I'm not saying that the specifics of this case are right, but thats what you have to do if you sue for damages with long term repercussions.
I think you're missing the over exaggeration mentioned in the original post.
1) This happened in an area of legendary corruption. So whatever profits they claim they "lost" have surely never been reported to the IRS. How about we just forget it, shred the claims, tell the IRS nothing, and call it even?
2) They get a vacation from work, and claim they could be having a string of record breaking years. Uh huh. In your example of a broken hand, I should be able to claim I was going to take up piano and become a world famous pianist and therefore deserve a bit more than the highest paid pianist whom currently walks the earth. And I was going to be a $500K/yr brain surgeon too. And I'd like compensation for my budding NFL wide receiver career. Even if I more realistically only pull down an upper middle class income (for my area, in the coasts I'd be considered working poor). Getting, say, half the pay for doing none of the work isn't all that unfair, really. If they had to do the work, and haul in empty nets for years, then sure, give them the money they earned for their labors. But it seems unfair for me to pay them to do nothing every time I fill my gas tank.
1) They're going to change their name in a couple months / years. Guaranteed. Bet you won't notice.
2) Carried out to the logical conclusion, if everyone shunned BP, our own govt (aka all of us) will have to pay the full costs of cleanup. I'd much rather voluntarily pay my tiny fraction of the costs and in return get a tank of gas in my car, than have the govt forcibly take everyone's money to pay for the full cost of cleanup and we get nothing but a larger national debt...
3) Gas stations are mostly franchises. So, the only people you're punishing are your local gas station owners whom randomly selected the wrong marketing firm. The guy down the street whom contracts to Exxon for his marketing, will simply buy the excess gas from BP and you'll never be the wiser. Punishing the local station owner is the same bullying mentality as screaming at a supermarket cashier or other McJob personnel, as if they have anything to do with it or as if your actions will have any effect.
is there any GOOD reason why they simply didn't repair the blowout preventer, hook up a new dipstick, set up a new rig, and keep on a-pumpin'?
There's two answers:
1) The legal one is once a well goes out of control, it gets the death penalty. Sounds on the surface as stupid as punishing a gun instead of a shooter... however this "gun" cost BP within an order of magnitude of $100M to drill. Wells are really quite expensive to drill. This lowers the wealth of the world as a whole by $100M but more specifically it lowers the wealth of BP by $100M, thus being very motivating for funding groups like BP to hire drillers (TO) whom don't screw up.
2) The semi-technical answer is rapid, uncontrolled sand flow pretty much destroys the pipes and other down hole stuff. It would be way faster and cheaper to drill a new well than to repair this one. Its sort of the difference between duct taping something together in a movie plot therefore its possible vs actual business operation. What I'm getting at is testing and certifying casings and hangers and parts is really cheap when its on the surface, and really expensive when its buried in the earth.
Doubtful. Back in the middle ages, the question arose if elves and giants could be baptized. They'd been sending missionaries out to the northern reaches of Europe, where everyone knew giants and elves lived. So the pope considered it, and said, sure. They could be baptized, too, if they wanted it.
Is there a Papal Bull on baptism of (internet) Trolls? I suspect he's cool with that.
Bigger question. This Baptism thing will not take off unless you can train some priests and send them back home. And most of our local religions have a serious anti-female pro-male bias. So what happens if the intelligent, baptized xenofungus wants to become a priest but their species does not have a biological male concept, unlikely as that may be?
I'm not at all surprised that the Vatican acknowledges the possibility of alien life. Not doing so would be placing limits on God's creative power(which would be a doctrinally unsound move) as well as ignoring the scientific fact that space is pretty fucking huge.
Don't forget, the Vatican is also Very, Very, old. Pre age of discovery. So they are already pretty experienced with the concept of discovering new continents / cultures / etc.
What does the article mean when they say Europe proposes something?
"Council of Europe" a very fuzzy imitation of the EU that does not have binding laws.
I cannot figure out what they do or what their place is. Plenty of fuzzy HR stuff about "whirrled peas" and so forth but nothing concrete about whom does what when to whom.
I actually assumed PCB here meant Printed Circuit Boards.
Polychlorinated biphenyls
A really fantastically good insulating oil, well, other than the cancer. I'm pretty sure that to this day no replacement has been invented that is as good and cheap as PCBs.
