It leads to inflation because to maintain the undervaluation, China's central bank has to intervene in the currency markets and buy dollars to prevent the Yuan from appreciating, which increases the domestic money supply. By having to buy dollars (ie: US treasuries) China is essentially stuck buying huge amounts of US debt as long as it wants to maintain the export edge from having an undervalued currency (which is causing huge domestic pressures within China, there have been quite a few labor riots and urban-rural tension in the past few years).
This bit here is complete nonsense. China owns a grand total of 7% of US foreign debt, and keeps its currency low by fiat, in other words it flatly refuses to allow it to be traded freely - it is not a participant in the free market. This is barely tolerated by international money markets because the advanges of cheap goods marginally outweigh the damage being caused to western labour markets, and even now rumblings are increasing to force it to unpeg its currency from the USD. They'll cling on like grim death to it as long as possible however. Union action is the natural result of the widening and clear gap between the ultra rich and the very poor in China.
Indeed, there are some interesting tidbits floating around out there:
Operation Highjump:
Operation Highjump (OpHjp), officially titled The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47, was a United States Navy operation organized by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd in Antarctica under the command of Richard Cruzen, which was launched on 26 August 1946 and ended abruptly in late February 1947, six months earlier than planned. The massive Antarctic task force included 4,700 men, 13 ships, and multiple aircraft.
The next bit is mostly reputed:
On March 5, 1947 the "El Mercurio" newspaper of Santiago, Chile, had a headline article "On Board the Mount Olympus on the High Seas" which quoted Byrd in an interview with Lee van Atta: "Adm. Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defense measures against hostile regions.
The admiral further stated that he didn't want to frighten anyone unduly but that it was a bitter reality that in case of a new war the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds. [Earlier he had recommended defense bases AT the NORTH Pole.] Admiral Byrd repeated the above points of view, resulting from his personal knowledge gathered both at the north and south poles, before a news conference held for International News Service." When Byrd returned to the States, he was hospitalized and was not allowed to hold any more press conferences. In March 1955, he was placed in charge of Operation Deepfreeze which was part of the International Geophysical Year [1957-1958] exploration of the Antarctic.
There's a lot more than that, including Nazi submarines surrendering months after the war to Argentina, an incident a couple of decades after about unidentified submarines easily evading the entire Argentinian navy for a month, and the verifiable fact that Nazis were working on disc shaped aircraft. During the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz spoke of "an invisible fortification, in midst of the eternal ice." The we have a reputed British flotilla commander who encountered a massive u-boat fleet heading south, can't find the reference now.
I personally give little credence to any of the above, but it is fascinating.
The tech you can use to read e-ink in low light is the same as you would use to read books in low light situations, lightbulbs. Again I'm not seeing a lot of low light use of computers, but if you needed to do that with e-ink it would be simple to have an LED extension over the top.
That and the luminous screen. Its this simple - read from a bright screen, and read from a piece of paper; which is preferable? The paper for most people I would say. So e-ink being a non luminous medium is much better for reading, and what a day that will be, hundreds of thousands of novels in a thumb drive, tiny form factor, and powered by the light you read by, in particular since e-ink devices use far less power. I will in fact buy three and use the other two for spare parts. All DRM free needless to say.
I think apple is riding on its marketing success with the iphone which rode on the marketing success of the ipod, and the other manufacturers are just chasing to keep up. In terms of utility I don't find tablets all that great, unless maybe someone comes up with a colour, solar powered, ruggedised ebook reader, then I'll buy two. I'd call it a pad fad until then. I know there will be hundreds of comments detailing all the wonderful uses they have found for the tablet, but I can't think of many my laptop doesn't do a lot better.
Its not meant to be a fully capable killbot at this stage in its life cycle I'd imagine. Give it a few years and the military will have a suitcase-carried remote piloted scout for urban areas, probably a lot quieter than this one, and larger models for ground support or duties currently filled by the A-10 or Spectre gunship. Is there a theoretical maximum size it can be? Even with some sort of sonic sensor kit I could see a few hundred of these being dropped out the back of a plane at high altitude, armed with longer range rifles, for area supression.
The point is that in a purely free market as espoused by many libertarians, sans tax and regulation, they don't HAVE to pay for the external costs like pollution. They HAVE to pay for workers, resources, and energy, otherwise they won't be able to produce anything, but in the interests of lowering costs they certainly can ignore side effects that might not hurt the bottom line for decades if ever. This is where you need a government to step in and take the long view, and impose regulations to reduce or mitigate long term effects for the good of society at large.
