Maybe not, but you can buy a new car twice as often. Ditto for clothes and electronics.
The appetite for consumption really isn't a problem. Also, this is a bit more complicated than consuming twice as much. I recently bought a washer/dryer combo. It was twice as expensive as the one I bought a decade ago, but it uses a tiny fraction of the water and power the old one used. An economist would say my consumption has doubled, but in some very real ways my consumption is going down.
The fact that we don't see a reason to spend hundreds of billions so you can take your space guitar to a space station isn't an indication of cowardice. That's just common sense.
There's nothing wrong with using old designs. There's even nothing wrong with making a mediocre hash of old designs if it results in a large cost savings. Cost, after all, is the big problem with these kinds of systems, not capability.
But an expensive mediocre rehash of old designs needs to be killed with fire. This is a make-work jobs program, not a launch system.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Then why are they not all in Somalia? No taxes at all there.
They don't have to go to Somalia. They could go to Germany, say, or France. They can go to almost any other country on the face of the planet. Last time I checked the US was #2 in corporate tax rates. We lose out on billions of dollars when companies recognize profits in other countries because it's too expensive to repatriate the money.
And then you just go off into generic lefty screed #235. Look, none of this has anything to do with the fact that the tax rates are stupidly high. I'm not arguing from macroeconomics here. I'm just pointing out the government collects hardly any taxes from corporations because tax rates are too high. It's almost impossible to prevent multinationals from moving profits using offset pricing schemes. They're illegal, technically, but impossible to prove. Even politicians on the left understand this. But since their base doesn't they can't support a more sensible policy. The way it stands now manufacturers in the US pay high corporate taxes until they move somewhere else. But hey, we're sticking it to the man, right? That's freakin' genius.
If it were up to me there would be no corporate income tax. It's not like the corporations pay it anyway - it gets passed right on to their customers. And profits are already taxed when they're disbursed to investors.
From the consumer's point of view, what's the point of downloading faster than one can listen?
People I know who do lots of torrent downloading grab pretty much everything they might be interested in someday. They have stacks of hard drives full of movies, and then they don't watch most of it, because you can only watch so many movies. I can see why someone like that would want to have a terrabit fiber to his bedroom. What's less clear is why I would want to pay extra in taxes or connection fees to support the infrastructure involved.
Maintaining peace? The Norks sank a South Korean corvette in March of 2010, and then shelled a South Korean island the following November. That's not "maintaining peace".
Actually, gold is used in a variety of industrial and scientific applications. Electronics, for instance, where it's typically plated onto cheaper metals because of the expense.
Nobody knows if the cruise (air) ship market exists or not. There are so many variables nobody knows how much you'd have to charge to make the whole thing profitable beyond "a whole lot". Boeing expects to build 1000 of its new 787 "Dreamliner", so it could divide the multi-billion development cost over enough units to keep it reasonably priced at $200m or so.
How many airships could a cruise industry support? Maybe a half-dozen or so? In the mid 1930s when the Hindenburg was constructed the ship cost about the same amount as a destroyer (which is why Hitler wasn't fond of them). It's probably a good parallel for today, when a destroyer costs something like $2bn-$4bn. The final passenger capacity for the Hindenburg was 72. Now, with new materials we could probably carry more people even using less efficient helium as the lifting gas, and we wouldn't need an engineer stationed at every engine, so the crew complement of 40 could be reduced somewhat. On the other hand, if you didn't provide some of (heavy) amenities people are used to on cruises nobody would book a cruise.
Say you ended up with a passenger complement of 200. The useful life of the ship would be a few decades under the rosiest scenario. How much would you have to charge to recoup billions in design and construction costs? Are there that many filthy rich people in the world dying to take such a cruise? It all adds up to a gamble with an enormous downside and a tiny upside. Who would fund something like that?
Why would they do that when, in the same amount of time and for 25% of the cost, they could fly a jet to their destination, spend a day lounging by the hotel pool, and sleep the night in a normal bed?
Probably so, but since you take so long to reach your destination you need more cargo capacity. I once flew from Portland to Frankfurt. IIRC it took eleven hours or so. The airline provided a couple meals and some toilets.