Printed Circuit Boards are mostly harmless in the post-lead solder era. A bit of plastic, glass, and copper, sounds like my bathroom or kitchen. Even during the lead solder era they were not so bad, most (non-slashdotter) homes probably had more lead solder on their copper pipes than their home electronics. A hundred bucks of hunting rifle ammo probably sprays 100 times as much lead into the environment than a hundred bucks of ipod.
Saying that a person can access the system if they have all of your credentials isn't really a flaw - it's the way the system has to work.
Not "has to work" at all. Not even remotely. First example off the top of my head in the first few seconds:
Some other gmail user whom you have sent email in the past (lets say, one year) has to log into gmail and acknowledge that yes indeed you are requesting a new password for yourself. That second factor would have to be via a voice telephone call or in person request or whatever.
In that two (or more) factor authentication, an attacker would not only have to take over all of your credentials, but also take over the credentials (or at least login) of one of your friends.
I think that the main hidden purpose of the "google me" social network thingy is to do stuff like this, friends that you've selected are authorized to unlock your account when at least X out of Y of them agree its a wise choice and there's less than Z vetos of the decision.
Where did you find that plan? Last time I researched, I could not find a way to have a text exchange that didn't cost more than a voice call, or I found "unlimited" plans where the marginal cost of the next call or text was zero.
I did find some plans where voice calls were "free" but each text was individually billed.
I think you just had your statement backwards and meant to say voice is always cheaper than text. Its a conspicuous consumption thing amongst the poorer classes. "Hey hey ladies, I'm wealthy enough to waste money on texts!" Very impressive if you are 2**4, not so impressive at 2**5 and up.
However the way that actually works, is out of ten people, lets say 3 of them are semi-institutionalized. Either prison, nursing home, elderly shut-in, hospital stay, unemployed, jury duty, home on a sick day from work, whatever, so three of them watch TV for sixteen hours a day, just to fill up their empty lives. Of the remaining seven or so people, a couple of them might watch for an hour. That adds up to 50 hours for 10 people, theoretically 5 hours per person.
I suspect texting has a similar distribution. One overly social teenage girl whom sends 500 texts per day (spam the entire class to vote for her for class president? Vote for some moron over and over on a TV game show?) and nine normal people whom don't send texts at all, theoretically averages out to 50 texts per person per day.
The median would have been much more interesting. And probably a low single digit number.
I have mod points but I hope to remedy your ignorance instead.
Your friendly neighborhood chemist says "ditto"
Unlike "regular old waste" e-waste has... PCBs...
You should read the wikipedia article.
They haven't been used in electronic products in the USA since 79 and since early 80s in Europe. Usually the Europeans are ahead of the USA in environmental stuff, but not that time.
Chronologically, the only way your e-cycled e-waste e-old e-computer at the e-dump will contain PCBs is if its a museum piece. Not anything that can run Winders, linux, or any mac that was ever made.
The other problem, is PCBs are a great "high temp" coolant for giant power transformers and giant capacitors that overheat due to a nice high ESR. Generally, if it plugs into a standard wall outlet and is full of transistors, it probably cannot draw enough power to require the unique cooling abilities of PCBs, with the exception of very old fashioned fluorescent light ballasts (which run really hot and waste lots of power).
Maybe, just maybe, a 1970s era large mainframe power supply might have some questionable caps in the power supply. Probably not an issue for 99.9999% of e-recyclers.
Look on the bright side. It means the whole scene will be burning out pretty soon and the internet can go back to its original purpose, the proliferation of misanthropy and technical arguments.
There is great potential for energy savings, which would mean higher payloads and/or less expensive flights.
You want higher payloads, find a rocket that works, and make it bigger.
As for less expense, I take it you believe most of the cost of the space shuttle program is liquid H2? If so, you are horribly misinformed. If, by some utter miracle, the shuttle could be operated on flying unicorns instead of solid boosters and H2/O2, calculate the delta cost in the shuttle program. I think you'll be surprised how many decimal places you'll need to use.
