Ah... Tomatoes... I _love_ good tomatoes and it's incredibly hard to find them in the US. You can buy "heirloom" tomatoes at farmers markets but they are often not really better than supermarket plasticy varieties. This is understandable - good tomatoes are extremely hard to transport or store for extended periods.
What angers me most, is that we actually used to have wonderful GM tomatoes that were tasty and easily transportable. But no, greeny idiots forced them out of the market.
Even low-end Tesla S60 is way nicer than Bolt - it has nicer handling, better acceleration and range. And the charging infrastructure for Tesla is available right now: https://supercharge.info/
Oh please. I've test-driven Bolt and it's nowhere close to Tesla. It's also purely a city car, you can't use it for road trips. There's no fast charging infrastructure for CCS (Combined Charging System) and even existing few stations are limited to 50kW versus 120kW for the current-gen Tesla superchargers.
With superchargers and some planning you can comfortably drive pretty much to any point of interest in the US - I have more than 50k miles on my 2 year old Tesla just from road trips.
Most people in Beijing don't use coal stoves or heaters. Or are you thinking that Beijing is populated with people living in mud houses and burning coal in open firepits?
2 trillion bad car loans? That's bullshit right here. It's enough to buy 66 million cars at $30000 and that's about 25% of all cars on the road right now.
Oh, and China is selling its US bonds to prop up the ailing RMB right now, they are not buying new US debt.
Most of the pollution in China is from coal powerplants and various industrial plants. They can't really do much about them in the near future even if they are willing to take a hit on the economy growth (which they are not). In more distant future, China is expanding renewable power generation, nuclear power and natural gas power plants.
Cars are not really a big problem in cities right now, most of them have effective emission control systems. But in future they are going to become more significant. Interestingly, electric-powered bikes and scooters are already insanely popular because gas-powered ones are too expensive because of regulations.
TPP is not a trade deal per se - the trade barriers are already low. It's a geopolitical deal to make sure the Pacific Rim countries are not dominated by China in future. TPP does have some nice areas - it requires Pacific countries to establish minimum wage laws, pollution controls and workplace safety regulations in line with other countries.
Unfortunately, copyright lobby is also using as a Trojan horse to smuggle in pro-copyright laws.
And you can bet that China is not sleeping - they are promoting their One-Belt-One-Road initiative to make a China-dominated trade pact.
Amazon is not permatemping. Most of warehouse associates are permanent full-time positions with some growth possibilities. Temps are hired for the peak season to handle the excess demand and are generally scaled back after that.
Beaglebones and RPi are OK - they are hobbyist products and won't be regulated. And an X-ray machines with WiFi are _already_ deeply regulated - there are mandated interlocks to avoid overdosing, for example (see: Therac).
Regulating IoT devices is a GOOD idea. Right now they are an example of a market failure - the huge cloud of insecure devices is created by the same market forces as a huge clouds of polluted air. Securing devices requires vendors to spend money so that vendors who don't care about security can undercut them.
And the solution is the same - impose regulation to make IoT vendors responsible for their security. For example, IoT vendors can create a standardized and replaceable "control module" that only needs to be certified once.
ITER is not a prototype of a commercial fusion reactor. It's more of a plasma physics lab, specifically designed to support various experiments and advance engineering required to build a real reactor.
Lots of ITER advances are as important for stellerators or other approaches as they are for tokamaks: neutral beam injectors (essential for open plasma trap systems), RF plasma heating (essential for stellerators), all the material science required to deal with tremendous heat flow with high neutron fluxes, remote robotic manipulators required to handle stuff within highly radioactive reactor, etc.
A tokamak was chosen for ITER because we know that it scales, it's a nice conservative choice. Lots of the ITER's complexity is actually due to its conservatism. For example, low-temperature superconductors are used for pretty much everything with high-Tc superconductors reserved only for interconnections with non-superconductive power systems. It's pretty clear that commercial reactors will have to use high-Tc systems.
