Keep in mind that what you're buying is probably not a politician, usually, but rather you a politician's position on one issue (or possibly even one vote).
The politicians I read about were given these contributions by industry groups, I would assume they are not given per vote, but per year. Still, even that would be more than sufficient to sway a lot of votes.
To expand on the idea a bit, from reading the Telecoms debate, it would appear that the going rate for a politician is around $40,000. So lets say you get 100,000 people on board with this idea, thats $10 million or 200-odd politicians you are buying after expenses.
If you can even get a quarter of a percent of the population on board, you can utterly dwarf any other special interests group out there, the corporations would have no notion of competing, although it would have some hair raising debates with a million people participating. One thing I like about Slashdot however is that it almost always acts as a superb bullshit filter, and the true facts of most matters come out in the end. The same effect would apply for such a system, and contrary to common wisdom, the average person knows a line when its pointed out to them.
It would remove the power from the politicians, and only those who were voting off message would need to be targeted. You want additional funds going to NASA, or a complete reorganisation of NASA, you got it. You want more spending on education, it will be pushed through. You want the Telecoms bill revoked, congratulations and here's your receipt. You'd need to be careful that you weren't overwhelmed by special interest groups in the early stages (NRA or theological cults for example).
The idea might leave a bad taste in the mouths of many, but in a warped, roundabout way it sort of is the mercantile American way. And it would without a doubt get things done.
I was just thinking of a solution like this in the wake of the Telecoms debacle. What if some reasonably intelligent, semi organised group was to set up a shadow government of sorts, with its own structure to debate and vote on issues on a public website?
You could set it up like Slashdot, with the explicit goal of influencing government policy and officials to move in a suitable direction.
Such a group could have policies on health, education, technology, science, military, the whole gamut, all debated by people who know what they are talking about, with a moderation system like slashdot. Once the debate was finalised, you could hold a poll for the final direction of that piece of legislation or whatever, and set that as the policy for the year. The debate could perhaps be re-opened by popular demand as situations change.
And then you give it teeth. All members donate a hundred bucks a year to it (also a handy way to ensure that there are not too many duplicate accounts) for lobbying or funding the political group, and representatives are appointed to push the agenda on the hill.
Its just the bare bones of an idea, it needs a hell of a lot of fleshing out, but damn me if I wouldn't set it up myself if I had the time.
And yet here they are, riding around on camels and porking their close relatives. Maybe they should have swapped their cultural longevity for a drop of intelligence.
No, they did not explain it. They made up some stuff they thought supported their conclusions. Point out the error(s)? Ok, I will.
1. They say that modern wind turbines use wide blades. That is not the case. The most efficient shape for blades has remained unchanged - long and thin. The size of the blades has changed a bit since the early days though, don't you think? Going from small to 80 meters plus, which is much easier for birds to see and avoid? They even have to use specialised trucks to transport the blades around. Would you say the blades are physically wider than the early ones?
2. They say that blades turn slowly. Not true. In their non-technical dilitant way they have confused low RPMs with low blade speed (they're artists, web designers, and self-promoters - not engineers). Even at a low RPM the tips of long blades can be travelling very fast - even approaching the speed of sound. And the tips are attached to the rest of the blade, which moves much slower, reducing the effective danger zone for birds as well as giving them something they can actually see. Speed of sound my arse.
3. They say that just by adding gearing (their stupid bicycle analogy) turbines can get the same energy from lower blade speeds. Just put some gears in to speed up the generator part! Gah this is painful. They specifically mentioned much larger turbines, which do produce higher power at lower RPM, a point which was aimed at the lowest common denominator, everyone else seems to have grasped, but you completely missed.
And these are the people you quote as experts! And because you did many people now think that wind turbines have been shown to be completely harmless to birds - based on the musings of a bunch of incompetents. Well heres a group possibly a little more to your liking in terms of qualifications: the Danish Wind Industry Association:
Birds often collide with high voltage overhead lines, masts, poles, and windows of buildings. They are also killed by cars in the traffic.
