Indeed. In today's legislative environment, at most 50% of the code in an engine controller is actually related to controlling the engine; the rest is OBD and other diagnostics, plus perhaps some other "advanced" features used for differentiation. Scheduling fuel, spark, and perhaps throttle control are not computationally-intensive tasks by any stretch of the imagination (even on engines like Formula 1 running at ~20k RPM).
Seems like we are indeed saying the same things, just using slightly different language. While there may be some slight differences in the thought process, and we could probably argue about which detail is correct*, I don't think that would add much value to the discussion... so I'll leave it at that!
*For instance, I disagree that the propeller is an energy sink when the vehicle CG has the same velocity (with respect to ground) as the wind because the total force on the vehicle in that condition is still in the direction of motion (not opposed to it).
The car isn't using the propeller as a turbine as a source of energy to power the wheels.
This is correct, but not for the reason you think. The vehicle is not moving forward because of torque applied to the wheels but solely due to aerodynamic forces. In fact, the force at the wheels opposes vehicle motion.
That, indeed, would be impossible, because once you reach wind speed the force exerted on the propeller is zero.
If the vehicle is moving at wind speed the propeller is spinning so there are fairly significant aerodynamic forces acting on it. The force on the propeller is most certainly not zero.
Instead, it works the other way around, as a fan to push air backwards and accelerate the car. The energy is transfered from the wheels to the fan.
All the energy in the system must come from the wind; there is no energy in the wheels that can be transferred to the fan. The propeller is not spinning because it is taking kinetic energy from the wheels. The propeller spins because that is the only possible kinematic state given non-slipping wheels and a forward motion of the vehicle center of mass. The aerodynamic forces on the propeller are indeed the forces that are moving the vehicle forward. You were correct, though, in stating the propeller is not "a source of energy for the wheels." The wheels, in fact, only contribute dissipation to the system. The wheels are simply there to provide necessary kinematic constraints through momentum exchange.
The ratchet is actually irrelevant (and just adds inefficiency to the system), since energy* transfer between the wheels and the ground does not contribute to forward vehicle motion at all.
Recall that the ground actually performs at best zero work in the entire system (in real systems the wheel/ground interface dissipates energy). Pure tractive friction is a workless constraint, because there is no relative motion between the wheel and the ground at the contact point (assuming no slipping). Since the traction force is not working through a distance, it performs no work. This means that all the energy driving the vehicle must be coming from the wind. The entire process is aerodynamic; the coupling to the wheels only provides the necessary momentum exchange.
Consider the angle of attack of the prop blades with respect to the wind. Starting from a standstill, a tailwind has a massive positive angle of attack with respect to the blades, generating a lot of force in the "forward" direction. It also generates some torque on the blades that must be resisted by a traction force between the wheels and the ground (otherwise the prop would spin like a windmill facing into the tailwind); in this instance that traction force must actually be against the "forward" direction, because the prop is being forced in the other direction. Since the actual force depends on gearing it can be made less than the net thrust: the vehicle accelerates.
While accelerating, the prop starts to rotate so the local wind velocity starts shifting toward the front of the vehicle. This reduces the angle of attack on the blade, but the prop is still providing forward thrust. The traction force on the wheels is still in the direction opposite vehicle motion. The net aerodynamic force is still in the direction of motion.
When the vehicle speed reaches wind speed, the prop blades still have a positive angle of attack so are producing forward thrust; they are also still producing a torque which results in an adverse tractive force. Net force on the vehicle, though, is still positive. Only when the vehicle accelerates to a speed where the angle of attack on the propellers is reduced to a small enough value such that the thrust produced by the propeller no longer exceeds the tractive force necessary to keep the propeller spinning (because the tractive force is always adverse) will the vehicle speed stabilize.
There is also the effect of the vehicle body drag which helps the vehicle speed up to wind speed but provides adverse force when the vehicle exceeds wind speed. That does not, however, alter the analysis.
*The ground interface only plays a part in momentum transfer, not energy transfer (excepting dissipative work of course).
No IRS, no filing any tax forms. Yep a mountain of bookkeeping here.
But
Or you just prefer not to mention a key component, the prebate.
So how is that prebate tracked again? Also, the prebate (being a fixed nominal amount) fails to take into account the geographic dependence on cost of living (granted, the current standard deduction/exemption system already has this particular problem).
If you really want to tax the wealthy
Ah, now we get an idea of where you want to go...
You falsely assumed that's where I wanted to go. I was simply proposing a method of achieving that particular goal. Also, property taxes obviously don't make the wealthy less wealthy if they use their property to create additional wealth: that's the whole point of capitalism actually. Incidentally, a property tax cannot reduce wealth because it doesn't destroy wealth: property tax merely ensures that a person continues to generate value from the wealth they control at the same time as preventing a wealth-holder from artificially increasing the value of their wealth by withholding its wealth-generating capacity from others (e.g., if a farmer does not produce the full yield of crops his farm is capable of producing).
Fair tax will grow the total wealth in the nation.
