer won't tell you, and even if he will, it's too complicated to tackle the capturing of a 1 ns burst on ping #153 out of 200 pins (hey you were holding the probe to the wrong pin, and damn, there flew that 1 ns electric trigger signal, you missed it! Troubleshooting if a chip even functions properly can be near impossible, let alone achieving security from hidden remote controls, wifi's, satellite link gps trackers that the manufacturer or the government may hide in every significant farming equipment that comes with chips). And unlike a horse that gives you new horses, you have to keep buying and buying newer and newer farm machinery at whatever astronomical prices they are sold at, before you paid off the loan on the previous one, because the stuff you make with it, the food, is so low priced, only if you make a million tons of it a year do you make good money, and that means a lot of land, and there is only so much land, fertile land, to go around for the 7,000,000,000 people in the world today. But food is the number one priority in everybody's life, and the farmer is the one who feeds everybody. Just because we have a temporary upset in the value or pricing system, in principle, farming, and the ability to self sustain in the absence of a government or an economy, that never loses value. You never read about peaceful farmers in history books, and what's in history books is what farmer's biggest problem is, history books are full of conquerors, not peaceful people, and military defense is the biggest deficiency of a peaceful farmer, for which he has to spend money by either being a serf to a landlord in an aristocratic nobility system, or through taxes (even though taxes like tea tax are so hated) in a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer democracy. The whole United States starts out with We The People believe that all men are created equal, but such an equality is only possible through yeoman farmers as voters, who can be self sufficient if need be, unlike city dwellers, but who are also middle class workers, the middle class being dominant with respect to the rest of the society. The dominant middle class setup has been obliterated, instead we gather two camps, the welfare/unemployment/prison labor class, and the rich get richer stratified "owners" class, a setup which is a de facto aristocratic system, where not all men are created equal. The dominant middle class had to only be sustained while there were worse around the world, such as commies, but once the commies are out, we no longer need to feed the middle class well and show them that see, life is better under private property and owner setup. But without mild wealth redistribution like Jefferson had set in the tax co
I beg to differ. They can increase the value of their patent litigations by extending the validity of patents from the present 20 years to first 50 years, then 500 years. Heck, copyright started with 14, and now it's lifetime+70, which could add up to something like 150 years, so 500 years for patents is not that inconceivable. Then you better have good lawyers and pay them a lot of money when the stuff they can get you can last for generations.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese may look smaller and weaker, fragile than whites and blacks, but they built the Great Wall, and also the US Trans Continental Railroads west portion, through the grueling treacherous mountains, the hard part, the eastern portion through flat terrain being piece of cake comparatively. They are good at an love to build large projects with backbreaking work, and they have the stamina to accomplish them. They are like masochists when it comes to working, pervertedly getting off on the pain and suffering involved
Maybe NASA could start begging for money like PBS and Wikipedia do, and email photographs of latest captures to donors as thanks, and if lots of people donate a few dollars, that could add up to a few hundred million, and help keep stuff in operation, even if not enough to create and launch new telescopes.
You sound like me.
A few little notes: a huge (I'm talking a whole building, possibly a stadium size) rotating (at the correct speed, 9.8 m2/s= g=omega^2 x r) metal cylinder could provide artificial gravity, by centrifugal force, when you walk on the inside surface. If it's triple walled steel or titanium, maybe some aluminum too, with many relatively small cylinder units connected, then when a tiny meteor hits going 20 miles per second, it won't leak suddenly if there are vacuum spacings between the walls that need to be filled and pressurized before they leak rapidly too, and there is time to evacuate to the next cylinder, while you lose air pressure, and then you can take like a week to patch the holes. The more layers and obstacles for the meteor, the more it can disintegrate, and possibly not penetrate the last layer, depending on size of course. Transparent glass domes as you imagine simply won't cut it from the gravity or meteorite resilience point of view. You have to have the spinning cylinder a certain large size before the gravity at your feet is not much greater than at the top of your head, and you don't get dizzy. Still, climbing up a huge ladder into the center of the cylinder lets you experience free floating, and maybe it'd be fun sleeping there, as long as you don't wander off slightly, then get blown by the rotating wind, then smack hard to the floor when you get very off center, so you might have to fasten yourself to a central metal bar if you go to sleep like that. A reality show could make such a thing profitable, especially with meteorite hits, losing air pressure in some units, losing power, losing recycling systems and running low on oxygen that has to be hauled up from the Moon or Earth, and the shit piles up because some systems failed, losing rotation by two opposingly rotating cylinders getting jammed and everything floating up into the air, there are lots of neat things to play with and make it interesting. It could be a cross between star trek and reality shows, possibly with a commander, and replicator-like food dispensers for no money, while on a small scale, or even like deep space 9, if it grows larger, with politics, deceit, trade and bribing.
