I have seen no data on gun proliferation that indicates that allowing guns into the hands of law-abiding citizens increases murder rates. It does increase death in assaults and home-invasions.
In places like Detroit or Washington DC or Baltimore City where legal gun ownership is basically non-existent, the huge amount of gun proliferation results in an armed criminal element and a disarmed citizenry. This creates a power dynamic whereby criminals have much more control and can be abusive. In truth, a lot of murders seem to be between criminals--they wind up shooting each other in gang turf arguments. They're actually afraid to pull their guns on private citizens, because the gun crime charge is like 10 times worse than the armed robbery charge (you can get 20 years for using a gun as a prop to threaten someone, whereas you may get thrown in jail for 2 years if you rob someone at knife point).
In places like Texas and Florida, murder rate is lower; however 'justifiable homicide' happens more. Basically when someone gets attacked, they shoot back. This means more shootings happen between crazies and less between bullies who think they're malendrine gangster mafioso. The insecure, up-tight morons are a hell of a lot more insecure when people can shoot back; a gunshot draws attention and when everyone in the area has guns and is afraid mostly of being shot but feels like they can shoot you first, they all come looking for you. At least, the theory is strong enough that people believe it and are hesitant to pull out a gun. It's lose-lose: if you don't shoot someone, they might have a gun, and might shoot you (this is fucking hard to do--why would you pull your gun out if the other guy ALREADY has a gun pointed at you?!); if you do shoot them, someone might come looking to see if everyone's alright, and they might find you, and they might have guns.
On top of all that, we have this whole culture thing going on. Look at the death penalty deterrent. In Texas, it's not much of a deterrent because you'll probably be dead before you make it to the court if you're planning on killing someone. In South Dakota, it's not much of a deterrent for unknown reasons. In Wisconsin, also for unknown reasons, when they abolished capital punishment they had murder rates quadrupal in 2 years, and re-instated it to get the murder rates back down.
The same principle applies to gun ownership: local cultural factors will affect how people behave with guns. If they're all insecure hicks who think only of themselves, anything off their property is not their responsibility (no one comes to help you) and anyone on their property needs killin'; if they're more communal, guns simply make people feel empowered and they believe they have a social responsibility, and they use their guns to protect others when other (bad people) bring out their guns to harm innocents. There's a huge gradient between, there's crazy people, people who don't care, people who are paranoid, and people who are just inborn heroes.
I don't think any country can call itself "civilized" when it decides the best way to handle society is to put the common man into a power-disadvantaged lower class. There are bullies and there are victims, and if we make all the common people victims then the bullies get to be kings by abusing people. We should be teaching men and women to fight and to not be afraid, not to cower in fear and leave everyone else to die if they can save themselves from harm. Humans are weak and useless, individual humans have no survival traits; we need to function in groups to live.
One day I'll be arrested for using logic. "You're THINKING! That's illegal! You must tow either the Republican or Democrat party line! Independent thought is systemic dissension and causes disorderly disruption to our country's political operation, and is thus terrorism!"
This is important. Also, language is processed through a single neurological center which links various abstract concepts together (such as geometry and coloring). This has less to do with multi-tasking, and language interpretation would have a large impact; although other spatial tasks may become difficult when done in tandem with abstract or logical tasks, some combinations would work well. An array of related spatial tasks, for example, would all be easy because they're context-related; but unrelated things that need analysis in relation to other unrelated things are going to cause a mess.
Ok. Now you're really confusing me. Are you saying that hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria burn hydrocarbons just for the heat and then run themselves off the heat? Do they have little steam engines in them? Stirling engines? Some sort of thermocouple. Honestly though, if it's true that the hydrocarbon eating bacteria operate by converting chemical energy to heat, then capture the heat and presumably convert it back to chemical energy as you seem to be implying, I'd be truly fascinated by the mechanism. It seems like, for such a thing to be remotely efficient, the bacteria would have to be able to contain temperatures that would normally kill a living thing.
Well, in plants, energy from the sun is used to excite an electron off a chlorophyll molecule to bind H2O and CO2, stripping the C off the CO2 and releasing O2. This electron supplies the input energy to create CH2O (well, C6H12O6, but close enough), which is used for structure (cellulose) as well as food.