Our current system continually increases the total wealth in our nation, but it's not perceived as "fair" because the distribution of that wealth increase is not uniform. I would argue that a "fair" system would always increase the wealth in proportion to the amount of work someone puts into the system relative to their individual capability. A "fair" system would never reward someone who is not increasing their own efforts. But nobody really wants that, they want something because they are entitled to it! (Yeah, that's a bit inflammatory.) A "fair" system would keep someone's standard of living constant for a constant amount of work, given a constant set of environmental conditions. If environmental conditions deteriorate, and a person's effort remains constant, their standard of living should decrease under a "fair" system.
Now, I'm not saying that's an ideal socioeconomic system; an ideal socioeconomic system would probably be one where every single person's standard of living increases, but the rate of increase is higher for those who have the lowest standard of living. The "fair tax" cannot perform this feat since it does nothing to actually raise the standard of living for anyone. The "fair tax" also only provides necessary funds if people consume, so there are erroneous assumptions that consumption will continue at rates that are sufficient to maintain the desired level of services. I would argue that, psychologically, people will complain more about seeing 23% tax on most transactions than they will about the current taxes, because it's taking money out of their wallet, which is different than never having it there in the first place.
In general I don't have a solution, but I do know that the Fair Tax has a miniscule chance to improve our standard of living. There's no even comparative reference to countries that currently have a VAT, because they never transitioned from a system like ours. At best the Fair Tax will be neutral, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if it were to be implemented there would be some concession in its implementation that would be far more insidious than what we have currently. The prebate is one such example: this is essentially a payment ahead of time - only if you register (what?) - so you actually get paid more the less you consume. I'm not sure how that can actually increase the overall wealth of the economy.
And, for the record, I hold equal indifference to Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Tea Party, Green, or whatever other label you put next to someone's name on a ballot.
Of course, you have to define what "fair" means in the first place. Regardless, the "Fair Tax" and all other forms of consumption tax are pretty regressive and don't address the true problems with tax burden. If you really want to tax the wealthy, you have a savings tax (negative interest rate) which discourages keeping large sums of wealth (note that property tax is a kind of negative interest rate because it's a fee you have to pay on the "stored value" inherent with owning a piece of real property).
There's some devil in the details there, though, because you don't want to encourage zero savings, because that makes for a fragile economy - a better system than the fair tax would be to have zero income tax, then tax all property (including deposit accounts) valued at more than some threshold (say, $1M, indexed to inflation of course) at some fixed rate. This way, people with a modest home, vehicle, and reasonable cash savings would have no tax burden, but entities that tried to maintain large piles of wealth would have to pay. You could still get richer, but it would eliminate one of the institutional reasons why it's hard for the poor to become middle class.
This is also much simpler to implement than the Fair Tax, which has complex bookkeeping and exemption mechanisms.
There are perhaps three major categories of thought here.
People see the moon, and reason that it must be made of something. It has a surface similar to the surface of cheese, so postulate it might be made of cheese. This is probably not likely, because people are fairly rational beings.
People see the moon, and someone comments that it has a surface texture similar to that of cheese, and the comment gets translated incorrectly as a belief that the moon is made of cheese.
People see the moon, and note it has an appearance similar to cheese, so just to mess with people claim it is, in fact, made of cheese.
In this case, though, there is direct evidence that the moon is not made of cheese, and direct evidence that the moon is made of rock and such, so belief that the moon is made of cheese is not really that common.
The same analysis on the concept of deity produces a slightly different result:
Some event occurs outside the realm of normal human experience and that event is accompanied by a revelation that claims deity.
Some people see some event outside the realm of normal human experience and call it 'supernatural' because there is no known cause for it. However, since humans know that things must have a cause, they transfer human-like will to the events and so invent the concept of deity.
Some people see some events, and know about the social concepts of supernatural, so invent the idea of 'deity' to see how people react.
Unlike the moon being made of cheese which has actual contrary evidence, however, there is no way to prove that there is no such thing as deity - there is no "contrary evidence." I equally understand the argument about the lack of direct evidence that there is a deity (assuming you count the Old Testament, which explicitly claims an event of revelation, and the New Testament which does as well in the camp of "some people made this up" instead of evidence that a revelation actually occurred), except that a large number of people claim to have experiences which cause them to claim deity despite all other available explanations.
Unfortunately, I don't think this philosophical discussion is as cut-and-dry as some would like to think. There's a reason why this particular debate has been raging for at least as long as written history, while most of the other 'controversial' debates have all been relegated to the fringe.
The universe is inherently hostile to our life. Why is that, if it was created for us?
Ah, well, there's a potential point of contention. Most Christian (and even Jewish) theologians would say that the universe wasn't created for man, but that the universe (and man) was created simply for God's glory. Simply stated: the universe isn't really about humanity at all, it's all about God.
NELL is apparently just creating a large correlation network between certain character strings it accesses through a network connection. Despite the label of things as "belief" it's not so much belief as it is "the criteria for making this association unalterable have been satisfied."
I think a better descriptive word for what NELL is doing is "memorization" - it's the same phenomenon that occurs when we learn multiplication tables without understanding how a multiplication table is created.
(So, yes, I agree that "learning" alone isn't what makes intelligence; it's necessary but not sufficient.)