Of course they can, but the difference between government spending and business investments is what happens when they don't yield positive returns. In a business setting, the investors pay for their bad choices; in the government setting, the "investors" (politicians) don't pay for their bad choices, they simply tax citizens for it.
That's why you need to actually _govern_ responsibly. It's something that Republicans know almost nothing about.
And you're probably living in a red state that hasn't seen responsible governance since the time of dinosaurs, so that's why you are thinking that ALL government spending is a waste.
No, I'm sorry, that's just not true. As the term "robber baron" implies, they were state actors first and robbers second. Their industries, foremost steel, banking, and railroads, were massively subsidized and protected by government.
Bullshit. Learn your history. Robber baron era lasted roughly from 1860 to 1910, there had been barely a federal government at that time. Even Fed hadn't been created yet.
I'm no great fan of Republicans, but relatively speaking, Democrats are a lot more "pro-poverty and pro-robbery".
That's why Blue states are all overwhelmingly poor. But how do you reconcile ALL of the politics that Republicans support and any believes that they aren't just out there to rob people? I hesitate to name even one good policy by Republicans that helped to lift people out of poverty or provided protection from monopolistic corporations.
California's yearly budget is 170 billion. A $4B deficit is a whopping 0.2% deficit. They can probably fix it by cutting free pizzas during the Happy Hour on Fridays for government employees.
The total pension debt is more serious, but it can be easily serviced over 20 years or so by making modest adjustments amounting to less than 5% of the budget.
Meanwhile, Kansas is borrowing money just to fund its regular expenses while hoping that the magic of tax cuts kicks in and fixes their economy.
No, you're delusional: government spending doesn't need to yield a return.
Correct. But that doesn't mean that government investments CAN NOT yield direct or indirect returns. An interstate highway system does not yield direct monetary returns (in fact, it's a constant money sink). Yet only idiots would argue that the interstate highway system is useless.
The "robber barons" refers to a group of ultra-wealthy people that enriched themselves through government spending. See above how government spending isn't investment.
Most robber barons acquired their wealth without government intervention. And THEN they started buying mostly local governments. You're all for concentrating power in the hands of easily bought local governments, aren't you?
You're obviously living in a fact free world.
So what's wrong with my evaluation of Republican strategy? It fits perfectly. EVERY action of Republicans helps to advance their pro-poverty and pro-robbery agenda.
Yes, the article mentions that before pointing out the long term problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sky is falling and Social Security will be bankrupt by 2005 or was it 2015? California can solve its problems and if anything pensions will only require minor adjustments to the budget.
Government spending isn't "investment" and doesn't work like a business.
You're delusional. Investment is investment. A government investing in a bridge is not any worse than a private investor building a toll bridge. In fact, government is usually BETTER than private companies for building infrastructure because government can actually concentrate on long-term strategy and not on the best way to get a golden parachute for the CEO.
But I understand, you'd prefer all the wealth to be concentrated in robber-barons' hands that will extract as much wealth as possible from helpless (no court access, no tort laws, no government protection) proles. That's the ideal Republican world.
Well, yes [downtrend.com]. Of course, the sad part is that many of the people who move from blue states to red states then attempt to wreck the states they move to in the same way they wrecked the states they moved from.
People gravitate toward warmer coastal states and it pretty much explains all the migration. But I've chosen Kansas specifically - it lowered its taxes drastically and yet it sees only ruined budgets and net outflow of people. How so?
True. It's primarily a factor for the middle class. People who don't pay taxes, or people who are quite rich, don't really care much about taxes.
Nope. People care about living in a nice and safe location with good schools. Taxes are about 4-th in the order of preference.
Look, I just read the article. It points out that California's credit rating has been raised. Yet it's somehow a catastrophe?
Besides, _not_ borrowing when you can invest it profitably is stupid. Just ask the president-elect - he's built his empire entirely on managing debt.
