The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
Why? Other than an appeal to authority, or FUD, I don't see it. And I'm fairly well educated in this area.
The inherent problem with "spent" fission fuel, is we have very little control over how the atoms fission. Generally you get about 1/3 and 2/3 chunks but a graph of the relative weights shows two wide peaks. The stuff thats stable for millions of years is harmless, because, well, its stable for millions of years before it does anything. Likewise for the stuff with a half life of a few seconds, like the silver isotopes, because an hour after shutdown its all reacted. But there are plenty of icky cobalt and strontium and other isotopes that have an annoying half life "around a human generation long" that are really hazardous biologically. So there is no way to run a fission reactor without accumulating icky radioactive waste. Don't want a fission reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well, tough luck, that is an inherent byproduct of the fuel itself.
On the other hand, fusion doesn't use "stuff" that inherently involves bad half lives. Don't want a fusion reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well then don't build the reactor out of it.
... solar panels...
Ah I see it was all just astroturfing or something.
Of course the Current version of Linux or BSD is probably more "bloated" then the last version of Multics.
Sure, trade in a 40 year old operating system for two 20s, just because its a little bloated after giving you the best years of its life... Does this tty driver make my kernel look fat?
Only recently has there been any concern whatsoever given to securing the thousands of SCADA [wikipedia.org] links that monitor and control our electrical grid.
Not really. There has always been an attempt at fail safe, because they've never ever, been 100% reliable... Operators have plenty of experience with "natural" failures, human error, bad designs, bad installs (now is phase 1 voltmeter really wired to phase 1 or perhaps to phase 2?).
Only recently has there been scaremongering about it to get bailout money, yes.
No such thing as a network with no external access points. Think about it. If you were able to "get in there" to install, configure and maintain it, someone else can do the same.
would seem to indicate "around 180 million LOC in Debian" vs maybe 50 MLOC for windows. Not everything is in Debian (believe it or not) and not everything MS is in Windows, but everything else that is MS licensed probably doesn't add up to more than 3 times the size of windows... Also, some stuff in MS products is BSD licensed and has to be subtracted.
The number of lines of GPL licensed code is probably larger than any other license, free or nonfree...
the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that the plaintiffs is unhurt, because her claimed pain is suspiciously directly proportional to the defendants bank account.
Arrrgh rephrased,
"the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that obviously the plaintiff was unhurt, and remained unhurt until she determined the size of the defendants bank account, at which time she felt like grubbing some money"
If the poster is autistic, disturbed or perhaps already in the court system for other offenses, the mother might decide to leave well alone.
Sorry, but you're profoundly ignorant of how the legal system works. She wants to know if he has any money, if it would be monetarily profitable to sue. Its an investment decision. If he/she is "judgement-proof" or "rich enough", she won't bother. If "mother" can ruin their life simply by filing suit, "mother" will. The justice system is all about money...
Guarantee step #2 after determining identity is deciding how to make the most money.
In a way, its a profoundly stupid tactic for the mother to follow, because either she'll discover theres no point in suing, or the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that the plaintiffs is unhurt, because her claimed pain is suspiciously directly proportional to the defendants bank account. Or, if he/she gets blackmailed, there is now a legal trail showing mother did it. An effective way to win the battle and lose the war.
As an industry, we've tried everything else as the magic bullet, why not a cellular automata based language? Draw yer turning machine and off you go...
A disciplined cartel that cooperates in restricting production could keep prices high, but the OPEC members make more money individually by defecting and producing over their quota.
Until they reach peak oil production, and can no longer produce at their quota anymore. Then the cartel falls apart because its not needed by at least some of the producers.
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Neither Sirius nor XM could merge while spinning off one of their satellite radio operations into a new company, to maintain a "semi-free market" or a "free-er market".
It would be trivial to sell off mysql. Heck, give it away. Sell it to the FSF for $1?
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
Most of the OPEC countries are in a demographic crisis, six kids per family and no economy other than the government distributing oil sales money. So when the income from oil drops, utter chaos.
Now, for a concrete example, consider Saudi Arabia, which will have a revolution after peak. They've been in permanent production decline since 05 or 07 depending on which numbers you believe. You can tell them the truth, in which case there's a bloody revolution next week and they completely shut off the taps. Alternatively you can lie or market or business as usual or corruption or whatever its called, in which case the taps stay open and you get maybe 90% of what they pumped last year.