Animals that consume plants, and the plants themselves in the absence of sunlight, utilize CH2O and oxygen in the opposite way. Through a rather complicated mechanism, mitochondria use CH2O to bind an array of chemicals into ATP. When a cell needs energy to perform work, O2 is combined with CH2O to produce CO2 and H2O, along with a small release of heat. This heat serves as an activation energy to reduce ATP into ADP, then AP, then base chemicals. Breaking the phosphorus bonds in ATP/ADP/AP releases MUCH more heat than combusting CH2O, and so is useful; it takes very little energy to trigger the exothermic reaction, and thus the combustion of CH2O is a fast and easy way to gain access to the energy stored in ATP.
In hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria, the biological processes all work the same way: thermal energy is used as an activation energy source to trigger certain endothermic (energy-consuming) reactions. That thermal energy is supplied by readily-triggered exothermic reactions such as oxidization. Because oxygen is plentiful, a combustible fuel source such as sugar or methane would supply the basic energy requirements to drive all of the cell's biological functions. Hydrocarbons in general are combustible.
They will also tend to opportunistically consume what they can, which may involve breaking down a large hydrocarbon into smaller, indigestible pieces, for example. If they can consume something they normally wouldn't be able to by consuming a second substance, then they will, even if it produces all kinds of byproducts. Same thing as humans needing biotin to metabolize amino acids.
True. Hydrocracking long chain hydrocarbons may be useful (combusting a big hydrocarbon chain releases a lot of energy; stability is favorable in biology), but that would involve... hydrogen. Which would come from water (or maybe acidic water for the free H+... would carbonic acid work? Is the environment sulfated such that sulfuric acid forms?). It wouldn't, however, form new compounds by the breakdown of oil. Hydrocarbons wouldn't combine with sulfurs to create hydrocarbonicsulfate or whatever; they'd just get shorter.
Maybe. Depends. Sometimes, the direction you want to go is inobvious or is not recoverable by the initial investors. The point is that this isn't always the case (i.e. market isn't ready yet, it'll go there later); and also that sometimes the investors would go do something else entirely which is economically worth more (i.e. market can't develop this technology on its own, but it does something entirely different that reaches other goals that in the end turn out to have much higher value). In these cases, we lose wealth by directing the market.
Everyone wants to look at the positive effects of socialist state research, but they don't want to look at the cost. Because of this, we see things like NASA as having a perfectly positive effect: have you ever seriously thought NASA had a cost associated with it? I don't mean just parroting "it costs money," but actually consider the impact taxation and government spending have on the market. Taxation weakens the market's ability to move in its own interest; government spending creates demand in a sector of the market, which means businesses may move away from one area of research and instead focus on something else because there is government money available there (think like if you had horse races, poker, and blackjack, and the casino says they're going to do double pay-outs on blackjack for the next hour. You WIN at blackjack, you're like 48% versus house 52% odds, now you're 74% vs 26% because every win is essentially 2 wins--a "safe bet," you will leave the table richer than you came).
It's very easy to measure the benefits, and very hard to measure the costs. The benefits are shiny and attractive and more interesting than the costs anyway; the costs are fuzzy economics concepts that you wouldn't understand if I could list them plainly, because the path from A to B isn't obvious. Because of this, it's technically hard or even impossible to determine which projects gave us an increase in wealth and which gave us a decrease in wealth.
Romney was a firm supporter of gay rights before he was firmly against the corruption of our family values. Romney viciously opposed planned parenthood before he supported it. Depending on what state he's in this week, anyway.
In 2004 there was a skit which utilized lots and lots of recordings of John Kerry during the election, by which he demanded we support our troops in Iraq and then demanded that we give them absolutely no funding; asserted that the war in Iraq was important and that it was completely unnecessary; stated that he was a strong supporter of Bush's tax cuts and then claimed he viciously opposed them; etc. At one point they used a clip from an interview with Oprah where she read off his statements taking multiple conflicting positions on one issue, and he claimed they didn't conflict (full context, one singe unedited recording).
We could do that with Mitt Romney now. They're both D-MA (Dumbass from Massachusetts).
Well first off, we define pedophilia as sex with anyone under 18
it is well established scientifically, that sexual abuse of children is devastatingly harmful to those children.