Because the only way that California can pay for its pension obligations is to raise taxes, but if California raises taxes, the people paying those taxes move away, which only worsens the fiscal problems. That's what these migration trends are telling you. It's a death spiral that we have already seen at the city level in places like Detroit.
And if you lower taxes then people will flock to your state, right? So Kansas should be bursting at the seams right now from a YUGE influx of people. Oh, wait....
Taxes are just one factor that determines where people want to live. And regarding pensions, I've seen estimates that they can be funded even without increasing taxes. You see, government in California is becoming more effective and needs less employees.
Yes, and that places it at the high end of US states. Note that this is on top of the already high federal debt to gdp ratio.
And I still fail to see the problem. California has no problems with servicing its debt and the federal debt is a red herring here. And never mind that California actually contributes to the federal budget unlike most of other states.
That's a different time horizon from the one we are talking about.
I realize that your time horizon is "the heat death of the Universe". California will be SO screwed by then!
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference between "domestic net migration" and "population growth".
And so why is it so bad? I fail to see any problems here.
California debt is not even 25% of its GDP. California's credit rating got INCREASED several times recently.
Yeah, it's SUCH a reason to worry. After all, with Republicans on board California could have been bankrupted and privatized already! Democrats are clearly not doing a good enough job of running it into the ground. This is intolerable.
In fact, without its massive illegal population, California would be losing several congressional seats (which is why Californian politicians love illegals so much).
Yeah, sure. It's plummeting so fast that cities are emptying and property can be bought for next to nothing. Oh, wait... https://www.google.com/publicd...
Dude, at least take care to factcheck your drivel.
Duh. California GDP is 2.5 trillion USD, compared to 1.3 trillion USD for NY. So the debt rate for California is not even 25% of GDP which is considered very healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah... Tomatoes... I _love_ good tomatoes and it's incredibly hard to find them in the US. You can buy "heirloom" tomatoes at farmers markets but they are often not really better than supermarket plasticy varieties. This is understandable - good tomatoes are extremely hard to transport or store for extended periods.
What angers me most, is that we actually used to have wonderful GM tomatoes that were tasty and easily transportable. But no, greeny idiots forced them out of the market.
Even low-end Tesla S60 is way nicer than Bolt - it has nicer handling, better acceleration and range. And the charging infrastructure for Tesla is available right now: https://supercharge.info/
Oh please. I've test-driven Bolt and it's nowhere close to Tesla. It's also purely a city car, you can't use it for road trips. There's no fast charging infrastructure for CCS (Combined Charging System) and even existing few stations are limited to 50kW versus 120kW for the current-gen Tesla superchargers.
With superchargers and some planning you can comfortably drive pretty much to any point of interest in the US - I have more than 50k miles on my 2 year old Tesla just from road trips.
Most people in Beijing don't use coal stoves or heaters. Or are you thinking that Beijing is populated with people living in mud houses and burning coal in open firepits?
2 trillion bad car loans? That's bullshit right here. It's enough to buy 66 million cars at $30000 and that's about 25% of all cars on the road right now.
Oh, and China is selling its US bonds to prop up the ailing RMB right now, they are not buying new US debt.
China doesn't have that much protectionism in trade. You'll just be hard-pressed to undercut them on price.
Most of the pollution in China is from coal powerplants and various industrial plants. They can't really do much about them in the near future even if they are willing to take a hit on the economy growth (which they are not). In more distant future, China is expanding renewable power generation, nuclear power and natural gas power plants.
Cars are not really a big problem in cities right now, most of them have effective emission control systems. But in future they are going to become more significant. Interestingly, electric-powered bikes and scooters are already insanely popular because gas-powered ones are too expensive because of regulations.
Well, H1-B is limited to 65k per year (if the cap is not raised). L1 is a different story, though.