I still think the most cost effective solution here is education. Trying to put more gadgets and complexity in vehicles sounds nice, and as an engineer I find it fun to try and think about how such things would be designed and built, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, I'm one of those people who adheres to the philosophy that "there is nothing inherently safe about the universe." I don't understand why some people are so affronted by the fact that humans are not indestructible.
I recently received a BB Bold from my company for work (I didn't really want a smartphone, but the BB Bold was literally 50% of the options offered by Verizon that did not have a camera, and the other 50% was some soon-to-be discontinued BB model; I work at locations that prohibit cameras and actually enforce that policy).
During my initial attempt to familiarize myself with the phone, the thing crashed while using the default browser on the NOAA website. Not just hung, mind you, but dump to the white screen with hex codes on it (that incidentally didn't stay there long enough to record to send in a bug report or whatever).
I was not impressed that the phone crashed in such a manner within an hour of booting it for the first time (and seriously - 60 seconds to boot a phone? A phone is an appliance, it shouldn't have to "boot".)
I still dislike smartphones...they have become portable computers with voice features rather than phones with computing capability. I wish the phone manufacturers would go back to the old way of thinking about things in this regard.
This isn't security in the first place. True information security would be a situation where even if someone had all your "authentication data" it wouldn't be possible to abuse. (I'm not claiming I know how to obtain such security, and I admit it is an idealized statement.)
It seems to me that the current situation we experience related to (financial) authentication is due to the fact that we have traded the necessity of actually knowing your banker or clients personally for what are essentially anonymous transactions. In the past, someone had to try quite hard to mimic your identity physically if they wanted to walk into a bank and raid your account, and they could only mimic one person at a time.
Now, all someone has to do is steal keys, so to speak, because nobody at the bank really knows who you are; all they have is a database entry. We have actually given up some control over our accounts for the "convenience" of forgoing relationships with our financial institutions.
As an aside, I actually hate the fact that this type of event is called "identity theft" because identity cannot be stolen. What is stolen (or copied or misappropriated or whatever) is authentication information, which is not the same thing as identity. It's very alarming to think that your authentication information and records define an identity.
The real problem with the system isn't that people can get your authentication information but that you can do too much with that authentication information.
How so? If (productive) people want more than the preventive/emergency care, they will pay the additional cost of the other service, providing the demand for the additional service. This is no different than today when we have people that spend larger sums of money than others.
My "proposal" does not force (productive) people to subsidize more than the basic care - a significant difference from our current system which forces the portion who pay to pay the full costs of everyone (hospitals cannot refuse treatment to emergency patients, but they don't work for free so someone is paying that bill already) - which is also extremely unfair. The idea is the "minimum fee" even accounting for reimbursements will be sufficient for the baseline health care (there will be people who don't get the minimum care, so their fees will go to offset the reimbursements).
If you have a specific scenario in which this idea would cause everyone to fall to the lowest common denominator, please describe in more detail than a conclusion without the steps how that result would arise. I'm definitely not opposed to modifying my idea, or accepting any other idea that suitably covers all the issues.
After thinking about things for a bit, here's a simple statement of the health care "problem" - from a bias of being familiar only with the US system. I've also got a proposal that could address many of the issues while meeting most of the goals of a health care system.
As introduction, the marks of a "good" system might be: treatment at any given level is available to all independent of individual wealth (equality of care), there is enough care at a given quality to support the needs at that level (availability of service), there is an emphasis on preventive care, and cost to individuals is proportional to amount of service utilized (fairness of cost). These are pretty much the main arguments of the day - people want to get (good) care for everyone but it is not economically or socially responsible to have everyone pay the same amount personally to get massively different benefit.
My solution would be along the lines of requiring everyone to pay some baseline amount for insurance. This would be a small amount so everyone could afford it. Note that I would not exempt anyone from this small payment. But: If individuals go in for at least the basic regular checkups and basic preventive care, they would receive rebates that would offset this minimal fee. However, if you need more service than that, you must pay increasing amounts depending on the level of service needed.
So this is something like the Taguchi loss function - if society as a whole has zero health care that's a big loss so should have a cost (the "minimum fee"). But if people have basic care to prevent communicable disease, basic checkups, etc. the total cost to society is lower - this is why rebates are offered. But then there are major illnesses and the like, which increase cost to society - so those should carry larger costs.
Admittedly there are details that are probably important, but the major idea is sound - it encourages both minimal levels of treatment and preventive care but also (fairly) puts higher costs on those who need greater amount of care. This "greater cost" should probably be on some kind of relative scale; chronic illnesses with treatments should have not have debilitating payments (think of future value of work). Probably something like cost is inversely proportional to amount of time remaining to the average lifespan or something. Or so that "chronic" treatments are just a small amount per month, but a major illness at age 68 would cost more than the same illness at age 28 or 38. The costs should really be structured to reflect the cost/benefit to society rather than simply spreading high costs for a few to a small amount of people (in other words, avoid the "car payment" situation where yes, the monthly payments are lower but the total cost is higher. This is the sad economic effect of the current health care system; individual payments may be lower but the total cost to society is higher.)