Mars is too friggin far and not that much bigger than the Moon. Also solar power is less there. It's a waste of money going to Mars, it's called a planet, but it never held an atmosphere, and there was probably never any flowing water on it - ice maybe, subliming directly into vapor, and its gravity is not strong enough to hold water vapor from escape velocity at its temperature. The first priority should be setting up a Moon base, mining stuff on the moon and shooting the cargo with a cannon or rollercoaster into outer space orbit, to manufacture space stations from, including building size rotation cylinders. Long term we might be able to convert Venus into livable space, if we could get it to rotate by smacking artificial comets made out of stuff like Ganymede by smacking other artificial comets on a near collision course with Ganymede, into Ganymede, or if that's too dangerous, doing it little bit at a time, with small asteroids and comets. But it's really hard to catch a comet, install Tsar bomba explosives on it, and adjust its track to where it accurately collides into Venus, instead of a near collision, and such near collisions where a little change can compound into dramatic changes, may be very rare.
In order to live you have to kill, you have to destroy, if nothing else, murder a carrot on your lunch plate, and sometimes you have to kill another human in self defense so that you live, but may decide not to kill 2 others and instead die, or be a kamikaze or suicide bomber killing many but protecting even many more of your nation vs one life of your own, it gets complicated, especially if you follow things like trying to sustain genetic variety and then you have one native american with one kid vs. 100 whites all of the same blood, same genetics, or 100 blacks, and in such cases the 1 but rare native american would outweigh the 100 others, it gets really complicated and eerie if you try to apply algebra to genetics and rights of human beings. Also, I've said this before, in theory there is a way to use solar panels and chemical manufacturing pots to create sugars and proteins and all nutrition out of nuclear, wind or solar power, and live in the middle of a desert without any other lifeforms present in a completely sterile or super-vegetarian of uber-kosher way, not having to kill any lifeforms at all to survive, but there is something off, something of bad taste with that picture, and most people would prefer instead bringing a jungle to the desert and living amidst the jungle, hunting other lifeforms, stepping on bugs, but providing the other lifeforms a way to live too, including protecting species from extinction, even if the Universe, or the cruel and harsh reality, has decided they must go, we, humans, beg to differ, and will spend our hard earned resources to try to maintain variety of life around us, even when our national debt is out of control.
But who wants to live in a world like that, when you, or your nation is alone, with all the other variety RIP disappearing? It's extremely hard to maintain balance in Civilization, and to win via a spaceship, because the natural tendency is for 1 to overpower all the others and emerge as the winner, just like in the business world there is a tendency for monopolies to arise and exterminate all the competition, if nothing else, through mergers with them, but when you go out into nature, you learn that there is something good about the variety of life, about multiplicity of the jungle, compared to one single celled photosynthetic bacteria digesting everything else around it and emerging as a winner, something that may be happening on other planets where life has arisen, and it may be a matter of time before it happens on this planet too, which is why it's important to have a space program, and life in outer space, to at least have some isolated pockets of life should a global infection outbreak erase all higher lifeforms down here on Earth, especially one that's created out of curiosity in a DNA-tinkering biotech lab, and gets out of hand and out of control.