TPP is not a trade deal per se - the trade barriers are already low. It's a geopolitical deal to make sure the Pacific Rim countries are not dominated by China in future. TPP does have some nice areas - it requires Pacific countries to establish minimum wage laws, pollution controls and workplace safety regulations in line with other countries.
Unfortunately, copyright lobby is also using as a Trojan horse to smuggle in pro-copyright laws.
And you can bet that China is not sleeping - they are promoting their One-Belt-One-Road initiative to make a China-dominated trade pact.
Just one member of the jury is enough in most states.
Amazon is not permatemping. Most of warehouse associates are permanent full-time positions with some growth possibilities. Temps are hired for the peak season to handle the excess demand and are generally scaled back after that.
Beaglebones and RPi are OK - they are hobbyist products and won't be regulated. And an X-ray machines with WiFi are _already_ deeply regulated - there are mandated interlocks to avoid overdosing, for example (see: Therac).
See: "replaceable". It will present a big attack surface but at the same time it can be designed to support updating and be easily swapable.
Regulating IoT devices is a GOOD idea. Right now they are an example of a market failure - the huge cloud of insecure devices is created by the same market forces as a huge clouds of polluted air. Securing devices requires vendors to spend money so that vendors who don't care about security can undercut them.
And the solution is the same - impose regulation to make IoT vendors responsible for their security. For example, IoT vendors can create a standardized and replaceable "control module" that only needs to be certified once.
ITER is not a prototype of a commercial fusion reactor. It's more of a plasma physics lab, specifically designed to support various experiments and advance engineering required to build a real reactor.
/me follows all ITER news and press-releases.
Lots of ITER advances are as important for stellerators or other approaches as they are for tokamaks: neutral beam injectors (essential for open plasma trap systems), RF plasma heating (essential for stellerators), all the material science required to deal with tremendous heat flow with high neutron fluxes, remote robotic manipulators required to handle stuff within highly radioactive reactor, etc.
A tokamak was chosen for ITER because we know that it scales, it's a nice conservative choice. Lots of the ITER's complexity is actually due to its conservatism. For example, low-temperature superconductors are used for pretty much everything with high-Tc superconductors reserved only for interconnections with non-superconductive power systems. It's pretty clear that commercial reactors will have to use high-Tc systems.
The average duty factor for the nuclear industry is 92%. Linky: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...
Please, provide sources for your dubious 50% claim.
Of course they can, but the difference between government spending and business investments is what happens when they don't yield positive returns. In a business setting, the investors pay for their bad choices; in the government setting, the "investors" (politicians) don't pay for their bad choices, they simply tax citizens for it.
That's why you need to actually _govern_ responsibly. It's something that Republicans know almost nothing about.
And you're probably living in a red state that hasn't seen responsible governance since the time of dinosaurs, so that's why you are thinking that ALL government spending is a waste.
No, I'm sorry, that's just not true. As the term "robber baron" implies, they were state actors first and robbers second. Their industries, foremost steel, banking, and railroads, were massively subsidized and protected by government.
Bullshit. Learn your history. Robber baron era lasted roughly from 1860 to 1910, there had been barely a federal government at that time. Even Fed hadn't been created yet.
I'm no great fan of Republicans, but relatively speaking, Democrats are a lot more "pro-poverty and pro-robbery".
That's why Blue states are all overwhelmingly poor. But how do you reconcile ALL of the politics that Republicans support and any believes that they aren't just out there to rob people? I hesitate to name even one good policy by Republicans that helped to lift people out of poverty or provided protection from monopolistic corporations.
California's yearly budget is 170 billion. A $4B deficit is a whopping 0.2% deficit. They can probably fix it by cutting free pizzas during the Happy Hour on Fridays for government employees.
The total pension debt is more serious, but it can be easily serviced over 20 years or so by making modest adjustments amounting to less than 5% of the budget.
Meanwhile, Kansas is borrowing money just to fund its regular expenses while hoping that the magic of tax cuts kicks in and fixes their economy.
