Considering that DeLorean Motors is still in business and they are even looking at restarting production, it is an interesting comparison to make. Admittedly that the company is certainly no longer under original ownership of any kind and that being a shareholder of the original company was likely a bad idea, the company still seems to have some amazing life and seems to be a company that can't quite die even if it is a Zombie of sorts.
The better comparison that has been often used for Tesla has been the Tucker Corporation, although Tesla has produced far more automobiles than Preston Tucker ever did. The only sales figures I can find reliable about the Roadster is that about 2500 were produced over its model lifetime, with about 2500 Model S vehicles that have been produced.... still less than what John DeLorean was able to produce before he got into trouble.
It will be interesting to see if Tesla can genuinely break out and become a "real" automobile company. Hundreds of other people have started "automobile companies" of some sort or another and have largely failed.
That is why those who think this is crazy thinking actually end up supporting corporate executives with outrageous salaries. Executives with short-term thinking that ends up running the company into the ground due to bad practices should get their compensation packages zeroed out and their "golden parachutes" turned into tertiary creditors at bankruptcy court with likely a few shareholder lawsuits to contend with as well rather than having my neighbors and my family end up paying for this fiasco through crazy legislation instead.
Yes, GM knew how to make electric vehicles. And of course the entire engineering team that built the EV1 was either reassigned or laid off with the entire engineering effort dead in the water at the time. I'm not disputing that GM knew how to make this kind of stuff (even though the EV1 did suck as a vehicle in a number of ways).
In terms of the effort they put into killing the concept of an electric automobile, it may have been a misguided effort.... and yes I've seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?" It really should have documented a misguided effort of a government agency to command entrepreneurs to innovate, and that the incentives were there for a large established business to build this kind of thing rather than encouraging a plethora of small start-up companies to make this kind of thing instead.
The big thing that made a difference between the EV1 and the Tesla Roadster was the development of the Lithium-ion batteries... primarily designed for laptop computers.... which helped to give electric automobiles a decent driving range. The EV1 used Lead-Acid battery packs and simply didn't have the driving range necessary for a mass consumer product. It certainly could have had hundreds or a few thousand customers, but it wouldn't have ever been anything other than a niche vehicle and was sort of a waste of time for the engineers at General Motors. It still is odd though that GM even bothered to build the vehicle in the first place.
What Tesla has done is to file formally with the loan agency (in this case the federal government.... thus the move is a matter of public record) to increase the rate at which it is repaying the load so it can pay the loan off in half the time. The problem is that except for some extreme circumstances Tesla is now committed to making this payment schedule as it was forced to file the paperwork with the federal government to make this increased level of payments.
Most companies, especially with the low interest rates that this particular loan was given out, would simply take the extra cash that they may have on hand and "park" the money in speculative investments until the final payment was due and only make minimal payments. It also isn't worth the bureaucratic hassle to renegotiate the payment terms under programs like this in most cases. Tesla Motors took that extra step to make that happen.
Do you suppose the money just up and vanishes when the government spends it?
Pretty much. The problem with having the government spend money is that you need to have a whole bunch of bureaucrats that supervise how the money is allocated, how the money is spent (once it has been actually given to some organization or group of people), how the money is returned (through taxes or from the loan agencies involved) as well as accountants that make sure the money is actually used in the way that was claimed. Absolutely none of those bureaucrats who are watching over all of that money being spent do anything productive in terms of actually producing a valuable product or service. Add on levels of supervision and a general tendency that bureaucracies expand over time pushing out the useful people who actually get things done, and you end up with what I hope is an explanation for why letting government do anything is usually a waste of resources, time, and labor.
Letting people keep their own damn money that they have worked hard to earn and letting them spend that money however they please is likely to have the money spent more directly on productive services and goods than any set of intelligent people could ever think up with the best possible education. That does take a leap of faith, but it is also a principle of freedom too. Government allocation of money in almost any form is a loss of freedom. The larger that the government gets, the less likely that ordinary citizens will be able to stop the government from abusing their freedoms in other ways as well.
There may be some very few tasks that are generally not profitable for private individuals to work on (like maintaining defensive fortifications or building a continent-spanning highway) that may have some utility for society as a whole. The question is where should you draw the line when it crosses into things that ordinary people should be taking care of for themselves?
We need to put the majority of our money into investments like this and make the entry into manufacturing and engineering low. Make laws that promote open technology and avoid patent trolls.
If you really believe this, you should simply encourage the repealing of laws, not the drafting of new ones. I'd start with simply repealing patent law altogether, which would go a long way to putting patent trolls out of business and making it much easier for start-up companies to compete with established players.
The crazy thing about the TARP funds was that many banks were essentially forced at gunpoint (well, more correctly forced by having their corporate charters revoked if they failed to cooperate) to take the money on the pretense that there were a couple of banks that were in danger of insolvency... and the government didn't want to advertise which ones were most in danger by loaning only to those banks which needed the money.
Since the money that most of these banks were given wasn't wanted or needed, they "parked" the money in places that were "safe" like Treasury Bills until they were told by regulators that they could pay it back. And then the money was paid back ASAP.
IMHO the poorly managed companies should have been made insolvent and forced into bankruptcy for their lousy policies. I'm not in charge though.
In fairness here, the government really didn't have to pick companies for this particular loan program. It was open to any company producing automobiles in America and using that money to expand automobile production domestically.
If you want to say that it was unfair that the government decided to single out the automobile industry over other industries like steel manufacturers or shoe cobblers, I'd have to agree more with your sentiment.