So, tell the truth and your pals in the friendly govt get beheaded and you get no oil. Or, lie and you get some fraction of peak oil production and your pals in the friendly govt remain in power. From our point of view, somethings better than nothing. From their point of view, staying in power is better than being beheaded.
Of course eventually the truth is a little too hard to hide. That is right about now, plus or minus some.
why give up that hard-earned precision in your result?
Because he doesn't know your height above sea level, other than its within -500 feet or so, to about 29000 feet or so?
"The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 8980 meters = 29500 ft"
Assuming it blew up directly over your head, that would really suck if you just climbed to the top of Mt Everest at 29029 and the final detonation was a mere 471 feet over your head.
On the other hand, my house at around 900 feet ASL would be about 6 miles away from the final explosion.
Folks in Denver "mile high city", being about 1/6 closer than my house, would probably have more than 1/6 more damage than my house would get, probably the untrained eye would be able to see the difference.
Just want to add... Don't let them pick the tile. They probably get this request frequently enough that they have a "show" tile or two if they are a shoddy organization.
If you pull this stunt, please understand that a techs hidden stockpile of magazines and canned soda does not necessarily indicate a shoddy organization, it merely means they have employees that like reading certain magazines for the interviews, and prefer to store their drinks in a nice clean spot underneath the chiller rather than the proverbially filthy employee refrigerator. On the good side this is a strong indication they don't have an under the floor rodent infestation.
Strangest thing I ever found under the floor was a vast amount of one employees (clean) clothing. He was kind of stuck in the process of moving and needed a temporary place to stash stuff. Apparently no one found it unusual that he was hauling bags of clothing in and out.
Drat, my units were cubic feet, not CCF, of natural gas. That's about 32,108 CCF.
Divided by 8000 or so residents, the fuel to melt approaches 4 CCF per resident. I googled around and a CCF goes for about a buck, at least as an order of magnitude. So it'll cost about $4/resident to melt a snowfall.
I pay about $200 per month to heat my hovel for four people, about $1.6 per person per day. So, each snow storm would be equivalent to about two days heating. Of course, if the outside of the dome were above freezing, that would imply the inside would be above freezing. And my $200/month was January when it was below freezing, 24x7. So, my heating bill would be considerably less.
Then you amortize the cost of my $1K snowblower that will probably only last a decade, that is very simplistically $100/yr. Plus the cost of snowplows for the road, wild guess about the same cost. Plus all the medical costs related to "slipped on the ice/snow". Plus the cost of the salt for my driveway, which destroys the road surface, eventually. Add in some taxable economic activity, this being the only "walk around in shirtsleeves outside" for miles around.
Note that you don't really need to melt it all, you just need to keep the surface melted as it slides to the ground in an immense pile, so it'll be much cheaper.
I think the dome will be way cheaper. Or, alternatively, they'll break even financially but spend big bucks on a very nice dome.
Since the disease leads to paralysis then death how safe does it have to be to be effective? If the cure kills 5% of the people that take it I would think that will be less than the 10 year delay in getting a "perfect" cure out of the lab and through FDA testing.
Unfortunately, if you give that treatment to everyone, after 5% die, you'll have no one left to experiment on to find an even newer cure that kills no one. Or even worse, you'll find out that half the dosage of the same stuff, cures them just as well without killing anyone at all.
Also the hypothesis is always that its a cure, because that is better for research grants. Of course, if you give it to everyone in an uncontrolled manner, if it doesn't work, which would not be entirely surprising, then ten years later when 100% die, you have to start all over again, except you've wasted ten years.
And then too, bad money always pushes out good money if the purchasers are ignorant, and all customers of medical treatment are ignorant, so no free medical market can exist, so.... A scammer could make a lot of dough, for awhile, by pushing something that doesn't work but is marketed well, look at the supplement and diet industries for example. So you need a system that prevents intentional failures from being marketed, otherwise we'd end up with only scams, because dreaming up scams is cheaper than real research. So to save everyone else from some totally different scam, we have to prove this real treatment isn't a scam, even if it takes awhile. And its only fair, since if we didn't prevent other scams in the past, this guy would never have gotten research money to find a real treatment, since it would have been more profitable to invest in a scam.
Thus the policy of careful testing, in the long run, is more humane, even if in the short run it looks bad.
I don't see how you can have a sense of acceleration. Perhaps change of acceleration....but acceleration? Categorically NO. We orbit the sun, but i wager you have no sense of angular acceleration about the sun.
Substitute the word velocity for acceleration throughout your entire post, then you are correct.