Birds are seldom bothered by wind turbines, however. Radar studies from Tjaereborg in the western part of Denmark, where a 2 megawatt wind turbine with 60 metre rotor diameter is installed, show that birds - by day or night - tend to change their flight route some 100-200 metres before the turbine and pass above the turbine at a safe distance.
In Denmark there are several examples of birds (falcons) nesting in cages mounted on wind turbine towers.
The only known site with bird collision problems is located in the Altamont Pass in California. Even there, collisions are not common, but they are of extra concern because the species involved are protected by law.
You sir are a buffoon, and my recommendations is that you either reduce the dose or increase it. Or quite possibly IHBT.
You quote unqualified, self-promoting dilitants as your technical source to justify your point of view, and somehow that makes my observations on the quality your experts irrelevant? But eh, they did explain it. If their explanation (the only part I quoted) was wrong, feel free to point out the error.
And remember what your [frankly] off-the-wall argument was: spinning windmill blades look like a solid cliff face to birds. Uh huh. I said a bird blind enough to get hit by one of these would also have trouble hitting just about anything, I did not say windmills=cliffs.
It is scientifically and logically deceptive to cite people who don't know a damned thing about the topic in question And for the third time, the one single and only point that matters: were they wrong?
and to give the impression that they are "experts". Where did I do that?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say you did it by accident, but be more careful next time, please. Sufficient unto the day, the evil thereof.
YOU'RE QUOTING THESE PEOPLE AS EXPERTS ON WIND-TURBINE BLADE DESIGN!? Not at all, it was literally one of the first results on Google that seemed to have a nice easy to grasp explanation of the reduced danger that modern wind turbines pose to wildlife. I'm sure someone with a bit more time on their hands could find a few more authoritative articles. However you seem to be getting terribly upset, purely because:
As an actual degree-granted environmental scientist (M.S., Environmental Sciences and Engineering), I find this site to be total baloney.
This "article" about the so-called misconceptions of wind-turbine bird-kills from a bunch of "sustainability enthusiasts" (their words) is about as worthless as it gets. Seriously, unless you have a specific argument against what I quoted, your opinions on the authors are entirely irrelevant. They do in this case explain what I wanted them to, and I don't vouch for the rest of the site.
Ireland is one of the best locations in Europe for wind power as it is situated on the Western edge of Europe and is exposed to high winds from the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea. Wind power utility factors tend to be higher in Ireland than anywhere else. By the end of 2006 the installed capacity of wind power in Ireland was over 745 MW, or around 6% of the total power production in the country (which climbed 50% in 2006).
So its not really that much of a stretch to see 80% or 90% of the power in the country being generated by offshore wind platforms over the coming two decades, although there are no concrete plans to do so, unfortunately.
And of course, there are the birds. Borrowed from here:
To help our understanding of turbine hazards to birds we'd like to make an analogy, to your bicycle. Turn your bike upside down or put it in a work rack, set it to the highest gear...the one you use to go fast on a level slope.... and now move the wheel slowly with your hand. The chain moves rapidly with only a few degrees of wheel rotation. This symbolizes today's cutting edge 1.5 mW turbines, which have a very large surface area of blade exposed to the wind and a gearbox that turns the dynamo quickly while the blades move slowly. Birds dodge these slow moving blades relatively easily.
Now put the bike in the lowest gear...the one you use to climb hills...and move the wheel with your hand fast enough to turn the chain as fast as before. That symbolizes the 20-year-old "bird-o-matic" wind turbine design. Small blades with small surface areas have to turn rapidly to overcome the magnetic force of the dynamos, which generate electricity.
Recapping: small blades, low surface area, lots of dead birds possible; very big blades, with large surface area exposed to wind, very few dead birds.
i didn't know there was a "noise" problem but if there was; how is this going to solve it? Apparently there is a problem at greater depths...
