Advanced Recouperating Compressed Air Energy Storage is current-tech, but everyone keeps trying to build them in caverns instead of using storage tanks. The caverns keep turning out to be sandstone, and porous, so they leak or fail. Even a giant, underground tank would carry a fraction of the cost of battery storage.
We have a few regular CAES stations running around the world, and they're fantastically cost-efficient. Recouperating CAES stations add a thermal store (non-pressurized) to raise efficiency as high as 90%. We also have a few CAES stations that use natural gas to reheat the air in expansion, essentially extracting more energy from the burning gas and recovering much of the energy in the stored air. I'm waiting for someone to bite the bullet and build a normal CAES--with a tank, not an underground cave--adding a thermal store for recouperating CAES.
That CRP land is still maintained, just no crop is taken from it. For land to "rest" means it's got a coverage of some kind of plant life but the nutrients are not removed in the form of crop and chaff.
Yeah and I'm also a little ahead of my knowledge on this one. In school, we had government and political science classes in which they told us the USDA pays farmers to not grow crops so as to stabilize prices, otherwise we get crop oversupply; I've been researching this lately, and it's not a thing. When I got down to the USDA's actual literature, I got different explanations of the CRP than what was written on other resources: the CRP leaves those lands wild to act as environmental barriers, catching run-off and cleaning contaminants before they hit rivers and aquifers.
I want to target reserve agriculture land, not land used for environmental management. Reserve agriculture land is important, because...
This is why central planning of an economy will never work, we'll have government know-it-alls telling farmers that have lived on the same land for 100 years on how to best manage their crop.
...farmers today can grow more on less land, and so fertile farmland is often sold off to developers, who pave over it and build cities. Clearing out the development costs an enormous amount of money and takes years; it might be a GDP-breaking practice, considering the sheer cost to demolish, haul away, and landfill or repurpose the debris. We put a lot of effort into protecting our reserve agricultural lands.
If you cover fertile land with solar panels the plants that hold the soil in place will die.
Actually, a lot of cover crop grows in low-light conditions just fine. Sunlight reflects, and we don't create a pitch-black wasteland below our solar arrays. Panels have tilt for optimal performance, and so have space between them so no panel is in another's shadow. As a result, solar farms are full of wide open spaces and light infiltrates under them pretty readily.
Potentially true, for performance-related reasons; however, that doesn't tie the lay-offs to making room in the budget.
Generally speaking, if your layoffs eliminate employees who produce more revenue than their payrolls, you're losing profits. Layoffs are a legitimate and important part of business when your business fails to expand to take advantage of new market opportunities; it's cheaper and more-efficient to instead transition your existing employees into new roles, as that retains a lot of organizational knowledge. Can't much help that when your business is data center servers and everyone moved to Dell, I guess: those jobs are transferring to Dell, and your employees are losing theirs to fix the imbalance.
This is why we need social safety nets, not corporate welfare.
We should have compressed air energy storage facilities, but people keep trying to use existing caverns as storage tanks and finding out they're porous sandstone. Nobody wants to just build a giant tank.
Thing is we're paying to buy nothing. We're taking taxpayer money to give the farmers to hold land and do nothing with it. If we subsidize the farmers making profit off solar capacity, then the farmers get more money--and they get it in exchange for electricity, lowering the other costs the people pay. It's a bit more optimal.
We can always sell overgeneration to Canada, or use it to pull carbon out of the air and make e-diesel (Volkswagen's process) or methane.
Nope I did the math wrong! At $1/watt installed utility-scale, it's a gigawatt per billion! It'll take 445 years at that rate to replace all our fossil fuel.
What will it do to GE when I implement my program to transition our $2Bn/year Conservation Reserve Program farm subsidies to a Conservation Reserve and Energy Production Program?
I plan to protect our reserve agricultural land--land on which we pay farmers to not farm--by placing non-permanent (no paving, no poured foundation) solar installations. Piles hammered into the ground or footed in concrete piers (removable with a shovel), metal conduit, panels mounted on the racks. We subsidize the farmers now, and I plan to push them to spend (say) 50% of that subsidy on the development of solar capacity. If their reserve land is full, then we give them only half the subsidy.
This will encourage farmers to hire tenant solar management, having generation capacity placed in sunny areas and preventing the permanent destruction of that agricultural land. The farmer profits from this generation, plus receives half the usual subsidy. The American people get something for the money they pour into this subsidy (granted it's like $13 per taxpayer per year), that being cheap renewable energy. If we need the farm land back, we can have a crew yank the poles out of the ground and store the panels and conduit--in such a crisis of farm land shortage, the government would subsidize the change back, of course.
Think of the fossil fuel market, though. With all this new capacity—a billion dollars's worth of installation per year!—we'll be competing against coal, oil, and gas combined cycle. It's under a dollar per megawatt capacity installed, so 1,000 TW or 1 petawatt of generation capacity. The US is already adding wind and retiring coal and natural gas. Our current consumption is about 4 petawatt-hours per year, less than half a TW of continuous generation.