And sadly we here in the USA have so many slips of bad paper held by the Chinese that we won't be able to say boo about anything they do. We'll probably end up a broken mess just like the Soviets in 89. Oh well, nothing lasts forever.
2) Something to pick up their planes. The US has a bunch of stealthy craft these days. Even the F/A-18Fs aren't easy to pick up and the F-22As are close to invisible unless the fire, never mind the B2-Bs. You need to have some technology to be able to find those, otherwise they'll pick off your planes, destroy your bases, etc and you won't be able to do anything about it. I don't know if there is such a technology, but you'd need to have some reasonable way to find their craft to kill them
Didn't the Serbs manage to down a stealth bomber using mobile phone towers as tracking devices? There's a reason the bombing runs don't start until the AA stuff is cleared away by ground forces.
Building a fighter is no easy task. They would have problems building decent gas turbines.
They already build their own fighters. I have big problems with saying "they" about the country of Iran anyway. Iranians generally are laid back, educated people with a good sense of humour. When the US overthrew their democratically elected government it opened the doors for the fundamentalist rednecks, and now we have a gang of well connected money men at the top making a stone cold fortune from the troubles, while the average Iranian gets more and more pissed off. The best thing the US could do is leave them alone and let nature take its course.
Except game producers are in it for one reason, and thats to make money, not to provide free entertainment. In fact the more time you spend grinding and not paying the more you are costing them, this is why things like friendster became basically worthless once it became apparent that most of the userbase was impoverished SE Asians. There's nothing amoral or unethical, flame-ey or otherwise in this statement, this is the simple fact of how things work. A nice free to play for all would be great but also unsustainable.
If it is a game like the traditional fantasy MMO, then high end raiders and solid group dungeon runners will start resenting people who can just hit a store and buy with real-life currency items that are up to par with them.
They can resent as much as they like, unless they are contributing equal or more money than the people who pay, the game manufacturers have no reason at all to cater to them.
My goal is to earn a BS in Business and become one of them.
Eh no, you get to be a boss (a real one, not a middle manager) by jumping into the shark tank with the others and being the one who emerges at the end. No amount of formal education will give you even a taste of the experience you need. Thats why you see plenty of successful businesses being run by college dropouts and the like - if you want to be a boss, go ahead and start a business. As for HR, I think you'll find they are peons like everyone else, they just loom large to new hires.
Britain controlled 25% of the land area and population of Planet Earth at one point in time. The Romans controlled less land but the same percentage of the population at their peak.
That doesn't sound nearly as impressive when you realise that most of it was an accidental experiment in laissez faire capitalism gone mad, and lasted about a generation, from the invention and use of machine guns and howitzers until the natives got their hands on enough of them to make a dfference, not unlike the US today. Why do you think the British were routed by the Germans and Japanese? Likewise, its not nearly as impressive when you realise that areas painted red on the map, like China, were never really "part of the empire" but closer to temporary vassal states, and by that metric the US is also on a par. Then you have huge areas like Canada and Australia which were claimed, but which were largely completely empty of people.
Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high.
If your natural gas turbine doesn't generate the natural gas, you aren't giving the full story here though. You also need hundreds of miles of carefully sealed pipelines and/or freight infrastructure, you also need the refining and mining infrastructure, and you need to factor in the cost for exploration and developing the mine in the first place, with all the dead ends that implies. Natural gas might be cheap but its often subsidised at source, but hey so what you say, I don't pay it. If you live in Europe and the Russians want to extract a trade agreement or something from you, the cost of that natural gas might suddenly start to fluctuate wildly however.
Meh, tabletop wargaming goes back centuries, you can find debates on things like initiative rolls from the 19th century, and it was traditionally an upper class pastime as well. Roleplaying is one offshoot of that, beginning with D&D, which in turn spawned games like WoW, which are fine as far as they go, but it also created a new emergent phenomenon, combining ad libbing with organised game mechanics. Its a very different experience to computer gaming, not neccessarily better or worse, but different and very enjoyable. Compared to WoW, original D&D is indeed old and busted. However comparing modern TTRPGs with WoW is apples and oranges, its different kinds of fun.
The only technology I need to enjoy a better RPG experience is a pencil, paper, and some dice. Don't get me wrong, computer games are great, MMO games even better, but its a very different sort of experience.
Slashdot Mirror
It leads to inflation because to maintain the undervaluation, China's central bank has to intervene in the currency markets and buy dollars to prevent the Yuan from appreciating, which increases the domestic money supply. By having to buy dollars (ie: US treasuries) China is essentially stuck buying huge amounts of US debt as long as it wants to maintain the export edge from having an undervalued currency (which is causing huge domestic pressures within China, there have been quite a few labor riots and urban-rural tension in the past few years).