Tests carried out in Denmark for shallow installations showed the levels were only significant up to a few hundred metres. However, sound injected into deeper water will travel much further and will be more likely to impact bigger creatures like whales which tend to use lower frequencies than porpoises and seals. A recent study found that wind farms add 80â"110 dB to the existing low-frequency ambient noise (under 400 Hz), which could impact baleen whales communication and stress levels, and possibly prey distribution.
As far as I understand it, towers will transmit the noise directly to the ocean floor, but a floating platform, even if anchored, distributes most of the noise at the surface, although I could be mistaken in that.
Indeed, Denmark already has extensive offshore windfarm resources, and they produce a good percentage of their power from wind as well. A small country like Ireland could well produce most or all of its power with this technology.
This also solves the issue with noise from wind generators anchored in deep water, which the Danes have estimated could cause problems for whales - sound travels much farther in deep water.
And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well.
Seriously, whatever resources we can find on the moon or mars are not worth the effort. The moon is a vacuum complete with razor sharp dust that is guaranteed to be shredding any machinery up there for the next forever, and microgravity that will turn your bones to jelly. Mars is a frozen wasteland with more jellifying low gravity, which is a full stop dead end for human colonisation with no easy answer.
We need to focus not on manned missions to these planets but on automated missions to asteroids and space platforms, where we can completely control the environment and simulate earthlike gravity. By harnessing the gargantuan resources just floating around out there, we can turn earth into a true paradise.
Ha, I have a brand new Dell XPS M1330, came pre loaded with vista and ran dog slow. It felt like I was back in 1999. After a bit of meddling with the partitions, I installed XP and bam, it runs like I've never seen. I'm quite happy with it now.
Their belief is that democracy won't work unless the country has reached higher level of prosperity -- i.e. massive middle class, otherwise democracy could be damaging.
No, thats not accurate. Democracy is one of the few forms of government that are meritocracies, the best rise to the top, not held back by political beliefs or whatever. This is an essential prerequisite for the growth of wealth and hence a large middle class. Most of those countries you listed are not true democracies, there is still an ingrained upper class which is holding on to the reins of power. Thailand, for example, still has a king.
The only place where semi autocratic rule provides an overall benefit would be places like Iraq, where domestic populations would tear each other apart in absentia, as they currently are doing, and even that isn't a good long term bet. China is going to find out the hard way that a strong middle class doesn't want taxation without representation.
Bahaha, there are rocks floating around up there with millions and billions of tons of iron and other raw materials. One single rock (can't recall the name now) was estimated to have five tons of iron ore for every man, woman and child on earth. Add to that we have basically infinite energy to fuel space industries in the form of the sun. So, if you can't see the benefit to continued space exploration and trying to get to space more cheaply, thats fine, others will be eating that lunch!
An enormous driving factor in America's busybody, self-appointed world-police role is the second world war; namely the runup and things like Czechoslovakia being sold out by Western European countries. The conventional wisdom in America is that it was wrong to stand idly by while a bombastic dictator was essentially able to conquer a country with the tacit approval of that Britain and France.
Er, thats utter bullshit. The US had been projecting military power worldwide to protect its economic interests since the start of the 20th century, if not earlier. Read up on Smedley Butler if you want to learn about that. It is not now and never was "world police". Most of the US didn't want to get involved in the war until the Japanese came and planted one swiftly between the nuts at Pearl harbour. Weak nations my arse.
On the other hand, the Iraq war would not have happened. Whether peace would be prevailing in the region is hard to say. Wars did not start with America's presence
More bullshit. The US did fund Iraq and supply them with advanced weaponary and training, and caused the problems with Iran. How did Gaw Bush know Saddam had WMDs? He still had the receipts.
Just so you know, as soon as I read the first five words or so of your rant and saw the ad hominem attacks coming, I stopped reading
Meh. Your loss, I quite enjoyed the points he made and the manner in which he delivered them. Some words are dirtier in your world than others, I guess, but life is a contact sport.