Liquid H2 costs about a buck a pound in the quantities NASA uses. (We'd pay closer to two bucks a pound). The entire shuttle tank holds about a quarter million pounds of liq H2. No math phd required to figure that filling the fuel tank costs about a quarter mil. A similar level of math is required to multiply that by about 130 shuttle flights to get a lifetime program cost of a whopping 30 million or so. Wikipedia claims the total cost of the shuttle program from "I gotta idea" to end of program is about 175 Billion. So, liquid H2 fuel cost works out to 30 / 175000 * 100 = about 0.02 percent of total project cost. "Saving fuel" is simply irrelevant.
So, if we risk the lives of every crewman using a new non-man rated engine and/or delay the vehicle program by decades to develop and deploy the amazing fuel free flying unicorn engine system, we will save a whopping two hundredths of a percent of total program cost. Or rephrased, for the R+D to pay for itself, we need the total cost of R+D and deployment to remain below two hundredths of a percent of program cost.
Two hundredths of a percent of project cost is about what you budget for developing and deploying the HR diversity training, or perhaps company funded picnics. Not a realistic budget factor for a new primary propulsion system.
Yes, you've verified the staging equations, but you're still better off with a traditional, simple, ultra reliable first stage. The absolutely cheapest thing about orbital rocket launchers is the propellants, everything from R+D to launch support costs more. "Saving fuel" is a profoundly false economy for orbital launchers. A great way to spend billions to save millions (or less).
Also first stage is arguably the most phase of flight. A terrible place to "innovate".
im pretty sure mach 25 is orbital velocity. which would make mach 6 a bit over 20% of the speed needed. which is more than 6%.
Ouch, hope your physics teacher doesn't see your post. If E=1/2 * m * v**2, the ratio boils down to (mach6)**2 / (mach25)**2 which works out to 36/625 which works out to 5.76 percent. The energy required to gain altitude does matter, if you're going up a couple hundred miles. If it didn't, elevators wouldn't need motors. You are correct that the velocity is where most of the energy goes, and I didn't bother to verify the math, but its vaguely around the remaining 0.24 percent figure.
My point still stands, an idealized orbital rocket at mach 6 and 60kft has only burned about 6% of its total fuel.
...then by definition they're launching at a tangent to the earth's surface. This means that they'll have to punch through a lot more atmosphere than they would have to with a traditional perpendicular launch. I wonder how much they're really gaining with this strategy.
Since they are depending on a miracle occurring in engine technology, maybe they are expecting an equal miracle to occur in wing technology, to get a high mach number wing with a slow glider like lift to drag ratio so they can pull up at the end of the launch rail thing. Piling on that many pipe dreams, they may as well ask for a flying unicorn.
Once ignited, Mach 10 wouldn't be outrageous for a Scramjet.
Well, that seems a bit optimistic for a device that has been successfully flown, what, twice? Its kind of like planning the Boeing 777 the day after the wright brothers first flight.
The real killer with all these "hybrid" lifter designs is they are all ignorant of the virtually unknown 666 rule.
The 666 rule is that Mach 6 (which is tricky for an air breathing aircraft) at 60000 feet (again, tricky) is a whopping 6% of the way to orbit.
So, if, in your wildest dreams, you can simultaneously achieve mach 6 at 60Kft, which would be quite the noteworthy achievement, you've still got 94% of the way to go.
Alternately, you could take the required second stage, and make the fuel tank at least 6% bigger and skip all this air breathing foolishness.
I thought they were a fully civilized county, aka they have socialized medicine... or is this tax only for the cost of optional cosmetic work?
Something I never understood about immigration, is why it is so profoundly non-capitalistic at the low end. Set up a market where I'll trade my US citizenship for Linus's Finnish citizenship plus some extra money on the side.
I suppose, from a "consensual identity theft" standpoint, this market could, very quietly, already exist.
At the high end, many countries like Canada, Ireland, and some Caribbean nations will let you walk right in and purchase citizenship for about a quarter to half mil. Its just the low end market that is non-capitalist.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that the specifics of this case are right, but thats what you have to do if you sue for damages with long term repercussions.
I think you're missing the over exaggeration mentioned in the original post.
1) This happened in an area of legendary corruption. So whatever profits they claim they "lost" have surely never been reported to the IRS. How about we just forget it, shred the claims, tell the IRS nothing, and call it even?