Do you think it's enough solar?
Really, though, I need to think about that. We may need to slow that down. That's a hell of a fast change-over and cutting the rug out from under that many working Americans that fast will make it difficult for them to find new jobs.
Actually, executive cash compensation in large companies amounts to very little per employee. At Sinclair, it's $112 per employee per year for the CEO; at Ford, it's $22.50, or around $65 if you only count American employees.
At GE, the CEO gets $33.03 per employee per year. If they just made the next round of wage raises 1 penny lower for everyone—you get $1.99/hr more this year instead of $2/hr—they could pay out $5.9 million in additional executive bonuses.
What about the engineers who are already unemployed? Don't they get a shot at getting back on their feet?
What we really need is some kind of social safety net that helps keep these people stable while they transition through the turmoil of economic change, and gives them a portion of our new growth--because they're unemployed, yes, and they got that way by being in the path of progress. Thanks for keeping the lights running for us all these years, and now your time is over; find somewhere else to be--maybe we kind of owe you for being there right to the end, too.
This is why my Wordpress site runs Wordfence and uses Google Authenticator. At least I have 2FA and everything thrown at it gets run through an analysis engine to detect known exploits (and attack patterns) before it gets passed onto Wordpress. Updating the plug-ins and theme also helps. It also runs inside a Docker container, without write access to the Wordpress core (just plug-ins, themes, and uploads).
It's nice software, but you need a security product dedicated to protecting that one piece of software if you're going to use it. Plus running as a Congressional candidate with an IT security background and getting hacked would be embarrassing.
We need to switch to cryptographic authentication. FIDO U2F makes a lot of this moot.
With some software put in place at the CRAs, they could use FIDO devices to prevent opening new accounts. If you go into a bank with ID (Driver's ID, passport) and a FIDO device, the bank has done the best identification of you it can. Plug the key into a USB port in a computer, have the bank authorize trust establishment, and you generate 3 new key pairs--one for each CRA. The CRAs get the public key; the private key stays on your FIDO device. If it gets lost or stolen, call your bank, voice-verify, and they can cancel the trusts: your credit cards still work, but you can't open any new credit accounts until you physically enter a bank.
Credit cards? Your computer should have an EVM reader. Google accepts FIDO U2F authentication; Google Wallet (or Verified by Visa) could readily authenticate you before accepting a transaction, providing EVM--cryptographic credit card transacting.
Social Security? Walk into a DMV, Social Security building, or other Government building. They all federate trust. Generate a pile of new keys for all the Government service providers.
The weakest link is really any Internet provider to whom you authenticate, since you'll need a method of recovery. Anyone handling credit card transactions should use the CRAs as a secondary: if you can authorize a credit check, you're probably you.
You can lose personally identifiable information, but you can't lose authentication--not for any broad window, and not over the Internet.
Should car insurance cover oil changes, tires, and fuel? That's a serious question.
Car insurance actually doesn't cover damage done to your car by lack of maintenance: if you don't change the oil and the engine dies, your insurer won't replace it (or even total out your vehicle!).
Health insurance, on the other hand, covers all of the costs of pregnancy. As such, the insurer has a risk stake in helping to avoid unwanted pregnancy. This is the same reason insurers now 100% cover wellness and surcharge you if you don't get physicals.
If you make insurance pay for condoms then you'll have to follow new rules.
HSAs and FSAs are paid out of your own pocket. You have to contribute to both, although FSAs fill your account for the year up-front. You don't pay taxes on purchases, though.
The rest of your argument is dubious, although I've only addressed the parts where you display clear and total ignorance.
A premature birth is only viable because it contains not only fully-formed organs, but a fully self-supporting system. That system may be insufficient and, depending on who you ask, viability may include viability if hooked up to a support machine rather than just viability to survive without care.
Generally, abortions occur prior to 9 weeks. Beyond 9 weeks, you need surgical abortion; up to that point, you can have a drug-induced abortion.
At about 9 weeks, the heart finishes dividing into chambers; internal organs are roughed-out, but nowhere near developed. Even the neural tube has only just curled up to take the place of the brain and started differentiating into scaffolding, not yet becoming an actual brain.
Viability is generally agreed upon at 24 weeks, although the low-point number is 20 weeks. Interestingly enough, premature infants seem to not have active default-mode neural networks (basic brain function) until around 30 weeks. In simple terms, a fetus isn't capable of being aware until around 25-30 weeks, although we think they can respond to (but possibly not experience) pain around 20-24.
The 20-24 week delineation avoids the upper end of the extreme, landing before the brain is capable of maybe being aware. The 9-week medical abortion limit is well before brain formation.