And the killer feature is that it's so close. You can get there in a few days, as opposed to years for any asteroid missions.
If you're talking about plumbing the resources of the system, you are talking decades at least in any case. Why not do it right? If you have enough remotely operated prospectors and refineries out there, the timescale is completely overwhelmed by the mass in question. And once you have enough raw materials (and there is certainly enough energy to process them) you can build what you like, wherever you like, manned or not.
And what do you think they will be using to complete those experiments, their bare hands? Whatever instruments and technology they use can be operated just as well remotely.
What we need is to set up an orbital refinery, not orbiting the earth, but orbiting the sun. Nothing too fancy, a massive solar collector to power the thing, a "catcher" to pick up the sliced bits of rock sent by prospectors, a refinery to seperate the useful elements, and a slingshot to send them elsewhere for processing. Or even process them on the spot and ship them back to earth.
Prospectors could be remotely operated drones who fly about mapping asteroids, slicing them up, and pushing the slices towards the orbital refinery. Even if they were only able to move around slowly, with enough of them you could realise very significant amounts of materials. This is not as difficult as it seems, if there is one thing we do well its breaking stuff into smaller pieces.
There are essentially infinite amounts of raw materials floating around out there. If we could harness them in a cost effective manner, we can solve just about every problem with resources the earth has, and then some.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that what you're buying is probably not a politician, usually, but rather you a politician's position on one issue (or possibly even one vote).
The politicians I read about were given these contributions by industry groups, I would assume they are not given per vote, but per year. Still, even that would be more than sufficient to sway a lot of votes.
To expand on the idea a bit, from reading the Telecoms debate, it would appear that the going rate for a politician is around $40,000. So lets say you get 100,000 people on board with this idea, thats $10 million or 200-odd politicians you are buying after expenses.
If you can even get a quarter of a percent of the population on board, you can utterly dwarf any other special interests group out there, the corporations would have no notion of competing, although it would have some hair raising debates with a million people participating. One thing I like about Slashdot however is that it almost always acts as a superb bullshit filter, and the true facts of most matters come out in the end. The same effect would apply for such a system, and contrary to common wisdom, the average person knows a line when its pointed out to them.
It would remove the power from the politicians, and only those who were voting off message would need to be targeted. You want additional funds going to NASA, or a complete reorganisation of NASA, you got it. You want more spending on education, it will be pushed through. You want the Telecoms bill revoked, congratulations and here's your receipt. You'd need to be careful that you weren't overwhelmed by special interest groups in the early stages (NRA or theological cults for example).
The idea might leave a bad taste in the mouths of many, but in a warped, roundabout way it sort of is the mercantile American way. And it would without a doubt get things done.
I was just thinking of a solution like this in the wake of the Telecoms debacle. What if some reasonably intelligent, semi organised group was to set up a shadow government of sorts, with its own structure to debate and vote on issues on a public website?
You could set it up like Slashdot, with the explicit goal of influencing government policy and officials to move in a suitable direction.
Such a group could have policies on health, education, technology, science, military, the whole gamut, all debated by people who know what they are talking about, with a moderation system like slashdot. Once the debate was finalised, you could hold a poll for the final direction of that piece of legislation or whatever, and set that as the policy for the year. The debate could perhaps be re-opened by popular demand as situations change.
And then you give it teeth. All members donate a hundred bucks a year to it (also a handy way to ensure that there are not too many duplicate accounts) for lobbying or funding the political group, and representatives are appointed to push the agenda on the hill. Its just the bare bones of an idea, it needs a hell of a lot of fleshing out, but damn me if I wouldn't set it up myself if I had the time.
They are charging money for bitorrent downloads now?
And yet here they are, riding around on camels and porking their close relatives. Maybe they should have swapped their cultural longevity for a drop of intelligence.