2) They get a vacation from work, and claim they could be having a string of record breaking years. Uh huh. In your example of a broken hand, I should be able to claim I was going to take up piano and become a world famous pianist and therefore deserve a bit more than the highest paid pianist whom currently walks the earth. And I was going to be a $500K/yr brain surgeon too. And I'd like compensation for my budding NFL wide receiver career. Even if I more realistically only pull down an upper middle class income (for my area, in the coasts I'd be considered working poor). Getting, say, half the pay for doing none of the work isn't all that unfair, really. If they had to do the work, and haul in empty nets for years, then sure, give them the money they earned for their labors. But it seems unfair for me to pay them to do nothing every time I fill my gas tank.
You should too.
A feel good idea. With no, to negative, results.
1) They're going to change their name in a couple months / years. Guaranteed. Bet you won't notice.
2) Carried out to the logical conclusion, if everyone shunned BP, our own govt (aka all of us) will have to pay the full costs of cleanup. I'd much rather voluntarily pay my tiny fraction of the costs and in return get a tank of gas in my car, than have the govt forcibly take everyone's money to pay for the full cost of cleanup and we get nothing but a larger national debt...
3) Gas stations are mostly franchises. So, the only people you're punishing are your local gas station owners whom randomly selected the wrong marketing firm. The guy down the street whom contracts to Exxon for his marketing, will simply buy the excess gas from BP and you'll never be the wiser. Punishing the local station owner is the same bullying mentality as screaming at a supermarket cashier or other McJob personnel, as if they have anything to do with it or as if your actions will have any effect.
is there any GOOD reason why they simply didn't repair the blowout preventer, hook up a new dipstick, set up a new rig, and keep on a-pumpin'?
There's two answers:
1) The legal one is once a well goes out of control, it gets the death penalty. Sounds on the surface as stupid as punishing a gun instead of a shooter... however this "gun" cost BP within an order of magnitude of $100M to drill. Wells are really quite expensive to drill. This lowers the wealth of the world as a whole by $100M but more specifically it lowers the wealth of BP by $100M, thus being very motivating for funding groups like BP to hire drillers (TO) whom don't screw up.
2) The semi-technical answer is rapid, uncontrolled sand flow pretty much destroys the pipes and other down hole stuff. It would be way faster and cheaper to drill a new well than to repair this one. Its sort of the difference between duct taping something together in a movie plot therefore its possible vs actual business operation. What I'm getting at is testing and certifying casings and hangers and parts is really cheap when its on the surface, and really expensive when its buried in the earth.
I'm curious if anyone knows of any success stories of using this strategy with large animals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island
Summary: Lots of voles, introduce reindeer, population explosion of reindeer, crash, everythings dead.
This is probably the source of the whole meme.
Unless you are a psychopath you really don't want to wound an animal and condemn it to a slow painful death from blood loss or infection.
Back to the original post, slow death by rabies is probably the only thing worse than death by blood loss or infection...
Doubtful. Back in the middle ages, the question arose if elves and giants could be baptized. They'd been sending missionaries out to the northern reaches of Europe, where everyone knew giants and elves lived. So the pope considered it, and said, sure. They could be baptized, too, if they wanted it.
Is there a Papal Bull on baptism of (internet) Trolls? I suspect he's cool with that.
Bigger question. This Baptism thing will not take off unless you can train some priests and send them back home. And most of our local religions have a serious anti-female pro-male bias. So what happens if the intelligent, baptized xenofungus wants to become a priest but their species does not have a biological male concept, unlikely as that may be?
I'm not at all surprised that the Vatican acknowledges the possibility of alien life. Not doing so would be placing limits on God's creative power(which would be a doctrinally unsound move) as well as ignoring the scientific fact that space is pretty fucking huge.
Don't forget, the Vatican is also Very, Very, old. Pre age of discovery. So they are already pretty experienced with the concept of discovering new continents / cultures / etc.
What does the article mean when they say Europe proposes something?
"Council of Europe" a very fuzzy imitation of the EU that does not have binding laws.
I cannot figure out what they do or what their place is. Plenty of fuzzy HR stuff about "whirrled peas" and so forth but nothing concrete about whom does what when to whom.
whoever smuggles them into this country will be treated the same as a drug dealer.
They'll be hired by the CIA?
I believe you need to use the actual tm symbol not just (tm).
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2122/index.htm
I actually assumed PCB here meant Printed Circuit Boards.
Polychlorinated biphenyls
A really fantastically good insulating oil, well, other than the cancer. I'm pretty sure that to this day no replacement has been invented that is as good and cheap as PCBs.