To summarize:
1. Minimum fee required by all.
2. Rebates for routine checkups and basic preventive care that would fully offset the minimum fee.
3. Additional fees for any additional treatment beyond preventive/basic care ("basic" here things like non-STD communicable diseases or non-lifestyle-related injuries) to discourage unnecessary treatment and overly-risky behavior (e.g., X-games participants would pay for injuries or take out additional "occupational/hobby injury" insurance) but structured in a way to not financially crush people who need it.
4. Provide some mechanism to reduce facility costs - property tax breaks or something. After all, we provide public libraries but not public clinics?
5. Reduction in certification requirements for basic health services to increase the available health care providers to help with supply side. Things like nurse practitioners are a step in the right direction.
I'm sure there are other minutiae, but this framework should address many of the personal-cost-side issues related to health care.
I agree here: lighter-than-air category aircraft already have large surface area and are not expected to have high speeds. Those characteristics make them very suitable for solar.
Solar is just not very practical for fixed-wing aircraft. Yes, you can make "solar gliders" as recreation aircraft, but you're never going to have a solar fixed-wing aircraft with any useful payload and acceptable speed. Solar planes are pretty much motor-gliders, and the applications for those are very different than for fixed-wing.
The only way to get "solar aircraft" in my opinion is to have a solar-powered plant that outputs liquid fuel. Alternatively, there are a few electric airplanes that are in development that are slightly more practical, except they still suffer from "refueling time" issues.
Secrecy is actually a synonym for privacy: they both mean "not visible."
At the end of the day, privacy means "nobody knows". So in one sense, anonymous activities are partially private. Given that definition - and perhaps this is what you meant? - then you are putting privacy on a sliding scale, saying that some things are more private than others based on the amount of information independent of the specific information.
I would probably revise my original sentiment: both privacy and anonymity are important: anonymity in the things which cannot be private, and as much private as possible. (And this is probably where people are uncomfortable - everything on the internet used to be largely anonymous, but the anonymity is fast eroding.)
I don't understand what part of my claim is false. While the content of an encrypted email may remain undeciphered (and so remain "private") the fact that an encrypted email was sent cannot be hidden. I consider "knowledge about the contents of a transaction" to be an issue of anonymity, not an issue of privacy - though I admit that is an issue of definition.
I suppose it's the different between "an email was transmitted" and "an email about topic X was transmitted." I would say that neither event is private, but the former event maintains much more anonymity than the latter.
Indeed! I'm still trying to figure out how to promote my campaign to educate people on a nice subtlety:
Privacy: doing something that other people don't know about. This is inherently impossible on the internet, because in order to do anything on the internet, you have to send data to or from somewhere - someone else knows what you're doing.
Anonymity: doing something but people don't know that it's you that's doing it. This is really what people are after, not privacy. People talk about "privacy" for many things, such as GPS for fuel tax in their cars, or speeding or whatever. The complaint there isn't privacy: anyone who has eyeballs can see that there is a car driving around. The complaint is anonymity: drivers don't want others to know that they are driving to a particular place or in a particular manner.
So, please help fix this argument: the internet cannot ever have privacy, but please let's keep it anonymous! All the things like Facebook, etc. are inherently non-anonymous, because people are volunteering identifying information. I suppose there's an argument about protecting who has access to the identifying information, but that's a different facet of the argument.
Many words: Higher octane gasolines are less likely to detonate (knock) at a given air charge temperature than a lower octane fuel. For high compression-ratio engines (those that say "93 Octane recommended" for instance), using a lower octane fuel will retard the spark timing (the spark will be later in the cycle) and reduce fuel economy, because energy available per combustion event is greater for earlier sparks (up to a point). However, if you have a car for which 87 octane is recommended, increasing octane won't really benefit you because the spark timing is already relatively late. Put another way: if you have a high compression engine, lower octane will retard your spark timing and reduce your fuel economy. If you have a low-compression engine, increasing octane won't improve your fuel economy because the spark timing will not increase.
I finally spent some time looking at this, and while it does provide variable speed ratios between +/-1, it is not a transmission in the sense most of us think of a transmission.
The output torque is a function only of geometry, input torque, and "control shaft" torque. Output torque does not scale with input torque as a function of speed ratio.
If we assume that the sun gears, planetary gears, and ring gears all have the same radii on the input and output sides, the governing equations for the device are:
Wring*Rring = 2*Wcarrier_in*Rcarrier_in - Wsun*Rsun// W is angular speed Wout = (Wring*Rring + Wsun*Rsun)/(2*Rcarrier_in) = Wcarrier_in /*Note: carrier input direction can be reversed by sun gear - this depends on torque and acceleration profiles so is omitted for simplicity */ Tout = Tcarrier_in + Tcontrol*Rcarrier/Rsun// T is torque
An important observation: the Tcarrier_in is not the torque provided by the driving motor/engine because of the orbital gear. If the input carrier is locked (by having the rung and sun spinning in opposite directions at the same speed) then the input ring gear just freewheels inside the orbital eccentric and all initial torque is lost to friction (probably melting the bearings). The input carrier speed can also never exceed the angular speed of that first ring gear, so there is a fixed gearing. (It may be worse than that actually; it looks like there will always be "slip" between that first input ring gear and the orbital, meaning you can never get all the prime mover power into the gear set from the start.) As the carrier is allowed to move by changing the speed of the sun gear, torque can then be transferred between the input ring and the eccentric orbital.
