I wish your post was true, but unfortunately it's only a half-truth. The institutional spending done by the DoD may be trending downward, but the operational spending done by the DoD is astronomical.
Actually, Defense spending is one of the few pieces of government spending which has been trending downward. It picked up again after 9/11, but is still near historical lows. The outrage over the amount of military spending made sense back in the 1960s - if we were at Vietnam War-era spending levels today, the Defense budget would be around $1.2 trillion instead of only $660 billion. Our modern levels of defense spending are only slightly above the world's average if you factor in Japan's GDP (we are obligated by the peace treaty ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense - a treaty I agree is long overdue for renegotiation). People keep dragging it up sometimes not adjusting for inflation, and sometimes adjusting for inflation but not for economic and population growth. If you compare defense spending as a percentage of GDP, it was on a clear downward trend prior to 9/11 unlike just about every other part of the budget.
It's the social programs (primarily Medicare/Medicaid) which are ballooning out of control and busting the budget. Those are the sacred cows we need to sacrifice (or at least pass some common sense reforms) if we want to get the budget under control.
And another stat I'm sure will throw people here for a loop. It was actually George W. Bush who increased non-DoD science spending the most of modern Presidents (though merely restoring it to 1980s levels as % of GDP).
As opposed to when cigarettes were illegal? Except they weren't. In your theory, the higher the taxes, the lower the smoking, but this is just another form of punishment. Empirically, if your theory were correct, European countries with high taxes on cigarettes would have low smoking rates, and yet they don't.
I did some googling on this after reading your post and this was the first hit (PDF warning). Figure 1 shows a pretty clear inverse correlation between tax rate and cigarette consumption. Other studies say the same thing. I think your error may be in that you're comparing smoking rates between countries - countries which undoubtedly have different social views of smoking. So their smoking rates are inherently different for reasons other than tax rate. Most of the studies I found which saw no decrease in smoking rates from increased taxes only found this to be the case for older smokers who already had a habit. The higher taxes were successful at deterring younger people from starting to smoke, thus lowering the overall smoking rate.
It's a fallacy to think that 100% of a tax gets passed down. If that were true, in 1946, when the top tax rate was 94%, then the government would have gotten around 94% of the money. And yet, it only got 20% of GDP or so. Check it out, these figures are easily available on the web.
It took me a while to figure out what you were trying to say because it didn't make sense. You're conflating a percentage with the amount that's passed down. OP's claim was that when the top tax rate was 94%, then only 94% of the income of top taxpayers would be passed down as extra expenses for everyone else. This works out to a lot less money than 94% of GDP. If the 94% rate applied to (say) just the top 1% of income earners who earned (say) 10% of the country's income, then their taxes would amount to just 9.4% of GDP.
Just because Amazon did the wrong thing doesn't mean Texas is "asking for a handout."
But Amazon didn't do anything which was wrong at the time. The court just now decided that what Amazon was doing was the wrong thing. I don't see how anyone should be liable for past actions based on ambiguities in law which a court has just now clarified. If you make that the precedent, everything is going to go to hell as everyone will have to act in accordance with the most strict and most disadvantageous interpretation of the law just so they aren't retroactively found liable for violating it in the future.
What should have happened was that when Texas filed the case in court, they should've asked the court to require Amazon to begin collecting sales taxes from Texans immediately, placing the funds into an escrow account. If the court decided in Texas' favor, the money could be given to Texas. If the court decided in Amazon's favor, they could refund the money to their Texas customers. Since Texas failed to do this, I can't agree with forcing Amazon to pay.
Now, they can certainly choose to pull out of Texas in order to avoid having to collect taxes there, that's within their rights. But they still owe the State of Texas $269 million (plus whatever other sales they make before they finish the pullout), because they were supposed to be collecting that money from their customers who live in Texas for the entire time they've had a presence there.
Actually, in cases like this I don't think any liability should start accruing until the matter has been decided in court. Otherwise, you get ridiculous situations like the folks in New Haven, CT who had their homes taken away via eminent domain after fighting it for ~5 years. After they lost, the city promptly billed them for 6 years back-rent, on the premise that the city retroactively became the legal owner of the properties as of 5 years ago.
Because the law wasn't clear, more than likely Amazon didn't collect any sales tax from Texans on purchases during the time this was being contested, so there is no tax money paid by Texans for Amazon to turn over to the state. If you want to insist Amazon pay, what really should've happened was that Texas should've asked the court to require that Amazon immediately begin collecting sales taxes from Texans, and put the money into an escrow account. If the decision went in Texas' favor, the money in the escrow account could be given to Texas. If the decision went in Amazon's favor, they could refund the money to their Texas customers who paid it.
The only way for sales tax to be close to "flat" is if you charged it on the purchase of financial instruments like stock.
That would defeat the original purpose of sales taxes though - to encourage people to save/invest their money for the future instead of spend it on transitory and consumable goods. You can't really have the government giving bonuses to people who save/invest to encourage it, so instead you have them tax spending to discourage that.
If you want to charge wealthy people more taxes, do it in the obvious place - income taxes. It would be horrendously inefficient to turn every purchase into something where you have to pull out last year's 1040 showing your income level so you can be charged the proper sales tax rate. The only way sales taxes make sense from an efficiency standpoint is if everyone pays the same amount of sales tax for a particular good. Which just reinforces what I first said - the real purpose of sales taxes is to encourage people to save/invest their money instead of spend it. (Besides which, sales taxes are already skewed in favor of less-wealthy people since necessities like food, clothing, and houses are not subject to sales tax in most places.)
Wasn't there reports on this site that Fox news viewers are the most misinformed
After watching different news stations, I suspect Fox News viewers are more misinformed. However, the "study" which was bandied out in the press "proving" it several years back was hardly proof. It based its conclusions on asking viewers biased questions like "Did the U.S. find WMDs in Iraq?" Of course conservative viewers are going to be more "misinformed" about that. Just like more liberal viewers would be more "misinformed" if the question had been "Has global warming been proven to be man-made?" You're not measuring how misinformed these people were. You're simply measuring the lower threshold of proof they have for theories they tend to favor.