Printed Circuit Boards are mostly harmless in the post-lead solder era. A bit of plastic, glass, and copper, sounds like my bathroom or kitchen. Even during the lead solder era they were not so bad, most (non-slashdotter) homes probably had more lead solder on their copper pipes than their home electronics. A hundred bucks of hunting rifle ammo probably sprays 100 times as much lead into the environment than a hundred bucks of ipod.
Apparently that is a very secure way to validate the user. The face recognition part, not necessarily the Facebook part.
Unless you are friends / schoolmates / coworkers with people in show business.
Saying that a person can access the system if they have all of your credentials isn't really a flaw - it's the way the system has to work.
Not "has to work" at all. Not even remotely. First example off the top of my head in the first few seconds:
Some other gmail user whom you have sent email in the past (lets say, one year) has to log into gmail and acknowledge that yes indeed you are requesting a new password for yourself. That second factor would have to be via a voice telephone call or in person request or whatever.
In that two (or more) factor authentication, an attacker would not only have to take over all of your credentials, but also take over the credentials (or at least login) of one of your friends.
I think that the main hidden purpose of the "google me" social network thingy is to do stuff like this, friends that you've selected are authorized to unlock your account when at least X out of Y of them agree its a wise choice and there's less than Z vetos of the decision.
Texting is cheaper than voice calls
Where did you find that plan? Last time I researched, I could not find a way to have a text exchange that didn't cost more than a voice call, or I found "unlimited" plans where the marginal cost of the next call or text was zero.
I did find some plans where voice calls were "free" but each text was individually billed.
I think you just had your statement backwards and meant to say voice is always cheaper than text. Its a conspicuous consumption thing amongst the poorer classes. "Hey hey ladies, I'm wealthy enough to waste money on texts!" Very impressive if you are 2**4, not so impressive at 2**5 and up.
Useless without knowing the distribution, much like "TV viewing hours".
Example, the supposedly average American watches TV for 5 hours per day. Every Day.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/24/business/fi-tvwatching24
However the way that actually works, is out of ten people, lets say 3 of them are semi-institutionalized. Either prison, nursing home, elderly shut-in, hospital stay, unemployed, jury duty, home on a sick day from work, whatever, so three of them watch TV for sixteen hours a day, just to fill up their empty lives. Of the remaining seven or so people, a couple of them might watch for an hour. That adds up to 50 hours for 10 people, theoretically 5 hours per person.
I suspect texting has a similar distribution. One overly social teenage girl whom sends 500 texts per day (spam the entire class to vote for her for class president? Vote for some moron over and over on a TV game show?) and nine normal people whom don't send texts at all, theoretically averages out to 50 texts per person per day.
The median would have been much more interesting. And probably a low single digit number.
I have mod points but I hope to remedy your ignorance instead.
Your friendly neighborhood chemist says "ditto"
Unlike "regular old waste" e-waste has ... PCBs ...
You should read the wikipedia article.
They haven't been used in electronic products in the USA since 79 and since early 80s in Europe. Usually the Europeans are ahead of the USA in environmental stuff, but not that time.
Chronologically, the only way your e-cycled e-waste e-old e-computer at the e-dump will contain PCBs is if its a museum piece. Not anything that can run Winders, linux, or any mac that was ever made.
The other problem, is PCBs are a great "high temp" coolant for giant power transformers and giant capacitors that overheat due to a nice high ESR. Generally, if it plugs into a standard wall outlet and is full of transistors, it probably cannot draw enough power to require the unique cooling abilities of PCBs, with the exception of very old fashioned fluorescent light ballasts (which run really hot and waste lots of power).
Maybe, just maybe, a 1970s era large mainframe power supply might have some questionable caps in the power supply. Probably not an issue for 99.9999% of e-recyclers.
you have absolutely no idea what your talking about.
Obviously. I only know L/D ratios always decrease with vehicle speed.
They already have images.google.com
Look on the bright side. It means the whole scene will be burning out pretty soon and the internet can go back to its original purpose, the proliferation of misanthropy and technical arguments.
And Pr0n. Lots of Pr0n.
There is great potential for energy savings, which would mean higher payloads and/or less expensive flights.
You want higher payloads, find a rocket that works, and make it bigger.