The same trip in an airship would take at least two full days. So instead of two meals per passenger we have six. And nobody is going to sit in a seat for two full days, so the passengers need more room to stretch out. They'll need somewhere to sleep and shower. Smokers will need somewhere to smoke. More water, more capacity for waste.
Why would airships require more maintenance?
Because the envelope is built out of some kind of high tech fabric instead of painted aluminum. It's more susceptible to damage from sunlight and weather. On top of that, helium becomes fouled over time with impurities that migrate through whatever you're using to contain it. So you have to periodically pump out the helium, clean it, and pump it back in, which is a nontrivial task for something that large. Plus you have the same sorts of maintenance to do that the 747 owner has - things like servicing engines after so many hours of operation.
This craft is not a regular airship though so weather should be less of an issue.
Weather is an issue for airships because of the cross-section, not the relative lack of power. From the picture I don't see much in the way of advantage over a more traditional teardrop design.
Although it is slower than an jet (100mph instead of 800mph), it will provide more comfort and be much cheaper (if you think oil is expensive now, imagine what it will cost in 5-10 years).
I've always been something of an airship buff and would love to see this, but I can guarantee you it will never happen. The problem is speed matters for a lot more than just convenience. If (using your numbers) your plane is 8x faster than an airship, that means you can sell eight times as many tickets over a given time frame. Or, to look at it another way, as a production airship of that size will cost about the same as a 747, by running a plane instead of eight airships you can save yourself ($300m x 7) $2.1bn in capital outlays.
Realistically, with a more rigid hull you could fly airships at about a quarter of commercial jet speeds, since for fuel-consumption reasons they don't fly jets at top speed. Even then the numbers just don't work out unless you can get passengers to pay substantially more for a ticket. Plus, there are other problems. Maintenance on airships is likely to be more expensive, and they require more frequent major overhauls. They're not safe to fly in weather conditions that are no problem for jets, and long before you reach unsafe conditions the passengers will be turning green.
Seems like I've seen this article a half dozen times over my career, and nothing ever comes of it. Usually by the time they get the bugs worked out a higher density generation of RAM comes along and the stacked wafers can't compete on price.
What makes you think that the Federal government allocates radio spectrum on other than a national basis?
Because it doesn't. Spectrum is allocated for a purpose at the national level, but within those bands spectrum is allocated to companies on a regional bases. Hell, in the early days of cellular you'd see groups of small investors pool their money and buy enough spectrum for a single cell so they could get rich off of roaming charges.
Yeah, the 45 year old COBOL programmer is in a lot better shape than the 45 year old guy writing ruby. He's not trying to compete with 25 year old guys who have just as much experience with this language, have more energy, make less money, and don't have families getting in the way of overtime. He's not too worried about the SAP project - they can't do it without his help, and anyway it won't be done until after he's retired.
When companies were worried about Y2K it was the COBOL programmers that were charging $300/hr to comb through code looking for two digit years.
They (AT&T) already have more spectrum than Verizon which has more customers and fewer issues with their network.
I do not believe this is true in the major metropolitan areas where it matters.
I agree the idea they need T-Mobile to build out their network is probably BS (though it would save some time), along with the idea this will represent any kind of net jobs gain. If it's a net jobs gain they can really only justify it if they intend to offer enough pricey services to make up the difference. Might happen, with 4G, I guess.
What resource is of a high enough value to warrant the extreme costs of mining it in space and returning it to earth?
There isn't any. But maybe that's not the right way to look at it. I mean, why assume returning it to earth is the goal? If you're planning to build a large space station it may be cheaper to use metals that are already out there than to laboriously loft them into orbit. Hell, if you could put a mile-wide asteroid into orbit you may as well just drill out a few rooms and call it a space station.
It's not as simple as just adding a few new towers. They'd have to re-layout the entire network. That would be many billions more than purchasing T-Mobile. Of course you can overcome spectrum problems with more towers - that's the point of a cell network, after all. But putting up a cell is very, very expensive, especially in a place like NYC. You can't just move them around at a whim.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not, but you can buy a new car twice as often. Ditto for clothes and electronics.