To come up with a bulletproof study on how misinformed news viewers are, you need to be asking them questions which are free from any confirmation bias. Stuff like "the Prime Minister of the U.K. is...?" or "The African nation which recently voted to split is...?" Questions which favor or disfavor one political or social group's viewpoint won't work, and is more indicative of the researchers' bias rather than the viewers'. (Ideally you'd also control for socio-economic factors like education level, available time to watch the news, etc.)
The mainland Chinese really will do anything to win. I've seen it repeatedly with my own eyes. I think it's got something to do with having to deal with the cognitive dissonace of thinking you're the master race, while nursing a massive inferiority complex viz-a-viz the West.
What I find amusing, is their apparently thin skins -- although when it comes to doing all these totally immoral things and losing tons of face, they don't show any shame at all.
It's cultural, and it has nothing to do with thinking they're the master race. It actually applies to nearly all of Asia, not just China, which makes me suspect it's rooted in Confucianism.
In Western culture, business is seen as something outside of regular social circles. It's something necessary to put food on the table, something that has to be done but shouldn't be a high priority in your life. Someone who prioritizes their job over (say) their girlfriend/wife is seen as an insensitive dolt with his priorities screwed up. As such, industrial espionage, while it happens, is generally frowned upon and considered immoral - you're sacrificing a social moral to accomplish a business objective. That just strikes many Westerners as something like running into your burning house to save your computer, while leaving your pet rabbit to die.
In Eastern culture, business is seen as an extension of your regular social circles (others being family and country). Just as you are expected to do whatever it takes to feed your family, and whatever it takes to defend your country, you are also expected to do whatever it takes to help your company. Industrial espionage is not only accepted, it's expected. If your boss asks you to steal another company's or country's secrets and you refuse, expect to get fired, and expect zero sympathy from others. It's part of the reason corruption and bribery are still so rampant in Asian countries. Those people are simply maximizing the potential of their position and social circle, the welfare of others be damned.
You assume that they know that they're doing something immoral and should be ashamed about it, but in that culture it's not considered immoral and the shame would be in refusing to do it. Any Western company doing business with/in China would be well-advised to understand this. The Chinese probably can't believe their luck that Western companies are so stupid to think that they can freely share technology with Chinese companies and expect their ideas not to be stolen/copied because of some Western moral or IP law.
The distinction (problem) isn't street thug vs. white collar. It's with the victims. With a street thug, there's one victim, one person bearing all of the injury. It's really easy to look at that one person, feel the emotional weight of the injury, and decide the perpetrator needs to be punished.. With white collar crime, the injury is distributed over dozens, hundreds, sometimes millions of victims. So even though the sum total of the injury may be much greater than the sum total of the injury caused by the street thug, there is little to no emotional impact. People still see it as "well, that spam only cost me 5 seconds of my life, so no big deal." So the punishments tend to be much less severe.
Guess what? 5 seconds per spam * 10 spams which get past the filters * 100 million recipients works out to 158 man-years of time lost. The sum total of the injury caused by this spammer is actually greater than killing a person. It's just that the injury is distributed instead of concentrated on one place. The average lost productivity to society is the same.
Let me tell you there is absolutely NOTHING easy about characterizing a system mass, spring, damper, damper (yes 2), with not only unknown but variable mass spring dampers even when you know a very rough approximation of what the impact velocity is [,,,]
With so many unknowns it is impossible to characterise a bump of a pothole from any of the other things that may happen. Was that a minor pothole or did the guy just drive over the lane reflector?
I actually know how to do those things, but I don't think they're very relevant to this idea. The key to this idea isn't for your phone to perfectly detect whenever you run over a pothole. The key is combining data from multiple sources and finding locations where they correlate. I'm imagining Google Maps with a bunch of dots which show every location where a phone experienced more than x g's of vertical acceleration rapidly in opposite directions. A slider bar on the side would let you adjust x. You simply slide it up and down until most of the "noise" dots disappear and all you're left with are tight concentrations of dots which would correlate to potholes. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have each phone track its vertical accelerations and assign some mitigating value to its data (e.g. "Hmm, low vertical accelerations, my car must have a super-cushy suspension. My average acceleration is y so make sure you scale my reported values by 1/y.").
Of course, for this to work, the city has to actually fix potholes when they're found. Most cities don't seem to fix them even when you call in to tell them there's a pothole at such-and-such location.
b) Take a 1.5 hour plane flight...where I need to be at the airport 2 hours early, and get dropped off about an hour or so from Seattle city center in traffic, thus making the whole trip take about ~5 hours
Some airports are worse than others. Like LAX, because of the traffic and lines, you should probably get there 1.5 hours early. SEA is actually one of the nicer airports. Very quick and (usually) very short lines. I got there 30 minutes before my flight once (traffic between Vancouver to Seattle), and I was able to get from the parking garage, to check-in, through security, and to my gate with 10 minutes to spare. ONT is a nice airport too. I usually get there 30 minutes before the flight and have no problems. There is no traffic and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes in line. I started flying SEA-ONT instead of SEA-LAX because the extra $40 for a round trip ticket was worth the 3-4 hours saved both ways.
c) Take a train that takes maybe 8-10 hours, costs as much as the airplane ride, but is comfy and relaxing?
I popped in San Francisco to Seattle on Amtrak's website. It takes their train 22h 46m to make that trip. If you figure the train moves at an average 50 mph over the 800 miles, then 16 hours of that trip is spent moving, and 6.75 hours is spent waiting at stations. Say a high-speed train moves at 150 mph. Theoretically it could do the trip in 5.3 hours. But add in 6.75 hours waiting at stations and you're at 12 hours. I suppose they could cut out most of the stops to reduce time wasted at stops, but then you'll be dealing with the same traffic problems as getting to airports since everyone will have to first drive to one of the few stations at which the train will stop.
