A billion per mile? That seems utterly ridiculous to me, since those are the sorts of numbers LA was getting for tunneling a new subway. I find it very difficult to believe you couldn't build a second level on a freeway for far less money than a billion per mile.
Add to the the most expensive part of any train is laying the road. And with magLEV you still need to do that.
But maglev track is an order of magnitude more expensive than the track designed for conventional high speed rail because it requires much, much tighter tolerances, has more restrictions on grade, and is more sensitive to the sorts of small shifts you get whenever you build something on the ground. Originally the Chinese intended to build a maglev track from the Shanghai airport all the way to Beijing, but after building the segment from the airport to downtown (well, not even downtown, really), they decided maglev was just too damn expensive and will build out the rest of the line with conventional track.
There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!
No, actually, if you're willing to spend 45 billion dollars you can add lanes pretty much indefinitely. Why the hell does it cost this much to build a few hundred miles of track? The Chinese were able to build maglev track for about the same cost per mile.
Maybe we should have the Chinese build it. What the hell, they did okay building railroads the first time around.
Yes, most states have similar laws. There was a case here in Northern California where a lawyer was literally paying the bills by suing one person or company after another. I think she filed something like sixty lawsuits in three years. Eventually they placed a court order on her such that if she wants to sue somebody she has to get the permission of the court in advance, i.e. she has to sue to get the right to sue. There were a bunch of fines and restraining-order-type penalties as well.
Of course I care about people and their quality of life. That's why I'm a strong proponent of private property. Being able to spend your money the way you want to spend it is an indispensable liberty, in my opinion - not only does it improve your quality of life on an individual basis, it's better for the society as a whole. Sure, the system isn't perfect, but in terms of allocating resources the choice isn't between what we have and perfection - the choice is between what we have and some other imperfect system. I would rather have a system where undeserving people get $200m bonuses than a system where all the money is parked in double-tax-free munis because the government swoops in and take any profits a person might get by taking an investment risk. Like most on the left you talk a big game about about caring for people and at the same time you're advocating policies that will take food off the table from those very same people. People need jobs, and jobs are created by other people trying to get rich.
And here you are off on a tangent again. Teacher pay? What does teacher pay have to do with the actual topic, which was the length of the school year? And again, nobody said we don't have the money to increase the length of the school year. All I said was the federal government should raise taxes if it's going to dictate increases in services.
Again, when other people are making and spending their own money, why do you care? Are you an Intel shareholder that you need to worry about how much the "Intel inside" campaign cost?
The Wikipedia numbers are based on 2001, which was the absolute top of the internet bubble and well into the housing bubble. If you're going to start throwing around numbers, why don't you find something a little more up to date? Is there something new and magical about this recession which makes you think it won't have the same effect as every other recession?
This jealousy is what seems to separate liberals from conservatives, from what I can see. Why do you care what other people make? Is it hurting you when somebody else gets a big bonus? Everybody who gets a PhD in physics knows going in it's not the road to riches. People who move money in circles have always made more than people who produce things. If you couldn't handle that, why did you get a PhD in physics instead of a degree in finance? And are you willing to let your jealousy impoverish everyone, including yourself? This makes no sense to me. The Laffer Curve is pretty well understood by economists. The exact shape of the curve is always contentious and changes as the economic environment changes, but there's no dispute about the general shape - revenue declines as you raise taxes past a certain point.
And yes, "we" found it to be a mistake to stifle growth and revenue with high marginal income tax rates. When Congress lowered the marginal tax rates in the '80s revenue went up, and for a very good reason - wealthy people moved money from double-tax-free munis into more profitable investments, because they could just pay the taxes and still come out ahead. What do you imagine the appetite for risk is when the government is going to take 90% of you investment income? If tax rates were raised to those levels again revenue would drop as wealthy people moved money into tax free investments or just moved it out of the country entirely. Don't get me wrong - I think we're still on the left side of the maximum, especially if you don't include growth effects (which are really hard to tease out from other factors). But just because the economy didn't collapse when rates were very high doesn't mean we didn't all end up with less money.
Personally I see no evidence the federal government has had any positive effect on primary and secondary education over the years and would just as soon have the matter left to the states. But if Washington is going to start dictating the length of the school year then Congress ought to provide money for those extra days instead of just issuing mandates.
We didn't have massive federal deficits because the government spent a lot less than it does now. In terms of the percentage of GDP the federal government is bigger now than it's ever been. How is that working out?
None of what you've said addresses my point. High marginal tax rates have been tried in the past and found to be a mistake, not just for rich people but for everyone. The only reason they exist anywhere is class jealousy as they do a lot of damage, decrease revenue, and serve no practical economic purpose.
