Indeed. That is one of the stupidest metrics I have seen in a while.
The cross sectional area would be much more interesting for saying how much it can carry.
Well, they do say 80 gigapascals, which means 80 billion newtons per square meter. That is 8 million newtons per square cm, which in earth's gravity is equivalent to supporting ~800,000 kg, or 800 metric tonnes. Which is roughly the weight of 160 elephants.
For a space elevator, an important metric is how much of its own length it can support. Carbon nanotubes have a density of about 2.5 gm/cc. So 800 tonnes is about 3200 km of fiber with a square cm cross section. TFA says that is enough, but that will get you only a tenth of the way to GEO.
TFA says 160 elephants, or 800 tonnes, or 5000 kg per elephant. That is about the average weight of an African elephant. Females are about 4000 kg and males about 6000 kg, averaging to 5000 kg.
Asian elephants are considerably smaller, averaging about 4000 kg. The only way to average 5000 kg with Asian elephants would be to use all males, but the males tend to be aggressive and difficult to handle, and there is no way you are going to get 160 of them onto a scale.
there would of been much more noise over this if Ultralong meant kilometers or or at least 10s of meters.
Actually, if a single nanotube is 1 cm, that is enough. The length would be 10M times the diameter, and the Van der Waals attraction between adjacent tubes along their entire length would far exceed the strength of the covalent link between carbon atoms in a tube.
If you were building a space elevator to GEO (36,000 km), the difference is strength between using a fiber constructed from 1 cm tubes and 1 km tubes would be negligible.
The kid learning to hack on a PC are gone. Computers no longer provide opportunities to tinker
Absolute nonsense. The opportunities today are vastly better than when I was a kid. There are tons of programming tools to download, and more than can run in a browser. A kid can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero, with a full Linux stack, including dev tools, for $5.
Keeping track of what the kids are doing, online or IRL is something all parents should do.
Plenty of kids can make their own decisions without parents hovering over them. Not all kids need their parents to micromanage their social lives.
At the end of the day, the internet is a poor substitute for actual parenting.
The answer is not being a neurotic control freak and making all their decisions for them. Tim Cook sounds like a nightmare of an uncle. He is control freaking and they aren't even his kids.
TFA has ZERO evidence that depriving kids of computers leads to better outcomes. I have worked in after school enrichment programs, and that is the exact opposite of what I have seen. The kids with computer skills read more, have broader knowledge of current events, and are WAY ahead on tech skills. They are even better at social skills and teamwork because they are friends on Facebook and all know each other. The kids without computers at home are at a big disadvantage.
As soon as fire was discovered, parents started complaining that kids were wasting time sitting around the campfire and socializing instead of building character by shivering in the dark. The world has been going to hell ever since.
Bullcrap. If nobody wanted it, then governments wouldn't have pass laws to block it from happening.
There is enormous demand for housing in city centers. In downtown San Francisco, even studio apartments can go for over $1M. Yet it is nearly impossible to build anything.
There is also the opposite, BETTER solution: Stop encouraging more people to be born and immigrating here.
That is a terrible idea. Americans are the most productive and innovative people in the world, and immigrants are able to unleash innovations, energy, and enterprise that were stifled in their homeland. We need more Americans, not fewer.
And the last time California even hinted that they wanted to implement rent control...
Several cities in California have rent control, including Berkeley (of course), San Francisco, and my fair city, San Jose.
Rent control is, of course, stupid and counterproductive. It is about as effective as trying to control food prices by legalizing shoplifting.
Nevertheless, it provides short term benefits to people with no long term stake in the community. Students in Berkeley vote for rent control to save money until they graduate, and then they leave town. They don't suffer from the urban decay and even higher housing prices in the future. It is pure selfishness.
Yes. It is called Land Value Tax, and fiscal conservatives are not only for it, we are the champions of the cause. It is progressives who are usually opposed, so I am not sure why that somehow got inverted here on Slashdot.
It is the least bad tax, and the best and most economically efficient form of taxation. Milton Friedman was an advocate, as was Ludwig von Mises, both demigods of economic freedom.
Unless you are an anarchist, you should accept that some taxes are necessary. Land Value Tax is fair, unavoidable, and unlike many taxes that disincentivize productive activity, LVT actually encourages enterprise.
It has been implemented many places, including Singapore and Denmark. It works well, which is what you should expect, since Milton Friedman was never wrong about anything.
You can't target the working poor. The right wing will put in so many exceptions that your attempts to will fail.
This is backwards. Conservatives generally favor work requirements, while liberals generally oppose them. EITC targets the working poor exclusively, and most economists believe it is effective. Ted Kennedy was a long term nemesis of EITC.