So, while interesting and novel, to be sure, I don't think this transmission will ever be replacing more traditional transmissions.
I've said it before, but the issue here isn't one of privacy, it's one of anonymity.
The census forms have nothing to do with privacy because they don't have anything to do with people knowing what you are doing. The census may be used to remove anonymity, though, because instead of just knowing that there is a person at some address, they know more specifics about the person at an address.
I think the "privacy" crowd would be much better served by understanding the differences between privacy and anonymity.
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Indeed. In today's legislative environment, at most 50% of the code in an engine controller is actually related to controlling the engine; the rest is OBD and other diagnostics, plus perhaps some other "advanced" features used for differentiation. Scheduling fuel, spark, and perhaps throttle control are not computationally-intensive tasks by any stretch of the imagination (even on engines like Formula 1 running at ~20k RPM).
Seems like we are indeed saying the same things, just using slightly different language. While there may be some slight differences in the thought process, and we could probably argue about which detail is correct*, I don't think that would add much value to the discussion... so I'll leave it at that!
*For instance, I disagree that the propeller is an energy sink when the vehicle CG has the same velocity (with respect to ground) as the wind because the total force on the vehicle in that condition is still in the direction of motion (not opposed to it).
Unfortunately, this is not physically accurate.
This is correct, but not for the reason you think. The vehicle is not moving forward because of torque applied to the wheels but solely due to aerodynamic forces. In fact, the force at the wheels opposes vehicle motion.
If the vehicle is moving at wind speed the propeller is spinning so there are fairly significant aerodynamic forces acting on it. The force on the propeller is most certainly not zero.
All the energy in the system must come from the wind; there is no energy in the wheels that can be transferred to the fan. The propeller is not spinning because it is taking kinetic energy from the wheels. The propeller spins because that is the only possible kinematic state given non-slipping wheels and a forward motion of the vehicle center of mass. The aerodynamic forces on the propeller are indeed the forces that are moving the vehicle forward. You were correct, though, in stating the propeller is not "a source of energy for the wheels." The wheels, in fact, only contribute dissipation to the system. The wheels are simply there to provide necessary kinematic constraints through momentum exchange.
The ratchet is actually irrelevant (and just adds inefficiency to the system), since energy* transfer between the wheels and the ground does not contribute to forward vehicle motion at all.
Recall that the ground actually performs at best zero work in the entire system (in real systems the wheel/ground interface dissipates energy). Pure tractive friction is a workless constraint, because there is no relative motion between the wheel and the ground at the contact point (assuming no slipping). Since the traction force is not working through a distance, it performs no work. This means that all the energy driving the vehicle must be coming from the wind. The entire process is aerodynamic; the coupling to the wheels only provides the necessary momentum exchange.
Consider the angle of attack of the prop blades with respect to the wind. Starting from a standstill, a tailwind has a massive positive angle of attack with respect to the blades, generating a lot of force in the "forward" direction. It also generates some torque on the blades that must be resisted by a traction force between the wheels and the ground (otherwise the prop would spin like a windmill facing into the tailwind); in this instance that traction force must actually be against the "forward" direction, because the prop is being forced in the other direction. Since the actual force depends on gearing it can be made less than the net thrust: the vehicle accelerates.
While accelerating, the prop starts to rotate so the local wind velocity starts shifting toward the front of the vehicle. This reduces the angle of attack on the blade, but the prop is still providing forward thrust. The traction force on the wheels is still in the direction opposite vehicle motion. The net aerodynamic force is still in the direction of motion.
When the vehicle speed reaches wind speed, the prop blades still have a positive angle of attack so are producing forward thrust; they are also still producing a torque which results in an adverse tractive force. Net force on the vehicle, though, is still positive. Only when the vehicle accelerates to a speed where the angle of attack on the propellers is reduced to a small enough value such that the thrust produced by the propeller no longer exceeds the tractive force necessary to keep the propeller spinning (because the tractive force is always adverse) will the vehicle speed stabilize.
There is also the effect of the vehicle body drag which helps the vehicle speed up to wind speed but provides adverse force when the vehicle exceeds wind speed. That does not, however, alter the analysis.
*The ground interface only plays a part in momentum transfer, not energy transfer (excepting dissipative work of course).
But
So how is that prebate tracked again? Also, the prebate (being a fixed nominal amount) fails to take into account the geographic dependence on cost of living (granted, the current standard deduction/exemption system already has this particular problem).
You falsely assumed that's where I wanted to go. I was simply proposing a method of achieving that particular goal. Also, property taxes obviously don't make the wealthy less wealthy if they use their property to create additional wealth: that's the whole point of capitalism actually. Incidentally, a property tax cannot reduce wealth because it doesn't destroy wealth: property tax merely ensures that a person continues to generate value from the wealth they control at the same time as preventing a wealth-holder from artificially increasing the value of their wealth by withholding its wealth-generating capacity from others (e.g., if a farmer does not produce the full yield of crops his farm is capable of producing).