By the way, I remember the '70s, and for the average person the '70s were much worse than what we're going through today. Also, your 40% number is no longer true, and was never relevant, as it was an artifact of stock and real estate bubbles. Sure, when you have an asset price bubble people with assets get really wealthy. On paper. And when the bubble pops they go back to where they were. Big deal.
So you say, but is that actually being proposed? In the last year I've heard a lot of proposals to spend money with nothing to pay for it. I'm against any unfunded mandates to the states - if the federal government wants to do something like that Congress should pass a federal tax increase.
Incidentally, marginal tax rates have been much higher in the past, but they were lowered for a reason - if tax rates are hiked up to that level again actual tax receipts will go down, which is something of a problem when you're trying to fund new programs. Nobody really knows where the maximum is on the Laffer curve, but it sure happens before 90%.
Where's the money going to come from? Adding a few days onto the school year will cost the states billions of dollars. I dunno what state you're living in, but here in California we're already in such a big hole we can't see the sky. Is Obama planning to raise federal taxes for this, or is it going to be another one of those unfunded mandates?
3.7 mph is a pretty sprightly clip. It's far faster than most people walk and most people aren't capable of maintaining that pace for long periods. Sure, if you're 20 years old and late for work it's not too fast. But this thing would be a godsend for older people or people who have bad knees provided it has a decent range and it fits into a car trunk (and it's light enough to pick it up). But the big plus will be if it can use the same space as pedestrians.
As I understand it the big reason the Segway turned out to be such a failure is it's heavy and fast enough to be dangerous to pedestrians. So in most places you can't ride one on the sidewalk. There's no reason to buy one if it's limited to the street, since for less money you can get a motor cycle or scooter that would be faster, just as safe, and have a much better range.
And when Microsoft moves all those jobs to India and posts their profit anywhere BUT Redmond where will the state be. That's my point.
This makes no sense to me. You think Washington isn't getting enough money from Microsoft but will get more when the state forces them to relocate somewhere else? Do you not see the connection between these kinds of policies in Michigan and the exodus of the state's tax base?
Except that the things we thought were right around the corner turned out not to be. By now we were supposed to have fusion power and sub-orbital passenger ships. Hydroponics for food staples. A cure for cancer. Cryogenics.
It's not the things you expect that turn out to be world changing. Those things tend to not happen at all or not be as important as you thought they'd be. It may be quite a bit harder than people think to produce these things economically, and there are already a few other technologies that may render reasonably efficient solar a negligible increase in cost over the substrate.
That was my first thought. Knowing they would always be able to strike back would reduce the pucker factor when it came to deciding when it was time to push the button. In a command society like that you really don't want to depend on mid-level guys deciding to disobey orders.
I don't know how you could blame them. In 1997 a US company called RiceTek patented a strain of Rice they called Basmati, a name the Indians have been using for centuries. All kinds of companies take out defensive patents, where they never intend to collect money from other people, but they don't want to pay for obvious ideas either. There's no reason the same thing wouldn't happen in the copyright arena. From here:
According to Dr Vandana Shiva, director of a Delhi-based research foundation which monitors issues involving patents and biopiracy, the main aim for obtaining the patent by RiceTec Inc. is to fool the consumers in believing there is no difference between spurious Basmati and real Basmati. Moreover, she claims the "theft involved in the Basmati patent is, therefore, threefold: a theft of collective intellectual and biodiversity heritage on Indian farmers, a theft from Indian traders and exporters whose markets are being stolen by RiceTec Inc., and finally a deception of consumers since RiceTec is using a stolen name Basmati for rice which are derived from Indian rice but not grown in India, and hence are not the same quality."
It doesn't seem odd the Malaysians would seek to prevent similar problems. The situation isn't exactly the same, since this is a copyright and RiceTek took out a patent, but I think the business objective is the same.
an artificial scarcity of ip numbers and ip names that the ISP's can rort a fortune out of their users for a service that costs them less to provide than the cost of billing their customers for it.
the vast majority of machines being dumb emasculated drones begging for content from the big media industries.
an a tightly controlled web where peer to peer traffic is being squeezed out.
Only your first point has anything to do with IPv6. Switching to a new protocol isn't going to make your machine any less "emasculated", and P2P is being suppressed over bandwidth costs (though I'm not even sure how much that's true - I use bittorrent all the time). People who aren't running some kind of web service aren't going to see any benefit from IPv6.