Remember as well: you're a person, being a sum of your experiences and your ability to think, reason, and engage in self-preservation responses. A fetus doesn't have a stress response and so no display of self-preservation behavior. It's rather conservative to consider an infant a "person" even at birth; yet we have this wonderful option to identify a missed menstrual cycle (at 4 weeks), test for pregnancy, and perform a drug-induced abortion (by 9 weeks), far before one would seriously begin to wonder if it's perhaps a living being and not just a blob of tissue. 24-week abortions may be legal in many places, but they're horrendously-stressful on the mother (surgery) and generally-unpleasant, so it's easy to encourage people to make that decision early.
Depending on your mood, one lump of cells could either be dumpster fodder or a human child we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save.
Surprisingly, my parents were vocally against abortion until my mom got pregnant again--then they had an abortion a few weeks later. They seem to have forgotten this since then. Mood seems to vary.
I don't believe a blastocyst or unformed fetus is a child. It's a triviality to me: personhood laws are ludicrous, insurance should cover birth control, and HSAs and FSAs should cover condoms (to control the spread of STDs).
What's a travesty is that so many children face neglect and abuse in our over-populated foster home system, and in families who didn't want and can't support a child. We treat children like chickens: fight to have them birthed whenever we get a hint that some breeder hen might have found a rooster, and then roll them through the factory farm with no real care toward their emotional needs. A piece of skin scraping which happens to have DNA distinct from those in the human population isn't a person, nor is it a concern; it takes a good while before it starts to change into something more.
As part of my plan for my Congressional office, I remain committed to our need for clean air and water. I will research and develop a policy to transition our Conservational Reserve Program farm subsidies to a land-preserving utility: rather than keeping reserve agricultural land empty, we will encourage farmers to retain this land and build non-permanent solar generation installations.
Solar generation farms require cabling, conduit, racks, and photovoltaic panels. They don't require poured concrete or other land-destroying development, and we can remove them by taking up the cabling and conduit, unbolting and storing the panels, and pulling the racking from the ground. No disposal of dug-out concrete foundation is necessary; at most, we may require reusable concrete piers as footer.
As farmland generally requires sunlight, it makes for ideal solar generation real estate. Subsidizing the initial deployment and operation of solar installations would displace our coal, oil, and natural gas electrical generation capacity with clean energy. The American taxpayer currently pays billions of dollars every year for the Conservational Reserve Program; this money returns nothing except the promise of land in reserve. The transition to solar operation will similarly preserve the land while producing clean energy at discount subsidy rates, allowing the American people to recover some of that tax cost.
We must pursue new solutions to bring progress to our great nation. Our Congressmen have failed to do this for us, so now I will replace one of our content and well-established so that I can do the job we as public servants owe the American people.
Yeah, that's my campaign. I had also started work on a piece of literature for the universal dividend, which generally follows GDP-per-capita (it follows income-per-capita, which is approximately the same thing, minus pre-tax savings such as 401(k) and IRA). I actually like that graph, because it shows the benefit's tendency to itself increase over time.
This is a completely-new approach, and has interesting properties stemming from the simple mechanism of making the poor less-poor. It takes in money and pays out twice-monthly, so acts as an aid package (for the poor) and an economic stimulus (for everyone), with properties of both.
Because it increases faster than inflation--it reflects a portion of GDP-per-capita, which means it reflects a portion of productivity, and grows more than cost-of-living--it tends to elevate the poor further out of poverty as the economy grows by technical progress. That, in turn, cuts back the need for welfare services, which have tended to require continuous increases in tax rate while still underperforming in their mission of reducing poverty. Cutting into Social Security--basically, having Retirement and Disability bridge the gap between what you should receive under those programs (e.g. when retired) and what you already receive as a fact of being an adult--allows us to guarantee the same level of total benefit while reducing the payroll tax (carried by the poor and middle-class).
All of this means the effectiveness of our anti-poverty programs increases while the tax rates required to run them decreases. When you account the Dividend as a rolling tax refund, the tax burden comes down immensely. This is structured such that you actually see a decrease in top income bracket tax rate, so it's not only a major cut on the middle-class and a major aid package to the poor, but a small cut to the upper-income earners. That, in turn, leaves us headroom to transfer some of that tax burden to funding a healthcare public option, rather than simply cutting taxes for the rich.
Yes, healthcare for 100% of Americans without raising taxes, when you factor in the effects of the Dividend as a new fiscal approach.
As an economic stimulus, we get the effect of the poor and middle-class being provided spending money regardless of employment. This helps carry them when the economy is disrupted; and it helps businesses retain an income flow, thus slowing job loss and speeding recovery, making recessions shorter and less-severe. In poor areas like Baltimore, the additional cash flow--coming from outside the local economy--creates additional spending capacity, thus the capacity for new jobs.