Our current system continually increases the total wealth in our nation, but it's not perceived as "fair" because the distribution of that wealth increase is not uniform. I would argue that a "fair" system would always increase the wealth in proportion to the amount of work someone puts into the system relative to their individual capability. A "fair" system would never reward someone who is not increasing their own efforts. But nobody really wants that, they want something because they are entitled to it! (Yeah, that's a bit inflammatory.) A "fair" system would keep someone's standard of living constant for a constant amount of work, given a constant set of environmental conditions. If environmental conditions deteriorate, and a person's effort remains constant, their standard of living should decrease under a "fair" system.
Now, I'm not saying that's an ideal socioeconomic system; an ideal socioeconomic system would probably be one where every single person's standard of living increases, but the rate of increase is higher for those who have the lowest standard of living. The "fair tax" cannot perform this feat since it does nothing to actually raise the standard of living for anyone. The "fair tax" also only provides necessary funds if people consume, so there are erroneous assumptions that consumption will continue at rates that are sufficient to maintain the desired level of services. I would argue that, psychologically, people will complain more about seeing 23% tax on most transactions than they will about the current taxes, because it's taking money out of their wallet, which is different than never having it there in the first place.
In general I don't have a solution, but I do know that the Fair Tax has a miniscule chance to improve our standard of living. There's no even comparative reference to countries that currently have a VAT, because they never transitioned from a system like ours. At best the Fair Tax will be neutral, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if it were to be implemented there would be some concession in its implementation that would be far more insidious than what we have currently. The prebate is one such example: this is essentially a payment ahead of time - only if you register (what?) - so you actually get paid more the less you consume. I'm not sure how that can actually increase the overall wealth of the economy.
And, for the record, I hold equal indifference to Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Tea Party, Green, or whatever other label you put next to someone's name on a ballot.
The "Fair Tax"... isn't.
Of course, you have to define what "fair" means in the first place. Regardless, the "Fair Tax" and all other forms of consumption tax are pretty regressive and don't address the true problems with tax burden. If you really want to tax the wealthy, you have a savings tax (negative interest rate) which discourages keeping large sums of wealth (note that property tax is a kind of negative interest rate because it's a fee you have to pay on the "stored value" inherent with owning a piece of real property).
There's some devil in the details there, though, because you don't want to encourage zero savings, because that makes for a fragile economy - a better system than the fair tax would be to have zero income tax, then tax all property (including deposit accounts) valued at more than some threshold (say, $1M, indexed to inflation of course) at some fixed rate. This way, people with a modest home, vehicle, and reasonable cash savings would have no tax burden, but entities that tried to maintain large piles of wealth would have to pay. You could still get richer, but it would eliminate one of the institutional reasons why it's hard for the poor to become middle class.
This is also much simpler to implement than the Fair Tax, which has complex bookkeeping and exemption mechanisms.
There are perhaps three major categories of thought here.
In this case, though, there is direct evidence that the moon is not made of cheese, and direct evidence that the moon is made of rock and such, so belief that the moon is made of cheese is not really that common.
The same analysis on the concept of deity produces a slightly different result:
Unlike the moon being made of cheese which has actual contrary evidence, however, there is no way to prove that there is no such thing as deity - there is no "contrary evidence." I equally understand the argument about the lack of direct evidence that there is a deity (assuming you count the Old Testament, which explicitly claims an event of revelation, and the New Testament which does as well in the camp of "some people made this up" instead of evidence that a revelation actually occurred), except that a large number of people claim to have experiences which cause them to claim deity despite all other available explanations.
Unfortunately, I don't think this philosophical discussion is as cut-and-dry as some would like to think. There's a reason why this particular debate has been raging for at least as long as written history, while most of the other 'controversial' debates have all been relegated to the fringe.
Ah, well, there's a potential point of contention. Most Christian (and even Jewish) theologians would say that the universe wasn't created for man, but that the universe (and man) was created simply for God's glory. Simply stated: the universe isn't really about humanity at all, it's all about God.
One of my favorite snide responses to "there is no evidence of God's existence" is a simple question:
Why does the fact that people believe in God not count as evidence for the existence of God?
NELL is apparently just creating a large correlation network between certain character strings it accesses through a network connection. Despite the label of things as "belief" it's not so much belief as it is "the criteria for making this association unalterable have been satisfied."
I think a better descriptive word for what NELL is doing is "memorization" - it's the same phenomenon that occurs when we learn multiplication tables without understanding how a multiplication table is created.
(So, yes, I agree that "learning" alone isn't what makes intelligence; it's necessary but not sufficient.)
I still think the most cost effective solution here is education. Trying to put more gadgets and complexity in vehicles sounds nice, and as an engineer I find it fun to try and think about how such things would be designed and built, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, I'm one of those people who adheres to the philosophy that "there is nothing inherently safe about the universe." I don't understand why some people are so affronted by the fact that humans are not indestructible.
I recently received a BB Bold from my company for work (I didn't really want a smartphone, but the BB Bold was literally 50% of the options offered by Verizon that did not have a camera, and the other 50% was some soon-to-be discontinued BB model; I work at locations that prohibit cameras and actually enforce that policy).