By the way Zimbabwe had a currency between 1980 and 2009, called the Zimbabwean dollar, Z$, that hyperinflated through the roof by not having a sound monetary policy - the president of dictator or whatever you wanna call him, instead of collecting taxes and staying within the limits of available funds collected, he simply didn't collect taxes and started up the printing machines when it came time to pay any government dues, such as employee salaries, or weapons for his military people. You can see pictures of Z$500 and later Z$100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion Z$ banknotes) at the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z... and you can buy one of these notes on Ebay at http://www.ebay.com/itm/100-Tr... the bidding stands at US$5.50 with 3 days and 3 hrs left to bid, or $16.99 buy it now on other auctions. The Z$ went through three redenominations, dropping zeros at the end (ATM machines were started choking up and software had to be custom designed for Zimbabwe), According to the wikipedia article,
The third redenomination produced the "fourth dollar" (ZWL), which was worth 1 trillion ZWR (third dollar), or 10^25 ZWD (first dollar). Despite attempts to control inflation by legislation, and three redenominations (in 2006, 2008 and 2009), use of the Zimbabwean dollar as an official currency was effectively abandoned on 12 April 2009 due to the skyrocketing inflation. According to some sources, a person would starve on just a billion Zimbabwe dollars.[3] This was a result of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe legalising use of foreign currencies for transactions in January 2009.[4]
That's 10^25 first dollars, or 25 zeros, or 4thZ$1 = 1st Z$10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 revaluation for the 4th generation in 2009 compared to the 1980 dollars. The result was legalizing foreign currencies, such as the stable US$ that the whole world uses where there are currency control issues, including China themselves used to peg their currency against the US$ and underwrite it's value with a tremedous amount of sweat. But once you remove the Chinese underwriting support, sending the US$ into an inflation spiral becomes easy, and inflating the heck out of our currency would be a great way to get rid of national debt, and create havoc in the whole world's economy. In theory holders of debt notes get paid an interest rate for the risk of inflation and other risks they assume in lending that money, but if inflation gets out of control, the winners are not the interest collectors but the debtors, because they have to pay back almost nothing, comparatively speaking.
George Carlin has a "Bigger dick" theory of why it's important to bomb people who are not like us. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... I think he did that gig before the war on Serbia, and we went to war with Serbia just to prove that white people are not racist, they can bomb white people too, with the same size dick, not just brown people, who have bigger dicks.
I'm all for engaging the Muslims to feel good about America. In America we have comparatively good racial harmony compared to the muslims bombing the fuck out of each other over being sunny or shia, or even not being related, they are so racist, even their names goes ibn, son of who, they track heredity very closely, and they got severe racism issues over it within their own kind, let alone with people that look different than them. A lot of them do live in the desert, and in the desert it's impossible to live without discipline, and islam provides them with that discipline, and the things we do in America, like watching porn, and wasting resources out of control, they severely criticize that, but wait til they get TV's and watch Pamela Anderson's tits jiggle around as she runs as a lifeguard in "Baywatch", which was the top program on Egyptian tv, because even Muslims are human beings, and like to see tits bounce around, and maybe even some naked Greek or Roman statues that I see on public buildings in the US, while they stick to towel wrapping their own women, like the discipline of islam teaches them. We let porn and even gay male gangbangs proliferate in our country, with criticism about it over here too, and music like https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Ms New Booty that tops our charts may be a bit too much for them now. To them women are not for "new booty" fun when you got bored of the same old same old, but to have children with and raise a family, actually raising their own kids and instead of having baby daddy's and baby mommas.
Jefferson had this idea that the "yeoman farmer" is the backbone of a democracy, and democracy cannot be trusted to city dwellers, because they are not self sufficient, not independent voters, their vote is controlled by those who can give them a job. A city, and urbanized population is undemocratic at its core, because of basic necessities, dependence on the elite for those basic necessities.
I think of whatever is left over after supporting the SS of elderly over 65 (that's a lot of baby boomers, and hospital charges are out of control), 80% of my taxes should be spent on military (and I include NASA with the military here), 5% on roads, with the remaining 15% on miscellaneous, while things like education can be done by private schools (I used to be a big fan of public education). Instead of welfare with people under 65 (optionally 60 for women) sitting home twirling their thumbs, everyone needs a plot of land of about 7 acres (which is not enough for a family of 4 with farming methods practiced by the Irish potato famine immigrants), with very low property tax, to grow their own food, and get off the back of the government, and be happy even in the absence of an economy. Then those who breed out of control then starve themselves, unlike in a city, where you can't really say to someone if nobody gives you a job you shouldn't have any kids, you can't sort of exterminate someone directly like that, but if they have a plot of land, they get some sense or idea of what even a resource limit looks like. The issue becomes how to fairly distribute land, and who to take it from, and how(gov't invest eminent domain money into land purchases hoping not to pay welfare later?) do we take the population levels of today as basis, tomorrow, or 20 years ago, or 100 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and then issues such as during slavery people couldn't really breed according to their abilities to take care of themselves, and their population might have been kept artificially low, so where is a fair balance of the competing racist populations of white, asian, black, hispanic, native american, muslim, and even inside white populations of jewish, irish, italian, hunky, german, slavic, etc., how you gonna allocate who gets what to make things fair? Btw urban farming is a joke - a 5 sq ft garden or a garden in a ceramic pot of 1/4 sq ft is not enough to feed a person for a whole year.