Um... We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without bombs attached.
We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without pilots attached...
You'd be surprised what a good autopilot can do. Did you know the space shuttle, using 70s tech, lands itself, with the only human interaction being pushing the landing gear doors? No kidding hands completely off from orbit to runway using 40 year old tech?
Okay, so let's say I want to work for zero wages to give your country free drugs. They're free. I'll refine and ship them to your citizens for free. Do you want to enact a tariff on them or would you be better off accepting them?
"the first hit is always free". Perhaps you meant legal drugs... Or isn't that also the business model of Doctors samples?
We have manufacturing plants that adhere to strict environmental standards, offer their employees good jobs with benefits and have lower prices to boot, yet are being turned down contracts they would normally receive due to protectionist requirements put in place by the US gov't.
1st answer - Corruption has and always will exist, but it says a lot more about the human condition in general than it does about the individual tools used in that corruption. Just your bad luck the wrong corporation donated to Obama or some congressmen or whatever. Better luck next election? Bribery in our elections result in un-free markets, regardless of using tariffs or not.
2nd answer - Misuse of one individual tool does not mean the entire class of that tool is inherently evil. Insert gun control argument here.
I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. What you describe is exactly the opposite: a coercive, authoritarian market.
If you have protectionist tariffs then your market is neither free nor libertarian. If these tariffs were in fact "critical economically" then free, libertarian markets would be a contradiction. Fortunately, they're not.
Oh, I agree with you completely, tariffs ALONE would result in a coercive authoritarian market.
But we already have a coercive authoritarian market because of a seemingly infinite collection of government social engineering regulations.
At least some of the time, one simple tariff can cancel out the distorting effects of hundreds of govt social engineering regulations, leaving an almost free market. Thats why they are critical economically, not subtracting out the cost of regulations via tariffs is like not subtracting expenses from incomes to get profit, or something truly basic like that.
Example, using political prisoners is free for the Chinese, giving them a $10 unfair advantage over free Americans. No free market can exist. Adding a $10 tariff results in something almost like a free market.
Tariffs and government regulation must be balanced, they algebraically cancel each other, like yin and yang or whatever.
First, "predatory" is a loaded adjective, and is meaningless in terms of economic activity. Is it "predatory" for people in one country to work for lower wages than the people in another country? Because that's the kind of "predatory" situation that is stopped by tariffs.
Yes, when the wage difference is due to social engineering governmental policies. Tariffs balance those differences out, thus creating a free(-er) market.
So, there is little need for US and German automakers to put tariffs on each other, because those governments are approximately, more or less equal. (I am sorry if I just insulted the entire German slashdot readership, my defense is its true, at least relative to my other example)
However, everything that China exports to the USA desperately needs USA import tariffs because the Chinese government actively encourages activities that the US government wisely will not permit USA companies to use, such as slave labor, no environmental controls at all, no worker safety regulations, limited/no health care (admittedly somewhat applies to USA), no product liability, no IP laws at all, industrial espionage is permitted (if not encouraged), etc.
Can't have a free market, when the players aren't equally free (or at least brought to mostly the same level by tariffs)
Most libertarians, are, in reality, nothing more than Cornucopians.
Naah, the Venn diagram has alot of overlap, look at lines from the wikipedia like "The extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge."
The difference between them is that cornucopians think that "ability to create new knowledge" is some inherent free good that always exists, even if a the culture turns against folks with knowledge, etc. On the other hand the libertarians think that everyone in society can play a free market because everyone in the society has the "ability to create new knowledge", even if by definition half the citizens are below the median of intelligence...
So the Cornucopians think new knowledge is our unavoidable destiny even if we culturally detest it (make fun of nerds, promote jock culture, etc), but the Libertarians think new knowledge is an unavoidable byproduct of all of us playing the free market because we are all intelligent enough to play the market, ignoring that half of us (if not more) are idiots whom can barely shop at the market on a good day, much less "create new knowledge".
"Effect without Cause" is not the same as "Ignore the morons".
Slashdot Mirror
The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
Why? Other than an appeal to authority, or FUD, I don't see it. And I'm fairly well educated in this area.