The problem with Solyndra, General Motors, and some of the more controversial loans you may be referring to is that individual companies were singled out with substantial graft and corruption. In the case of GM in particular, the "bailout money" eventually did force the company into bankruptcy and destroyed the value of the individual shares where the United Auto Workers ended up with perhaps the best deal of the whole thing.... done as a political payoff for their backing of many people in political power in Washington DC. You have a right to be pissed off at that kind of blatant corruption in government.
The Volt is widely acknowledged to have been started explicitly because the CEO of General Motors took a bunch of marketing literature from Tesla Motors and threw it down on the desks of his engineers asking why a California start-up company could make a successful electric automobile but they couldn't. The rest, as they say, is history.
Mind you, the Volt is a pretty good automobile and deserves its own kind of kudos. The GM engineers made some compromises that I don't agree with, but I'm not exactly a professional automotive engineer nor have been put into their position to design a new automobile from scratch. Doing such things isn't as easy as it sounds.
In addition to your excellent reply, it should be worth noting that the route manufacturing companies get cheap consumer prices (like Henry Ford did with the Model T) is to have massive production where you make up profits through volume sales and scales of efficiency. That is something incredibly hard for any start-up company to perform, where it costs roughly a couple billion dollars just to start a major new low-cost automobile with production runs in the hundreds of thousands of editions.
Elon Musk was incredibly intelligent to start out with the high end automobiles, especially the niche market of performance sports cars with a little bit of a twist. The Model S is really aiming more toward the luxury sedan market... again a very astute move on his part where the Model S clearly compares well with a Lexis or Mercedes Benz (or the Lincoln branded cars by General Motors). Volume of the vehicle production line doesn't have to be quite so high for these kind of vehicles and ultimately doesn't take as much cash to get them started.
The original approach that Tesla was going to take was to simply buy off the shelf components already being made by several automobile manufacturers and simply assemble a new automobile. Unfortunately because of quality control and inventory issues Tesla has been forced to increasingly build more and more components "in-house". One example was the transmission needed for the Roadster that very nearly bankrupted the company (and forced Elon Musk to double down and dump essentially all liquid assets that he had into Tesla as well as make a whole bunch of phone calls to friends with money to help out). And yes, Tesla automobiles do have a transmission... even if it is pretty simple in its design.
It is in the announced product line of development that eventually Tesla is going to be building economy automobiles, but that the original plan was to wait until they had both the manufacturing facility (that they now have with the NUMMI plant in California) and the working capital needed to get it all to happen.
The only thing that I am a bit surprised at myself is not the cheap low-end automobiles, but rather why Tesla hasn't moved into the all-electric delivery van market (aka FedEx trucks) or even the short haul semi-trailer tractor market where people routinely dump more money on vehicle purchases that would make a typical sports car enthusiast look twice at the price tag and doubt they could foot the bill. There are electric vehicles in those markets, and having corporations set up charging stations for a fleet of vehicles would be even a bonus (on site refueling without having to deal with petroleum companies). The drawback might be the existing competition as well as the fact that such companies are less likely to be hung up in the "green energy" hype.... and that Tesla can only do so many things at the same time. There are also a bunch of patent trolls hanging out in those markets with patents for electric vehicles of those types as well.... that might be causing some additional problems.
That isn't quite true that Virgin Galactic has "no hardware". The plan is to use the White Knight as the 1st stage for the launch into orbit (that is already built) and they have "bent metal" on the rocket itself as well as have engineers (via "The Spaceship Company"... now wholly owned by Virgin Enterprises after Scaled Composites sold out their share) who are gaining experience building real rocket motors. It is definitely on their engineering design path and something they are very much capable of achieving in time with the resources they have.
I don't know if they will drop the performance and raise costs, particularly as you should note they are in pretty steep competition with other launch providers. It isn't being built as a government cost-plus project where you can get away with screwing your customers over as you'll get paid anyway. Those requirements and costs are sort of a hard line as that is what their customers are willing to pay.... not how much it will cost Richard Branson to have a fun toy for putting microsats into orbit.
For cheap throw-away devices that you don't care if they work properly in the first place? Sure, use some consumer electronics. Laptop computers have been going up into space on the Space Shuttle for decades now, and fill up a major part of the International Space Station. They are also kept in a nice cushy environment that doesn't exceed tolerances for consumer devices either.
As for the cubesat devices you linked to, those are using hardened electronics. That they happen to be using components that are similar in nature to cell phones and run on the Android operating system is immaterial to the fact that they are hardened electronics. Note that cell phones do tend to hold up to a whole bunch of abuse as well. Ask any electrical engineer what "milspec" components are in devices, and how much they cost? It usually is of slightly inferior quality in terms of performance (aka less memory and slightly older technology), but they are designed for extreme environments. That is simply something you take into account and one of the compromises you must make when simply designing electronic components.
By comparison, the spacecraft "New Horizon" that is currently headed to Pluto is powered by what amounts to be a PlayStation 2 (the same CPU and similar memory capacity).
I'll also note that the radiation environment for low-Earth orbit (where these cube sats will be operating at) is a much more benign environment than the Moon as well, where not only do you need to pass through the Van Allen belts but also lack the protection of the Earth's Magnetosphere.
The design principles and even the data protocols may be the same as consumer electronics, and there is a pretty strong supply chain for electronics that fly in space. You don't have to design literally everything from scratch, but you do need to take the environment into consideration as going down to your local Wal-Mart or IKEA and picking up some consumer electronics and strapping that onto a giant bottle rocket isn't going to work for real things that need to work in space... at least reliably.
The problem with electronics in space isn't the vacuum, but rather radiation of all sorts, including solar flares and cosmic radiation. You also have extreme temperatures that you need to work with that come from the environment, and then since it is going to the Moon you may need to deal with what happens when you go through a lunar night. By extreme temperatures, I'm talking temperatures far hotter and colder than any place found on the Earth. Hotter than the Sahara in the Summer at Noon and colder than the coldest part of Antarctica. Electronics tend not to work very well in that kind of environment.