Bill Clinton raised work requirements for welfare in 1996 with strong support from Republicans, but into the teeth of resistance from his own party.
We need higher density and more housing. The only way to solve this problem is to increase the supply; the ONLY reason this problem exists is because of lack of housing in places people want to live.
Indeed. Lack of housing in the most productive cities is a major drag on the economy, and also a major cause of inequality.
Lower income people are locked out of the cities with the best job opportunities and best pay. Meanwhile, soaring property values enrich the people who are already well off. Liberal NIMBYism may be responsible for even more of the growth in inequality than regressive conservative tax "reform".
perhaps they have adjusted for 'people that eat large amounts of organic food generally being more health concious'.
TFA quotes several scientists criticising the study because it did NOT correct for other factors. So this could just be "eating organic" being correlated with eating fewer calories and less sugar and processed food. It could also just be a correlation with being more affluent, which is already known to be correlated with better health.
Studies based on surveys, like this one, should be viewed with far more skepticism than studies based on controlled experiments.
(er... Greece again) then you don't really have a choice.
The Greeks did have a choice. The problem is that they chose poorly and are now living with the consequences.
Even when the cost of their financial recklessness was becoming obvious, they continued to elect irresponsible populists who promised them cost-free bread and circuses.
In 2009, the average retirement age in Greece was 57. Germans work to 67. Why should a German factory worker get up and go to work every morning for an extra decade to pay younger Greeks to relax?
The minimum wage increase directly caused 30%-50% of the price increase through increased costs.
4/25 = 16%
plus the price of hamburger buns, lettuce, cups etc, all made by low-wage employees, went up.
Agricultural workers are exempted from minimum wage laws. Manufacturing workers are not paid the minimum wage. 2% of full time workers earn the minimum wage, and they are not working in cup factories.
Most businesses employ at least some lower wage workers.
Most businesses do not employ any minimum wage workers.
Increasing the minimum wage will result in increased costs of business and thus prices
Of course. That is the deal. We all pay slightly more, and the lowest paid get a raise. TANSTAAFL, so that money has to come from somewhere.
So is this a good policy to reduce income inequality? No not really, because most minimum wage workers are not poor, and most of the poor are not minimum wage workers. Most minimum wage workers are 2nd or 3rd earners in households averaging $53k in income.
Meanwhile, 60% of households below the poverty line have NO earned income at all. The problem isn't "low pay" but "no pay". Instead of just focusing on higher pay, it would be better to focus on getting these people into the workforce, even if just on the bottom rung.
but perhaps there's someone with an economics background out there that can explain exactly why minimum wage increases don't drive inflation as much as some people fear it would or should.
Increases in the minimum wage likey do cause a small increase in inflation, but the effect is small enough that it is lost in the noise.
1. Most increases in the minimum wage are small, and they are one-offs, not tied to inflation. 2. Only 2 percent of full time workers earn the minimum wage 3. 2/3rds of min wage workers get a raise within a year if they stick with the job. 4. Many minimum wage businesses are not as labor intensive as you think. McDonalds spends about 25% of their revenue on labor, and many of those workers make more than min wage.
"Inflation" is not a very good argument against minimum wages increases. A better argument is that it doesn't do much to help the poor because... most minimum wage workers are not poor. Most are part time 2nd or 3rd earners in their households. The average household income of a minimum wage earner in 2016 was $53,000.
A better policy would be to increase programs targeted directly at the working poor, such as EITC.
On the day that minimum wage went up 15%, all of the fast food restaurants increased prices by 25%.
This makes no sense, and I think you just made it up. The cost of labor went up less than 15%, since not all workers were below the threshold. Other costs, such as COGS, rent, utilities, did not go up at all.
At fast food restaurants labor is about 25% of revenue. So a 15% rise in wages is less than a 4% rise in total cost.
So maybe they just used the wage increase as an excuse to raise prices? No, that makes no sense either. Businesses can change their prices anytime they want, and they do it all the time. They don't need an "excuse". If the market would bear a 25% increase, they would have raised prices long ago.
Your entire scenario sounds like made up bullcrap.
Slashdot Mirror
A space elevator has to be located on the equator, where there is no coriolis effect, and thus no hurricanes.
Quoting volume for a rope is not very helpful.
Indeed. That is one of the stupidest metrics I have seen in a while.
The cross sectional area would be much more interesting for saying how much it can carry.
Well, they do say 80 gigapascals, which means 80 billion newtons per square meter. That is 8 million newtons per square cm, which in earth's gravity is equivalent to supporting ~800,000 kg, or 800 metric tonnes. Which is roughly the weight of 160 elephants.
For a space elevator, an important metric is how much of its own length it can support. Carbon nanotubes have a density of about 2.5 gm/cc. So 800 tonnes is about 3200 km of fiber with a square cm cross section. TFA says that is enough, but that will get you only a tenth of the way to GEO.