Are you saying 17 year old boys are children, and a 22 year old college girl giving a 17 year old boy is devastatingly harmful? Because that's what the law says in many US states and you get a child sexual crime for that and get sent to jail and put on Megan's list (Megan was an 8 year old girl who was raped and murdered--murder is devastatingly harmful to children).
They didn't load the rockets with money you know. They spent it all here on earth give jobs to everyone from the burger flipping kid to the actual rocket scientists, and everyone in between.
'Spending money' doesn't necessarily make the economy better. The government goes into debt, it takes money in taxes, etc, which slows economic growth. You need a bigger impact than the harm done in order to stimulate the economy.
Geographical coverage is more important for this versus population. It's a matter of where you are. Let's say that something the size of, say, Germany had 2/3 the population of the world (doable but would be impractical) and drove on the left. The rest of the earth drives on the right. Would you say, well, 2/3 of the earth drives on the left?
The nice thing about left hand drive is you can operate the gear stick with the left hand. Unfortunately, they still operate on the idea that the back brake is the primary brake, and so on bicycles in left-drive countries the right brake is the front brake (the one you can't operate while signalling). As ridiculous as this method of thinking is, it's really a non-issue: you want to come down on the front brake and only the front brake to emergency stop on a bicycle (the back won't add braking force and will cause the bike to fishtail), but you can't do it with one hand.
You need both hands to do an emergency stop on a bicycle because your body will be forced forward, and with one hand you'll at best wind up turning the bike sharply in the direction of the rear brake; at worst, you'll fly forward, smack your crotch into the handle, and flip the bike over its front end. Really to brake fast, you need both hands on the handlebars, drop your elbows to brace, then hit the front brake hard. This pushes your body forward, but your elbows should be lined up with the handlebars and you'll remain in your seat. Of course if you squeeze the front brake too hard, the front wheel skids and the bike goes down.
People do lots of silly things. Like putting the clutch on the left. Who does that?
Tight inbreeding without health care actually eliminates congenital birth defects. By the third generation, some 9/32 of that generation survive, with 3/32 being carriers of defects and 6/32 being non-carriers. Tight inbreeding is very, VERY unfriendly to carriers of congenital defects, and in a few short generations MOST of their offspring come out defective (and die) and the remainder are largely non-carriers and so can safely inbreed without any further defects.
Interbreeding carries other advantages, such as sharing built-in immune system diversification. Tight inbreeding limits natural immunity. There are other advantages to interbreeding as well. It's not all a matter of avoiding defects and damaged offspring. However, viability of a small population is not lost just because of the inability to avoid inbreeding; it may, in fact, be advantageous (if brutal) to go out 10 generations on a strict, tight inbreeding policy before mandating interbreeding at least with first cousin or further (i.e. nobody has sex with their sister/daughter/whatnot anymore). At that level it'd be hard to find people who aren't your cousin (at that level, it'd be hard to figure out who is your uncle-cousin-brother though)
What I want to know is if the space program created or destroyed wealth.
Building temples, digging holes and filling them back in, making mounds of products and burning them, these are destructive. The Government's "tax and distribute" stimulus tax refunds are also destructive, though less so. Inefficiency destroys wealth by the waste of surplus labor rather than the leveraging of said surplus to explore new endeavors.
The large question, therefor, is one of relative results. Does the space program and similar government funded research provide an economic benefit not otherwise attainable? That is, do we gain new industries which produce enough wealth to cover the costs before said industries would have appeared themselves by the natural course? If you create a new industry by spending $2T, and it generates $2T of economic activity in 15 years, but that industry would have developed and appeared in 15 years, you break even; if it would have only taken 10 years, you sunk money in a hole and you are behind; if it would have taken 20 years, you are ahead.
The question is not, therefor, if certain technologies would have ever been invented without the space program--an argument a lot of people like to use while ignoring current research cropping up that's of no practical use (like materials that are invisible in certain wavelengths, which is of absolutely no use for stealth--it's not 100% invisible in the visible or IR spectrum) but for which exotic uses can and will appear eventually. This is also a common argument for why our military needs to develop so many weapons--the technology in the weapons eventually gets recycled back into other domestic technology. It is, however, irrelevant, if not completely wrong.