As for less expense, I take it you believe most of the cost of the space shuttle program is liquid H2? If so, you are horribly misinformed. If, by some utter miracle, the shuttle could be operated on flying unicorns instead of solid boosters and H2/O2, calculate the delta cost in the shuttle program. I think you'll be surprised how many decimal places you'll need to use.
Liquid H2 costs about a buck a pound in the quantities NASA uses. (We'd pay closer to two bucks a pound). The entire shuttle tank holds about a quarter million pounds of liq H2. No math phd required to figure that filling the fuel tank costs about a quarter mil. A similar level of math is required to multiply that by about 130 shuttle flights to get a lifetime program cost of a whopping 30 million or so. Wikipedia claims the total cost of the shuttle program from "I gotta idea" to end of program is about 175 Billion. So, liquid H2 fuel cost works out to 30 / 175000 * 100 = about 0.02 percent of total project cost. "Saving fuel" is simply irrelevant.
So, if we risk the lives of every crewman using a new non-man rated engine and/or delay the vehicle program by decades to develop and deploy the amazing fuel free flying unicorn engine system, we will save a whopping two hundredths of a percent of total program cost. Or rephrased, for the R+D to pay for itself, we need the total cost of R+D and deployment to remain below two hundredths of a percent of program cost.
Two hundredths of a percent of project cost is about what you budget for developing and deploying the HR diversity training, or perhaps company funded picnics. Not a realistic budget factor for a new primary propulsion system.
Yes, you've verified the staging equations, but you're still better off with a traditional, simple, ultra reliable first stage. The absolutely cheapest thing about orbital rocket launchers is the propellants, everything from R+D to launch support costs more. "Saving fuel" is a profoundly false economy for orbital launchers. A great way to spend billions to save millions (or less).
Also first stage is arguably the most phase of flight. A terrible place to "innovate".
im pretty sure mach 25 is orbital velocity. which would make mach 6 a bit over 20% of the speed needed. which is more than 6%.
Ouch, hope your physics teacher doesn't see your post. If E=1/2 * m * v**2, the ratio boils down to (mach6)**2 / (mach25)**2 which works out to 36/625 which works out to 5.76 percent. The energy required to gain altitude does matter, if you're going up a couple hundred miles. If it didn't, elevators wouldn't need motors. You are correct that the velocity is where most of the energy goes, and I didn't bother to verify the math, but its vaguely around the remaining 0.24 percent figure.
My point still stands, an idealized orbital rocket at mach 6 and 60kft has only burned about 6% of its total fuel.
...then by definition they're launching at a tangent to the earth's surface. This means that they'll have to punch through a lot more atmosphere than they would have to with a traditional perpendicular launch. I wonder how much they're really gaining with this strategy.
Since they are depending on a miracle occurring in engine technology, maybe they are expecting an equal miracle to occur in wing technology, to get a high mach number wing with a slow glider like lift to drag ratio so they can pull up at the end of the launch rail thing. Piling on that many pipe dreams, they may as well ask for a flying unicorn.
Once ignited, Mach 10 wouldn't be outrageous for a Scramjet.
Well, that seems a bit optimistic for a device that has been successfully flown, what, twice? Its kind of like planning the Boeing 777 the day after the wright brothers first flight.
The real killer with all these "hybrid" lifter designs is they are all ignorant of the virtually unknown 666 rule.
The 666 rule is that Mach 6 (which is tricky for an air breathing aircraft) at 60000 feet (again, tricky) is a whopping 6% of the way to orbit.
So, if, in your wildest dreams, you can simultaneously achieve mach 6 at 60Kft, which would be quite the noteworthy achievement, you've still got 94% of the way to go.
Alternately, you could take the required second stage, and make the fuel tank at least 6% bigger and skip all this air breathing foolishness.
medical expenses
I thought they were a fully civilized county, aka they have socialized medicine... or is this tax only for the cost of optional cosmetic work?
Something I never understood about immigration, is why it is so profoundly non-capitalistic at the low end. Set up a market where I'll trade my US citizenship for Linus's Finnish citizenship plus some extra money on the side.
I suppose, from a "consensual identity theft" standpoint, this market could, very quietly, already exist.
At the high end, many countries like Canada, Ireland, and some Caribbean nations will let you walk right in and purchase citizenship for about a quarter to half mil. Its just the low end market that is non-capitalist.