"space exploration just seems to drop right out of the equation, doesn't it?" That is the crux of the argument. At this point in time, large portions of the population just do not care about space exploration or research because there are more tangible topics that dominate their thinking.
Such as having food on the table every day. That's a constant topic at the city kennel for animals, because there is always more animals than money to feed them. And animals that don't find an owner adopting them sooner or later get put to death. Those that do get adopted, do so being neutered. It's like the right to freely breed and the right to food on the table are human rights that should apply even to animals like cats, unfortunately there is no amount of money in the entire universe that's able to keep up with the ability of these cats to reproduce. With a government supported unlimited food supply two cats can very quickly grow to a population of 100 cats, and if there is still enough food and space, to 1000 cats, then 100,000, etc. The ability of lifeforms to breed is tremendous, and in absence of self control, or forced population control such as euthanasia and neutering, it's always the external lack of resources put a limiting factor on population size. Having food on the table is a constant topic with people on welfare too, but when it comes to humans, you cannot apply euthanasia and neutering to control the population, so instead you have to support an ever increasing government debt, so the welfare manna falling from the sky keeps falling. You cannot tell people to not have kids. You cannot allow people to starve. What you can do is let people freely breed out of control, and keep increasing the government debt over it. Eventually this leads to cutting other things such as NASA or the military, to keep up with the ever increasing load, but eventually the whole system collapses financially. You can have things like China injecting more money into our economy, increasing our debt even further, but that's like instead of having 100,000 cats from 2 cats, now you'll have 1 million, then 10 million, then 100 million, you're simply postponing the problem and making it worse, the fundamental question being the setup of unlimited resources provided to unlimited breeding capacity. It's hard to preach self control to people, as whoever practices self control gets quickly drowned out and outvoted by those who don't, in a democracy, so instead you have territorial struggles in jobs by those who maintain some kind of self control sense, and try to keep those who'll breed out of control irregardless of available resources and sooner or later outvote them in their localities, away, and those who're kept away keep shouting no fair, I demand a job, it's a human right to have a job, it's a human right to have food on the table, it's a human right to breed out of control irregardless of available resources. In places like India there is still a struggle between the muslim and hindu population, and AIDS is not that prevalent because both stay monogamous but with huge family sizes, playing chicken against overpopulation issues, and neither one can relent, because the other one will outvote them in elections if they let the other ones get ahead. Instead there is a lot of fingerpointing and criticizing of how some people have over 10 kids and they are miserably poor, by those who don't, while they too are trying to get over 10 kids to "stay in the game", to retain their voting power. See under a monarchy those who disrespect resource limits don't end up automatically dominating those who try to keep things in balance, like it happens in a democracy. The royalists know this very well, and they are actively working to exacerbate the problems even further, until people realize how many different things are wrong with a democracy, and how right nobility and serfdom, masters and slavery, or bourgeoisie and proletariat, are. They are also actively exterminating the middle class, now that we no longer have to worry
Correction (above): I had to see = I hate to see (everybody's saved money going to waste.)
The idea is that you're not supposed to save anything on local disk, everything should be on the cloud, and you get to get blackmailed for access to it. Or at least intellectual property is fully contained, as there is a single copy of it anywhere on the web, and no 500 million copies on everybody's local harddrives. Then you pay for access, pay per view, and copyright fair use issues are simpler. Which is why I seriously started investing in oldschool tech, including old software, old computers, or old tv's, that can record and playback without asking for permission each time from authorities, authorities that may not be there after a government financial collapse and apocalypse ensuing after it. Have you checked the national debt lately? In how many years are we predicted to pay it off? 50? More? Even if it's more, that means a gradual decrease of the debt, and instead all I hear is disagreements about raising the debt ceiling even further. If they tell me inflation is outpacing the rate of indebtedness of the government, so that the whole debt will be minuscule once minimum wage rises to 10 trillion dollars per hr, then I'll say, aha, they've got a plan. But I had to see everybody's money savings go to waste, and a destabilized currency makes life hell. Something eventually gotta give, and I'd pick an inflation out of control but the gov't maintaining control of the situation and still feeding everybody vs. an apocalypse and anarchy where people start eating each other. Without a guarantee of the internet available 20 or 50 years from now, and webpages doing the authentication and approval of what I'm buying today still up and in business 50 years from now, I'm keepin my save button, and prefer nonauthenticated, non"activated" software and files.