During my initial attempt to familiarize myself with the phone, the thing crashed while using the default browser on the NOAA website. Not just hung, mind you, but dump to the white screen with hex codes on it (that incidentally didn't stay there long enough to record to send in a bug report or whatever).
I was not impressed that the phone crashed in such a manner within an hour of booting it for the first time (and seriously - 60 seconds to boot a phone? A phone is an appliance, it shouldn't have to "boot".)
I still dislike smartphones...they have become portable computers with voice features rather than phones with computing capability. I wish the phone manufacturers would go back to the old way of thinking about things in this regard.
Wait, you mean they weren't specifying a 75 milli-Tesla magnetic rocket!?
This isn't security in the first place. True information security would be a situation where even if someone had all your "authentication data" it wouldn't be possible to abuse. (I'm not claiming I know how to obtain such security, and I admit it is an idealized statement.)
It seems to me that the current situation we experience related to (financial) authentication is due to the fact that we have traded the necessity of actually knowing your banker or clients personally for what are essentially anonymous transactions. In the past, someone had to try quite hard to mimic your identity physically if they wanted to walk into a bank and raid your account, and they could only mimic one person at a time.
Now, all someone has to do is steal keys, so to speak, because nobody at the bank really knows who you are; all they have is a database entry. We have actually given up some control over our accounts for the "convenience" of forgoing relationships with our financial institutions.
As an aside, I actually hate the fact that this type of event is called "identity theft" because identity cannot be stolen. What is stolen (or copied or misappropriated or whatever) is authentication information, which is not the same thing as identity. It's very alarming to think that your authentication information and records define an identity.
The real problem with the system isn't that people can get your authentication information but that you can do too much with that authentication information.
How so? If (productive) people want more than the preventive/emergency care, they will pay the additional cost of the other service, providing the demand for the additional service. This is no different than today when we have people that spend larger sums of money than others.
My "proposal" does not force (productive) people to subsidize more than the basic care - a significant difference from our current system which forces the portion who pay to pay the full costs of everyone (hospitals cannot refuse treatment to emergency patients, but they don't work for free so someone is paying that bill already) - which is also extremely unfair. The idea is the "minimum fee" even accounting for reimbursements will be sufficient for the baseline health care (there will be people who don't get the minimum care, so their fees will go to offset the reimbursements).
If you have a specific scenario in which this idea would cause everyone to fall to the lowest common denominator, please describe in more detail than a conclusion without the steps how that result would arise. I'm definitely not opposed to modifying my idea, or accepting any other idea that suitably covers all the issues.
After thinking about things for a bit, here's a simple statement of the health care "problem" - from a bias of being familiar only with the US system. I've also got a proposal that could address many of the issues while meeting most of the goals of a health care system.
As introduction, the marks of a "good" system might be: treatment at any given level is available to all independent of individual wealth (equality of care), there is enough care at a given quality to support the needs at that level (availability of service), there is an emphasis on preventive care, and cost to individuals is proportional to amount of service utilized (fairness of cost). These are pretty much the main arguments of the day - people want to get (good) care for everyone but it is not economically or socially responsible to have everyone pay the same amount personally to get massively different benefit.
My solution would be along the lines of requiring everyone to pay some baseline amount for insurance. This would be a small amount so everyone could afford it. Note that I would not exempt anyone from this small payment. But: If individuals go in for at least the basic regular checkups and basic preventive care, they would receive rebates that would offset this minimal fee. However, if you need more service than that, you must pay increasing amounts depending on the level of service needed.
So this is something like the Taguchi loss function - if society as a whole has zero health care that's a big loss so should have a cost (the "minimum fee"). But if people have basic care to prevent communicable disease, basic checkups, etc. the total cost to society is lower - this is why rebates are offered. But then there are major illnesses and the like, which increase cost to society - so those should carry larger costs.
Admittedly there are details that are probably important, but the major idea is sound - it encourages both minimal levels of treatment and preventive care but also (fairly) puts higher costs on those who need greater amount of care. This "greater cost" should probably be on some kind of relative scale; chronic illnesses with treatments should have not have debilitating payments (think of future value of work). Probably something like cost is inversely proportional to amount of time remaining to the average lifespan or something. Or so that "chronic" treatments are just a small amount per month, but a major illness at age 68 would cost more than the same illness at age 28 or 38. The costs should really be structured to reflect the cost/benefit to society rather than simply spreading high costs for a few to a small amount of people (in other words, avoid the "car payment" situation where yes, the monthly payments are lower but the total cost is higher. This is the sad economic effect of the current health care system; individual payments may be lower but the total cost to society is higher.)
To summarize:
1. Minimum fee required by all.
2. Rebates for routine checkups and basic preventive care that would fully offset the minimum fee.
3. Additional fees for any additional treatment beyond preventive/basic care ("basic" here things like non-STD communicable diseases or non-lifestyle-related injuries) to discourage unnecessary treatment and overly-risky behavior (e.g., X-games participants would pay for injuries or take out additional "occupational/hobby injury" insurance) but structured in a way to not financially crush people who need it.