This bit here is complete nonsense. China owns a grand total of 7% of US foreign debt, and keeps its currency low by fiat, in other words it flatly refuses to allow it to be traded freely - it is not a participant in the free market. This is barely tolerated by international money markets because the advanges of cheap goods marginally outweigh the damage being caused to western labour markets, and even now rumblings are increasing to force it to unpeg its currency from the USD. They'll cling on like grim death to it as long as possible however. Union action is the natural result of the widening and clear gap between the ultra rich and the very poor in China.
Indeed, there are some interesting tidbits floating around out there:
Operation Highjump:
Operation Highjump (OpHjp), officially titled The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47, was a United States Navy operation organized by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd in Antarctica under the command of Richard Cruzen, which was launched on 26 August 1946 and ended abruptly in late February 1947, six months earlier than planned. The massive Antarctic task force included 4,700 men, 13 ships, and multiple aircraft.
The next bit is mostly reputed:
On March 5, 1947 the "El Mercurio" newspaper of Santiago, Chile, had a headline article "On Board the Mount Olympus on the High Seas" which quoted Byrd in an interview with Lee van Atta: "Adm. Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defense measures against hostile regions.
The admiral further stated that he didn't want to frighten anyone unduly but that it was a bitter reality that in case of a new war the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds. [Earlier he had recommended defense bases AT the NORTH Pole.] Admiral Byrd repeated the above points of view, resulting from his personal knowledge gathered both at the north and south poles, before a news conference held for International News Service." When Byrd returned to the States, he was hospitalized and was not allowed to hold any more press conferences. In March 1955, he was placed in charge of Operation Deepfreeze which was part of the International Geophysical Year [1957-1958] exploration of the Antarctic.
There's a lot more than that, including Nazi submarines surrendering months after the war to Argentina, an incident a couple of decades after about unidentified submarines easily evading the entire Argentinian navy for a month, and the verifiable fact that Nazis were working on disc shaped aircraft. During the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz spoke of "an invisible fortification, in midst of the eternal ice." The we have a reputed British flotilla commander who encountered a massive u-boat fleet heading south, can't find the reference now.
I personally give little credence to any of the above, but it is fascinating.
The tech you can use to read e-ink in low light is the same as you would use to read books in low light situations, lightbulbs. Again I'm not seeing a lot of low light use of computers, but if you needed to do that with e-ink it would be simple to have an LED extension over the top.
I don't want to read in direct sunlight, I want to read without having to strain at a bright screen. Perhaps I should have specified e-ink.
Ooh and capacitors or long lifespan batteries, that is all that is needed to create a device which cannot be topped, ever.
That and the luminous screen. Its this simple - read from a bright screen, and read from a piece of paper; which is preferable? The paper for most people I would say. So e-ink being a non luminous medium is much better for reading, and what a day that will be, hundreds of thousands of novels in a thumb drive, tiny form factor, and powered by the light you read by, in particular since e-ink devices use far less power. I will in fact buy three and use the other two for spare parts. All DRM free needless to say.
You can play expensive frisbee with your desktop? Impressive.
I think apple is riding on its marketing success with the iphone which rode on the marketing success of the ipod, and the other manufacturers are just chasing to keep up. In terms of utility I don't find tablets all that great, unless maybe someone comes up with a colour, solar powered, ruggedised ebook reader, then I'll buy two. I'd call it a pad fad until then. I know there will be hundreds of comments detailing all the wonderful uses they have found for the tablet, but I can't think of many my laptop doesn't do a lot better.
Its not meant to be a fully capable killbot at this stage in its life cycle I'd imagine. Give it a few years and the military will have a suitcase-carried remote piloted scout for urban areas, probably a lot quieter than this one, and larger models for ground support or duties currently filled by the A-10 or Spectre gunship. Is there a theoretical maximum size it can be? Even with some sort of sonic sensor kit I could see a few hundred of these being dropped out the back of a plane at high altitude, armed with longer range rifles, for area supression.
The point is that in a purely free market as espoused by many libertarians, sans tax and regulation, they don't HAVE to pay for the external costs like pollution. They HAVE to pay for workers, resources, and energy, otherwise they won't be able to produce anything, but in the interests of lowering costs they certainly can ignore side effects that might not hurt the bottom line for decades if ever. This is where you need a government to step in and take the long view, and impose regulations to reduce or mitigate long term effects for the good of society at large.
And sadly we here in the USA have so many slips of bad paper held by the Chinese that we won't be able to say boo about anything they do. We'll probably end up a broken mess just like the Soviets in 89. Oh well, nothing lasts forever.