That is sort of what makes building spacecraft electronics sort of expensive. Consumer electronics typically can't survive that sort of punishment.
I should also point out that there isn't a single team in this competition that is even looking at building their own rockets, except for figuring out how to land on the Moon. Even landing on the Moon is likely going to be done with existing companies that have already developed that technology. There are companies who have even done that already so they have a clue how to accomplish that task for others.
I'm not saying that you can't come up with something original, but rocket science is hard..... that is why "rocket scientists" (or aerospace engineers) are usually considered pretty smart people.
This was just a silly reporter from the BBC that was somehow impressed with the idea but otherwise clueless about the whole thing. If you want to read something much more authoritative on the topic, read this:
The goal here is to make a low-cost vehicle that can do surface exploration of the Moon. Mining isn't even really a goal, although the technology to get it done would ultimately be useful to engage in mining activities eventually. It is not a sample return mission through.
Why do you think Google won't pay up on this offer? They certainly have that kind of money ($20 million) and this is also being offered through the X-Prize Foundation.... the same guys that did the "Ansari X-Prize" that paid a roughly similar amount for the first private reusable spacecraft capable of carrying passengers into space.... and that technology was purchased by Richard Branson to start Virgin Galactic.
2015 also isn't really too close for a program like this, as this concept and the prize itself has been going for several years now. I would agree that somebody starting from scratch right now won't be able to meet the goal, but there are several teams of people who are well on their way. I should note that the Google Lunar X-Prize group has stopped taking team applications, with interested parties being encouraged to help support existing efforts to claim the prize.
Most of the teams are hoping to get into space as secondary payloads on board spacecraft like the Falcon 9 and Atlas V. That will reduce the cost for going into space, but I'd agree that won't necessarily make it profitable.
Then again, in terms of making a profit by going into space, the point of the prize is to act as an incentive for people to do something like this, not to necessarily fund the whole thing. Think of the Olympics, where admittedly there is a sort of cash prize (or at least some precious metals being given to the winners), but most people spend far more than the value of that award in terms of training and development costs to win the prize. Other examples can be found. Being declared the "winner" and actually getting to the Moon would be a great way to demonstrate that your company or group has the technical skills necessary to do some impressive things in space. Again look at the example of Scaled Composites and the huge contracts they've landed after winning the original X-Prize competition. That more than paid off any development costs... as if that was even a concern in the first place.
That's why TV News reporters can't just send up an AR.Drone to watch traffic in the afternoon, even though its right outside their studio.
That is why news reporters can't head to COSCO or Wal-Mart and buy a plane 30 minutes before their news broadcast in order to do a traffic watch update.
Still, they can do this if it is licensed, and of any organization that could get through the legal morass that is both the FAA and the FCC to get something like that accomplished, it would be the legal department of even a small town television station. Then again, they would want to stay legal for something like this because their broadcast license as a television station could be yanked for *any* radio frequency violations. Traffic helicopters are very common in larger cities already, so making that a bit cheaper to run by making them unmanned may even make some economic sense.
Those kind of commercial drone operators would be smart enough to stay away from airports though, unless they also got clearance from the control towers and followed FAA flight rules.
When I'm in a firefight, the last thing I want is my weapon "harmlessly" disabling it's function.
When you're in a firefight? So this is something that happen to you regularly? Remind me never to be around you, if chance ever comes up.
Some people do end up in that position on a semi-regular basis. Interestingly, they are people you want to have around you on a regular basis.... if the opportunity presents itself. You may not want to go to the places they travel regularly nor want to have their profession, but to each their own I guess. I'm personally glad that such people do exist, and that other than their profession they are good upstanding citizens in the community and helping to make this world a better and safer place to live.
What major country somewhere else around the world is buying T-bills currently? China isn't, and Germany is demanding all of their gold to be repatriated back to Germany that had been sitting in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other countries are doing the same. That doesn't sound like people who have a whole lot of confidence in the U.S. Dollar and are paying America to "hold their cash". Oil is now being purchased with Euros or other currencies instead of dollars, and there are other signs that dollars are not in demand.
I'll admit it is fiscal nonsense to have the Federal Reserve buying up trillions of dollars worth of T-Bills. But that is precisely what Ben Bernanke and the rest of the governors of the Federal Reserve are doing. If there was so much demand for T-bills, why on Earth is the Federal Reserve buying up all of those T-Bills? If you don't think this is happening, look up "qualitative easing" on a search engine of your choice, especially "QE2" and "QE3" with "Federal Reserve" (they aren't talking about the cruise liners BTW). The Fed is buying these bonds precisely because nobody else around the world is willing to buy them in the quantities that the U.S. Federal government is issuing them at. The Federal Reserve is deliberately keeping the rates down on purpose.
If you think I'm wrong, then you don't have a bloody clue about what is happening to our country right now and need to get a bit of an education yourself.
The problem with Liberty Dollars is that they were pegged at the exchange rate of 1 LD == 1 USD as well as using the term "dollar". The other slightly more minor problem was that the developer of Liberty Dollars could also be prosecuted in federal court.... with the end effect of discontinuing the currency. I disagree that the legal action which took place against the developers of the Liberty Dollar as I find nothing illegal was actually done, but it pissed off the wrong people none the less.
Since Bitcoins are not pegged at any currency of any kind, clearly are not even using the term "dollar", nor is there a central repository which can be shut down through legal action, it makes a much harder target to make the same kind of arguments. That physical bills aren't even needed to keep Bitcoins in circulation, it makes the whole thing moot.