Kinda like the gelatinous cubes in AD&D would clean up the dungeons. Figure out a way to manufacture aerogel cubes in space. NASA used aerogels to capture cometary particles because the high impact velocity with a solid would obliterate or vaporize the particles. It could turn a small piece of debris into a thousand smaller pieces of debris. An aerogel would decelerate the particle slowly enough that it could be captured intact. You want something like a cube because you want a big cross-sectional area to increase the chance of a collision - a sphere is the least effective design. Just put a bunch of them in known orbits. The smaller debris like paint chips which hits them will be captured within the gel. The bigger debris we already track and can be avoided. After a few decades, either de-orbit them, or just leave them up there since each should be big enough for us to track.
Nuclear already has a healthy share of the DOE's development budget
This meme (along with the one about fossil fuels getting the bulk of energy research dollars) really needs to die. It makes people who are pro-renewables look like extremists who'll bend the statistics any which way to try to make it support their position. Here's the breakdown on DOE funding dollars (pdf warning). Divide it by the amount of electricity generated by source to get our return on investment:
Over 10 years (FY1998-FY2007):
Renewables: $3.94 billion R&D, 10.5% of nation's electricity, $375 million per %
Fossil Fuels: $5.36 billion R&D, 69.3% of nation's electricity, $77 million per %
Nuclear: $6.41 billion R&D, 20.3% of nation's electricity, $316 million per %
The 30 and 60 year funding timespans probably don't favor nuclear as much, but I can't find cumulative power generation figures for 30 or 60 years, and don't think comparing those cumulative funding totals to a snapshot of today's power generation is really fair. Also, the bulk of "renewable" electrical generation is hydro, which gets very little R&D funding. So the $dollars of funding for wind and solar are in reality about 3x higher than what's spent on nuclear per MWh of electricity generated, and over an order of magnitude higher than what's spent on fossil fuels per MWh.
I am all for research on renewables. But we need to stop trying to make it sound like they're cost-competitive, or underfunded compared to nuclear and fossil fuels. They are vastly overfunded compared to those two relative to the power the ROI they've given in terms of power generation. But that's ok because it's normal for a new technology. You invest in new technologies not because they're initially cheaper than your current technologies, but because because they will (hopefully) become cheaper than current technologies in the long-term.
A 1Gw wind farm with a wind generator shutdown produces almost full capacity minus the non-functioning generators. [...] Before some one talks about "Only Nuclear can do base load", base load is a function of the entire grid not any one energy source.
Actually, time-averaged generation among currently operational wind farms is about 18%-25% peak capacity. For example, Altamont Pass Wind Farm is capable of 576 MW peak capacity, but produces an average of only 125 MW (21.7%). So to produce 1 GW of base load capability from wind for your entire grid will require roughly 4-5 GW of peak capacity. And you still need to hedge your bets that the wind won't simultaneously slow down across a large section of the country. Base load is more about being able to generate power on demand, not on average.
Nuclear occupies the mining space as well as the reactor space in land so they are probably about even there.
Horse Hollow is supposed to have (if I did my math right) 735.5 MW peak capacity covering 190 km^2. So that's about 3.9 MW per km^2 peak, or (going with 25% average) 0.97 MW per km^2 average. Roscoe Wind Farm is supposed to be 781.5 MW peak on 400 km^2, which works out to 0.49 MW per km^2. Call it 0.5-1 MW per km^2.
U.S. nuclear plants generate roughly 800,000 GWh per year, which works out to an average of 91 GW. We burn about 2000 tons of uranium per year (without reprocessing) to generate this power. For uranium mines to have the same footprint as wind (0.5-1 MW per km^2), there would need to be 91,000-180,000 km^2 of uranium mines to yield just 2000 tons of ore, or 45-90 km^2 per ton. I serious
The licence key that came with your PC is still valid, so if you've got a friend with a Win7 DVD, copy it and use the key. Edit / remove ei.cfg to choose the correct version for your CD key and you're golden.
Actually, Microsoft makes the Windows 7 DVD images available for download as part of Technet. Burn it to a DVD (or mount it with VMWare/VirtualBox) and you're good to go. You still need a valid key to activate though.
Also, I have to ask why you're buying a branded machine anyway when you can get more power and a longer lasting machine for less money. I guess you have to with a laptop form factor, but that's really the only reason to not just pick up the parts and put the damned thing together yourself.
Despite the bad rap Sony gets here, I rather like their solution to the problem. The Sony laptop I staged a few months ago shipped with the crapware installed. But the Restore DVD gives you two options - a total restore (Windows + drivers + crapware), or a minimal restore (Windows + drivers) with an option to pick and choose which extra apps to install. I did the minimal restore first thing after getting the laptop, and it yielded a clean fully functional system with all drivers working, and no crapware. Seems not everyone at Sony is evil.
People who have opted to send information to microsoft used google (and various other search engines) to search for something. The Bing toolbar, or whatever was collecting the information, noted that person X searched for term Y, and eventually ended up at page Z. It makes perfect sense to connect Y and Z, regardless of the search engine used, or even if they asked a friend to point them to a page about the subject.
That's a weak argument. It's like that story about Alison Chang and Virgin Mobile. Just because the person who took her picture gave a free license to use those photos, doesn't mean you automatically get the permission of the people in the picture. Likewise, just because people opted into using the Bing toolbar doesn't mean that all the info it collects is free for Microsoft to use. If that reasoning worked, I could ask my friend for permission to videotape everything he does for a day, follow him into a movie theater, record the movie, and when the MPAA sues I could just claim I was recording my friend's activities, not the movie. When Microsoft saw the Bing toolbar returning results from google.com, they should've been smart enough to think "This is a competitor's site. It would be downright unethical to copy results from it, if not outright plagiarism and illegal."
So now, not only do sellers need to give (most) of the money to publishers, they now have to give another 30% to Apple. Since I know at least Amazon sells really close to their own cost (or even less, in some cases), this would mean Amazon either needs to take a loss on eBooks sold on Apple's platform, or else raise prices.