Steel toe boots are not as comfortable as tennis shoes.
Of course Borg-like implants that can read her thoughts would have a much higher value. However, I don't know about brain researchers and cybernetic implant researchers, but I'd be unwilling to work on such implants, to create such implants, in the present state of general human affairs, as the powers that be might be using them to read the thoughts of the general population. The freedom of speech is guaranteed by the first amendment, but under severe attack these days, like all the other amendments, by the royalist/nobility forces, but the freedom of thought is guaranteed by the status quo until mind reading things become available, so that unspoken thought can be recorded, as it needs to be, before it can be criminalized. Only the Lord Almighty and his angels have the technology to read everybody's thoughts, and that should be sufficient, we can leave it up to them to make the decisions, including mindreading and communication decisions. If they really want to they can make her do telepathy with someone else, but most likely they don't want to. And that's that. Quod est.
Just because she's conscious and has a means to convey her wishes, it does not mean that other people around her will respect her wishes. For instance, they could declare her mentally challenged, unable to make correct decisions under the duress and stress of the situation, and she might be overly emotional(like all women are), and the community might make a decision for her different than what she would make for herself. Also, it's unlikely that she'd opt for suicide (unless she's Korean or Japanese), as women are the survivors of the species and males are the discardable ones, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... , so the issue of the community wanting to keep her alive and her wanting to die instead should not arise. The issue of her wanting to live and the community wanting her to die is a weird one, as she's not a criminal, and communities spend a shitload of money on sustaining criminals, and only the gravest criminals will be put to death by the community against the individual's wish to live, and if they run out of money, they should take it from the non-selfsustaining private profit prisons that are government funded, and put it to supporting people like her. Although most of the slashdot folks here seem unversed in the topics of Borg-like brain-computer implants and interfaces http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net... (as none of us really know how the brain works, or even what sleep is), we deteriorate into this ethical discussion of cost to society and worth to live. And it's a valid discussion, as healthy prison inmates with some bogus charges of drug abuse, or even framed people for murders (Shawshank redemption is a movie about the wrong guy going to jail, and truck drivers are the most frequent serial killers, not because they have higher tendencies, but because they are so easy to frame - anyone on the shitlist of the powers to be will be herded toward a truckdriver job, given a route they have no control over, and the morgues are full of dead bodies of people with no relatives looking for them who can be used as murder framing dummies, and it's easy to frame anyone into being a murderer, especially if they are also willing to read some murder-mystery novels like "the perfect crime" or Agatha Christie type stuff, stuff that the general population loves to read anyway) might have a more valid reason to be kept alive than someone who lost brain function to the point of unable to control her lung, if we'd have to choose because of cost. But it shouldn't be a matter of cost considering the wealth of the society we live in. I'd be willing to skip eating every other day and instead give the money to supporting both the criminal and the sick on life support, and of the two the criminal is the cheaper to support, but has less value as a moral human being in being supported compared to a law abiding sick patient without lung function. By the way food is so cheap, it wouldn't be that much money. Especially the food I eat.
Religion is very cheap, and its quality of support value is very high.
It's often all just a matter of money. Often people will be kept artificially on the machines until the insurance is willing to pay, and as soon as it runs out, they are "relocated" and such relocation involves getting permanently unplugged too, if nothing else, unplugged in a mild sense from the superhigh-quality support to a mediocre but "acceptable" support, with unfortunate consequences when such "acceptable" support is not enough, especially when the "superhigh-quality support" was barely letting the person hang in there. Having no insurance qualifies you for the mediocre support very fast, and sometimes that's what you want for yourself, lower cost to you or lower burden to society.