BTW, you can make rectangular pieces of paper that have value in Bitcoins (with pictures of dead people if you really want them on that paper)... and there are several notions on how to accomplish that trick. None the less, it is still a distributed operation if such "printing" of bitcoins happens.
The value of the U.S. Dollar is at the moment pure faith, as in religious kind of faith, but faith in the federal government and the faith that people have that they can use that dollar to buy something of value in the future. Perhaps you think that is misplaced faith or that it is born of ignorance to reality, but that is the best way I can think of describing what its current real value holds.
BTW, your "technical fix" for what the government can spend is technically what federal law says should be happening for tax revenue and budget planning right now. The only reason why it isn't working is that the loans of money to the government to help balance the federal budget are getting out of control. That and of course the Federal Reserve is literally "printing money out of thin air" by loaning trillions of dollars to banks who are in turn using that money to buy debt. Even that isn't enough so the Federal Reserve is instead buying T-bills directly.
... because it's very difficult to expand the bitcoin supply
Which is why scalability issues would** eventually render Bitcoin useless as a currency. Metallic standards had the virtue that mining extraction rates reflect economic expansion of the general economy (up to the point that increasing economic complexity eventually requires abandonment of metallic standards.) Bitcoin supply reflects nothing more than the lack of understanding its creators had of what money is.
[** were it generally to be adopted]
What scalability issues are there that would be a major issue?
I think the guys who set up Bitcoin understood money very well and likely better than this AC poster. There are some scalability issues with the processing of work units and transmitting work unit information from one node to the next (nothing that hasn't been discussed with any other peer to peer network, but it is a problem). The thought was that there eventually would be a "central core" of "bankers" or at least very interested participants with high speed data lines that would deal with major transactions involving Bitcoins and working with the main work units, and then there would be ancillary tiers for more mundane transactions (like buying a burger at a local restaurant) that would engage in transactions with a "bank" or at least a trusted Bitcoin provider for reduced fees.
Scalability issues with Bitcoins have been discussed since its inception and are well taken care of for anybody who really wants to use it for currency. There are some legitimate gripes about how it is organized and for some of the finer points of the protocol, but the broad issue of scalability is not even remotely an issue.
One thing to note is that Bitcoins are a deflationary currency rather than an inflationary one. As the economy of the Bitcoin users has expanded, the value of an individual bitcoin has continually climbed. The first transaction for Bitcoins was buying a pizza in Florida (it cost about 1000 Bitcoins at the time). Individual Bitcoins are now worth quite a bit more, even though the direct exchange rate between U.S. Dollars and Bitcoins has varied.... generally the trend has been for individual Bitcoins to be worth even more (aka a single Bitcoin buys more Dollars over time). That is why fractional bitcoins are commonly used now instead of full bitcoins or even kilobitcoins. It does take getting used to the idea of a deflationary currency than an inflationary currency like most countries of the world use, and where holding onto some bitcoins actually "earns interest" over time simply because of the deflation. That doesn't stop transactions from happening though.
The counterfeiting operations that Nazi Germany was running had purposes other than simply buying a few items and making the people running the presses wealthy. Their goal and aim was to deliberately devalue the British Pound (their main target.... not really the U.S. Dollar) so as to cause economic turmoil in the country. It was an operation intended to be far more involved than just passing off a few notes but rather to literally flood England with so much money that rampant inflation would take hold.
The Federal Reserve is pretty much trying the same idea out on an even larger scale with their quantitative easing policies and performing an interesting social experiment to see what would have happened had the U.S. Dollar been targeted in WWII, only this time doing it in the 21st Century.
Social Security could get to something like actual bank accounts where you save money over your employment lifetime.
The problem with Social Security is that it has been spent as quickly as it came in, and the whole notion of a trust fund is a complete lie. In fact, the trust fund ceased to be an actual reserve when Thomas "Tip" O'Neil was Speaker of the House (during Ronald Reagan's administration) due to some budget changes on how the trust fund was actually administered or misappropriated as it were. Changing it back would expose just how horribly broke the whole system has become.
It should also be pointed out that it was over the past couple of years that more money has been leaving the supposed trust fund than has been collected through payroll taxes. It is already unsustainable and will be more directly impacting the budget in a negative manner soon enough. That is presuming Congress will actually pass a federal budget any time in the next four to sixteen years.
America doesn't borrow money from other countries any more.... since none of them are willing to lend money to America. Instead you just have the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air (just typing in a 1 followed by a bunch of zero on a computer terminal really.... they don't even print the actual cash) and buying T-bills to keep the deficit rolling.
As to the merit of paying a bank for the privilege of lending money to the federal government instead of simply having the U.S. Treasury Department issuing that money directly that is created out of nothing is a valid question to raise. I think it is silly either way. Something in that whole practice sounds like a recipe for hyperinflation.... but I've been told repeatedly that such creation of money and spending isn't inflationary.
Of course it is magnetic states that are the key to core memory systems.... one of the earliest kind of computer memory systems.
Seriously, this whole suggestion sounds like what was once old is now new again. I'm sure there are some impressive miniaturization factors here and some interesting technology, but the "discovery" of magnetic memory is one of the oldest ideas in computer engineering. Voyager 2 is using one of the last operational core memory systems in the Solar System right now.... at least as long as it remains here and how far you want to stretch that definition.
I don't want to pay the $40 for just the article, so I can't read the details. Still, I'm sure there is something in this concept that goes a little beyond what has been done in the past. You don't get everything you want in computer technology "for free", so I'm sure there are some drawbacks to this method. I would guess that memory density and speed are two significant trade-offs from this approach. It would be better than magnetic storage systems like a hard drive or floppy disc, but I just can't see something like this competing against current chip technology in all aspects, nor is it being claimed.