The appetite for consumption really isn't a problem. Also, this is a bit more complicated than consuming twice as much. I recently bought a washer/dryer combo. It was twice as expensive as the one I bought a decade ago, but it uses a tiny fraction of the water and power the old one used. An economist would say my consumption has doubled, but in some very real ways my consumption is going down.
The fact that we don't see a reason to spend hundreds of billions so you can take your space guitar to a space station isn't an indication of cowardice. That's just common sense.
The DC-X was a better start than X-33. They tried to do too much at once in X-33 - it was guaranteed to be a failure.
No they won't. If this thing actually gets funded SpaceEx will be a competitor and the Falcon will be cast into regulation hell.
There's nothing wrong with using old designs. There's even nothing wrong with making a mediocre hash of old designs if it results in a large cost savings. Cost, after all, is the big problem with these kinds of systems, not capability.
But an expensive mediocre rehash of old designs needs to be killed with fire. This is a make-work jobs program, not a launch system.
As long as it happens before I get cancer.
Two thirds? Most women can do that without any fancy equipment.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Then why are they not all in Somalia? No taxes at all there.
They don't have to go to Somalia. They could go to Germany, say, or France. They can go to almost any other country on the face of the planet. Last time I checked the US was #2 in corporate tax rates. We lose out on billions of dollars when companies recognize profits in other countries because it's too expensive to repatriate the money.
And then you just go off into generic lefty screed #235. Look, none of this has anything to do with the fact that the tax rates are stupidly high. I'm not arguing from macroeconomics here. I'm just pointing out the government collects hardly any taxes from corporations because tax rates are too high. It's almost impossible to prevent multinationals from moving profits using offset pricing schemes. They're illegal, technically, but impossible to prove. Even politicians on the left understand this. But since their base doesn't they can't support a more sensible policy. The way it stands now manufacturers in the US pay high corporate taxes until they move somewhere else. But hey, we're sticking it to the man, right? That's freakin' genius.
If it were up to me there would be no corporate income tax. It's not like the corporations pay it anyway - it gets passed right on to their customers. And profits are already taxed when they're disbursed to investors.
People I know who do lots of torrent downloading grab pretty much everything they might be interested in someday. They have stacks of hard drives full of movies, and then they don't watch most of it, because you can only watch so many movies. I can see why someone like that would want to have a terrabit fiber to his bedroom. What's less clear is why I would want to pay extra in taxes or connection fees to support the infrastructure involved.
Why is it that corporations get tax breaks at all?
Because corporate taxes in the US are stupidly high. If they didn't get tax breaks they'd go somewhere else, and who could blame them?
Maintaining peace? The Norks sank a South Korean corvette in March of 2010, and then shelled a South Korean island the following November. That's not "maintaining peace".
although it seems they've managed to settle out of court in a dozen cases or so
Hah! Wouldn't you feel like a genius if you were one of those dozen?
Actually, gold is used in a variety of industrial and scientific applications. Electronics, for instance, where it's typically plated onto cheaper metals because of the expense.
Nobody knows if the cruise (air) ship market exists or not. There are so many variables nobody knows how much you'd have to charge to make the whole thing profitable beyond "a whole lot". Boeing expects to build 1000 of its new 787 "Dreamliner", so it could divide the multi-billion development cost over enough units to keep it reasonably priced at $200m or so.
How many airships could a cruise industry support? Maybe a half-dozen or so? In the mid 1930s when the Hindenburg was constructed the ship cost about the same amount as a destroyer (which is why Hitler wasn't fond of them). It's probably a good parallel for today, when a destroyer costs something like $2bn-$4bn. The final passenger capacity for the Hindenburg was 72. Now, with new materials we could probably carry more people even using less efficient helium as the lifting gas, and we wouldn't need an engineer stationed at every engine, so the crew complement of 40 could be reduced somewhat. On the other hand, if you didn't provide some of (heavy) amenities people are used to on cruises nobody would book a cruise.
Say you ended up with a passenger complement of 200. The useful life of the ship would be a few decades under the rosiest scenario. How much would you have to charge to recoup billions in design and construction costs? Are there that many filthy rich people in the world dying to take such a cruise? It all adds up to a gamble with an enormous downside and a tiny upside. Who would fund something like that?