Instead the argument is wholly whether or not the economic growth experienced without such "stimulus" would have met or exceeded the growth garnered from said "stimulus" in the same or less time. It is completely possible that, without such "stimulus" being a drain on the economy, other technologies would appear that would take industry in a different direction. Such developments are likely to provide a greater economic benefit: industry creates things to solve its immediate problems, increasing efficiency and stimulating economic growth. For this reason, generally free market economists believe the free market is the most efficient model.
In practice, an artificially stimulated new technology may solve a broader range of problems, or it may simply create a new industry; but to achieve that growth there is the taxation and thus slowing of development of natural industry. In short, the problems solved may be solved less effectively than if the market had solved them itself, or solved at greater cost and thus to no advantage or to a disadvantage over allowing the market to solve those problems in the first place.
New industries created come at the expense of advancement of existing industry and, while they may experience initial explosive growth, long-term benefit may be limited. Photovoltaics are a good example of this: PV panels are inefficient and expensive, and as solar energy becomes more viable we move to focused beam systems that use a parabolic reflector or lenses to direct sunlight onto a sterling engine or a heating column that uses molten salt as a transfer mechanism to drive a heat engine. PV panels are becoming largely obsolete, and existing installations have low ROI and long ROI wait because they're expensive and the panels deteriorate with time.
These considerations come into play when you want to assess the impact of a tax-funded research program. A lot of the time, people like to see that there are results and assume that results would not have existed otherwise; in reality, the results may be better or worse than if the market had been left to fend for itself.
And I'm saying everything other than "apply oxygen, get heat" is going to require a needlessly large amount of energy, which would make hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria which follow those methods require more food. Be aware that snakes don't inject a lot of venom when they bite, and they resist biting and don't inject venom on every bite because of the energy required to produce venom.
Do you think bacteria would evolve to needlessly consume excess energy? The population growth of those strains would be very slow compared to the explosive growth of those that just rapidly burned the oil by oxidization; they'd be overtaken and then starved out: dwindling supplies of food would be quickly consumed by the big population of simple combustion bacteria.
Your argument is "science is hard and biological science involves a lot of complex stuff, so this must be complex." That's an argument from ignorance: you don't understand it, so it must be complicated. Your argument fails Occam's Razor. There are important reasons why this would end up being simple.
In America we're taught that Henry Ford invented the automobile and the assembly line. And occasionally, the internal combustion engine. Education is kind of propagandist here.
Ah, Britishisms. While 85% of the world drives on the left and the automobile was invented in America, Britain claims that the US, Germany, France, and basically everyone except New Zealand drives on the wrong side of the road.
Um, no, see, try showing your penis to a 16 year old girl in Virginia, or in a state where the age of consent is 16 (or 14, or in Arizona you can have sex with a 13 year old if you're of the same sex!) but she's traveled across state lines to get there. You'll get thrown in jail for child molestation. Then the news will pick it up and tell everyone you're a pedophile.
We use the word 'pedophile' to describe criminals because we don't distinguish between the thought and the crime in this country, otherwise they'd be called 'pederasts'.
But that would be needlessly complex and likely require some sort of intelligent designer. Hydrocarbons don't supply much in the way of useful building material without putting in quite a lot of energy. They're most readily reacted with oxygen to provide energy to drive biological processes. You could hydrocrack them, but that requires +2 hydrogen which you have to get from somewhere, most likely from dividing water, which is hard. That, of course, gets you lighter oil or hydrocarbon gases like propane, methane, etc.
False. ALL hydrocarbons are composed of CH4, C2H6, C3H8, C4H10, etc.... Carbon surrounded by hydrogen. Hydrocarbon. There's sulfides and other shit mixed in with the oil, but that's not oil. Burning this in a furnace is different from bacteria absorbing chemicals that come in contact with the cell membrane and doing stuff with them. Bacteria will be more selective; anything not meant to be absorbed will either not enter the cell or will behave in unpredicted or undesirable ways (poison).
it would work if the QR code held a digital signature for that particular mint and year of the serial, along with the denomination. Each code would fit one bill from one mint from one year with one serial number.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen no data on gun proliferation that indicates that allowing guns into the hands of law-abiding citizens increases murder rates. It does increase death in assaults and home-invasions.