Birds often collide with high voltage overhead lines, masts, poles, and windows of buildings. They are also killed by cars in the traffic. Birds are seldom bothered by wind turbines, however. Radar studies from Tjaereborg in the western part of Denmark, where a 2 megawatt wind turbine with 60 metre rotor diameter is installed, show that birds - by day or night - tend to change their flight route some 100-200 metres before the turbine and pass above the turbine at a safe distance.
In Denmark there are several examples of birds (falcons) nesting in cages mounted on wind turbine towers.
The only known site with bird collision problems is located in the Altamont Pass in California. Even there, collisions are not common, but they are of extra concern because the species involved are protected by law.
You sir are a buffoon, and my recommendations is that you either reduce the dose or increase it. Or quite possibly IHBT.
Ireland is one of the best locations in Europe for wind power as it is situated on the Western edge of Europe and is exposed to high winds from the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea. Wind power utility factors tend to be higher in Ireland than anywhere else. By the end of 2006 the installed capacity of wind power in Ireland was over 745 MW, or around 6% of the total power production in the country (which climbed 50% in 2006).
So its not really that much of a stretch to see 80% or 90% of the power in the country being generated by offshore wind platforms over the coming two decades, although there are no concrete plans to do so, unfortunately.
To help our understanding of turbine hazards to birds we'd like to make an analogy, to your bicycle. Turn your bike upside down or put it in a work rack, set it to the highest gear...the one you use to go fast on a level slope.... and now move the wheel slowly with your hand. The chain moves rapidly with only a few degrees of wheel rotation. This symbolizes today's cutting edge 1.5 mW turbines, which have a very large surface area of blade exposed to the wind and a gearbox that turns the dynamo quickly while the blades move slowly. Birds dodge these slow moving blades relatively easily.
Now put the bike in the lowest gear...the one you use to climb hills...and move the wheel with your hand fast enough to turn the chain as fast as before. That symbolizes the 20-year-old "bird-o-matic" wind turbine design. Small blades with small surface areas have to turn rapidly to overcome the magnetic force of the dynamos, which generate electricity.
Recapping: small blades, low surface area, lots of dead birds possible; very big blades, with large surface area exposed to wind, very few dead birds.
Tests carried out in Denmark for shallow installations showed the levels were only significant up to a few hundred metres. However, sound injected into deeper water will travel much further and will be more likely to impact bigger creatures like whales which tend to use lower frequencies than porpoises and seals. A recent study found that wind farms add 80â"110 dB to the existing low-frequency ambient noise (under 400 Hz), which could impact baleen whales communication and stress levels, and possibly prey distribution.
As far as I understand it, towers will transmit the noise directly to the ocean floor, but a floating platform, even if anchored, distributes most of the noise at the surface, although I could be mistaken in that.
Indeed, Denmark already has extensive offshore windfarm resources, and they produce a good percentage of their power from wind as well. A small country like Ireland could well produce most or all of its power with this technology.
This also solves the issue with noise from wind generators anchored in deep water, which the Danes have estimated could cause problems for whales - sound travels much farther in deep water.
And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well.
Seriously, whatever resources we can find on the moon or mars are not worth the effort. The moon is a vacuum complete with razor sharp dust that is guaranteed to be shredding any machinery up there for the next forever, and microgravity that will turn your bones to jelly. Mars is a frozen wasteland with more jellifying low gravity, which is a full stop dead end for human colonisation with no easy answer.
We need to focus not on manned missions to these planets but on automated missions to asteroids and space platforms, where we can completely control the environment and simulate earthlike gravity. By harnessing the gargantuan resources just floating around out there, we can turn earth into a true paradise.
Weren't a few early search engines like AskJeeves and those just a basic spider with a load of actual humans filtering popular searches?
Ha, I have a brand new Dell XPS M1330, came pre loaded with vista and ran dog slow. It felt like I was back in 1999. After a bit of meddling with the partitions, I installed XP and bam, it runs like I've never seen. I'm quite happy with it now.