Is there any reason Amazon can't just sell the ebooks for 30% more in Apple's store than in its own? Unless Amazon signed some binding contract, I think any judge would laugh Apple out of the courtroom for trying to make Amazon sell ebooks in Apple's store at a loss, or trying to make Amazon raise prices in its own store to subsidize sales in Apple's store.
Also, why are publishers still getting most of the money for ebook sales? There's nothing to publish. You still need an editor and a marketer, but there's no text to lay out, no pages to print, no bindings to make, and no boxes of books to distribute. Previously, publishing was controlled by a few companies who subsequently raised prices to where they were taking an exorbitant slice of the pie. But with the Internet, ebooks, and electronic publishing, you could do it all yourself if you wanted. This is a shakeup to the industry's business model which has long been needed.
It does sound like something very logical to do to improve search results, doesn't it?
It improves search results, but it doesn't improve your search results. All it's doing is making the search results more Google-like. If Google's search results are better than yours, then yes your search results will appear to become better. But that's because they're becoming more Google-like, not because they're becoming better. If Google had worse search results, then it would make your search results appear to become worse. Important distinction.
e.g. Say you're trying to weigh an object which weighs T kg (T for truth). You try to make your own scale and it comes up with a certain weight (call it B). But it isn't as accurate as the best scale on the market, which returns a slightly different value (call it G, and |T-G| is less than |T-B| ). As it happens the best scale on the market is free to use. So you just set up your scale to report a weight of B' = (0.5*G+0.5*B) instead of B. B' is only closer to T than B when G is more accurate than B. If the opposite is true, then B' is actually less accurate than B.
So across all possible vales of T, G, and B, your B' is going to be no more and no less accurate than B. So it's not an improved measuring engine. It's just relying on the fact that G is more accurate than B to come up with a more accurate measurement. If you extend the logic fully, B' would come closest to T when B' = (1*G +0*B). That is, when you completely discount your own measurement and just copy the G measurement. So no it's not a very logical thing to do to improve your search results. Essentially, (1) you're telling people to just use Google, and (2) you're sticking your own ads onto Google's results.
Also, apparently the new/. design breaks when it encounters less-than and greater-than signs.
The only reason they aren't used in place of trucks for cargo completely is their inflexibility. They are largely point-to-point transit. You can't have crisscrossing rails and lots of intersections for them to turn on and choose where they want to go.
That's only partially true. Most of the world uses trains the move cargo between metropolitan areas, then uses trucks to get the cargo to its final destination within the metro area. This makes the most economic sense.
The U.S. uses trucks to move most of its cargo between metro areas because trucks are being subsidized by passenger vehicles. The higher loading weight of trucks causes most of the damage to our highways (this is why the right-most two lanes of the road are almost always in much worse shape, even though they are built with more reinforcement). A civil engineering highway report I read estimated about 90% of the damage to our roads is caused by trucks. Yet revenue from fuel taxes are split about 50/50 between cars and trucks.
We could save a ton of money and burn a lot less fuel by shifting most of our long-haul cargo transport back to trains. But this won't happen because 50+ years of highways has led to a huge trucking fleet with a considerable number of people/voters employed in the industry, and lobbying clout to resist that change ("think of the jobs!"). Because we've let our rail system atrophy, switching long-haul transport to rail now involves a short-term increase in prices due to the need for new rail construction. And because government and the environmental movement is in love with gasoline taxes and won't stand for any change which would actually cause a decrease in the necessary amount of taxes. Don't get me wrong, the Interstate Highway System has done a lot to help this country, but this is one of the areas where it didn't work out so well.
AAPL dipped below it's IPO price in 2003, so yes it's the same time period. But this was shortly after Jobs had taken over from a decidedly lackluster previous CEO, they'd screwed over companies which were making Mac compatibles, and Apple was obsessed with the color of the plastic on their computers. It's an unfair comparison in that it's taking the stock price of a company that was neutral in 2003 to present, and comparing it to a company that was on its way down in 2003 to present.
The current price of AAPL is totally out of whack with market norms as well. The earnings and revenue simply do not support Apple's current market valuation. Apple does not pay dividends so their huge profit margins you hear about does not (or rather, should not) reflect on the stock price. Not one cent of that profit makes it to the shareholders. The value of AAPL is entirely based on how much people are betting the company will expand in the future.
AAPL's rise from 2003-2007 was mostly attributable to the success of the iPod, and was within what I'd consider "reasonable" valuations most of that time. But since then people have gone crazy bidding up the price for seemingly no reason than feeling that Apple can do no wrong. It's like the 1995-1998 tech bubble and 2003-2006 housing bubble all over again, in one stock. In fact the GP's attitude of "Why should I listen to you? Look at how much my stock has risen. You're pathetic in comparison," reminds me of a lot of the people pushing tech stocks in 1998 and houses in 2006.
I was watching cartoons on the local CBS/NBC affiliate. Then they cut in with the shuttle launch. KABOOM.
An interesting aside to this: The launch wasn't broadcast live on the major networks. It was live pretty much only on CNN, and CNN was only carrying it live because it had the world's first schoolteacher/astronaut aboard.
Back when the space shuttle was envisioned, NASA was projecting weekly shuttle launches. That's why the cost of it is so exorbitant compared to other launch vehicles - it was designed assuming large capital expenditures like the assembly facility and maintenance labor pool would be amortized over 50 shuttle flights a year, not the 4-5 average that became the reality (indeed, that's why they wanted a reusable vehicle - because throwing away most of your vehicle 50 times a year would have been an unconscionable waste of money). They wanted to make launches so routine we could think of the shuttle as a space truck.
While the fiscal reality of that dream never materialized, the PR reality of it did. Even at 4-5 flights a year, the launches became so common and routine that public interest waned, and the major networks all decided to drop them from their live broadcasts. CNN eventually followed suit as well (this was before most cable stations carried NASA TV), only broadcasting launch video on news recaps and the nightly news. This particular Challenger launch was broadcast live only because the first schoolteacher in space was going to be aboard, and a lot of schools were planning on letting the kids watch it. CNN, perhaps sensing both a chance to be a good citizen and a publicity opportunity (the major networks had announced they weren't going to pre-empt regular programming for it), decided to carry it live for them.