Think about Target: they put a store in Baltimore, and everything they sell is made outside Baltimore--sending part of their revenue out of the city, and bringing no new income into the city. That just bleeds our local economy. With new money coming from outside, enabling purchasing, the revenue can thus support wages for the jobs required by Target. Part of that money goes right back out; part of it goes into the hands of cashiers and inventory specialists. Now you have cash flow in (Dividend) and cash flow out, and so can support some additional jobs. The area tends to become wealthier and more middle-class, without gentrification: we put money into the hands of the people already there, instead of swapping them for rich kids.
So you end up with stronger economies and bigger profits from this kind of approach. Lower tax burdens, better economic stability. Your businesses can take bigger risks and make better advancements, bigger rewards.
It's not like buy-in is going to be easy; it's achievable, though. First, I need to get voted in. Our current crop of Congressmen only care about the same old political talking points and won't push for progressive policy.
Everyone who says something can't be done gets nothing done. I'm going to pass a universal dividend--UBI is old tech and I built something better--and it won't cause a tax increase, either.
You can't reliably extract rent from someone with no income or with an unstable income and periods of unemployment. Risk is high, and so rents must be raised high enough to cover the risk of eviction: three months of renter protection (lost rent), empty unit cost (maintenance), legal proceedings, and the labor to throw all their shit out, plus have the junk cleared away before you get fined for having a bunch of debris on the sidewalk in front of your unit. If you expect 10% of units to undergo eviction per year, you must raise the rent by 10% of the cost of eviction.
If your tenants can't reliably make that higher rent, then you'll take a loss renting to them at an affordable price, or else they'll get evicted more-often and thus raise your cost of risk and push you into a loss (or require even-higher rent).
If a group of people have money from which you can profit, then someone will adjust prices to undercut yours and profit from them, unless you do it first.
That's not what "productive" means, particularly in this context where we are talking about income/wealth produced relative to hours worked.
Actually, it's impossible to measure proportional productivity in any way other than time at maximum productivity. Technological progress can always increase the amount produced per unit time worked, so the theoretical productivity would be 1/inf or 0% at all times; whereas the productivity of a worker using whatever tools at hand top out at a maximum. If the worker operates at half that maximum output, he's 50% productive.
Thing is some jobs are uneven in terms of available work, and can be "caught up". If you work 8 hours a day, but spend 2 hours in the middle waiting for another department to give you an input, then you can actually come in 2 hours late and get all your work done in 6 hours--no loss of productivity. On the other hand, a restaurant will suffer in terms of service quality if it's short-staffed, even though the waitresses aren't busy 100% of the time: you can't toggle them on and off (to release them, you have to allow them to go anywhere, so bringing them back in may take half an hour), so you need your waitstaff on-hand 100% of the time--therefor cutting waitstaff hours in half means you must hire twice as many waitstaff. They're productive 100% of the time, thus 100% productive.
Even if you have no customers one hour, you can't very well predict that. You can predict low customer load and so have reduced staff in that hour, yet you will still have some staff. If you try to predict the days when customer load will be zero, you'll suffer loss. Because you have no way to avoid said loss except by having staff on-hand during those times, that's the maximum output of your staff--long-running productivity is decreased by sending them away when you think there will be no work.
Your waitstaff are producing what is called "coverage" in the industry.
Possible, but unlikely. If you mean that 20% less work is actually done, perhaps. But only if the 20% of work not being done is average with respect to the wealth it produces. However, working 20% fewer hours does not mean less work will get done.
Oh come now, you can do better than that.
The major assumption is that most productive work done is full-time. Problem is service work is 100% productive: all service jobs rely on time coverage, rather than strict output. That means you need those grocery cashiers and waitresses on staff continuously, even if the place is more or less slow within the variation of what requires a minimum of and no more than X people. Much service work is also part-time; whereas full-time work often involves problem-solving, and problem-solving uses down time (your brain continues to make associations in the background when not actively thinking on a problem, and so it becomes efficient to set the problem aside and come back later). Much office work is down-time.
So the first-pass consideration suggests that a 20% reduction in what we call full-time hours results in less than a 20% reduction in total working hours. A second-pass suggests that some subset of full-time work will be more than 80% as productive even when 80% of working hours are performed.
But yes, a reduction of work actually performed by 20% will result in 20% less wealth. That's the conservative estimate.
Not really. Remember wages are paid by consumers: you need the revenue stream to make payroll. Wages are just labor hours at exchange rate.
In a population which works 20% less, 20% less is produced, and wealth drops by 20%. Sliding wages as a whole doesn't change relative consumer buying power: your consumers are just 20% poorer and can only afford to buy 20% less.
I have a path to a 32-hour work week. It involves taking productivity increases in part by reducing full-time working hours, slowly marching toward a 4-day work week while becoming wealthier more-slowly. The alternative is to stay 40 hours and end up with more stuff in the end.
What good is amassing more stuff if you don't have the free time to enjoy your wealth?