Life is negative entropy. The appearance of a tendency for the creation and sustaining of order, in a disordertending environment.
Though sometimes it gets complicated, like in case of kamikaze's.
In dire straits religion, and in that, monotheistic religion, can pull your ass out of trouble. In a sense religion is a patchwork of the weakness of human psyche. There is this picture of who they call Prometheus, as a pilot, http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XBXL..., alone, under infection, with his face getting chewed off, just like the alien's female's face, http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jxym... , but he is hanging in there, and the only way he can do that is if he's a monotheist, with a personal God, not just a nirvana impersonless Universe that awaits him to become one with it. Whether there is any tangible reality to religion as interpreted to the letter, well, time and time again people come and go who point out inconsistencies, faults and mistakes in religions, also corruption and abuses of power by the clergy, and religion may not have anything to do with reality at all, but it has a tremendous value as an effect on the human psyche, as a patchwork to the defects of almost any intelligent psyche. Which is why these nonomnipotent beings of the Milky Way galaxy, managing other beings, promote religion to humans, and themselves pretend to be omnipotent sometimes. By the way they are seldom active, but in some cases, like people dwelling in the dire deserts, or the Jews acting in the ways of the Lord under Egyptian captivity, they will do things, including splitting of the Red Sea, which goes far beyond mere hallucinations, that almost every other thing can be ascribed to, such as Moses receiving the 10 commandments, seeing a burning bush - he might have been just hallucinating. Btw 9/11 was mostly Muslims against Jews, the Lord's people against the Lord's people, and there must have been some things going on not in accordance with the ways of the Lord in those buildings. Perhaps people lost faith, they've stopped being true believers, and that's how they wandered off the path. There is this saying that the Jews control the world, and they do a pretty good job at it, much better than the Romans did, or would have, but sometimes they make mistakes, especially when they forget about their religion. Again, religion may not have anything to do with reality at all, when it comes to interpreting it by the letter, such as Noah's Ark issues, but it has a tremendous value as an effect on the human psyche. This Slashdot post asked for what can they do under such circumstances, and I wrote what I thought could help.
Btw, the brits at Trafalgar saved every single Spanish soldier from the water, from the sunken ships (no longer possible to practice with the advent of submarines and obsolescence of battleships), and treated them well. That is in accordance with the ways of the Lord, unlike the stuff that went down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...örgy_Dózsa rebellions, and during http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... during the 100 year war. Throughout history and even to these days the treatment of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... is often not in accordance with the ways of the Lord. In particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... shows some exceptional deathrates:
German POWs in British hands 0.03%[90]
German POWs in American hands 0.15%[90]
German POWs in French hands 2.58%[90]
Japanese POWs held by U.S.: relatively low, mainly suicides according to James D. Morrow.
Since Abraham and Isaac, the Lord no longer asks for human sacrifices, so a goat sacrifice will do. In fact the great civilizations of Central and South America were at one time the most advanced in the world in such things as math and computing astronomical orbits, the Lord propelled them to such heights, but they could never get over, progress past the stage of human sacrifices. That is not the ways of the Lord. The Lord asks for the sacrifice to see how people react internally, to see what they think, but the Lord told Abraham to stop, sacrifice a ram instead. The Lord can read your thinking, and it is the thinking that matters more than what actually happens. Those who stray far from the ways of the Lord, in thinking, get punished. Even if they are Jews, with whom the Lord made a covenant, if they stop believing in the Lord internally, which might be forgivable, but when they start thinking and behaving in ways not in accordance with the ways of the Lord, they will be punished. David taking Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, was not in accordance with the ways of the Lord. Thou shalt not covent thy neighbors wife. For which he was punished, as his first born son from her had to die. But David got up from his hunger strike as soon as it happened, and showered, and went to lay with Bathsheba. This pleased the Lord.
I think in such situation religion helps. In a sense the Lord made her be in this state, to see how she reacts, how she thinks. Maybe she knows what kind of incorrect thoughts she thought in the past that would trigger this. The Quran, in which the Lord speaks in the plural, as we, is full of lines such as 41:51, one of the translations being: "When We show favour unto man, he withdraweth and turneth aside(from his Lord), but when ill toucheth him then he aboundeth in prayer." The Lord knows what you think, and he is, or more like "they are" reading her thoughts in her present state.