Not true, actually. Organized crime survives because it provides a service that's illegal but people are willing to pay for. In the US that's mostly drugs, hookers, and gambling. In some places the cops are corrupt or untrusted enough you need the local mafia to keep order - the IRA functioned this way for a time in Northern Ireland. If you robbed someone nobody would tell the cops, but at some point an IRA guy would swing by and put a bullet in your knee. In Japan the Yakuza is sometimes used to make sure people hold up their end of business arrangements when the amount of money is so large the law isn't a big enough incentive. In the USSR you could turn to the mafia to be smuggled out or even get you an exit visa.
Of course these people are brutal thugs, but by and large they don't interfere with normal folks going about their business.
But what happens, periodically, is the gangsters forget why they're tolerated. They decide they're untouchable and start to cause problems for ordinary people. They start killing politicians (Japan) or judges (Italy) or blowing up police stations (Columbia) or doing things the general public finds shocking (like the St. Valentine's day massacre). When that happens they're usually all but wiped out. Not completely wiped out, of course, but severely (to use the military term) "degraded". That's what happened in Japan, Italy and Columbia. It happens periodically even in New York. The point is what it takes is the public to decide "fuck these people" and vote to do something about it. I don't know if sunken radioactive waste will be one of those triggers in Italy, but it's certainly possible.
You want to know why science is not popular in the first place? Because we (as a society, we can't just blame the "education system", after all, parents, they're YOUR kids) as a society are teaching our kids to be consumerist, apathetic, self-centered brats. We need a whole new social order, including a new social mindset that teaches people a proper set of values. Science and all the higher arts won't be popular again until people learn to value them.
Kids don't turn into one kind of person or another based on what you teach them. The environment they grow up in will have a far stronger influence than parents or schools can ever hope to have. When did music literacy start to die? Well, right around the time mass media made it available with no effort. Why would I learn to play the piano when I can always hear professionals play at the touch of a button? It's not that people don't get enjoyment out of playing the piano. They do. But it's a lot of work to learn how to play, and the major part of the traditional payoff (that you would have music to listen to) just isn't there any more.
You want to know the real reason science isn't popular? Because as an individual you don't need it. The vast majority of people no longer fix their own cars, brew their own beer, grow anything in the garden, preserve food, purify water, fight battles, deliver babies, or any of the myriad of other things that would have made it obvious how useful a bit of information about the world can be. There was a generation that went into science and engineering to hold off the Red Menace, but since that's pretty much over with (and the jobs are pretty much over with, too), if you want to get ahead in the US the best thing you can learn how to do is learn how to move other peoples' money in circles while you take a little bite each time it passes.
NASA does not get a real budget because NASA does not generate votes.
This is 180 degrees wrong. NASA wouldn't exist at all if not for it's utility in getting votes. The entire purpose of manned spaceflight is to generate jobs in critical Congressional districts. This is why the Ares will end up costing just as much as the space shuttle - nobody in Congress or the NASA bureaucracy is going to make a move that reduces the biggest cost to the program - the 20,000 jobs it maintains.
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A billion per mile? That seems utterly ridiculous to me, since those are the sorts of numbers LA was getting for tunneling a new subway. I find it very difficult to believe you couldn't build a second level on a freeway for far less money than a billion per mile.
But maglev track is an order of magnitude more expensive than the track designed for conventional high speed rail because it requires much, much tighter tolerances, has more restrictions on grade, and is more sensitive to the sorts of small shifts you get whenever you build something on the ground. Originally the Chinese intended to build a maglev track from the Shanghai airport all the way to Beijing, but after building the segment from the airport to downtown (well, not even downtown, really), they decided maglev was just too damn expensive and will build out the rest of the line with conventional track.
No, actually, if you're willing to spend 45 billion dollars you can add lanes pretty much indefinitely. Why the hell does it cost this much to build a few hundred miles of track? The Chinese were able to build maglev track for about the same cost per mile.
Maybe we should have the Chinese build it. What the hell, they did okay building railroads the first time around.
Yes, most states have similar laws. There was a case here in Northern California where a lawyer was literally paying the bills by suing one person or company after another. I think she filed something like sixty lawsuits in three years. Eventually they placed a court order on her such that if she wants to sue somebody she has to get the permission of the court in advance, i.e. she has to sue to get the right to sue. There were a bunch of fines and restraining-order-type penalties as well.
How about Facebook? The word "investment" covers a whole lot more territory than just equities.
Of course I care about people and their quality of life. That's why I'm a strong proponent of private property. Being able to spend your money the way you want to spend it is an indispensable liberty, in my opinion - not only does it improve your quality of life on an individual basis, it's better for the society as a whole. Sure, the system isn't perfect, but in terms of allocating resources the choice isn't between what we have and perfection - the choice is between what we have and some other imperfect system. I would rather have a system where undeserving people get $200m bonuses than a system where all the money is parked in double-tax-free munis because the government swoops in and take any profits a person might get by taking an investment risk. Like most on the left you talk a big game about about caring for people and at the same time you're advocating policies that will take food off the table from those very same people. People need jobs, and jobs are created by other people trying to get rich.