7%. Thats how much US debt is held by China.
2) Something to pick up their planes. The US has a bunch of stealthy craft these days. Even the F/A-18Fs aren't easy to pick up and the F-22As are close to invisible unless the fire, never mind the B2-Bs. You need to have some technology to be able to find those, otherwise they'll pick off your planes, destroy your bases, etc and you won't be able to do anything about it. I don't know if there is such a technology, but you'd need to have some reasonable way to find their craft to kill them
Didn't the Serbs manage to down a stealth bomber using mobile phone towers as tracking devices? There's a reason the bombing runs don't start until the AA stuff is cleared away by ground forces.
Building a fighter is no easy task. They would have problems building decent gas turbines.
They already build their own fighters. I have big problems with saying "they" about the country of Iran anyway. Iranians generally are laid back, educated people with a good sense of humour. When the US overthrew their democratically elected government it opened the doors for the fundamentalist rednecks, and now we have a gang of well connected money men at the top making a stone cold fortune from the troubles, while the average Iranian gets more and more pissed off. The best thing the US could do is leave them alone and let nature take its course.
Was that not Huffy the Muff Buffer?
There's really no downside to this.
Except game producers are in it for one reason, and thats to make money, not to provide free entertainment. In fact the more time you spend grinding and not paying the more you are costing them, this is why things like friendster became basically worthless once it became apparent that most of the userbase was impoverished SE Asians. There's nothing amoral or unethical, flame-ey or otherwise in this statement, this is the simple fact of how things work. A nice free to play for all would be great but also unsustainable.
If it is a game like the traditional fantasy MMO, then high end raiders and solid group dungeon runners will start resenting people who can just hit a store and buy with real-life currency items that are up to par with them.
They can resent as much as they like, unless they are contributing equal or more money than the people who pay, the game manufacturers have no reason at all to cater to them.
So you're comparing newts to humans on a one to one basis are you? Thats... interesting.
Newts can and do regularly live over 20 years.
My goal is to earn a BS in Business and become one of them.
Eh no, you get to be a boss (a real one, not a middle manager) by jumping into the shark tank with the others and being the one who emerges at the end. No amount of formal education will give you even a taste of the experience you need. Thats why you see plenty of successful businesses being run by college dropouts and the like - if you want to be a boss, go ahead and start a business. As for HR, I think you'll find they are peons like everyone else, they just loom large to new hires.
Britain controlled 25% of the land area and population of Planet Earth at one point in time. The Romans controlled less land but the same percentage of the population at their peak.
That doesn't sound nearly as impressive when you realise that most of it was an accidental experiment in laissez faire capitalism gone mad, and lasted about a generation, from the invention and use of machine guns and howitzers until the natives got their hands on enough of them to make a dfference, not unlike the US today. Why do you think the British were routed by the Germans and Japanese? Likewise, its not nearly as impressive when you realise that areas painted red on the map, like China, were never really "part of the empire" but closer to temporary vassal states, and by that metric the US is also on a par. Then you have huge areas like Canada and Australia which were claimed, but which were largely completely empty of people.
To keep them operational? Nothing at all. I guess sunlight if you wanted to be pedantic.
Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high.
If your natural gas turbine doesn't generate the natural gas, you aren't giving the full story here though. You also need hundreds of miles of carefully sealed pipelines and/or freight infrastructure, you also need the refining and mining infrastructure, and you need to factor in the cost for exploration and developing the mine in the first place, with all the dead ends that implies. Natural gas might be cheap but its often subsidised at source, but hey so what you say, I don't pay it. If you live in Europe and the Russians want to extract a trade agreement or something from you, the cost of that natural gas might suddenly start to fluctuate wildly however.
And thats the full story.
Thats how much US national debt China holds. A measely seven percent.
Meh, tabletop wargaming goes back centuries, you can find debates on things like initiative rolls from the 19th century, and it was traditionally an upper class pastime as well. Roleplaying is one offshoot of that, beginning with D&D, which in turn spawned games like WoW, which are fine as far as they go, but it also created a new emergent phenomenon, combining ad libbing with organised game mechanics. Its a very different experience to computer gaming, not neccessarily better or worse, but different and very enjoyable. Compared to WoW, original D&D is indeed old and busted. However comparing modern TTRPGs with WoW is apples and oranges, its different kinds of fun.
Seriously guys, we're limited by the technology.
The only technology I need to enjoy a better RPG experience is a pencil, paper, and some dice. Don't get me wrong, computer games are great, MMO games even better, but its a very different sort of experience.