By the way Mohamed was the last prophet of the Lord, because even "they" are not omnipotent, they pretend to be to help humans through this pretense, but prophecies take way too much effort to fulfill, and the practice has been abandoned starting with Mohamed. Though "they" can predict the future way beyond our abilities, they, or he, can't predict it completely, and prophecies since Mohamed should be taken as guidelines, with the understanding that life has to adapt to new circumstances and some prophecies will be abandoned because it's not worth fulfilling them. Nobody knows the distant future in exact detail, though "they" are pretty good at it. "They" are of this galaxy. "Their" biggest fear is an intergalactic invasion by an unbenign, unkind intellect, or kind intellect slave to unkind beings, which is why they would like humans and all other lifeforms in this galaxy to be well versed in the affairs of warfare and defense. Such is a thing is increasingly difficult in face of nuclear weapons, in face of artificial intelligence, but even with computing new ways of practice arise through lots of virtual reality wargames, and even real thing viruses and virus scanners, things that could come in handy knowing about under an invasion, if the invaders run computer systems. The decrease and simplification of computing technology to a 1 menu 2 item feature list and one button thing (inside a 5 GB piece of software) as a solution to security and computer warfare issues is not welcome by "they." It is a way to stray from the ways of the Lord. Things are starting to turn into very Mac-like appliances - back in the old days Mac's came with a single mouse button. That's not what the Lord wants, the Lord wants skill, variety, dynamics, even if it's too hard to fight, drop the footprint if you need more security, to DOS-like hardiness from Windows 8.1-like bloatness, and maintain the richness and features and possibilities, and fight the fights you have to fight, be good at defense, strategy, attack. In a sense you could say terrorist attacks are caused by Allah, to create skill, strategy and tactics in dealing w
Yeah, radioactive waste is worth more than gold, ounce to ounce, for the people wise enough to know how to use it. It's like plastic, paper and wood trash, that people pay to get rid of, instead of asking money for it, that can be burned to get energy out of - like Sweden can't import enough trash for their energy to fuel schemes.
Also the calcium-thermite reaction may or may not suffer from the high volatility of calcium metal, unlike aluminum thermite where the liquid aluminum has a very high boiling point, So the calcium reduction may not proceed as violently as the aluminum thermite reaction, never exceeding the boiling point of calcium, quenching reaction temperatures, and then a protracted reduction in a possibly externally heated vessel may be needed, similar to the Kroll process of titanium manufacture from TiCl4 by Mg metal reduction. The Kroll process takes days to proceed, but the Mg is easily distilled out of the final metal. One wonders if it worked faster with Ca metal instead of Mg, and Ca might still be distillable enough. It would be less energy efficient, but, with a higher driving force, more time efficient, and time is money. Both the Kroll process and the lunar oxygen "calcium reduction" reaction, in absence of an efficient thermite self-reaction might benefit from the FFC Cambridge salt-dissolved calcium-reduction, with the salt periodically regenerated by venting oxides from it via HCl bubbling, venting as H2O vapor. However Mg is much more volatile than Ca, and there is documented evidence of Mg doing a thermite reaction with SiO2, ignitable with a Mg-strip, and forming some Mg2Si silicide which hydrolyzes to SiH4 silane, which is one of the easiest methods to get silane, so if the very volatile Mg works fine, Ca should have no problems.
Also, on the surface of the Moon, as there is no atmosphere, a ramp-like shooting into orbit accelerating on a track might work, not a cannon-fire, as the acceleration is too sudden, but a gradual acceleration on rollercoaster-like maglev or similar track, long enough to reach escape velocity (which is much lower on the Moon, and there is no air-drag), might be the cheapest way to launch anything into orbit. However it requires a preconstructed site, as opposed to the nailgun propulsion/gaseous steering, which can land and takeoff from any uninhabited spots on the Moon, and leave the ejected material back on the surface, later reusable, unlike a gas-emission propulsion that almost-forever wastes the material into the vacuum of outer space. By the way any forever lost to vacuum material such as gases or even vaporized metal chunks should be accelerated as high a velocity as possible before ejection, through a cyclotron or similar device, and then some ICP (inductively coupled plasma) metal vapors might be preferable propulsion agents compared to others (ie. Mg, Al, Fe, Si, K, Na - some of these might be easier to accelerate/gasify than the others). In theory it's possible to create a completely matterless propulsion, to collect light through solar panels, then form a high energy laser beam and shoot it off in a direction, and as any energy is mass, there is a momentum gained by shooting it off, but the momentum gain vs. energy expended is very low from a laser, compared to using the same energy on tangible matter harvested on the Moon's surface, and accelerating that up to very high speed and ejecting it in a direction. As long as it's in a vapor form, it should be disperse and safe enough to accidentally hit some other space station object, even if it's a condensed metal vapor flying at high speed, so you could use even the metallic gas "stuff" from the surface of the Moon for propulsion purposes, not just the gaseous oxygen, though as a first step, we are after oxygen, to combine it with cheaply lifted lightweight hydrogen, and get gaseous propulsion out of the whole thing that way.