And here you are off on a tangent again. Teacher pay? What does teacher pay have to do with the actual topic, which was the length of the school year? And again, nobody said we don't have the money to increase the length of the school year. All I said was the federal government should raise taxes if it's going to dictate increases in services.
Again, when other people are making and spending their own money, why do you care? Are you an Intel shareholder that you need to worry about how much the "Intel inside" campaign cost?
The Wikipedia numbers are based on 2001, which was the absolute top of the internet bubble and well into the housing bubble. If you're going to start throwing around numbers, why don't you find something a little more up to date? Is there something new and magical about this recession which makes you think it won't have the same effect as every other recession?
This jealousy is what seems to separate liberals from conservatives, from what I can see. Why do you care what other people make? Is it hurting you when somebody else gets a big bonus? Everybody who gets a PhD in physics knows going in it's not the road to riches. People who move money in circles have always made more than people who produce things. If you couldn't handle that, why did you get a PhD in physics instead of a degree in finance? And are you willing to let your jealousy impoverish everyone, including yourself? This makes no sense to me. The Laffer Curve is pretty well understood by economists. The exact shape of the curve is always contentious and changes as the economic environment changes, but there's no dispute about the general shape - revenue declines as you raise taxes past a certain point.
And yes, "we" found it to be a mistake to stifle growth and revenue with high marginal income tax rates. When Congress lowered the marginal tax rates in the '80s revenue went up, and for a very good reason - wealthy people moved money from double-tax-free munis into more profitable investments, because they could just pay the taxes and still come out ahead. What do you imagine the appetite for risk is when the government is going to take 90% of you investment income? If tax rates were raised to those levels again revenue would drop as wealthy people moved money into tax free investments or just moved it out of the country entirely. Don't get me wrong - I think we're still on the left side of the maximum, especially if you don't include growth effects (which are really hard to tease out from other factors). But just because the economy didn't collapse when rates were very high doesn't mean we didn't all end up with less money.
Personally I see no evidence the federal government has had any positive effect on primary and secondary education over the years and would just as soon have the matter left to the states. But if Washington is going to start dictating the length of the school year then Congress ought to provide money for those extra days instead of just issuing mandates.
We didn't have massive federal deficits because the government spent a lot less than it does now. In terms of the percentage of GDP the federal government is bigger now than it's ever been. How is that working out?
None of what you've said addresses my point. High marginal tax rates have been tried in the past and found to be a mistake, not just for rich people but for everyone. The only reason they exist anywhere is class jealousy as they do a lot of damage, decrease revenue, and serve no practical economic purpose.
By the way, I remember the '70s, and for the average person the '70s were much worse than what we're going through today. Also, your 40% number is no longer true, and was never relevant, as it was an artifact of stock and real estate bubbles. Sure, when you have an asset price bubble people with assets get really wealthy. On paper. And when the bubble pops they go back to where they were. Big deal.
So you say, but is that actually being proposed? In the last year I've heard a lot of proposals to spend money with nothing to pay for it. I'm against any unfunded mandates to the states - if the federal government wants to do something like that Congress should pass a federal tax increase.
Incidentally, marginal tax rates have been much higher in the past, but they were lowered for a reason - if tax rates are hiked up to that level again actual tax receipts will go down, which is something of a problem when you're trying to fund new programs. Nobody really knows where the maximum is on the Laffer curve, but it sure happens before 90%.
Where's the money going to come from? Adding a few days onto the school year will cost the states billions of dollars. I dunno what state you're living in, but here in California we're already in such a big hole we can't see the sky. Is Obama planning to raise federal taxes for this, or is it going to be another one of those unfunded mandates?
3.7 mph is a pretty sprightly clip. It's far faster than most people walk and most people aren't capable of maintaining that pace for long periods. Sure, if you're 20 years old and late for work it's not too fast. But this thing would be a godsend for older people or people who have bad knees provided it has a decent range and it fits into a car trunk (and it's light enough to pick it up). But the big plus will be if it can use the same space as pedestrians.
As I understand it the big reason the Segway turned out to be such a failure is it's heavy and fast enough to be dangerous to pedestrians. So in most places you can't ride one on the sidewalk. There's no reason to buy one if it's limited to the street, since for less money you can get a motor cycle or scooter that would be faster, just as safe, and have a much better range.