A gallon of gas is equivalent to ~34kWh of electricity. At the relatively cheap rate of 10 cents per kWh, that means $3.40 in electricity costs to replace a gallon of gas. Plugging in seems to have no price advantage over filling up, and has the extra problems of range and charge time.
The difference is in energy conversion efficiency. An internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient. Add in mechanical losses and gasoline refining/transport costs and you're at about 15% of the energy from the oil that comes out of the ground to drive the wheels of your car.
Electricity has about 40% efficiency from a coal plant (higher for nuclear and renewables), 95% transmission efficiency to a person's house, and about 80% for battery conversion and electric motor efficiency. So overall about 30% of the energy from the coal drives the wheels of your car. Roughly twice as efficient as an ICE. Also note that the price you pay per kWh already takes into account the losses from the first two steps. So on a $ per mile basis, electric is about 5x cheaper than an ICE, assuming $3.40/gal gas.
The same reason is why hydrogen generated from electrolysis is a dead end as a fuel. You're talking about 40% efficiency from coal plant to electricity, and (optimistically) 65% efficiency from electrolysis, then 70% for a hydrogen fuel cell, and 95% electric motor efficiency. Overall you're at 17% of the coal's energy driving your car's wheels, which is pretty much the same as existing ICE vehicles. Factor in the storage and transport problems along with lack of infrastructure, and hydrogen is worse than oil. It only becomes viable if we can get nuclear or renewables to generate most of our electricity, and realistically, only nuclear has a chance of that in the next 20+ years.
(DIsclaimer: All numbers are ballpark what I remember off the top of my head. They may not be exact.)
Slashdot Mirror
Pic in visible light so you can see why it's called the North America Nebula.
The $660 billion I quoted included Overseas Contingency Operations (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Total baseline DoD funding in FY2010 was $534 billion, OCO was $130 billion, for a total $664 billion.
Actually, Defense spending is one of the few pieces of government spending which has been trending downward. It picked up again after 9/11, but is still near historical lows. The outrage over the amount of military spending made sense back in the 1960s - if we were at Vietnam War-era spending levels today, the Defense budget would be around $1.2 trillion instead of only $660 billion. Our modern levels of defense spending are only slightly above the world's average if you factor in Japan's GDP (we are obligated by the peace treaty ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense - a treaty I agree is long overdue for renegotiation). People keep dragging it up sometimes not adjusting for inflation, and sometimes adjusting for inflation but not for economic and population growth. If you compare defense spending as a percentage of GDP, it was on a clear downward trend prior to 9/11 unlike just about every other part of the budget.
It's the social programs (primarily Medicare/Medicaid) which are ballooning out of control and busting the budget. Those are the sacred cows we need to sacrifice (or at least pass some common sense reforms) if we want to get the budget under control.
And another stat I'm sure will throw people here for a loop. It was actually George W. Bush who increased non-DoD science spending the most of modern Presidents (though merely restoring it to 1980s levels as % of GDP).
I did some googling on this after reading your post and this was the first hit (PDF warning). Figure 1 shows a pretty clear inverse correlation between tax rate and cigarette consumption. Other studies say the same thing. I think your error may be in that you're comparing smoking rates between countries - countries which undoubtedly have different social views of smoking. So their smoking rates are inherently different for reasons other than tax rate. Most of the studies I found which saw no decrease in smoking rates from increased taxes only found this to be the case for older smokers who already had a habit. The higher taxes were successful at deterring younger people from starting to smoke, thus lowering the overall smoking rate.
It took me a while to figure out what you were trying to say because it didn't make sense. You're conflating a percentage with the amount that's passed down. OP's claim was that when the top tax rate was 94%, then only 94% of the income of top taxpayers would be passed down as extra expenses for everyone else. This works out to a lot less money than 94% of GDP. If the 94% rate applied to (say) just the top 1% of income earners who earned (say) 10% of the country's income, then their taxes would amount to just 9.4% of GDP.
But Amazon didn't do anything which was wrong at the time. The court just now decided that what Amazon was doing was the wrong thing. I don't see how anyone should be liable for past actions based on ambiguities in law which a court has just now clarified. If you make that the precedent, everything is going to go to hell as everyone will have to act in accordance with the most strict and most disadvantageous interpretation of the law just so they aren't retroactively found liable for violating it in the future.
What should have happened was that when Texas filed the case in court, they should've asked the court to require Amazon to begin collecting sales taxes from Texans immediately, placing the funds into an escrow account. If the court decided in Texas' favor, the money could be given to Texas. If the court decided in Amazon's favor, they could refund the money to their Texas customers. Since Texas failed to do this, I can't agree with forcing Amazon to pay.
Actually, in cases like this I don't think any liability should start accruing until the matter has been decided in court. Otherwise, you get ridiculous situations like the folks in New Haven, CT who had their homes taken away via eminent domain after fighting it for ~5 years. After they lost, the city promptly billed them for 6 years back-rent, on the premise that the city retroactively became the legal owner of the properties as of 5 years ago.
Because the law wasn't clear, more than likely Amazon didn't collect any sales tax from Texans on purchases during the time this was being contested, so there is no tax money paid by Texans for Amazon to turn over to the state. If you want to insist Amazon pay, what really should've happened was that Texas should've asked the court to require that Amazon immediately begin collecting sales taxes from Texans, and put the money into an escrow account. If the decision went in Texas' favor, the money in the escrow account could be given to Texas. If the decision went in Amazon's favor, they could refund the money to their Texas customers who paid it.
That would defeat the original purpose of sales taxes though - to encourage people to save/invest their money for the future instead of spend it on transitory and consumable goods. You can't really have the government giving bonuses to people who save/invest to encourage it, so instead you have them tax spending to discourage that.