4. Provide some mechanism to reduce facility costs - property tax breaks or something. After all, we provide public libraries but not public clinics?
5. Reduction in certification requirements for basic health services to increase the available health care providers to help with supply side. Things like nurse practitioners are a step in the right direction.
I'm sure there are other minutiae, but this framework should address many of the personal-cost-side issues related to health care.
Sadly, the most thermodynamically efficient solution is not necessarily the most economically or socially efficient solution.
I agree here: lighter-than-air category aircraft already have large surface area and are not expected to have high speeds. Those characteristics make them very suitable for solar.
Solar is just not very practical for fixed-wing aircraft. Yes, you can make "solar gliders" as recreation aircraft, but you're never going to have a solar fixed-wing aircraft with any useful payload and acceptable speed. Solar planes are pretty much motor-gliders, and the applications for those are very different than for fixed-wing.
The only way to get "solar aircraft" in my opinion is to have a solar-powered plant that outputs liquid fuel. Alternatively, there are a few electric airplanes that are in development that are slightly more practical, except they still suffer from "refueling time" issues.
Secrecy is actually a synonym for privacy: they both mean "not visible."
At the end of the day, privacy means "nobody knows". So in one sense, anonymous activities are partially private. Given that definition - and perhaps this is what you meant? - then you are putting privacy on a sliding scale, saying that some things are more private than others based on the amount of information independent of the specific information.
I would probably revise my original sentiment: both privacy and anonymity are important: anonymity in the things which cannot be private, and as much private as possible. (And this is probably where people are uncomfortable - everything on the internet used to be largely anonymous, but the anonymity is fast eroding.)
I don't understand what part of my claim is false. While the content of an encrypted email may remain undeciphered (and so remain "private") the fact that an encrypted email was sent cannot be hidden. I consider "knowledge about the contents of a transaction" to be an issue of anonymity, not an issue of privacy - though I admit that is an issue of definition.
I suppose it's the different between "an email was transmitted" and "an email about topic X was transmitted." I would say that neither event is private, but the former event maintains much more anonymity than the latter.
Indeed! I'm still trying to figure out how to promote my campaign to educate people on a nice subtlety:
Privacy: doing something that other people don't know about. This is inherently impossible on the internet, because in order to do anything on the internet, you have to send data to or from somewhere - someone else knows what you're doing.
Anonymity: doing something but people don't know that it's you that's doing it. This is really what people are after, not privacy. People talk about "privacy" for many things, such as GPS for fuel tax in their cars, or speeding or whatever. The complaint there isn't privacy: anyone who has eyeballs can see that there is a car driving around. The complaint is anonymity: drivers don't want others to know that they are driving to a particular place or in a particular manner.
So, please help fix this argument: the internet cannot ever have privacy, but please let's keep it anonymous! All the things like Facebook, etc. are inherently non-anonymous, because people are volunteering identifying information. I suppose there's an argument about protecting who has access to the identifying information, but that's a different facet of the argument.
This is a terribly disturbing observation.
Two words: spark timing.
Many words: Higher octane gasolines are less likely to detonate (knock) at a given air charge temperature than a lower octane fuel. For high compression-ratio engines (those that say "93 Octane recommended" for instance), using a lower octane fuel will retard the spark timing (the spark will be later in the cycle) and reduce fuel economy, because energy available per combustion event is greater for earlier sparks (up to a point). However, if you have a car for which 87 octane is recommended, increasing octane won't really benefit you because the spark timing is already relatively late. Put another way: if you have a high compression engine, lower octane will retard your spark timing and reduce your fuel economy. If you have a low-compression engine, increasing octane won't improve your fuel economy because the spark timing will not increase.
I finally spent some time looking at this, and while it does provide variable speed ratios between +/-1, it is not a transmission in the sense most of us think of a transmission.
The output torque is a function only of geometry, input torque, and "control shaft" torque. Output torque does not scale with input torque as a function of speed ratio.
If we assume that the sun gears, planetary gears, and ring gears all have the same radii on the input and output sides, the governing equations for the device are:
An important observation: the Tcarrier_in is not the torque provided by the driving motor/engine because of the orbital gear. If the input carrier is locked (by having the rung and sun spinning in opposite directions at the same speed) then the input ring gear just freewheels inside the orbital eccentric and all initial torque is lost to friction (probably melting the bearings). The input carrier speed can also never exceed the angular speed of that first ring gear, so there is a fixed gearing. (It may be worse than that actually; it looks like there will always be "slip" between that first input ring gear and the orbital, meaning you can never get all the prime mover power into the gear set from the start.) As the carrier is allowed to move by changing the speed of the sun gear, torque can then be transferred between the input ring and the eccentric orbital.
So, while interesting and novel, to be sure, I don't think this transmission will ever be replacing more traditional transmissions.
I've said it before, but the issue here isn't one of privacy, it's one of anonymity.
The census forms have nothing to do with privacy because they don't have anything to do with people knowing what you are doing. The census may be used to remove anonymity, though, because instead of just knowing that there is a person at some address, they know more specifics about the person at an address.
I think the "privacy" crowd would be much better served by understanding the differences between privacy and anonymity.