You have to add your CA certificate (with the proper attribute CA: True) to your browser, and configure your proxy server to use client-first TLS bumping so it doesn't generate a new certificate every day. Then your caching proxy will work with HSTS sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Advanced Recouperating Compressed Air Energy Storage is current-tech, but everyone keeps trying to build them in caverns instead of using storage tanks. The caverns keep turning out to be sandstone, and porous, so they leak or fail. Even a giant, underground tank would carry a fraction of the cost of battery storage.
We have a few regular CAES stations running around the world, and they're fantastically cost-efficient. Recouperating CAES stations add a thermal store (non-pressurized) to raise efficiency as high as 90%. We also have a few CAES stations that use natural gas to reheat the air in expansion, essentially extracting more energy from the burning gas and recovering much of the energy in the stored air. I'm waiting for someone to bite the bullet and build a normal CAES--with a tank, not an underground cave--adding a thermal store for recouperating CAES.
That CRP land is still maintained, just no crop is taken from it. For land to "rest" means it's got a coverage of some kind of plant life but the nutrients are not removed in the form of crop and chaff.
Yeah and I'm also a little ahead of my knowledge on this one. In school, we had government and political science classes in which they told us the USDA pays farmers to not grow crops so as to stabilize prices, otherwise we get crop oversupply; I've been researching this lately, and it's not a thing. When I got down to the USDA's actual literature, I got different explanations of the CRP than what was written on other resources: the CRP leaves those lands wild to act as environmental barriers, catching run-off and cleaning contaminants before they hit rivers and aquifers.
I want to target reserve agriculture land, not land used for environmental management. Reserve agriculture land is important, because...
This is why central planning of an economy will never work, we'll have government know-it-alls telling farmers that have lived on the same land for 100 years on how to best manage their crop.
If you cover fertile land with solar panels the plants that hold the soil in place will die.
Actually, a lot of cover crop grows in low-light conditions just fine. Sunlight reflects, and we don't create a pitch-black wasteland below our solar arrays. Panels have tilt for optimal performance, and so have space between them so no panel is in another's shadow. As a result, solar farms are full of wide open spaces and light infiltrates under them pretty readily.
Potentially true, for performance-related reasons; however, that doesn't tie the lay-offs to making room in the budget.
Generally speaking, if your layoffs eliminate employees who produce more revenue than their payrolls, you're losing profits. Layoffs are a legitimate and important part of business when your business fails to expand to take advantage of new market opportunities; it's cheaper and more-efficient to instead transition your existing employees into new roles, as that retains a lot of organizational knowledge. Can't much help that when your business is data center servers and everyone moved to Dell, I guess: those jobs are transferring to Dell, and your employees are losing theirs to fix the imbalance.
This is why we need social safety nets, not corporate welfare.
We should have compressed air energy storage facilities, but people keep trying to use existing caverns as storage tanks and finding out they're porous sandstone. Nobody wants to just build a giant tank.
Thing is we're paying to buy nothing. We're taking taxpayer money to give the farmers to hold land and do nothing with it. If we subsidize the farmers making profit off solar capacity, then the farmers get more money--and they get it in exchange for electricity, lowering the other costs the people pay. It's a bit more optimal.
We can always sell overgeneration to Canada, or use it to pull carbon out of the air and make e-diesel (Volkswagen's process) or methane.
Nope I did the math wrong! At $1/watt installed utility-scale, it's a gigawatt per billion! It'll take 445 years at that rate to replace all our fossil fuel.
What will it do to GE when I implement my program to transition our $2Bn/year Conservation Reserve Program farm subsidies to a Conservation Reserve and Energy Production Program?
I plan to protect our reserve agricultural land--land on which we pay farmers to not farm--by placing non-permanent (no paving, no poured foundation) solar installations. Piles hammered into the ground or footed in concrete piers (removable with a shovel), metal conduit, panels mounted on the racks. We subsidize the farmers now, and I plan to push them to spend (say) 50% of that subsidy on the development of solar capacity. If their reserve land is full, then we give them only half the subsidy.
This will encourage farmers to hire tenant solar management, having generation capacity placed in sunny areas and preventing the permanent destruction of that agricultural land. The farmer profits from this generation, plus receives half the usual subsidy. The American people get something for the money they pour into this subsidy (granted it's like $13 per taxpayer per year), that being cheap renewable energy. If we need the farm land back, we can have a crew yank the poles out of the ground and store the panels and conduit--in such a crisis of farm land shortage, the government would subsidize the change back, of course.
Think of the fossil fuel market, though. With all this new capacity—a billion dollars's worth of installation per year!—we'll be competing against coal, oil, and gas combined cycle. It's under a dollar per megawatt capacity installed, so 1,000 TW or 1 petawatt of generation capacity. The US is already adding wind and retiring coal and natural gas. Our current consumption is about 4 petawatt-hours per year, less than half a TW of continuous generation.
Do you think it's enough solar?
Really, though, I need to think about that. We may need to slow that down. That's a hell of a fast change-over and cutting the rug out from under that many working Americans that fast will make it difficult for them to find new jobs.