If you want to charge wealthy people more taxes, do it in the obvious place - income taxes. It would be horrendously inefficient to turn every purchase into something where you have to pull out last year's 1040 showing your income level so you can be charged the proper sales tax rate. The only way sales taxes make sense from an efficiency standpoint is if everyone pays the same amount of sales tax for a particular good. Which just reinforces what I first said - the real purpose of sales taxes is to encourage people to save/invest their money instead of spend it. (Besides which, sales taxes are already skewed in favor of less-wealthy people since necessities like food, clothing, and houses are not subject to sales tax in most places.)
After watching different news stations, I suspect Fox News viewers are more misinformed. However, the "study" which was bandied out in the press "proving" it several years back was hardly proof. It based its conclusions on asking viewers biased questions like "Did the U.S. find WMDs in Iraq?" Of course conservative viewers are going to be more "misinformed" about that. Just like more liberal viewers would be more "misinformed" if the question had been "Has global warming been proven to be man-made?" You're not measuring how misinformed these people were. You're simply measuring the lower threshold of proof they have for theories they tend to favor.
To come up with a bulletproof study on how misinformed news viewers are, you need to be asking them questions which are free from any confirmation bias. Stuff like "the Prime Minister of the U.K. is...?" or "The African nation which recently voted to split is...?" Questions which favor or disfavor one political or social group's viewpoint won't work, and is more indicative of the researchers' bias rather than the viewers'. (Ideally you'd also control for socio-economic factors like education level, available time to watch the news, etc.)
It's cultural, and it has nothing to do with thinking they're the master race. It actually applies to nearly all of Asia, not just China, which makes me suspect it's rooted in Confucianism.
In Western culture, business is seen as something outside of regular social circles. It's something necessary to put food on the table, something that has to be done but shouldn't be a high priority in your life. Someone who prioritizes their job over (say) their girlfriend/wife is seen as an insensitive dolt with his priorities screwed up. As such, industrial espionage, while it happens, is generally frowned upon and considered immoral - you're sacrificing a social moral to accomplish a business objective. That just strikes many Westerners as something like running into your burning house to save your computer, while leaving your pet rabbit to die.
In Eastern culture, business is seen as an extension of your regular social circles (others being family and country). Just as you are expected to do whatever it takes to feed your family, and whatever it takes to defend your country, you are also expected to do whatever it takes to help your company. Industrial espionage is not only accepted, it's expected. If your boss asks you to steal another company's or country's secrets and you refuse, expect to get fired, and expect zero sympathy from others. It's part of the reason corruption and bribery are still so rampant in Asian countries. Those people are simply maximizing the potential of their position and social circle, the welfare of others be damned.
You assume that they know that they're doing something immoral and should be ashamed about it, but in that culture it's not considered immoral and the shame would be in refusing to do it. Any Western company doing business with/in China would be well-advised to understand this. The Chinese probably can't believe their luck that Western companies are so stupid to think that they can freely share technology with Chinese companies and expect their ideas not to be stolen/copied because of some Western moral or IP law.
The distinction (problem) isn't street thug vs. white collar. It's with the victims. With a street thug, there's one victim, one person bearing all of the injury. It's really easy to look at that one person, feel the emotional weight of the injury, and decide the perpetrator needs to be punished.. With white collar crime, the injury is distributed over dozens, hundreds, sometimes millions of victims. So even though the sum total of the injury may be much greater than the sum total of the injury caused by the street thug, there is little to no emotional impact. People still see it as "well, that spam only cost me 5 seconds of my life, so no big deal." So the punishments tend to be much less severe.
Guess what? 5 seconds per spam * 10 spams which get past the filters * 100 million recipients works out to 158 man-years of time lost. The sum total of the injury caused by this spammer is actually greater than killing a person. It's just that the injury is distributed instead of concentrated on one place. The average lost productivity to society is the same.
I actually know how to do those things, but I don't think they're very relevant to this idea. The key to this idea isn't for your phone to perfectly detect whenever you run over a pothole. The key is combining data from multiple sources and finding locations where they correlate. I'm imagining Google Maps with a bunch of dots which show every location where a phone experienced more than x g's of vertical acceleration rapidly in opposite directions. A slider bar on the side would let you adjust x. You simply slide it up and down until most of the "noise" dots disappear and all you're left with are tight concentrations of dots which would correlate to potholes. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have each phone track its vertical accelerations and assign some mitigating value to its data (e.g. "Hmm, low vertical accelerations, my car must have a super-cushy suspension. My average acceleration is y so make sure you scale my reported values by 1/y.").
Of course, for this to work, the city has to actually fix potholes when they're found. Most cities don't seem to fix them even when you call in to tell them there's a pothole at such-and-such location.
Some airports are worse than others. Like LAX, because of the traffic and lines, you should probably get there 1.5 hours early. SEA is actually one of the nicer airports. Very quick and (usually) very short lines. I got there 30 minutes before my flight once (traffic between Vancouver to Seattle), and I was able to get from the parking garage, to check-in, through security, and to my gate with 10 minutes to spare. ONT is a nice airport too. I usually get there 30 minutes before the flight and have no problems. There is no traffic and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes in line. I started flying SEA-ONT instead of SEA-LAX because the extra $40 for a round trip ticket was worth the 3-4 hours saved both ways.
I popped in San Francisco to Seattle on Amtrak's website. It takes their train 22h 46m to make that trip. If you figure the train moves at an average 50 mph over the 800 miles, then 16 hours of that trip is spent moving, and 6.75 hours is spent waiting at stations. Say a high-speed train moves at 150 mph. Theoretically it could do the trip in 5.3 hours. But add in 6.75 hours waiting at stations and you're at 12 hours. I suppose they could cut out most of the stops to reduce time wasted at stops, but then you'll be dealing with the same traffic problems as getting to airports since everyone will have to first drive to one of the few stations at which the train will stop.
Skip to 0:45 of the video. The live action shots start there. The video ends with a live action outdoor flight.