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Considering that DeLorean Motors is still in business and they are even looking at restarting production, it is an interesting comparison to make. Admittedly that the company is certainly no longer under original ownership of any kind and that being a shareholder of the original company was likely a bad idea, the company still seems to have some amazing life and seems to be a company that can't quite die even if it is a Zombie of sorts.
The better comparison that has been often used for Tesla has been the Tucker Corporation, although Tesla has produced far more automobiles than Preston Tucker ever did. The only sales figures I can find reliable about the Roadster is that about 2500 were produced over its model lifetime, with about 2500 Model S vehicles that have been produced.... still less than what John DeLorean was able to produce before he got into trouble.
It will be interesting to see if Tesla can genuinely break out and become a "real" automobile company. Hundreds of other people have started "automobile companies" of some sort or another and have largely failed.
That is why those who think this is crazy thinking actually end up supporting corporate executives with outrageous salaries. Executives with short-term thinking that ends up running the company into the ground due to bad practices should get their compensation packages zeroed out and their "golden parachutes" turned into tertiary creditors at bankruptcy court with likely a few shareholder lawsuits to contend with as well rather than having my neighbors and my family end up paying for this fiasco through crazy legislation instead.
Yes, GM knew how to make electric vehicles. And of course the entire engineering team that built the EV1 was either reassigned or laid off with the entire engineering effort dead in the water at the time. I'm not disputing that GM knew how to make this kind of stuff (even though the EV1 did suck as a vehicle in a number of ways).
In terms of the effort they put into killing the concept of an electric automobile, it may have been a misguided effort.... and yes I've seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?" It really should have documented a misguided effort of a government agency to command entrepreneurs to innovate, and that the incentives were there for a large established business to build this kind of thing rather than encouraging a plethora of small start-up companies to make this kind of thing instead.
The big thing that made a difference between the EV1 and the Tesla Roadster was the development of the Lithium-ion batteries... primarily designed for laptop computers.... which helped to give electric automobiles a decent driving range. The EV1 used Lead-Acid battery packs and simply didn't have the driving range necessary for a mass consumer product. It certainly could have had hundreds or a few thousand customers, but it wouldn't have ever been anything other than a niche vehicle and was sort of a waste of time for the engineers at General Motors. It still is odd though that GM even bothered to build the vehicle in the first place.
What Tesla has done is to file formally with the loan agency (in this case the federal government.... thus the move is a matter of public record) to increase the rate at which it is repaying the load so it can pay the loan off in half the time. The problem is that except for some extreme circumstances Tesla is now committed to making this payment schedule as it was forced to file the paperwork with the federal government to make this increased level of payments.
Most companies, especially with the low interest rates that this particular loan was given out, would simply take the extra cash that they may have on hand and "park" the money in speculative investments until the final payment was due and only make minimal payments. It also isn't worth the bureaucratic hassle to renegotiate the payment terms under programs like this in most cases. Tesla Motors took that extra step to make that happen.
I fail to see why you think this is a bad thing?
Do you suppose the money just up and vanishes when the government spends it?
Pretty much. The problem with having the government spend money is that you need to have a whole bunch of bureaucrats that supervise how the money is allocated, how the money is spent (once it has been actually given to some organization or group of people), how the money is returned (through taxes or from the loan agencies involved) as well as accountants that make sure the money is actually used in the way that was claimed. Absolutely none of those bureaucrats who are watching over all of that money being spent do anything productive in terms of actually producing a valuable product or service. Add on levels of supervision and a general tendency that bureaucracies expand over time pushing out the useful people who actually get things done, and you end up with what I hope is an explanation for why letting government do anything is usually a waste of resources, time, and labor.
Letting people keep their own damn money that they have worked hard to earn and letting them spend that money however they please is likely to have the money spent more directly on productive services and goods than any set of intelligent people could ever think up with the best possible education. That does take a leap of faith, but it is also a principle of freedom too. Government allocation of money in almost any form is a loss of freedom. The larger that the government gets, the less likely that ordinary citizens will be able to stop the government from abusing their freedoms in other ways as well.
There may be some very few tasks that are generally not profitable for private individuals to work on (like maintaining defensive fortifications or building a continent-spanning highway) that may have some utility for society as a whole. The question is where should you draw the line when it crosses into things that ordinary people should be taking care of for themselves?
We need to put the majority of our money into investments like this and make the entry into manufacturing and engineering low. Make laws that promote open technology and avoid patent trolls.
If you really believe this, you should simply encourage the repealing of laws, not the drafting of new ones. I'd start with simply repealing patent law altogether, which would go a long way to putting patent trolls out of business and making it much easier for start-up companies to compete with established players.
The crazy thing about the TARP funds was that many banks were essentially forced at gunpoint (well, more correctly forced by having their corporate charters revoked if they failed to cooperate) to take the money on the pretense that there were a couple of banks that were in danger of insolvency... and the government didn't want to advertise which ones were most in danger by loaning only to those banks which needed the money.
Since the money that most of these banks were given wasn't wanted or needed, they "parked" the money in places that were "safe" like Treasury Bills until they were told by regulators that they could pay it back. And then the money was paid back ASAP.
IMHO the poorly managed companies should have been made insolvent and forced into bankruptcy for their lousy policies. I'm not in charge though.
In fairness here, the government really didn't have to pick companies for this particular loan program. It was open to any company producing automobiles in America and using that money to expand automobile production domestically.
If you want to say that it was unfair that the government decided to single out the automobile industry over other industries like steel manufacturers or shoe cobblers, I'd have to agree more with your sentiment.