In places like Detroit or Washington DC or Baltimore City where legal gun ownership is basically non-existent, the huge amount of gun proliferation results in an armed criminal element and a disarmed citizenry. This creates a power dynamic whereby criminals have much more control and can be abusive. In truth, a lot of murders seem to be between criminals--they wind up shooting each other in gang turf arguments. They're actually afraid to pull their guns on private citizens, because the gun crime charge is like 10 times worse than the armed robbery charge (you can get 20 years for using a gun as a prop to threaten someone, whereas you may get thrown in jail for 2 years if you rob someone at knife point).
In places like Texas and Florida, murder rate is lower; however 'justifiable homicide' happens more. Basically when someone gets attacked, they shoot back. This means more shootings happen between crazies and less between bullies who think they're malendrine gangster mafioso. The insecure, up-tight morons are a hell of a lot more insecure when people can shoot back; a gunshot draws attention and when everyone in the area has guns and is afraid mostly of being shot but feels like they can shoot you first, they all come looking for you. At least, the theory is strong enough that people believe it and are hesitant to pull out a gun. It's lose-lose: if you don't shoot someone, they might have a gun, and might shoot you (this is fucking hard to do--why would you pull your gun out if the other guy ALREADY has a gun pointed at you?!); if you do shoot them, someone might come looking to see if everyone's alright, and they might find you, and they might have guns.
On top of all that, we have this whole culture thing going on. Look at the death penalty deterrent. In Texas, it's not much of a deterrent because you'll probably be dead before you make it to the court if you're planning on killing someone. In South Dakota, it's not much of a deterrent for unknown reasons. In Wisconsin, also for unknown reasons, when they abolished capital punishment they had murder rates quadrupal in 2 years, and re-instated it to get the murder rates back down.
The same principle applies to gun ownership: local cultural factors will affect how people behave with guns. If they're all insecure hicks who think only of themselves, anything off their property is not their responsibility (no one comes to help you) and anyone on their property needs killin'; if they're more communal, guns simply make people feel empowered and they believe they have a social responsibility, and they use their guns to protect others when other (bad people) bring out their guns to harm innocents. There's a huge gradient between, there's crazy people, people who don't care, people who are paranoid, and people who are just inborn heroes.
I don't think any country can call itself "civilized" when it decides the best way to handle society is to put the common man into a power-disadvantaged lower class. There are bullies and there are victims, and if we make all the common people victims then the bullies get to be kings by abusing people. We should be teaching men and women to fight and to not be afraid, not to cower in fear and leave everyone else to die if they can save themselves from harm. Humans are weak and useless, individual humans have no survival traits; we need to function in groups to live.
One day I'll be arrested for using logic. "You're THINKING! That's illegal! You must tow either the Republican or Democrat party line! Independent thought is systemic dissension and causes disorderly disruption to our country's political operation, and is thus terrorism!"
I am Emmanuel Goldstein.
This is important. Also, language is processed through a single neurological center which links various abstract concepts together (such as geometry and coloring). This has less to do with multi-tasking, and language interpretation would have a large impact; although other spatial tasks may become difficult when done in tandem with abstract or logical tasks, some combinations would work well. An array of related spatial tasks, for example, would all be easy because they're context-related; but unrelated things that need analysis in relation to other unrelated things are going to cause a mess.
Ok. Now you're really confusing me. Are you saying that hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria burn hydrocarbons just for the heat and then run themselves off the heat? Do they have little steam engines in them? Stirling engines? Some sort of thermocouple. Honestly though, if it's true that the hydrocarbon eating bacteria operate by converting chemical energy to heat, then capture the heat and presumably convert it back to chemical energy as you seem to be implying, I'd be truly fascinated by the mechanism. It seems like, for such a thing to be remotely efficient, the bacteria would have to be able to contain temperatures that would normally kill a living thing.
Well, in plants, energy from the sun is used to excite an electron off a chlorophyll molecule to bind H2O and CO2, stripping the C off the CO2 and releasing O2. This electron supplies the input energy to create CH2O (well, C6H12O6, but close enough), which is used for structure (cellulose) as well as food.
Animals that consume plants, and the plants themselves in the absence of sunlight, utilize CH2O and oxygen in the opposite way. Through a rather complicated mechanism, mitochondria use CH2O to bind an array of chemicals into ATP. When a cell needs energy to perform work, O2 is combined with CH2O to produce CO2 and H2O, along with a small release of heat. This heat serves as an activation energy to reduce ATP into ADP, then AP, then base chemicals. Breaking the phosphorus bonds in ATP/ADP/AP releases MUCH more heat than combusting CH2O, and so is useful; it takes very little energy to trigger the exothermic reaction, and thus the combustion of CH2O is a fast and easy way to gain access to the energy stored in ATP.
In hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria, the biological processes all work the same way: thermal energy is used as an activation energy source to trigger certain endothermic (energy-consuming) reactions. That thermal energy is supplied by readily-triggered exothermic reactions such as oxidization. Because oxygen is plentiful, a combustible fuel source such as sugar or methane would supply the basic energy requirements to drive all of the cell's biological functions. Hydrocarbons in general are combustible.
They will also tend to opportunistically consume what they can, which may involve breaking down a large hydrocarbon into smaller, indigestible pieces, for example. If they can consume something they normally wouldn't be able to by consuming a second substance, then they will, even if it produces all kinds of byproducts. Same thing as humans needing biotin to metabolize amino acids.
True. Hydrocracking long chain hydrocarbons may be useful (combusting a big hydrocarbon chain releases a lot of energy; stability is favorable in biology), but that would involve... hydrogen. Which would come from water (or maybe acidic water for the free H+... would carbonic acid work? Is the environment sulfated such that sulfuric acid forms?). It wouldn't, however, form new compounds by the breakdown of oil. Hydrocarbons wouldn't combine with sulfurs to create hydrocarbonicsulfate or whatever; they'd just get shorter.
Maybe. Depends. Sometimes, the direction you want to go is inobvious or is not recoverable by the initial investors. The point is that this isn't always the case (i.e. market isn't ready yet, it'll go there later); and also that sometimes the investors would go do something else entirely which is economically worth more (i.e. market can't develop this technology on its own, but it does something entirely different that reaches other goals that in the end turn out to have much higher value). In these cases, we lose wealth by directing the market.
Everyone wants to look at the positive effects of socialist state research, but they don't want to look at the cost. Because of this, we see things like NASA as having a perfectly positive effect: have you ever seriously thought NASA had a cost associated with it? I don't mean just parroting "it costs money," but actually consider the impact taxation and government spending have on the market. Taxation weakens the market's ability to move in its own interest; government spending creates demand in a sector of the market, which means businesses may move away from one area of research and instead focus on something else because there is government money available there (think like if you had horse races, poker, and blackjack, and the casino says they're going to do double pay-outs on blackjack for the next hour. You WIN at blackjack, you're like 48% versus house 52% odds, now you're 74% vs 26% because every win is essentially 2 wins--a "safe bet," you will leave the table richer than you came).
It's very easy to measure the benefits, and very hard to measure the costs. The benefits are shiny and attractive and more interesting than the costs anyway; the costs are fuzzy economics concepts that you wouldn't understand if I could list them plainly, because the path from A to B isn't obvious. Because of this, it's technically hard or even impossible to determine which projects gave us an increase in wealth and which gave us a decrease in wealth.
Romney was a firm supporter of gay rights before he was firmly against the corruption of our family values. Romney viciously opposed planned parenthood before he supported it. Depending on what state he's in this week, anyway.
In 2004 there was a skit which utilized lots and lots of recordings of John Kerry during the election, by which he demanded we support our troops in Iraq and then demanded that we give them absolutely no funding; asserted that the war in Iraq was important and that it was completely unnecessary; stated that he was a strong supporter of Bush's tax cuts and then claimed he viciously opposed them; etc. At one point they used a clip from an interview with Oprah where she read off his statements taking multiple conflicting positions on one issue, and he claimed they didn't conflict (full context, one singe unedited recording).
We could do that with Mitt Romney now. They're both D-MA (Dumbass from Massachusetts).
Well our laws say that showing a 17 year old boy your boobies is roughly equivalent to inserting objects and genitals into infants.
Well first off, we define pedophilia as sex with anyone under 18
it is well established scientifically, that sexual abuse of children is devastatingly harmful to those children.
Are you saying 17 year old boys are children, and a 22 year old college girl giving a 17 year old boy is devastatingly harmful? Because that's what the law says in many US states and you get a child sexual crime for that and get sent to jail and put on Megan's list (Megan was an 8 year old girl who was raped and murdered--murder is devastatingly harmful to children).