The inherent problem with "spent" fission fuel, is we have very little control over how the atoms fission. Generally you get about 1/3 and 2/3 chunks but a graph of the relative weights shows two wide peaks. The stuff thats stable for millions of years is harmless, because, well, its stable for millions of years before it does anything. Likewise for the stuff with a half life of a few seconds, like the silver isotopes, because an hour after shutdown its all reacted. But there are plenty of icky cobalt and strontium and other isotopes that have an annoying half life "around a human generation long" that are really hazardous biologically. So there is no way to run a fission reactor without accumulating icky radioactive waste. Don't want a fission reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well, tough luck, that is an inherent byproduct of the fuel itself.
On the other hand, fusion doesn't use "stuff" that inherently involves bad half lives. Don't want a fusion reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well then don't build the reactor out of it.
... solar panels ...
Ah I see it was all just astroturfing or something.
Of course the Current version of Linux or BSD is probably more "bloated" then the last version of Multics.
Sure, trade in a 40 year old operating system for two 20s, just because its a little bloated after giving you the best years of its life... Does this tty driver make my kernel look fat?
Only recently has there been any concern whatsoever given to securing the thousands of SCADA [wikipedia.org] links that monitor and control our electrical grid.
Not really. There has always been an attempt at fail safe, because they've never ever, been 100% reliable... Operators have plenty of experience with "natural" failures, human error, bad designs, bad installs (now is phase 1 voltmeter really wired to phase 1 or perhaps to phase 2?).
Only recently has there been scaremongering about it to get bailout money, yes.
Suppose someone holds the nation's power grid hostage and then wants payment?
Same thing they did to Enron, nothing and/or get a cut of the profit?
no external access points
No such thing as a network with no external access points. Think about it. If you were able to "get in there" to install, configure and maintain it, someone else can do the same.
the GPL, a widely used (including by the Linux kernel) free software license
Good thing they cleared that up. I never would've known what the GPL is without this explanation.
I wonder if its time to stop referring to the GPL as a "widely used free software license" and refer to it as "THE most widely used software license".
A combination of
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
would seem to indicate "around 180 million LOC in Debian" vs maybe 50 MLOC for windows. Not everything is in Debian (believe it or not) and not everything MS is in Windows, but everything else that is MS licensed probably doesn't add up to more than 3 times the size of windows... Also, some stuff in MS products is BSD licensed and has to be subtracted.
The number of lines of GPL licensed code is probably larger than any other license, free or nonfree...
the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that the plaintiffs is unhurt, because her claimed pain is suspiciously directly proportional to the defendants bank account.
Arrrgh rephrased,
"the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that obviously the plaintiff was unhurt, and remained unhurt until she determined the size of the defendants bank account, at which time she felt like grubbing some money"
If the poster is autistic, disturbed or perhaps already in the court system for other offenses, the mother might decide to leave well alone.
Sorry, but you're profoundly ignorant of how the legal system works. She wants to know if he has any money, if it would be monetarily profitable to sue. Its an investment decision. If he/she is "judgement-proof" or "rich enough", she won't bother. If "mother" can ruin their life simply by filing suit, "mother" will. The justice system is all about money...
Guarantee step #2 after determining identity is deciding how to make the most money.
In a way, its a profoundly stupid tactic for the mother to follow, because either she'll discover theres no point in suing, or the defense will use the fairly obvious argument that the plaintiffs is unhurt, because her claimed pain is suspiciously directly proportional to the defendants bank account. Or, if he/she gets blackmailed, there is now a legal trail showing mother did it. An effective way to win the battle and lose the war.
GoL?
(Conways) Game of Life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life
As an industry, we've tried everything else as the magic bullet, why not a cellular automata based language? Draw yer turning machine and off you go...
A disciplined cartel that cooperates in restricting production could keep prices high, but the OPEC members make more money individually by defecting and producing over their quota.
Until they reach peak oil production, and can no longer produce at their quota anymore. Then the cartel falls apart because its not needed by at least some of the producers.
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Neither Sirius nor XM could merge while spinning off one of their satellite radio operations into a new company, to maintain a "semi-free market" or a "free-er market".
It would be trivial to sell off mysql. Heck, give it away. Sell it to the FSF for $1?
USA research on coal to liquids is so good that the world leader in the field is Sasol : a South African company.
Don't forget the apartheid embargo... That was very motivational for them.
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
Most of the OPEC countries are in a demographic crisis, six kids per family and no economy other than the government distributing oil sales money. So when the income from oil drops, utter chaos.
Now, for a concrete example, consider Saudi Arabia, which will have a revolution after peak. They've been in permanent production decline since 05 or 07 depending on which numbers you believe. You can tell them the truth, in which case there's a bloody revolution next week and they completely shut off the taps. Alternatively you can lie or market or business as usual or corruption or whatever its called, in which case the taps stay open and you get maybe 90% of what they pumped last year.