Why would they do that when, in the same amount of time and for 25% of the cost, they could fly a jet to their destination, spend a day lounging by the hotel pool, and sleep the night in a normal bed?
Can these perhaps lift more than a 747?
Probably so, but since you take so long to reach your destination you need more cargo capacity. I once flew from Portland to Frankfurt. IIRC it took eleven hours or so. The airline provided a couple meals and some toilets.
The same trip in an airship would take at least two full days. So instead of two meals per passenger we have six. And nobody is going to sit in a seat for two full days, so the passengers need more room to stretch out. They'll need somewhere to sleep and shower. Smokers will need somewhere to smoke. More water, more capacity for waste.
Why would airships require more maintenance?
Because the envelope is built out of some kind of high tech fabric instead of painted aluminum. It's more susceptible to damage from sunlight and weather. On top of that, helium becomes fouled over time with impurities that migrate through whatever you're using to contain it. So you have to periodically pump out the helium, clean it, and pump it back in, which is a nontrivial task for something that large. Plus you have the same sorts of maintenance to do that the 747 owner has - things like servicing engines after so many hours of operation.
This craft is not a regular airship though so weather should be less of an issue.
Weather is an issue for airships because of the cross-section, not the relative lack of power. From the picture I don't see much in the way of advantage over a more traditional teardrop design.
I've always been something of an airship buff and would love to see this, but I can guarantee you it will never happen. The problem is speed matters for a lot more than just convenience. If (using your numbers) your plane is 8x faster than an airship, that means you can sell eight times as many tickets over a given time frame. Or, to look at it another way, as a production airship of that size will cost about the same as a 747, by running a plane instead of eight airships you can save yourself ($300m x 7) $2.1bn in capital outlays.
Realistically, with a more rigid hull you could fly airships at about a quarter of commercial jet speeds, since for fuel-consumption reasons they don't fly jets at top speed. Even then the numbers just don't work out unless you can get passengers to pay substantially more for a ticket. Plus, there are other problems. Maintenance on airships is likely to be more expensive, and they require more frequent major overhauls. They're not safe to fly in weather conditions that are no problem for jets, and long before you reach unsafe conditions the passengers will be turning green.
Seems like I've seen this article a half dozen times over my career, and nothing ever comes of it. Usually by the time they get the bugs worked out a higher density generation of RAM comes along and the stacked wafers can't compete on price.
Sure, if you can get ahold of them.
What makes you think that the Federal government allocates radio spectrum on other than a national basis?
Because it doesn't. Spectrum is allocated for a purpose at the national level, but within those bands spectrum is allocated to companies on a regional bases. Hell, in the early days of cellular you'd see groups of small investors pool their money and buy enough spectrum for a single cell so they could get rich off of roaming charges.
Yeah, the 45 year old COBOL programmer is in a lot better shape than the 45 year old guy writing ruby. He's not trying to compete with 25 year old guys who have just as much experience with this language, have more energy, make less money, and don't have families getting in the way of overtime. He's not too worried about the SAP project - they can't do it without his help, and anyway it won't be done until after he's retired.
When companies were worried about Y2K it was the COBOL programmers that were charging $300/hr to comb through code looking for two digit years.
They (AT&T) already have more spectrum than Verizon which has more customers and fewer issues with their network.
I do not believe this is true in the major metropolitan areas where it matters.
I agree the idea they need T-Mobile to build out their network is probably BS (though it would save some time), along with the idea this will represent any kind of net jobs gain. If it's a net jobs gain they can really only justify it if they intend to offer enough pricey services to make up the difference. Might happen, with 4G, I guess.
There isn't any. But maybe that's not the right way to look at it. I mean, why assume returning it to earth is the goal? If you're planning to build a large space station it may be cheaper to use metals that are already out there than to laboriously loft them into orbit. Hell, if you could put a mile-wide asteroid into orbit you may as well just drill out a few rooms and call it a space station.
It's not as simple as just adding a few new towers. They'd have to re-layout the entire network. That would be many billions more than purchasing T-Mobile. Of course you can overcome spectrum problems with more towers - that's the point of a cell network, after all. But putting up a cell is very, very expensive, especially in a place like NYC. You can't just move them around at a whim.