Asian or African elephants, laden or unladen?
African elephants, unladen.
TFA says 160 elephants, or 800 tonnes, or 5000 kg per elephant. That is about the average weight of an African elephant. Females are about 4000 kg and males about 6000 kg, averaging to 5000 kg.
Asian elephants are considerably smaller, averaging about 4000 kg. The only way to average 5000 kg with Asian elephants would be to use all males, but the males tend to be aggressive and difficult to handle, and there is no way you are going to get 160 of them onto a scale.
there would of been much more noise over this if Ultralong meant kilometers or or at least 10s of meters.
Actually, if a single nanotube is 1 cm, that is enough. The length would be 10M times the diameter, and the Van der Waals attraction between adjacent tubes along their entire length would far exceed the strength of the covalent link between carbon atoms in a tube.
If you were building a space elevator to GEO (36,000 km), the difference is strength between using a fiber constructed from 1 cm tubes and 1 km tubes would be negligible.
Children should not be allowed to use computers until they are able to design and fab a microprocessor.
This is why VHDL should be taught in preschool.
The kid learning to hack on a PC are gone. Computers no longer provide opportunities to tinker
Absolute nonsense. The opportunities today are vastly better than when I was a kid. There are tons of programming tools to download, and more than can run in a browser. A kid can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero, with a full Linux stack, including dev tools, for $5.
Keeping track of what the kids are doing, online or IRL is something all parents should do.
Plenty of kids can make their own decisions without parents hovering over them. Not all kids need their parents to micromanage their social lives.
At the end of the day, the internet is a poor substitute for actual parenting.
The answer is not being a neurotic control freak and making all their decisions for them. Tim Cook sounds like a nightmare of an uncle. He is control freaking and they aren't even his kids.
TFA has ZERO evidence that depriving kids of computers leads to better outcomes. I have worked in after school enrichment programs, and that is the exact opposite of what I have seen. The kids with computer skills read more, have broader knowledge of current events, and are WAY ahead on tech skills. They are even better at social skills and teamwork because they are friends on Facebook and all know each other. The kids without computers at home are at a big disadvantage.
As soon as fire was discovered, parents started complaining that kids were wasting time sitting around the campfire and socializing instead of building character by shivering in the dark. The world has been going to hell ever since.
Families don't want to live in high rise blocks.
Bullcrap. If nobody wanted it, then governments wouldn't have pass laws to block it from happening.
There is enormous demand for housing in city centers. In downtown San Francisco, even studio apartments can go for over $1M. Yet it is nearly impossible to build anything.
There is also the opposite, BETTER solution: Stop encouraging more people to be born and immigrating here.
That is a terrible idea. Americans are the most productive and innovative people in the world, and immigrants are able to unleash innovations, energy, and enterprise that were stifled in their homeland. We need more Americans, not fewer.
there isn't anyone in North America, in the 21st century, that wants to live in a city like Boise.
... except for the 200,000 people that live in Boise, and the thousands more that move there every year.
And the last time California even hinted that they wanted to implement rent control ...
Several cities in California have rent control, including Berkeley (of course), San Francisco, and my fair city, San Jose.
Rent control is, of course, stupid and counterproductive. It is about as effective as trying to control food prices by legalizing shoplifting.
Nevertheless, it provides short term benefits to people with no long term stake in the community. Students in Berkeley vote for rent control to save money until they graduate, and then they leave town. They don't suffer from the urban decay and even higher housing prices in the future. It is pure selfishness.
You think conservatives should be for this tax?
Yes. It is called Land Value Tax, and fiscal conservatives are not only for it, we are the champions of the cause. It is progressives who are usually opposed, so I am not sure why that somehow got inverted here on Slashdot.
It is the least bad tax, and the best and most economically efficient form of taxation. Milton Friedman was an advocate, as was Ludwig von Mises, both demigods of economic freedom.
Unless you are an anarchist, you should accept that some taxes are necessary. Land Value Tax is fair, unavoidable, and unlike many taxes that disincentivize productive activity, LVT actually encourages enterprise.
It has been implemented many places, including Singapore and Denmark. It works well, which is what you should expect, since Milton Friedman was never wrong about anything.
You can't target the working poor. The right wing will put in so many exceptions that your attempts to will fail.
This is backwards. Conservatives generally favor work requirements, while liberals generally oppose them. EITC targets the working poor exclusively, and most economists believe it is effective. Ted Kennedy was a long term nemesis of EITC.
Bill Clinton raised work requirements for welfare in 1996 with strong support from Republicans, but into the teeth of resistance from his own party.