Kinda like the gelatinous cubes in AD&D would clean up the dungeons. Figure out a way to manufacture aerogel cubes in space. NASA used aerogels to capture cometary particles because the high impact velocity with a solid would obliterate or vaporize the particles. It could turn a small piece of debris into a thousand smaller pieces of debris. An aerogel would decelerate the particle slowly enough that it could be captured intact. You want something like a cube because you want a big cross-sectional area to increase the chance of a collision - a sphere is the least effective design. Just put a bunch of them in known orbits. The smaller debris like paint chips which hits them will be captured within the gel. The bigger debris we already track and can be avoided. After a few decades, either de-orbit them, or just leave them up there since each should be big enough for us to track.
This meme (along with the one about fossil fuels getting the bulk of energy research dollars) really needs to die. It makes people who are pro-renewables look like extremists who'll bend the statistics any which way to try to make it support their position. Here's the breakdown on DOE funding dollars (pdf warning). Divide it by the amount of electricity generated by source to get our return on investment:
Over 10 years (FY1998-FY2007):
Renewables: $3.94 billion R&D, 10.5% of nation's electricity, $375 million per %
Fossil Fuels: $5.36 billion R&D, 69.3% of nation's electricity, $77 million per %
Nuclear: $6.41 billion R&D, 20.3% of nation's electricity, $316 million per %
The 30 and 60 year funding timespans probably don't favor nuclear as much, but I can't find cumulative power generation figures for 30 or 60 years, and don't think comparing those cumulative funding totals to a snapshot of today's power generation is really fair. Also, the bulk of "renewable" electrical generation is hydro, which gets very little R&D funding. So the $dollars of funding for wind and solar are in reality about 3x higher than what's spent on nuclear per MWh of electricity generated, and over an order of magnitude higher than what's spent on fossil fuels per MWh.
I am all for research on renewables. But we need to stop trying to make it sound like they're cost-competitive, or underfunded compared to nuclear and fossil fuels. They are vastly overfunded compared to those two relative to the power the ROI they've given in terms of power generation. But that's ok because it's normal for a new technology. You invest in new technologies not because they're initially cheaper than your current technologies, but because because they will (hopefully) become cheaper than current technologies in the long-term.
Actually, time-averaged generation among currently operational wind farms is about 18%-25% peak capacity. For example, Altamont Pass Wind Farm is capable of 576 MW peak capacity, but produces an average of only 125 MW (21.7%). So to produce 1 GW of base load capability from wind for your entire grid will require roughly 4-5 GW of peak capacity. And you still need to hedge your bets that the wind won't simultaneously slow down across a large section of the country. Base load is more about being able to generate power on demand, not on average.
Horse Hollow is supposed to have (if I did my math right) 735.5 MW peak capacity covering 190 km^2. So that's about 3.9 MW per km^2 peak, or (going with 25% average) 0.97 MW per km^2 average. Roscoe Wind Farm is supposed to be 781.5 MW peak on 400 km^2, which works out to 0.49 MW per km^2. Call it 0.5-1 MW per km^2.
U.S. nuclear plants generate roughly 800,000 GWh per year, which works out to an average of 91 GW. We burn about 2000 tons of uranium per year (without reprocessing) to generate this power. For uranium mines to have the same footprint as wind (0.5-1 MW per km^2), there would need to be 91,000-180,000 km^2 of uranium mines to yield just 2000 tons of ore, or 45-90 km^2 per ton. I serious
Actually, Microsoft makes the Windows 7 DVD images available for download as part of Technet. Burn it to a DVD (or mount it with VMWare/VirtualBox) and you're good to go. You still need a valid key to activate though.
Despite the bad rap Sony gets here, I rather like their solution to the problem. The Sony laptop I staged a few months ago shipped with the crapware installed. But the Restore DVD gives you two options - a total restore (Windows + drivers + crapware), or a minimal restore (Windows + drivers) with an option to pick and choose which extra apps to install. I did the minimal restore first thing after getting the laptop, and it yielded a clean fully functional system with all drivers working, and no crapware. Seems not everyone at Sony is evil.
Reminds me of this Monty Python skit.
That's a weak argument. It's like that story about Alison Chang and Virgin Mobile. Just because the person who took her picture gave a free license to use those photos, doesn't mean you automatically get the permission of the people in the picture. Likewise, just because people opted into using the Bing toolbar doesn't mean that all the info it collects is free for Microsoft to use. If that reasoning worked, I could ask my friend for permission to videotape everything he does for a day, follow him into a movie theater, record the movie, and when the MPAA sues I could just claim I was recording my friend's activities, not the movie. When Microsoft saw the Bing toolbar returning results from google.com, they should've been smart enough to think "This is a competitor's site. It would be downright unethical to copy results from it, if not outright plagiarism and illegal."
Is there any reason Amazon can't just sell the ebooks for 30% more in Apple's store than in its own? Unless Amazon signed some binding contract, I think any judge would laugh Apple out of the courtroom for trying to make Amazon sell ebooks in Apple's store at a loss, or trying to make Amazon raise prices in its own store to subsidize sales in Apple's store.
Also, why are publishers still getting most of the money for ebook sales? There's nothing to publish. You still need an editor and a marketer, but there's no text to lay out, no pages to print, no bindings to make, and no boxes of books to distribute. Previously, publishing was controlled by a few companies who subsequently raised prices to where they were taking an exorbitant slice of the pie. But with the Internet, ebooks, and electronic publishing, you could do it all yourself if you wanted. This is a shakeup to the industry's business model which has long been needed.
It improves search results, but it doesn't improve your search results. All it's doing is making the search results more Google-like. If Google's search results are better than yours, then yes your search results will appear to become better. But that's because they're becoming more Google-like, not because they're becoming better. If Google had worse search results, then it would make your search results appear to become worse. Important distinction.