They didn't load the rockets with money you know. They spent it all here on earth give jobs to everyone from the burger flipping kid to the actual rocket scientists, and everyone in between.
'Spending money' doesn't necessarily make the economy better. The government goes into debt, it takes money in taxes, etc, which slows economic growth. You need a bigger impact than the harm done in order to stimulate the economy.
Geographical coverage is more important for this versus population. It's a matter of where you are. Let's say that something the size of, say, Germany had 2/3 the population of the world (doable but would be impractical) and drove on the left. The rest of the earth drives on the right. Would you say, well, 2/3 of the earth drives on the left?
The nice thing about left hand drive is you can operate the gear stick with the left hand. Unfortunately, they still operate on the idea that the back brake is the primary brake, and so on bicycles in left-drive countries the right brake is the front brake (the one you can't operate while signalling). As ridiculous as this method of thinking is, it's really a non-issue: you want to come down on the front brake and only the front brake to emergency stop on a bicycle (the back won't add braking force and will cause the bike to fishtail), but you can't do it with one hand.
You need both hands to do an emergency stop on a bicycle because your body will be forced forward, and with one hand you'll at best wind up turning the bike sharply in the direction of the rear brake; at worst, you'll fly forward, smack your crotch into the handle, and flip the bike over its front end. Really to brake fast, you need both hands on the handlebars, drop your elbows to brace, then hit the front brake hard. This pushes your body forward, but your elbows should be lined up with the handlebars and you'll remain in your seat. Of course if you squeeze the front brake too hard, the front wheel skids and the bike goes down.
People do lots of silly things. Like putting the clutch on the left. Who does that?
Tight inbreeding without health care actually eliminates congenital birth defects. By the third generation, some 9/32 of that generation survive, with 3/32 being carriers of defects and 6/32 being non-carriers. Tight inbreeding is very, VERY unfriendly to carriers of congenital defects, and in a few short generations MOST of their offspring come out defective (and die) and the remainder are largely non-carriers and so can safely inbreed without any further defects.
Interbreeding carries other advantages, such as sharing built-in immune system diversification. Tight inbreeding limits natural immunity. There are other advantages to interbreeding as well. It's not all a matter of avoiding defects and damaged offspring. However, viability of a small population is not lost just because of the inability to avoid inbreeding; it may, in fact, be advantageous (if brutal) to go out 10 generations on a strict, tight inbreeding policy before mandating interbreeding at least with first cousin or further (i.e. nobody has sex with their sister/daughter/whatnot anymore). At that level it'd be hard to find people who aren't your cousin (at that level, it'd be hard to figure out who is your uncle-cousin-brother though)
Romney == John Kerry. Obama is also pretty bad. We have no good options.
What I want to know is if the space program created or destroyed wealth.
Building temples, digging holes and filling them back in, making mounds of products and burning them, these are destructive. The Government's "tax and distribute" stimulus tax refunds are also destructive, though less so. Inefficiency destroys wealth by the waste of surplus labor rather than the leveraging of said surplus to explore new endeavors.
The large question, therefor, is one of relative results. Does the space program and similar government funded research provide an economic benefit not otherwise attainable? That is, do we gain new industries which produce enough wealth to cover the costs before said industries would have appeared themselves by the natural course? If you create a new industry by spending $2T, and it generates $2T of economic activity in 15 years, but that industry would have developed and appeared in 15 years, you break even; if it would have only taken 10 years, you sunk money in a hole and you are behind; if it would have taken 20 years, you are ahead.
The question is not, therefor, if certain technologies would have ever been invented without the space program--an argument a lot of people like to use while ignoring current research cropping up that's of no practical use (like materials that are invisible in certain wavelengths, which is of absolutely no use for stealth--it's not 100% invisible in the visible or IR spectrum) but for which exotic uses can and will appear eventually. This is also a common argument for why our military needs to develop so many weapons--the technology in the weapons eventually gets recycled back into other domestic technology. It is, however, irrelevant, if not completely wrong.
Instead the argument is wholly whether or not the economic growth experienced without such "stimulus" would have met or exceeded the growth garnered from said "stimulus" in the same or less time. It is completely possible that, without such "stimulus" being a drain on the economy, other technologies would appear that would take industry in a different direction. Such developments are likely to provide a greater economic benefit: industry creates things to solve its immediate problems, increasing efficiency and stimulating economic growth. For this reason, generally free market economists believe the free market is the most efficient model.