So, tell the truth and your pals in the friendly govt get beheaded and you get no oil. Or, lie and you get some fraction of peak oil production and your pals in the friendly govt remain in power. From our point of view, somethings better than nothing. From their point of view, staying in power is better than being beheaded.
Of course eventually the truth is a little too hard to hide. That is right about now, plus or minus some.
I have trouble believing that people wouldn't at least hear it, even if it popped, as the estimate says, at 121,000 feet.
That is 24 miles away, vertically, through "atmosphere" that qualifies as a pretty decent vacuum.
why give up that hard-earned precision in your result?
Because he doesn't know your height above sea level, other than its within -500 feet or so, to about 29000 feet or so?
"The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 8980 meters = 29500 ft"
Assuming it blew up directly over your head, that would really suck if you just climbed to the top of Mt Everest at 29029 and the final detonation was a mere 471 feet over your head.
On the other hand, my house at around 900 feet ASL would be about 6 miles away from the final explosion.
Folks in Denver "mile high city", being about 1/6 closer than my house, would probably have more than 1/6 more damage than my house would get, probably the untrained eye would be able to see the difference.
Just want to add... Don't let them pick the tile. They probably get this request frequently enough that they have a "show" tile or two if they are a shoddy organization.
If you pull this stunt, please understand that a techs hidden stockpile of magazines and canned soda does not necessarily indicate a shoddy organization, it merely means they have employees that like reading certain magazines for the interviews, and prefer to store their drinks in a nice clean spot underneath the chiller rather than the proverbially filthy employee refrigerator. On the good side this is a strong indication they don't have an under the floor rodent infestation.
Strangest thing I ever found under the floor was a vast amount of one employees (clean) clothing. He was kind of stuck in the process of moving and needed a temporary place to stash stuff. Apparently no one found it unusual that he was hauling bags of clothing in and out.
Drat, my units were cubic feet, not CCF, of natural gas. That's about 32,108 CCF.
Divided by 8000 or so residents, the fuel to melt approaches 4 CCF per resident. I googled around and a CCF goes for about a buck, at least as an order of magnitude. So it'll cost about $4/resident to melt a snowfall.
I pay about $200 per month to heat my hovel for four people, about $1.6 per person per day. So, each snow storm would be equivalent to about two days heating. Of course, if the outside of the dome were above freezing, that would imply the inside would be above freezing. And my $200/month was January when it was below freezing, 24x7. So, my heating bill would be considerably less.
Then you amortize the cost of my $1K snowblower that will probably only last a decade, that is very simplistically $100/yr. Plus the cost of snowplows for the road, wild guess about the same cost. Plus all the medical costs related to "slipped on the ice/snow". Plus the cost of the salt for my driveway, which destroys the road surface, eventually. Add in some taxable economic activity, this being the only "walk around in shirtsleeves outside" for miles around.
Note that you don't really need to melt it all, you just need to keep the surface melted as it slides to the ground in an immense pile, so it'll be much cheaper.
I think the dome will be way cheaper. Or, alternatively, they'll break even financially but spend big bucks on a very nice dome.
Since the disease leads to paralysis then death how safe does it have to be to be effective? If the cure kills 5% of the people that take it I would think that will be less than the 10 year delay in getting a "perfect" cure out of the lab and through FDA testing.
Unfortunately, if you give that treatment to everyone, after 5% die, you'll have no one left to experiment on to find an even newer cure that kills no one. Or even worse, you'll find out that half the dosage of the same stuff, cures them just as well without killing anyone at all.
Also the hypothesis is always that its a cure, because that is better for research grants. Of course, if you give it to everyone in an uncontrolled manner, if it doesn't work, which would not be entirely surprising, then ten years later when 100% die, you have to start all over again, except you've wasted ten years.
And then too, bad money always pushes out good money if the purchasers are ignorant, and all customers of medical treatment are ignorant, so no free medical market can exist, so.... A scammer could make a lot of dough, for awhile, by pushing something that doesn't work but is marketed well, look at the supplement and diet industries for example. So you need a system that prevents intentional failures from being marketed, otherwise we'd end up with only scams, because dreaming up scams is cheaper than real research. So to save everyone else from some totally different scam, we have to prove this real treatment isn't a scam, even if it takes awhile. And its only fair, since if we didn't prevent other scams in the past, this guy would never have gotten research money to find a real treatment, since it would have been more profitable to invest in a scam.