/. design breaks when it encounters less-than and greater-than signs.
e.g. Say you're trying to weigh an object which weighs T kg (T for truth). You try to make your own scale and it comes up with a certain weight (call it B). But it isn't as accurate as the best scale on the market, which returns a slightly different value (call it G, and |T-G| is less than |T-B| ). As it happens the best scale on the market is free to use. So you just set up your scale to report a weight of B' = (0.5*G+0.5*B) instead of B. B' is only closer to T than B when G is more accurate than B. If the opposite is true, then B' is actually less accurate than B.
So across all possible vales of T, G, and B, your B' is going to be no more and no less accurate than B. So it's not an improved measuring engine. It's just relying on the fact that G is more accurate than B to come up with a more accurate measurement. If you extend the logic fully, B' would come closest to T when B' = (1*G +0*B). That is, when you completely discount your own measurement and just copy the G measurement. So no it's not a very logical thing to do to improve your search results. Essentially, (1) you're telling people to just use Google, and (2) you're sticking your own ads onto Google's results.
Also, apparently the new
That's only partially true. Most of the world uses trains the move cargo between metropolitan areas, then uses trucks to get the cargo to its final destination within the metro area. This makes the most economic sense.
The U.S. uses trucks to move most of its cargo between metro areas because trucks are being subsidized by passenger vehicles. The higher loading weight of trucks causes most of the damage to our highways (this is why the right-most two lanes of the road are almost always in much worse shape, even though they are built with more reinforcement). A civil engineering highway report I read estimated about 90% of the damage to our roads is caused by trucks. Yet revenue from fuel taxes are split about 50/50 between cars and trucks.
We could save a ton of money and burn a lot less fuel by shifting most of our long-haul cargo transport back to trains. But this won't happen because 50+ years of highways has led to a huge trucking fleet with a considerable number of people/voters employed in the industry, and lobbying clout to resist that change ("think of the jobs!"). Because we've let our rail system atrophy, switching long-haul transport to rail now involves a short-term increase in prices due to the need for new rail construction. And because government and the environmental movement is in love with gasoline taxes and won't stand for any change which would actually cause a decrease in the necessary amount of taxes. Don't get me wrong, the Interstate Highway System has done a lot to help this country, but this is one of the areas where it didn't work out so well.
AAPL dipped below it's IPO price in 2003, so yes it's the same time period. But this was shortly after Jobs had taken over from a decidedly lackluster previous CEO, they'd screwed over companies which were making Mac compatibles, and Apple was obsessed with the color of the plastic on their computers. It's an unfair comparison in that it's taking the stock price of a company that was neutral in 2003 to present, and comparing it to a company that was on its way down in 2003 to present.
The current price of AAPL is totally out of whack with market norms as well. The earnings and revenue simply do not support Apple's current market valuation. Apple does not pay dividends so their huge profit margins you hear about does not (or rather, should not) reflect on the stock price. Not one cent of that profit makes it to the shareholders. The value of AAPL is entirely based on how much people are betting the company will expand in the future.
AAPL's rise from 2003-2007 was mostly attributable to the success of the iPod, and was within what I'd consider "reasonable" valuations most of that time. But since then people have gone crazy bidding up the price for seemingly no reason than feeling that Apple can do no wrong. It's like the 1995-1998 tech bubble and 2003-2006 housing bubble all over again, in one stock. In fact the GP's attitude of "Why should I listen to you? Look at how much my stock has risen. You're pathetic in comparison," reminds me of a lot of the people pushing tech stocks in 1998 and houses in 2006.
An interesting aside to this: The launch wasn't broadcast live on the major networks. It was live pretty much only on CNN, and CNN was only carrying it live because it had the world's first schoolteacher/astronaut aboard.
Back when the space shuttle was envisioned, NASA was projecting weekly shuttle launches. That's why the cost of it is so exorbitant compared to other launch vehicles - it was designed assuming large capital expenditures like the assembly facility and maintenance labor pool would be amortized over 50 shuttle flights a year, not the 4-5 average that became the reality (indeed, that's why they wanted a reusable vehicle - because throwing away most of your vehicle 50 times a year would have been an unconscionable waste of money). They wanted to make launches so routine we could think of the shuttle as a space truck.
While the fiscal reality of that dream never materialized, the PR reality of it did. Even at 4-5 flights a year, the launches became so common and routine that public interest waned, and the major networks all decided to drop them from their live broadcasts. CNN eventually followed suit as well (this was before most cable stations carried NASA TV), only broadcasting launch video on news recaps and the nightly news. This particular Challenger launch was broadcast live only because the first schoolteacher in space was going to be aboard, and a lot of schools were planning on letting the kids watch it. CNN, perhaps sensing both a chance to be a good citizen and a publicity opportunity (the major networks had announced they weren't going to pre-empt regular programming for it), decided to carry it live for them.
I'm sure he has some buddies in Nigeria who can loan him the money.
The difference is in energy conversion efficiency. An internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient. Add in mechanical losses and gasoline refining/transport costs and you're at about 15% of the energy from the oil that comes out of the ground to drive the wheels of your car.
Electricity has about 40% efficiency from a coal plant (higher for nuclear and renewables), 95% transmission efficiency to a person's house, and about 80% for battery conversion and electric motor efficiency. So overall about 30% of the energy from the coal drives the wheels of your car. Roughly twice as efficient as an ICE. Also note that the price you pay per kWh already takes into account the losses from the first two steps. So on a $ per mile basis, electric is about 5x cheaper than an ICE, assuming $3.40/gal gas.
The same reason is why hydrogen generated from electrolysis is a dead end as a fuel. You're talking about 40% efficiency from coal plant to electricity, and (optimistically) 65% efficiency from electrolysis, then 70% for a hydrogen fuel cell, and 95% electric motor efficiency. Overall you're at 17% of the coal's energy driving your car's wheels, which is pretty much the same as existing ICE vehicles. Factor in the storage and transport problems along with lack of infrastructure, and hydrogen is worse than oil. It only becomes viable if we can get nuclear or renewables to generate most of our electricity, and realistically, only nuclear has a chance of that in the next 20+ years.
(DIsclaimer: All numbers are ballpark what I remember off the top of my head. They may not be exact.)