I recently had the chance to work with a "farmer boy." He never gets tired, he used to work 18's. On a hogfarm. Only people who have been around a real farm can appreciate that statement, because chicken shit is bad, but it's not that bad, cow shit is almost pleasant, but working in pig shit is just awful. A vegetable farm is a whole lot more enjoyable than most livestock farms, that is closed quarter livestock where the shit piles up deep, not open wild roaming cattle ranches, or other free range chicken places, those are pretty nice. Working all day. That's a farmer's life even today, in the US, work from sunup to sundown, and make like 7000 a year on a small farm if you're lucky(at much less than minimum wage if you count the hours), from which you have to pay $20 special farming property tax on an at least 10 acre lot (unless you can figure out how to make some astronomical amount of money farming on less land, astronomical in terms of farm incomes, something like $5000/yr farming on 5 acres, then you can get the farming property tax discount on smaller lots too). If you have more land, you may be able to afford machinery, but maintenance and repair is often impossible if they are fuel injected or just computerized and chipped in any way, as you don't know what a chip does, you can't get the full spec and description, or protocols used, the manufacturer won't tell you, and even if he will, it's too complicated to tackle the capturing of a 1 ns burst on ping #153 out of 200 pins (hey you were holding the probe to the wrong pin, and damn, there flew that 1 ns electric trigger signal, you missed it! Troubleshooting if a chip even functions properly can be near impossible, let alone achieving security from hidden remote controls, wifi's, satellite link gps trackers that the manufacturer or the government may hide in every significant farming equipment that comes with chips). And unlike a horse that gives you new horses, you have to keep buying and buying newer and newer farm machinery at whatever astronomical prices they are sold at, before you paid off the loan on the previous one, because the stuff you make with it, the food, is so low priced, only if you make a million tons of it a year do you make good money, and that means a lot of land, and there is only so much land, fertile land, to go around for the 7,000,000,000 people in the world today. But food is the number one priority in everybody's life, and the farmer is the one who feeds everybody. Just because we have a temporary upset in the value or pricing system, in principle, farming, and the ability to self sustain in the absence of a government or an economy, that never loses value. You never read about peaceful farmers in history books, and what's in history books is what farmer's biggest problem is, history books are full of conquerors, not peaceful people, and military defense is the biggest deficiency of a peaceful farmer, for which he has to spend money by either being a serf to a landlord in an aristocratic nobility system, or through taxes (even though taxes like tea tax are so hated) in a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer democracy. The whole United States starts out with We The People believe that all men are created equal, but such an equality is only possible through yeoman farmers as voters, who can be self sufficient if need be, unlike city dwellers, but who are also middle class workers, the middle class being dominant with respect to the rest of the society. The dominant middle class setup has been obliterated, instead we gather two camps, the welfare/unemployment/prison labor class, and the rich get richer stratified "owners" class, a setup which is a de facto aristocratic system, where not all men are created equal. The dominant middle class had to only be sustained while there were worse around the world, such as commies, but once the commies are out, we no longer need to feed the middle class well and show them that see, life is better under private property and owner setup. But without mild wealth redistribution like Jefferson had set in the tax co
I beg to differ. They can increase the value of their patent litigations by extending the validity of patents from the present 20 years to first 50 years, then 500 years. Heck, copyright started with 14, and now it's lifetime+70, which could add up to something like 150 years, so 500 years for patents is not that inconceivable. Then you better have good lawyers and pay them a lot of money when the stuff they can get you can last for generations.