Actually, executive cash compensation in large companies amounts to very little per employee. At Sinclair, it's $112 per employee per year for the CEO; at Ford, it's $22.50, or around $65 if you only count American employees.
At GE, the CEO gets $33.03 per employee per year. If they just made the next round of wage raises 1 penny lower for everyone—you get $1.99/hr more this year instead of $2/hr—they could pay out $5.9 million in additional executive bonuses.
You need something like a capacitor. Maybe Recouperative Compressed Air Energy Storage.
What about the engineers who are already unemployed? Don't they get a shot at getting back on their feet?
What we really need is some kind of social safety net that helps keep these people stable while they transition through the turmoil of economic change, and gives them a portion of our new growth--because they're unemployed, yes, and they got that way by being in the path of progress. Thanks for keeping the lights running for us all these years, and now your time is over; find somewhere else to be--maybe we kind of owe you for being there right to the end, too.
This is why my Wordpress site runs Wordfence and uses Google Authenticator. At least I have 2FA and everything thrown at it gets run through an analysis engine to detect known exploits (and attack patterns) before it gets passed onto Wordpress. Updating the plug-ins and theme also helps. It also runs inside a Docker container, without write access to the Wordpress core (just plug-ins, themes, and uploads).
It's nice software, but you need a security product dedicated to protecting that one piece of software if you're going to use it. Plus running as a Congressional candidate with an IT security background and getting hacked would be embarrassing.
We need to switch to cryptographic authentication. FIDO U2F makes a lot of this moot.
With some software put in place at the CRAs, they could use FIDO devices to prevent opening new accounts. If you go into a bank with ID (Driver's ID, passport) and a FIDO device, the bank has done the best identification of you it can. Plug the key into a USB port in a computer, have the bank authorize trust establishment, and you generate 3 new key pairs--one for each CRA. The CRAs get the public key; the private key stays on your FIDO device. If it gets lost or stolen, call your bank, voice-verify, and they can cancel the trusts: your credit cards still work, but you can't open any new credit accounts until you physically enter a bank.
Credit cards? Your computer should have an EVM reader. Google accepts FIDO U2F authentication; Google Wallet (or Verified by Visa) could readily authenticate you before accepting a transaction, providing EVM--cryptographic credit card transacting.
Social Security? Walk into a DMV, Social Security building, or other Government building. They all federate trust. Generate a pile of new keys for all the Government service providers.
The weakest link is really any Internet provider to whom you authenticate, since you'll need a method of recovery. Anyone handling credit card transactions should use the CRAs as a secondary: if you can authorize a credit check, you're probably you.
You can lose personally identifiable information, but you can't lose authentication--not for any broad window, and not over the Internet.
Should car insurance cover oil changes, tires, and fuel? That's a serious question.
Car insurance actually doesn't cover damage done to your car by lack of maintenance: if you don't change the oil and the engine dies, your insurer won't replace it (or even total out your vehicle!).
Health insurance, on the other hand, covers all of the costs of pregnancy. As such, the insurer has a risk stake in helping to avoid unwanted pregnancy. This is the same reason insurers now 100% cover wellness and surcharge you if you don't get physicals.
If you make insurance pay for condoms then you'll have to follow new rules.
HSAs and FSAs are paid out of your own pocket. You have to contribute to both, although FSAs fill your account for the year up-front. You don't pay taxes on purchases, though.
The rest of your argument is dubious, although I've only addressed the parts where you display clear and total ignorance.
A premature birth is only viable because it contains not only fully-formed organs, but a fully self-supporting system. That system may be insufficient and, depending on who you ask, viability may include viability if hooked up to a support machine rather than just viability to survive without care.
this is a blastocyst.
Generally, abortions occur prior to 9 weeks. Beyond 9 weeks, you need surgical abortion; up to that point, you can have a drug-induced abortion. At about 9 weeks, the heart finishes dividing into chambers; internal organs are roughed-out, but nowhere near developed. Even the neural tube has only just curled up to take the place of the brain and started differentiating into scaffolding, not yet becoming an actual brain.
Viability is generally agreed upon at 24 weeks, although the low-point number is 20 weeks. Interestingly enough, premature infants seem to not have active default-mode neural networks (basic brain function) until around 30 weeks. In simple terms, a fetus isn't capable of being aware until around 25-30 weeks, although we think they can respond to (but possibly not experience) pain around 20-24.
The 20-24 week delineation avoids the upper end of the extreme, landing before the brain is capable of maybe being aware. The 9-week medical abortion limit is well before brain formation.
Remember as well: you're a person, being a sum of your experiences and your ability to think, reason, and engage in self-preservation responses. A fetus doesn't have a stress response and so no display of self-preservation behavior. It's rather conservative to consider an infant a "person" even at birth; yet we have this wonderful option to identify a missed menstrual cycle (at 4 weeks), test for pregnancy, and perform a drug-induced abortion (by 9 weeks), far before one would seriously begin to wonder if it's perhaps a living being and not just a blob of tissue. 24-week abortions may be legal in many places, but they're horrendously-stressful on the mother (surgery) and generally-unpleasant, so it's easy to encourage people to make that decision early.