We need higher density and more housing. The only way to solve this problem is to increase the supply; the ONLY reason this problem exists is because of lack of housing in places people want to live.
Indeed. Lack of housing in the most productive cities is a major drag on the economy, and also a major cause of inequality.
Lower income people are locked out of the cities with the best job opportunities and best pay. Meanwhile, soaring property values enrich the people who are already well off. Liberal NIMBYism may be responsible for even more of the growth in inequality than regressive conservative tax "reform".
I know they tried to control for a lot of stuff
How do you know that?
perhaps they have adjusted for 'people that eat large amounts of organic food generally being more health concious'.
TFA quotes several scientists criticising the study because it did NOT correct for other factors. So this could just be "eating organic" being correlated with eating fewer calories and less sugar and processed food. It could also just be a correlation with being more affluent, which is already known to be correlated with better health.
Studies based on surveys, like this one, should be viewed with far more skepticism than studies based on controlled experiments.
It will be interesting to see if giving minimum wage earners more money translates to an improved economy as many economists predict.
Most economists don't predict that it will improve the overall economy.
They predict it will (modestly) reduce income inequality, which is not the same thing.
(er... Greece again) then you don't really have a choice.
The Greeks did have a choice. The problem is that they chose poorly and are now living with the consequences.
Even when the cost of their financial recklessness was becoming obvious, they continued to elect irresponsible populists who promised them cost-free bread and circuses.
In 2009, the average retirement age in Greece was 57. Germans work to 67. Why should a German factory worker get up and go to work every morning for an extra decade to pay younger Greeks to relax?
the politicians are stupid and mostly just give money to their donors.
That may be self-interested and greedy, but it is not stupid.
If anyone is stupid, it is the voters that re-elect them.
The minimum wage increase directly caused 30%-50% of the price increase through increased costs.
4/25 = 16%
plus the price of hamburger buns, lettuce, cups etc, all made by low-wage employees, went up.
Agricultural workers are exempted from minimum wage laws. Manufacturing workers are not paid the minimum wage. 2% of full time workers earn the minimum wage, and they are not working in cup factories.
Most businesses employ at least some lower wage workers.
Most businesses do not employ any minimum wage workers.
Increasing the minimum wage will result in increased costs of business and thus prices
Of course. That is the deal. We all pay slightly more, and the lowest paid get a raise. TANSTAAFL, so that money has to come from somewhere.
So is this a good policy to reduce income inequality? No not really, because most minimum wage workers are not poor, and most of the poor are not minimum wage workers. Most minimum wage workers are 2nd or 3rd earners in households averaging $53k in income.
Meanwhile, 60% of households below the poverty line have NO earned income at all. The problem isn't "low pay" but "no pay". Instead of just focusing on higher pay, it would be better to focus on getting these people into the workforce, even if just on the bottom rung.
you might pay the same amount as you always did, but get a smaller burger or fewer chicken meat wads.
Ahhh, this explains why portion sizes have been declining. No wonder Americans keep getting skinnier.
That reset included othet actual or expected cost increases.
Yet, after waiting for years, they all increased their price by the exact same amount on the very same day? That seems wildly implausible.
And if the price rise had little to do with the min wage increase, they why bring it up?
but perhaps there's someone with an economics background out there that can explain exactly why minimum wage increases don't drive inflation as much as some people fear it would or should.
Increases in the minimum wage likey do cause a small increase in inflation, but the effect is small enough that it is lost in the noise.
1. Most increases in the minimum wage are small, and they are one-offs, not tied to inflation.
2. Only 2 percent of full time workers earn the minimum wage
3. 2/3rds of min wage workers get a raise within a year if they stick with the job.
4. Many minimum wage businesses are not as labor intensive as you think. McDonalds spends about 25% of their revenue on labor, and many of those workers make more than min wage.
"Inflation" is not a very good argument against minimum wages increases. A better argument is that it doesn't do much to help the poor because ... most minimum wage workers are not poor. Most are part time 2nd or 3rd earners in their households. The average household income of a minimum wage earner in 2016 was $53,000.
A better policy would be to increase programs targeted directly at the working poor, such as EITC.
On the day that minimum wage went up 15%, all of the fast food restaurants increased prices by 25%.
This makes no sense, and I think you just made it up. The cost of labor went up less than 15%, since not all workers were below the threshold. Other costs, such as COGS, rent, utilities, did not go up at all.
At fast food restaurants labor is about 25% of revenue. So a 15% rise in wages is less than a 4% rise in total cost.
So maybe they just used the wage increase as an excuse to raise prices? No, that makes no sense either. Businesses can change their prices anytime they want, and they do it all the time. They don't need an "excuse". If the market would bear a 25% increase, they would have raised prices long ago.
Your entire scenario sounds like made up bullcrap.