In practice, an artificially stimulated new technology may solve a broader range of problems, or it may simply create a new industry; but to achieve that growth there is the taxation and thus slowing of development of natural industry. In short, the problems solved may be solved less effectively than if the market had solved them itself, or solved at greater cost and thus to no advantage or to a disadvantage over allowing the market to solve those problems in the first place.
New industries created come at the expense of advancement of existing industry and, while they may experience initial explosive growth, long-term benefit may be limited. Photovoltaics are a good example of this: PV panels are inefficient and expensive, and as solar energy becomes more viable we move to focused beam systems that use a parabolic reflector or lenses to direct sunlight onto a sterling engine or a heating column that uses molten salt as a transfer mechanism to drive a heat engine. PV panels are becoming largely obsolete, and existing installations have low ROI and long ROI wait because they're expensive and the panels deteriorate with time.
These considerations come into play when you want to assess the impact of a tax-funded research program. A lot of the time, people like to see that there are results and assume that results would not have existed otherwise; in reality, the results may be better or worse than if the market had been left to fend for itself.
Apparently he didn't invent the assembly line at all. But we're taught that here.
And I'm saying everything other than "apply oxygen, get heat" is going to require a needlessly large amount of energy, which would make hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria which follow those methods require more food. Be aware that snakes don't inject a lot of venom when they bite, and they resist biting and don't inject venom on every bite because of the energy required to produce venom.
Do you think bacteria would evolve to needlessly consume excess energy? The population growth of those strains would be very slow compared to the explosive growth of those that just rapidly burned the oil by oxidization; they'd be overtaken and then starved out: dwindling supplies of food would be quickly consumed by the big population of simple combustion bacteria.
Your argument is "science is hard and biological science involves a lot of complex stuff, so this must be complex." That's an argument from ignorance: you don't understand it, so it must be complicated. Your argument fails Occam's Razor. There are important reasons why this would end up being simple.
In America we're taught that Henry Ford invented the automobile and the assembly line. And occasionally, the internal combustion engine. Education is kind of propagandist here.
Ah, Britishisms. While 85% of the world drives on the left and the automobile was invented in America, Britain claims that the US, Germany, France, and basically everyone except New Zealand drives on the wrong side of the road.
Um, no, see, try showing your penis to a 16 year old girl in Virginia, or in a state where the age of consent is 16 (or 14, or in Arizona you can have sex with a 13 year old if you're of the same sex!) but she's traveled across state lines to get there. You'll get thrown in jail for child molestation. Then the news will pick it up and tell everyone you're a pedophile.
We use the word 'pedophile' to describe criminals because we don't distinguish between the thought and the crime in this country, otherwise they'd be called 'pederasts'.
But that would be needlessly complex and likely require some sort of intelligent designer. Hydrocarbons don't supply much in the way of useful building material without putting in quite a lot of energy. They're most readily reacted with oxygen to provide energy to drive biological processes. You could hydrocrack them, but that requires +2 hydrogen which you have to get from somewhere, most likely from dividing water, which is hard. That, of course, gets you lighter oil or hydrocarbon gases like propane, methane, etc.
It's a robot, does it drive an automatic or a manual transmission? If it's an American made robot I doubt it's programmed to operate a clutch.
False. ALL hydrocarbons are composed of CH4, C2H6, C3H8, C4H10, etc.... Carbon surrounded by hydrogen. Hydrocarbon. There's sulfides and other shit mixed in with the oil, but that's not oil. Burning this in a furnace is different from bacteria absorbing chemicals that come in contact with the cell membrane and doing stuff with them. Bacteria will be more selective; anything not meant to be absorbed will either not enter the cell or will behave in unpredicted or undesirable ways (poison).
CH4, CH2O, etc. I guess CH4 is improper because it's not C2H8, it's C2H6... CH2O is C6H12O6 though (or (CH2O)3 depending who you ask...)
Where did I say that we were dealing with methane?
So, Linux? Without a Web browser, since you can't do that in uh. Windows.
it would work if the QR code held a digital signature for that particular mint and year of the serial, along with the denomination. Each code would fit one bill from one mint from one year with one serial number.