Depending on your mood, one lump of cells could either be dumpster fodder or a human child we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save.
Surprisingly, my parents were vocally against abortion until my mom got pregnant again--then they had an abortion a few weeks later. They seem to have forgotten this since then. Mood seems to vary.
I don't believe a blastocyst or unformed fetus is a child. It's a triviality to me: personhood laws are ludicrous, insurance should cover birth control, and HSAs and FSAs should cover condoms (to control the spread of STDs).
What's a travesty is that so many children face neglect and abuse in our over-populated foster home system, and in families who didn't want and can't support a child. We treat children like chickens: fight to have them birthed whenever we get a hint that some breeder hen might have found a rooster, and then roll them through the factory farm with no real care toward their emotional needs. A piece of skin scraping which happens to have DNA distinct from those in the human population isn't a person, nor is it a concern; it takes a good while before it starts to change into something more.
As part of my plan for my Congressional office, I remain committed to our need for clean air and water. I will research and develop a policy to transition our Conservational Reserve Program farm subsidies to a land-preserving utility: rather than keeping reserve agricultural land empty, we will encourage farmers to retain this land and build non-permanent solar generation installations.
Solar generation farms require cabling, conduit, racks, and photovoltaic panels. They don't require poured concrete or other land-destroying development, and we can remove them by taking up the cabling and conduit, unbolting and storing the panels, and pulling the racking from the ground. No disposal of dug-out concrete foundation is necessary; at most, we may require reusable concrete piers as footer.
As farmland generally requires sunlight, it makes for ideal solar generation real estate. Subsidizing the initial deployment and operation of solar installations would displace our coal, oil, and natural gas electrical generation capacity with clean energy. The American taxpayer currently pays billions of dollars every year for the Conservational Reserve Program; this money returns nothing except the promise of land in reserve. The transition to solar operation will similarly preserve the land while producing clean energy at discount subsidy rates, allowing the American people to recover some of that tax cost.
We must pursue new solutions to bring progress to our great nation. Our Congressmen have failed to do this for us, so now I will replace one of our content and well-established so that I can do the job we as public servants owe the American people.
Yeah, that's my campaign. I had also started work on a piece of literature for the universal dividend, which generally follows GDP-per-capita (it follows income-per-capita, which is approximately the same thing, minus pre-tax savings such as 401(k) and IRA). I actually like that graph, because it shows the benefit's tendency to itself increase over time.
This is a completely-new approach, and has interesting properties stemming from the simple mechanism of making the poor less-poor. It takes in money and pays out twice-monthly, so acts as an aid package (for the poor) and an economic stimulus (for everyone), with properties of both.
Because it increases faster than inflation--it reflects a portion of GDP-per-capita, which means it reflects a portion of productivity, and grows more than cost-of-living--it tends to elevate the poor further out of poverty as the economy grows by technical progress. That, in turn, cuts back the need for welfare services, which have tended to require continuous increases in tax rate while still underperforming in their mission of reducing poverty. Cutting into Social Security--basically, having Retirement and Disability bridge the gap between what you should receive under those programs (e.g. when retired) and what you already receive as a fact of being an adult--allows us to guarantee the same level of total benefit while reducing the payroll tax (carried by the poor and middle-class).
All of this means the effectiveness of our anti-poverty programs increases while the tax rates required to run them decreases. When you account the Dividend as a rolling tax refund, the tax burden comes down immensely. This is structured such that you actually see a decrease in top income bracket tax rate, so it's not only a major cut on the middle-class and a major aid package to the poor, but a small cut to the upper-income earners. That, in turn, leaves us headroom to transfer some of that tax burden to funding a healthcare public option, rather than simply cutting taxes for the rich.
Yes, healthcare for 100% of Americans without raising taxes, when you factor in the effects of the Dividend as a new fiscal approach.
As an economic stimulus, we get the effect of the poor and middle-class being provided spending money regardless of employment. This helps carry them when the economy is disrupted; and it helps businesses retain an income flow, thus slowing job loss and speeding recovery, making recessions shorter and less-severe. In poor areas like Baltimore, the additional cash flow--coming from outside the local economy--creates additional spending capacity, thus the capacity for new jobs.
Think about Target: they put a store in Baltimore, and everything they sell is made outside Baltimore--sending part of their revenue out of the city, and bringing no new income into the city. That just bleeds our local economy. With new money coming from outside, enabling purchasing, the revenue can thus support wages for the jobs required by Target. Part of that money goes right back out; part of it goes into the hands of cashiers and inventory specialists. Now you have cash flow in (Dividend) and cash flow out, and so can support some additional jobs. The area tends to become wealthier and more middle-class, without gentrification: we put money into the hands of the people already there, instead of swapping them for rich kids.