No, you're delusional: government spending doesn't need to yield a return.
Correct. But that doesn't mean that government investments CAN NOT yield direct or indirect returns. An interstate highway system does not yield direct monetary returns (in fact, it's a constant money sink). Yet only idiots would argue that the interstate highway system is useless.
The "robber barons" refers to a group of ultra-wealthy people that enriched themselves through government spending. See above how government spending isn't investment.
Most robber barons acquired their wealth without government intervention. And THEN they started buying mostly local governments. You're all for concentrating power in the hands of easily bought local governments, aren't you?
You're obviously living in a fact free world.
So what's wrong with my evaluation of Republican strategy? It fits perfectly. EVERY action of Republicans helps to advance their pro-poverty and pro-robbery agenda.
Yes, the article mentions that before pointing out the long term problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sky is falling and Social Security will be bankrupt by 2005 or was it 2015? California can solve its problems and if anything pensions will only require minor adjustments to the budget.
Government spending isn't "investment" and doesn't work like a business.
You're delusional. Investment is investment. A government investing in a bridge is not any worse than a private investor building a toll bridge. In fact, government is usually BETTER than private companies for building infrastructure because government can actually concentrate on long-term strategy and not on the best way to get a golden parachute for the CEO.
But I understand, you'd prefer all the wealth to be concentrated in robber-barons' hands that will extract as much wealth as possible from helpless (no court access, no tort laws, no government protection) proles. That's the ideal Republican world.
Well, yes [downtrend.com]. Of course, the sad part is that many of the people who move from blue states to red states then attempt to wreck the states they move to in the same way they wrecked the states they moved from.
People gravitate toward warmer coastal states and it pretty much explains all the migration. But I've chosen Kansas specifically - it lowered its taxes drastically and yet it sees only ruined budgets and net outflow of people. How so?
True. It's primarily a factor for the middle class. People who don't pay taxes, or people who are quite rich, don't really care much about taxes.
Nope. People care about living in a nice and safe location with good schools. Taxes are about 4-th in the order of preference.
Besides, _not_ borrowing when you can invest it profitably is stupid. Just ask the president-elect - he's built his empire entirely on managing debt.
Because the only way that California can pay for its pension obligations is to raise taxes, but if California raises taxes, the people paying those taxes move away, which only worsens the fiscal problems. That's what these migration trends are telling you. It's a death spiral that we have already seen at the city level in places like Detroit.
And if you lower taxes then people will flock to your state, right? So Kansas should be bursting at the seams right now from a YUGE influx of people. Oh, wait....
Taxes are just one factor that determines where people want to live. And regarding pensions, I've seen estimates that they can be funded even without increasing taxes. You see, government in California is becoming more effective and needs less employees.
Yes, and that places it at the high end of US states. Note that this is on top of the already high federal debt to gdp ratio.
And I still fail to see the problem. California has no problems with servicing its debt and the federal debt is a red herring here. And never mind that California actually contributes to the federal budget unlike most of other states.
That's a different time horizon from the one we are talking about.
I realize that your time horizon is "the heat death of the Universe". California will be SO screwed by then!
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference between "domestic net migration" and "population growth".
And so why is it so bad? I fail to see any problems here.
So it's much better to let friendly a-political monopolistic megacorporations to decide issues, right?
Yeah, it's SUCH a reason to worry. After all, with Republicans on board California could have been bankrupted and privatized already! Democrats are clearly not doing a good enough job of running it into the ground. This is intolerable.
In fact, without its massive illegal population, California would be losing several congressional seats (which is why Californian politicians love illegals so much).
Yeah, sure. It's plummeting so fast that cities are emptying and property can be bought for next to nothing. Oh, wait... https://www.google.com/publicd...
Dude, at least take care to factcheck your drivel.
Duh. California GDP is 2.5 trillion USD, compared to 1.3 trillion USD for NY. So the debt rate for California is not even 25% of GDP which is considered very healthy.