The problem with Solyndra, General Motors, and some of the more controversial loans you may be referring to is that individual companies were singled out with substantial graft and corruption. In the case of GM in particular, the "bailout money" eventually did force the company into bankruptcy and destroyed the value of the individual shares where the United Auto Workers ended up with perhaps the best deal of the whole thing.... done as a political payoff for their backing of many people in political power in Washington DC. You have a right to be pissed off at that kind of blatant corruption in government.
The Volt is widely acknowledged to have been started explicitly because the CEO of General Motors took a bunch of marketing literature from Tesla Motors and threw it down on the desks of his engineers asking why a California start-up company could make a successful electric automobile but they couldn't. The rest, as they say, is history.
Mind you, the Volt is a pretty good automobile and deserves its own kind of kudos. The GM engineers made some compromises that I don't agree with, but I'm not exactly a professional automotive engineer nor have been put into their position to design a new automobile from scratch. Doing such things isn't as easy as it sounds.
In addition to your excellent reply, it should be worth noting that the route manufacturing companies get cheap consumer prices (like Henry Ford did with the Model T) is to have massive production where you make up profits through volume sales and scales of efficiency. That is something incredibly hard for any start-up company to perform, where it costs roughly a couple billion dollars just to start a major new low-cost automobile with production runs in the hundreds of thousands of editions.
Elon Musk was incredibly intelligent to start out with the high end automobiles, especially the niche market of performance sports cars with a little bit of a twist. The Model S is really aiming more toward the luxury sedan market... again a very astute move on his part where the Model S clearly compares well with a Lexis or Mercedes Benz (or the Lincoln branded cars by General Motors). Volume of the vehicle production line doesn't have to be quite so high for these kind of vehicles and ultimately doesn't take as much cash to get them started.
The original approach that Tesla was going to take was to simply buy off the shelf components already being made by several automobile manufacturers and simply assemble a new automobile. Unfortunately because of quality control and inventory issues Tesla has been forced to increasingly build more and more components "in-house". One example was the transmission needed for the Roadster that very nearly bankrupted the company (and forced Elon Musk to double down and dump essentially all liquid assets that he had into Tesla as well as make a whole bunch of phone calls to friends with money to help out). And yes, Tesla automobiles do have a transmission... even if it is pretty simple in its design.
It is in the announced product line of development that eventually Tesla is going to be building economy automobiles, but that the original plan was to wait until they had both the manufacturing facility (that they now have with the NUMMI plant in California) and the working capital needed to get it all to happen.
The only thing that I am a bit surprised at myself is not the cheap low-end automobiles, but rather why Tesla hasn't moved into the all-electric delivery van market (aka FedEx trucks) or even the short haul semi-trailer tractor market where people routinely dump more money on vehicle purchases that would make a typical sports car enthusiast look twice at the price tag and doubt they could foot the bill. There are electric vehicles in those markets, and having corporations set up charging stations for a fleet of vehicles would be even a bonus (on site refueling without having to deal with petroleum companies). The drawback might be the existing competition as well as the fact that such companies are less likely to be hung up in the "green energy" hype.... and that Tesla can only do so many things at the same time. There are also a bunch of patent trolls hanging out in those markets with patents for electric vehicles of those types as well.... that might be causing some additional problems.
That isn't quite true that Virgin Galactic has "no hardware". The plan is to use the White Knight as the 1st stage for the launch into orbit (that is already built) and they have "bent metal" on the rocket itself as well as have engineers (via "The Spaceship Company"... now wholly owned by Virgin Enterprises after Scaled Composites sold out their share) who are gaining experience building real rocket motors. It is definitely on their engineering design path and something they are very much capable of achieving in time with the resources they have.
I don't know if they will drop the performance and raise costs, particularly as you should note they are in pretty steep competition with other launch providers. It isn't being built as a government cost-plus project where you can get away with screwing your customers over as you'll get paid anyway. Those requirements and costs are sort of a hard line as that is what their customers are willing to pay.... not how much it will cost Richard Branson to have a fun toy for putting microsats into orbit.
For cheap throw-away devices that you don't care if they work properly in the first place? Sure, use some consumer electronics. Laptop computers have been going up into space on the Space Shuttle for decades now, and fill up a major part of the International Space Station. They are also kept in a nice cushy environment that doesn't exceed tolerances for consumer devices either.
As for the cubesat devices you linked to, those are using hardened electronics. That they happen to be using components that are similar in nature to cell phones and run on the Android operating system is immaterial to the fact that they are hardened electronics. Note that cell phones do tend to hold up to a whole bunch of abuse as well. Ask any electrical engineer what "milspec" components are in devices, and how much they cost? It usually is of slightly inferior quality in terms of performance (aka less memory and slightly older technology), but they are designed for extreme environments. That is simply something you take into account and one of the compromises you must make when simply designing electronic components.
By comparison, the spacecraft "New Horizon" that is currently headed to Pluto is powered by what amounts to be a PlayStation 2 (the same CPU and similar memory capacity).
I'll also note that the radiation environment for low-Earth orbit (where these cube sats will be operating at) is a much more benign environment than the Moon as well, where not only do you need to pass through the Van Allen belts but also lack the protection of the Earth's Magnetosphere.
The design principles and even the data protocols may be the same as consumer electronics, and there is a pretty strong supply chain for electronics that fly in space. You don't have to design literally everything from scratch, but you do need to take the environment into consideration as going down to your local Wal-Mart or IKEA and picking up some consumer electronics and strapping that onto a giant bottle rocket isn't going to work for real things that need to work in space... at least reliably.
The problem with electronics in space isn't the vacuum, but rather radiation of all sorts, including solar flares and cosmic radiation. You also have extreme temperatures that you need to work with that come from the environment, and then since it is going to the Moon you may need to deal with what happens when you go through a lunar night. By extreme temperatures, I'm talking temperatures far hotter and colder than any place found on the Earth. Hotter than the Sahara in the Summer at Noon and colder than the coldest part of Antarctica. Electronics tend not to work very well in that kind of environment.