Their belief is that democracy won't work unless the country has reached higher level of prosperity -- i.e. massive middle class, otherwise democracy could be damaging.
No, thats not accurate. Democracy is one of the few forms of government that are meritocracies, the best rise to the top, not held back by political beliefs or whatever. This is an essential prerequisite for the growth of wealth and hence a large middle class. Most of those countries you listed are not true democracies, there is still an ingrained upper class which is holding on to the reins of power. Thailand, for example, still has a king.
The only place where semi autocratic rule provides an overall benefit would be places like Iraq, where domestic populations would tear each other apart in absentia, as they currently are doing, and even that isn't a good long term bet. China is going to find out the hard way that a strong middle class doesn't want taxation without representation.
See what you can achieve if you don't go around wasting your budget on invasions to satisfy someones cracked idea of a new American century?
Bahaha, there are rocks floating around up there with millions and billions of tons of iron and other raw materials. One single rock (can't recall the name now) was estimated to have five tons of iron ore for every man, woman and child on earth. Add to that we have basically infinite energy to fuel space industries in the form of the sun. So, if you can't see the benefit to continued space exploration and trying to get to space more cheaply, thats fine, others will be eating that lunch!
Just stop posting for a while. The system will automatically assign mod points to you to try and get you back in.
An enormous driving factor in America's busybody, self-appointed world-police role is the second world war; namely the runup and things like Czechoslovakia being sold out by Western European countries. The conventional wisdom in America is that it was wrong to stand idly by while a bombastic dictator was essentially able to conquer a country with the tacit approval of that Britain and France.
Er, thats utter bullshit. The US had been projecting military power worldwide to protect its economic interests since the start of the 20th century, if not earlier. Read up on Smedley Butler if you want to learn about that. It is not now and never was "world police". Most of the US didn't want to get involved in the war until the Japanese came and planted one swiftly between the nuts at Pearl harbour. Weak nations my arse. On the other hand, the Iraq war would not have happened. Whether peace would be prevailing in the region is hard to say. Wars did not start with America's presence
More bullshit. The US did fund Iraq and supply them with advanced weaponary and training, and caused the problems with Iran. How did Gaw Bush know Saddam had WMDs? He still had the receipts.
Such a strategy is effective by design. This is the problem with businessmen.
Actually it was a businessman who came up with the idea first. Ever heard of "give em the razor but sell them the blade"?
Just so you know, as soon as I read the first five words or so of your rant and saw the ad hominem attacks coming, I stopped reading
Meh. Your loss, I quite enjoyed the points he made and the manner in which he delivered them. Some words are dirtier in your world than others, I guess, but life is a contact sport.
It wants to go for a walk!
And the killer feature is that it's so close. You can get there in a few days, as opposed to years for any asteroid missions.
If you're talking about plumbing the resources of the system, you are talking decades at least in any case. Why not do it right? If you have enough remotely operated prospectors and refineries out there, the timescale is completely overwhelmed by the mass in question. And once you have enough raw materials (and there is certainly enough energy to process them) you can build what you like, wherever you like, manned or not.
And what do you think they will be using to complete those experiments, their bare hands? Whatever instruments and technology they use can be operated just as well remotely.
What we need is to set up an orbital refinery, not orbiting the earth, but orbiting the sun. Nothing too fancy, a massive solar collector to power the thing, a "catcher" to pick up the sliced bits of rock sent by prospectors, a refinery to seperate the useful elements, and a slingshot to send them elsewhere for processing. Or even process them on the spot and ship them back to earth.
Prospectors could be remotely operated drones who fly about mapping asteroids, slicing them up, and pushing the slices towards the orbital refinery. Even if they were only able to move around slowly, with enough of them you could realise very significant amounts of materials. This is not as difficult as it seems, if there is one thing we do well its breaking stuff into smaller pieces.
There are essentially infinite amounts of raw materials floating around out there. If we could harness them in a cost effective manner, we can solve just about every problem with resources the earth has, and then some.