So you end up with stronger economies and bigger profits from this kind of approach. Lower tax burdens, better economic stability. Your businesses can take bigger risks and make better advancements, bigger rewards.
It's not like buy-in is going to be easy; it's achievable, though. First, I need to get voted in. Our current crop of Congressmen only care about the same old political talking points and won't push for progressive policy.
Everyone who says something can't be done gets nothing done. I'm going to pass a universal dividend--UBI is old tech and I built something better--and it won't cause a tax increase, either.
It's a Betteridge headline.
"Could we fund a universal basic income with ..."
No.
Don't try to reason with a Georgist. You'll have more-meaningful conversations with a Marxist.
You can't reliably extract rent from someone with no income or with an unstable income and periods of unemployment. Risk is high, and so rents must be raised high enough to cover the risk of eviction: three months of renter protection (lost rent), empty unit cost (maintenance), legal proceedings, and the labor to throw all their shit out, plus have the junk cleared away before you get fined for having a bunch of debris on the sidewalk in front of your unit. If you expect 10% of units to undergo eviction per year, you must raise the rent by 10% of the cost of eviction.
If your tenants can't reliably make that higher rent, then you'll take a loss renting to them at an affordable price, or else they'll get evicted more-often and thus raise your cost of risk and push you into a loss (or require even-higher rent).
If a group of people have money from which you can profit, then someone will adjust prices to undercut yours and profit from them, unless you do it first.
That's not what "productive" means, particularly in this context where we are talking about income/wealth produced relative to hours worked.
Actually, it's impossible to measure proportional productivity in any way other than time at maximum productivity. Technological progress can always increase the amount produced per unit time worked, so the theoretical productivity would be 1/inf or 0% at all times; whereas the productivity of a worker using whatever tools at hand top out at a maximum. If the worker operates at half that maximum output, he's 50% productive.
Thing is some jobs are uneven in terms of available work, and can be "caught up". If you work 8 hours a day, but spend 2 hours in the middle waiting for another department to give you an input, then you can actually come in 2 hours late and get all your work done in 6 hours--no loss of productivity. On the other hand, a restaurant will suffer in terms of service quality if it's short-staffed, even though the waitresses aren't busy 100% of the time: you can't toggle them on and off (to release them, you have to allow them to go anywhere, so bringing them back in may take half an hour), so you need your waitstaff on-hand 100% of the time--therefor cutting waitstaff hours in half means you must hire twice as many waitstaff. They're productive 100% of the time, thus 100% productive.
Even if you have no customers one hour, you can't very well predict that. You can predict low customer load and so have reduced staff in that hour, yet you will still have some staff. If you try to predict the days when customer load will be zero, you'll suffer loss. Because you have no way to avoid said loss except by having staff on-hand during those times, that's the maximum output of your staff--long-running productivity is decreased by sending them away when you think there will be no work.
Your waitstaff are producing what is called "coverage" in the industry.
Possible, but unlikely. If you mean that 20% less work is actually done, perhaps. But only if the 20% of work not being done is average with respect to the wealth it produces. However, working 20% fewer hours does not mean less work will get done.
Oh come now, you can do better than that.
The major assumption is that most productive work done is full-time. Problem is service work is 100% productive: all service jobs rely on time coverage, rather than strict output. That means you need those grocery cashiers and waitresses on staff continuously, even if the place is more or less slow within the variation of what requires a minimum of and no more than X people. Much service work is also part-time; whereas full-time work often involves problem-solving, and problem-solving uses down time (your brain continues to make associations in the background when not actively thinking on a problem, and so it becomes efficient to set the problem aside and come back later). Much office work is down-time.
So the first-pass consideration suggests that a 20% reduction in what we call full-time hours results in less than a 20% reduction in total working hours. A second-pass suggests that some subset of full-time work will be more than 80% as productive even when 80% of working hours are performed.
But yes, a reduction of work actually performed by 20% will result in 20% less wealth. That's the conservative estimate.
Not really. Remember wages are paid by consumers: you need the revenue stream to make payroll. Wages are just labor hours at exchange rate.
In a population which works 20% less, 20% less is produced, and wealth drops by 20%. Sliding wages as a whole doesn't change relative consumer buying power: your consumers are just 20% poorer and can only afford to buy 20% less.
I have a path to a 32-hour work week. It involves taking productivity increases in part by reducing full-time working hours, slowly marching toward a 4-day work week while becoming wealthier more-slowly. The alternative is to stay 40 hours and end up with more stuff in the end.
What good is amassing more stuff if you don't have the free time to enjoy your wealth?
You have to add your CA certificate (with the proper attribute CA: True) to your browser, and configure your proxy server to use client-first TLS bumping so it doesn't generate a new certificate every day. Then your caching proxy will work with HSTS sites.