That is sort of what makes building spacecraft electronics sort of expensive. Consumer electronics typically can't survive that sort of punishment.
I should also point out that there isn't a single team in this competition that is even looking at building their own rockets, except for figuring out how to land on the Moon. Even landing on the Moon is likely going to be done with existing companies that have already developed that technology. There are companies who have even done that already so they have a clue how to accomplish that task for others.
I'm not saying that you can't come up with something original, but rocket science is hard..... that is why "rocket scientists" (or aerospace engineers) are usually considered pretty smart people.
This was just a silly reporter from the BBC that was somehow impressed with the idea but otherwise clueless about the whole thing. If you want to read something much more authoritative on the topic, read this:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/
The goal here is to make a low-cost vehicle that can do surface exploration of the Moon. Mining isn't even really a goal, although the technology to get it done would ultimately be useful to engage in mining activities eventually. It is not a sample return mission through.
Why do you think Google won't pay up on this offer? They certainly have that kind of money ($20 million) and this is also being offered through the X-Prize Foundation.... the same guys that did the "Ansari X-Prize" that paid a roughly similar amount for the first private reusable spacecraft capable of carrying passengers into space.... and that technology was purchased by Richard Branson to start Virgin Galactic.
2015 also isn't really too close for a program like this, as this concept and the prize itself has been going for several years now. I would agree that somebody starting from scratch right now won't be able to meet the goal, but there are several teams of people who are well on their way. I should note that the Google Lunar X-Prize group has stopped taking team applications, with interested parties being encouraged to help support existing efforts to claim the prize.
Most of the teams are hoping to get into space as secondary payloads on board spacecraft like the Falcon 9 and Atlas V. That will reduce the cost for going into space, but I'd agree that won't necessarily make it profitable.
Then again, in terms of making a profit by going into space, the point of the prize is to act as an incentive for people to do something like this, not to necessarily fund the whole thing. Think of the Olympics, where admittedly there is a sort of cash prize (or at least some precious metals being given to the winners), but most people spend far more than the value of that award in terms of training and development costs to win the prize. Other examples can be found. Being declared the "winner" and actually getting to the Moon would be a great way to demonstrate that your company or group has the technical skills necessary to do some impressive things in space. Again look at the example of Scaled Composites and the huge contracts they've landed after winning the original X-Prize competition. That more than paid off any development costs... as if that was even a concern in the first place.
That's why TV News reporters can't just send up an AR.Drone to watch traffic in the afternoon, even though its right outside their studio.
That is why news reporters can't head to COSCO or Wal-Mart and buy a plane 30 minutes before their news broadcast in order to do a traffic watch update.
Still, they can do this if it is licensed, and of any organization that could get through the legal morass that is both the FAA and the FCC to get something like that accomplished, it would be the legal department of even a small town television station. Then again, they would want to stay legal for something like this because their broadcast license as a television station could be yanked for *any* radio frequency violations. Traffic helicopters are very common in larger cities already, so making that a bit cheaper to run by making them unmanned may even make some economic sense.
Those kind of commercial drone operators would be smart enough to stay away from airports though, unless they also got clearance from the control towers and followed FAA flight rules.
When I'm in a firefight, the last thing I want is my weapon "harmlessly" disabling it's function.
When you're in a firefight? So this is something that happen to you regularly? Remind me never to be around you, if chance ever comes up.
Some people do end up in that position on a semi-regular basis. Interestingly, they are people you want to have around you on a regular basis.... if the opportunity presents itself. You may not want to go to the places they travel regularly nor want to have their profession, but to each their own I guess. I'm personally glad that such people do exist, and that other than their profession they are good upstanding citizens in the community and helping to make this world a better and safer place to live.
What major country somewhere else around the world is buying T-bills currently? China isn't, and Germany is demanding all of their gold to be repatriated back to Germany that had been sitting in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other countries are doing the same. That doesn't sound like people who have a whole lot of confidence in the U.S. Dollar and are paying America to "hold their cash". Oil is now being purchased with Euros or other currencies instead of dollars, and there are other signs that dollars are not in demand.
I'll admit it is fiscal nonsense to have the Federal Reserve buying up trillions of dollars worth of T-Bills. But that is precisely what Ben Bernanke and the rest of the governors of the Federal Reserve are doing. If there was so much demand for T-bills, why on Earth is the Federal Reserve buying up all of those T-Bills? If you don't think this is happening, look up "qualitative easing" on a search engine of your choice, especially "QE2" and "QE3" with "Federal Reserve" (they aren't talking about the cruise liners BTW). The Fed is buying these bonds precisely because nobody else around the world is willing to buy them in the quantities that the U.S. Federal government is issuing them at. The Federal Reserve is deliberately keeping the rates down on purpose.
If you think I'm wrong, then you don't have a bloody clue about what is happening to our country right now and need to get a bit of an education yourself.
The problem with Liberty Dollars is that they were pegged at the exchange rate of 1 LD == 1 USD as well as using the term "dollar". The other slightly more minor problem was that the developer of Liberty Dollars could also be prosecuted in federal court.... with the end effect of discontinuing the currency. I disagree that the legal action which took place against the developers of the Liberty Dollar as I find nothing illegal was actually done, but it pissed off the wrong people none the less.
Since Bitcoins are not pegged at any currency of any kind, clearly are not even using the term "dollar", nor is there a central repository which can be shut down through legal action, it makes a much harder target to make the same kind of arguments. That physical bills aren't even needed to keep Bitcoins in circulation, it makes the whole thing moot.