Thus the policy of careful testing, in the long run, is more humane, even if in the short run it looks bad.
I don't see how you can have a sense of acceleration. Perhaps change of acceleration....but acceleration? Categorically NO.
We orbit the sun, but i wager you have no sense of angular acceleration about the sun.
Substitute the word velocity for acceleration throughout your entire post, then you are correct.
Um... We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without bombs attached.
We do have fully automated drones flying around, both with and without pilots attached...
You'd be surprised what a good autopilot can do. Did you know the space shuttle, using 70s tech, lands itself, with the only human interaction being pushing the landing gear doors? No kidding hands completely off from orbit to runway using 40 year old tech?
Okay, so let's say I want to work for zero wages to give your country free drugs. They're free. I'll refine and ship them to your citizens for free. Do you want to enact a tariff on them or would you be better off accepting them?
"the first hit is always free". Perhaps you meant legal drugs... Or isn't that also the business model of Doctors samples?
We have manufacturing plants that adhere to strict environmental standards, offer their employees good jobs with benefits and have lower prices to boot, yet are being turned down contracts they would normally receive due to protectionist requirements put in place by the US gov't.
1st answer - Corruption has and always will exist, but it says a lot more about the human condition in general than it does about the individual tools used in that corruption. Just your bad luck the wrong corporation donated to Obama or some congressmen or whatever. Better luck next election? Bribery in our elections result in un-free markets, regardless of using tariffs or not.
2nd answer - Misuse of one individual tool does not mean the entire class of that tool is inherently evil. Insert gun control argument here.
I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. What you describe is exactly the opposite: a coercive, authoritarian market.
If you have protectionist tariffs then your market is neither free nor libertarian. If these tariffs were in fact "critical economically" then free, libertarian markets would be a contradiction. Fortunately, they're not.
Oh, I agree with you completely, tariffs ALONE would result in a coercive authoritarian market.
But we already have a coercive authoritarian market because of a seemingly infinite collection of government social engineering regulations.
At least some of the time, one simple tariff can cancel out the distorting effects of hundreds of govt social engineering regulations, leaving an almost free market. Thats why they are critical economically, not subtracting out the cost of regulations via tariffs is like not subtracting expenses from incomes to get profit, or something truly basic like that.
Example, using political prisoners is free for the Chinese, giving them a $10 unfair advantage over free Americans. No free market can exist. Adding a $10 tariff results in something almost like a free market.
Tariffs and government regulation must be balanced, they algebraically cancel each other, like yin and yang or whatever.
First, "predatory" is a loaded adjective, and is meaningless in terms of economic activity. Is it "predatory" for people in one country to work for lower wages than the people in another country? Because that's the kind of "predatory" situation that is stopped by tariffs.
Yes, when the wage difference is due to social engineering governmental policies. Tariffs balance those differences out, thus creating a free(-er) market.
So, there is little need for US and German automakers to put tariffs on each other, because those governments are approximately, more or less equal. (I am sorry if I just insulted the entire German slashdot readership, my defense is its true, at least relative to my other example)
However, everything that China exports to the USA desperately needs USA import tariffs because the Chinese government actively encourages activities that the US government wisely will not permit USA companies to use, such as slave labor, no environmental controls at all, no worker safety regulations, limited/no health care (admittedly somewhat applies to USA), no product liability, no IP laws at all, industrial espionage is permitted (if not encouraged), etc.
Can't have a free market, when the players aren't equally free (or at least brought to mostly the same level by tariffs)
Most libertarians, are, in reality, nothing more than Cornucopians.
Naah, the Venn diagram has alot of overlap, look at lines from the wikipedia like "The extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge."
The difference between them is that cornucopians think that "ability to create new knowledge" is some inherent free good that always exists, even if a the culture turns against folks with knowledge, etc. On the other hand the libertarians think that everyone in society can play a free market because everyone in the society has the "ability to create new knowledge", even if by definition half the citizens are below the median of intelligence...
So the Cornucopians think new knowledge is our unavoidable destiny even if we culturally detest it (make fun of nerds, promote jock culture, etc), but the Libertarians think new knowledge is an unavoidable byproduct of all of us playing the free market because we are all intelligent enough to play the market, ignoring that half of us (if not more) are idiots whom can barely shop at the market on a good day, much less "create new knowledge".
"Effect without Cause" is not the same as "Ignore the morons".