This makes no sense to me. You think Washington isn't getting enough money from Microsoft but will get more when the state forces them to relocate somewhere else? Do you not see the connection between these kinds of policies in Michigan and the exodus of the state's tax base?
Sure, maybe Washington should be more like Michigan. How are things in Michigan these days?
Except that the things we thought were right around the corner turned out not to be. By now we were supposed to have fusion power and sub-orbital passenger ships. Hydroponics for food staples. A cure for cancer. Cryogenics.
It's not the things you expect that turn out to be world changing. Those things tend to not happen at all or not be as important as you thought they'd be. It may be quite a bit harder than people think to produce these things economically, and there are already a few other technologies that may render reasonably efficient solar a negligible increase in cost over the substrate.
That was my first thought. Knowing they would always be able to strike back would reduce the pucker factor when it came to deciding when it was time to push the button. In a command society like that you really don't want to depend on mid-level guys deciding to disobey orders.
I don't know how you could blame them. In 1997 a US company called RiceTek patented a strain of Rice they called Basmati, a name the Indians have been using for centuries. All kinds of companies take out defensive patents, where they never intend to collect money from other people, but they don't want to pay for obvious ideas either. There's no reason the same thing wouldn't happen in the copyright arena. From here:
It doesn't seem odd the Malaysians would seek to prevent similar problems. The situation isn't exactly the same, since this is a copyright and RiceTek took out a patent, but I think the business objective is the same.
Only your first point has anything to do with IPv6. Switching to a new protocol isn't going to make your machine any less "emasculated", and P2P is being suppressed over bandwidth costs (though I'm not even sure how much that's true - I use bittorrent all the time). People who aren't running some kind of web service aren't going to see any benefit from IPv6.
Not true, actually. Organized crime survives because it provides a service that's illegal but people are willing to pay for. In the US that's mostly drugs, hookers, and gambling. In some places the cops are corrupt or untrusted enough you need the local mafia to keep order - the IRA functioned this way for a time in Northern Ireland. If you robbed someone nobody would tell the cops, but at some point an IRA guy would swing by and put a bullet in your knee. In Japan the Yakuza is sometimes used to make sure people hold up their end of business arrangements when the amount of money is so large the law isn't a big enough incentive. In the USSR you could turn to the mafia to be smuggled out or even get you an exit visa.
Of course these people are brutal thugs, but by and large they don't interfere with normal folks going about their business.
But what happens, periodically, is the gangsters forget why they're tolerated. They decide they're untouchable and start to cause problems for ordinary people. They start killing politicians (Japan) or judges (Italy) or blowing up police stations (Columbia) or doing things the general public finds shocking (like the St. Valentine's day massacre). When that happens they're usually all but wiped out. Not completely wiped out, of course, but severely (to use the military term) "degraded". That's what happened in Japan, Italy and Columbia. It happens periodically even in New York. The point is what it takes is the public to decide "fuck these people" and vote to do something about it. I don't know if sunken radioactive waste will be one of those triggers in Italy, but it's certainly possible.
Kids don't turn into one kind of person or another based on what you teach them. The environment they grow up in will have a far stronger influence than parents or schools can ever hope to have. When did music literacy start to die? Well, right around the time mass media made it available with no effort. Why would I learn to play the piano when I can always hear professionals play at the touch of a button? It's not that people don't get enjoyment out of playing the piano. They do. But it's a lot of work to learn how to play, and the major part of the traditional payoff (that you would have music to listen to) just isn't there any more.
You want to know the real reason science isn't popular? Because as an individual you don't need it. The vast majority of people no longer fix their own cars, brew their own beer, grow anything in the garden, preserve food, purify water, fight battles, deliver babies, or any of the myriad of other things that would have made it obvious how useful a bit of information about the world can be. There was a generation that went into science and engineering to hold off the Red Menace, but since that's pretty much over with (and the jobs are pretty much over with, too), if you want to get ahead in the US the best thing you can learn how to do is learn how to move other peoples' money in circles while you take a little bite each time it passes.
You give holidays to people when you want them to keep doing what they're doing without getting paid more.
This is 180 degrees wrong. NASA wouldn't exist at all if not for it's utility in getting votes. The entire purpose of manned spaceflight is to generate jobs in critical Congressional districts. This is why the Ares will end up costing just as much as the space shuttle - nobody in Congress or the NASA bureaucracy is going to make a move that reduces the biggest cost to the program - the 20,000 jobs it maintains.
Cam you burn things in Seattle?
I'm guessing the roof of a coal plant ends up being covered with a layer of decidedly non-reflective soot.
You don't have to do much damage to ensure it doesn't survive reentry.