BTW, you can make rectangular pieces of paper that have value in Bitcoins (with pictures of dead people if you really want them on that paper)... and there are several notions on how to accomplish that trick. None the less, it is still a distributed operation if such "printing" of bitcoins happens.
The value of the U.S. Dollar is at the moment pure faith, as in religious kind of faith, but faith in the federal government and the faith that people have that they can use that dollar to buy something of value in the future. Perhaps you think that is misplaced faith or that it is born of ignorance to reality, but that is the best way I can think of describing what its current real value holds.
BTW, your "technical fix" for what the government can spend is technically what federal law says should be happening for tax revenue and budget planning right now. The only reason why it isn't working is that the loans of money to the government to help balance the federal budget are getting out of control. That and of course the Federal Reserve is literally "printing money out of thin air" by loaning trillions of dollars to banks who are in turn using that money to buy debt. Even that isn't enough so the Federal Reserve is instead buying T-bills directly.
Which is why scalability issues would** eventually render Bitcoin useless as a currency. Metallic standards had the virtue that mining extraction rates reflect economic expansion of the general economy (up to the point that increasing economic complexity eventually requires abandonment of metallic standards.) Bitcoin supply reflects nothing more than the lack of understanding its creators had of what money is.
[** were it generally to be adopted]
What scalability issues are there that would be a major issue?
I think the guys who set up Bitcoin understood money very well and likely better than this AC poster. There are some scalability issues with the processing of work units and transmitting work unit information from one node to the next (nothing that hasn't been discussed with any other peer to peer network, but it is a problem). The thought was that there eventually would be a "central core" of "bankers" or at least very interested participants with high speed data lines that would deal with major transactions involving Bitcoins and working with the main work units, and then there would be ancillary tiers for more mundane transactions (like buying a burger at a local restaurant) that would engage in transactions with a "bank" or at least a trusted Bitcoin provider for reduced fees.
Scalability issues with Bitcoins have been discussed since its inception and are well taken care of for anybody who really wants to use it for currency. There are some legitimate gripes about how it is organized and for some of the finer points of the protocol, but the broad issue of scalability is not even remotely an issue.
One thing to note is that Bitcoins are a deflationary currency rather than an inflationary one. As the economy of the Bitcoin users has expanded, the value of an individual bitcoin has continually climbed. The first transaction for Bitcoins was buying a pizza in Florida (it cost about 1000 Bitcoins at the time). Individual Bitcoins are now worth quite a bit more, even though the direct exchange rate between U.S. Dollars and Bitcoins has varied.... generally the trend has been for individual Bitcoins to be worth even more (aka a single Bitcoin buys more Dollars over time). That is why fractional bitcoins are commonly used now instead of full bitcoins or even kilobitcoins. It does take getting used to the idea of a deflationary currency than an inflationary currency like most countries of the world use, and where holding onto some bitcoins actually "earns interest" over time simply because of the deflation. That doesn't stop transactions from happening though.
The counterfeiting operations that Nazi Germany was running had purposes other than simply buying a few items and making the people running the presses wealthy. Their goal and aim was to deliberately devalue the British Pound (their main target.... not really the U.S. Dollar) so as to cause economic turmoil in the country. It was an operation intended to be far more involved than just passing off a few notes but rather to literally flood England with so much money that rampant inflation would take hold.
The Federal Reserve is pretty much trying the same idea out on an even larger scale with their quantitative easing policies and performing an interesting social experiment to see what would have happened had the U.S. Dollar been targeted in WWII, only this time doing it in the 21st Century.
Social Security could get to something like actual bank accounts where you save money over your employment lifetime.
The problem with Social Security is that it has been spent as quickly as it came in, and the whole notion of a trust fund is a complete lie. In fact, the trust fund ceased to be an actual reserve when Thomas "Tip" O'Neil was Speaker of the House (during Ronald Reagan's administration) due to some budget changes on how the trust fund was actually administered or misappropriated as it were. Changing it back would expose just how horribly broke the whole system has become.
It should also be pointed out that it was over the past couple of years that more money has been leaving the supposed trust fund than has been collected through payroll taxes. It is already unsustainable and will be more directly impacting the budget in a negative manner soon enough. That is presuming Congress will actually pass a federal budget any time in the next four to sixteen years.
America doesn't borrow money from other countries any more.... since none of them are willing to lend money to America. Instead you just have the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air (just typing in a 1 followed by a bunch of zero on a computer terminal really.... they don't even print the actual cash) and buying T-bills to keep the deficit rolling.
As to the merit of paying a bank for the privilege of lending money to the federal government instead of simply having the U.S. Treasury Department issuing that money directly that is created out of nothing is a valid question to raise. I think it is silly either way. Something in that whole practice sounds like a recipe for hyperinflation.... but I've been told repeatedly that such creation of money and spending isn't inflationary.
Of course it is magnetic states that are the key to core memory systems.... one of the earliest kind of computer memory systems.
Seriously, this whole suggestion sounds like what was once old is now new again. I'm sure there are some impressive miniaturization factors here and some interesting technology, but the "discovery" of magnetic memory is one of the oldest ideas in computer engineering. Voyager 2 is using one of the last operational core memory systems in the Solar System right now.... at least as long as it remains here and how far you want to stretch that definition.
I don't want to pay the $40 for just the article, so I can't read the details. Still, I'm sure there is something in this concept that goes a little beyond what has been done in the past. You don't get everything you want in computer technology "for free", so I'm sure there are some drawbacks to this method. I would guess that memory density and speed are two significant trade-offs from this approach. It would be better than magnetic storage systems like a hard drive or floppy disc, but I just can't see something like this competing against current chip technology in all aspects, nor is it being claimed.