Is it really, in the longer term? I mean, the total amount of available solar, compared to the eventual population of the Earth. All the people, with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, central heat and air, with two electric cars in the garage. Ten billion electric cars, commuting every morning on the planet Earth.
Will solar do that? I see big figures for daily solar radiation, but doesn't the planet need most of that? Will it ever be feasible to store newly generated electrons on that level? It certainly isn't now.
What we have now, is two forms of energy stored in the Earth's crust. One is carbon, of which we are realizing the costs. The other is nuclear, of which we are as afraid as medieval peasants were of witches and omens.
Don't talk to me about costs; you make it cost that much, with your triple certified inspections and permits and years of studies to tie up the capital. You mean to kill it, and that's how you do it. Concrete and steel and welders and a truckload of cobalt pipe or whatever does not cost that much. All you have to do is mine some uranium or thorium.
Oh wait, we already did that. It's sitting around as really bad (seriously) nuclear waste at various sites throughout the country. Too hot and poisonous even, to bury under Yucca mountain, apparently. What are you going to do with that, btw?
You burn it up in a nuclear reactor, in case I have to spell it out. I just did I guess. Your plan is to leave it sitting around for 10,000 years. That's a bad plan.
Your point is well taken; Apple is simply making a smart financial move, albeit with some small amount of risk in an area that is not their specialty. Just a nerd worthy bit of cool news.
But I'm correcting you on the 3/4 trillion and even the 160 billion figures; they mean far less than you think they do. It's not like Apple is an Exxon, or even a Sears back in the day. They can crash and burn with very little notice, and also go in a slow motion spiraling arc; they've done both. They know this about themselves; that's why they hoard and stockpile.
When, not if, things start going badly for them again, then they have $160 billion only, which they will burn through pretty quickly. And I doubt Steve can come and save them again. But maybe..
They got out of those taxes by doing without the money. I'll repeat: they didn't take the money. It's literally sitting in a vault overseas somewhere. If and when they take it, they will then have to pay the tax on it.
Why don't they take it? Aren't they greedy? It's not making them any more money sitting there; interest rates are near zero. Now they've lost some because of oil and the strong dollar. What are they waiting for?
If the greedy rich won't take their own money, simply because of the tax, that's your best indicator that the tax is too damn high.
OPEC Is done man. Seriously, fracking has done that. New technology, in the end, always destroys monopolies and cartels.
While one can't help but worry about longer term environmental issues, everyone must appreciate the shorter term benefits. Not just cheap gas; that's one of the manifestations, but OPEC has been soaking us for many many years now. All those shiny new cites and ports and resorts; that's all our money. Some from Europe, most of it US. Think about what our economy would look like now, if that money had stayed here these last 30-40 years. *That's* the price we paid for a political alliance with them. Seems high...
At any rate, no; now is not a good time to invest in solar research and production. Probably a decent time to buy a big lot of solar panels though.
Oh no, zero population growth is a perfectly good reason to criticize them.
Myself, I like people, and I'm very suspicious of people that hate people. Why would someone want to deny new people their existence? Well, greed would be the only answer.
It's only 7 billion anyway. Possibly around 40ish billion, something cool will have to be invented to sustain us all. But then we'll have 33 billion new people, one of which will have been smart enough to think of it.
Feral cats do great harm. They have no real predators. Not sure about Germany, but 'rouge' perfectly describes feral cats in US wilderness areas.
Squirrels can get out of hand in an area where all their predators and competition are gone. (Cats often killed that competition btw.) The squirrels themselves will then start murdering each other; it's an awful sight to see. And hear too; young squirrels scream and sound a lot like tiny children as the adult males go around killing them.
But I sort of agree with your sentiment; I cooked and ate the few squirrels that I have shot. Tasty.:)
AC is a coverup minion for them. Every good consipiracy buff knows that tin indeed blocks the mind control rays, as opposed to aluminum. Which is why they did away with tin foil, and replaced it with aluminum. Go ahead, try to find some tin foil nowadays...
I submit that the French did it wrong. You can have a revolution without guillotines. The French were worse off for longer than they had to be because of the over the top bloody way they did it. They disrupted their economy terribly, and a lot of good and innocent people died.
Those inbred idiots invariably squander those fortunes by spending it. Which is the best thing a rich man can do for me. Giving it to the government helps me indirectly, and I never said no or ridiculously low taxes (not saying you said I did).
But coming to my place of business and buying something is the best and most direct way for me to get my hands on rich people's money.
My premise was that you try and try to tax the rich more, and you just end up empowering them more with multi-thousand page tax laws that only they understand. The rich really are in charge, and we will never legislate their money away. There is only one way to truly take it from them.
Instead of taking it, wouldn't it be better if they just freely spent it? Why aren't they doing that? If they did that, then they don't have that money anymore and we do. And it gets taxed, again. Why are they parking $4+ trillion in the Caymans and Ireland? Keep in mind, while they are hiding their money overseas, they themselves have to do without it in the meantime.
The Caymans and Ireland and Switzerland were there before this wealth gap, and yet the rich used to take the income, pay the tax, and spent or invested the rest. What has changed? Well, that could be a book right there.
Use the greed of the rich as your indicator: If they are willing to do without their own money to avoid the tax, then the tax is too high. It's also way, way too complicated. It should be a reasonable rate that nobody gets out of.
Senatobia Mississippi had a different experience. The Tru-Value, the Western Auto, most of the little dress shops; gone. 3 grocery stores became one and a half. At least a dozen businesses went under soon after Wal-Mart arrived.
Sure, the stores were charging more than they could have before Wal-Mart. That extra money went for higher than apparently necessary wages and the remainder stayed in the pockets of business owners. In this example, that's about a dozen slightly rich people and a hundred making a living wage.
The Wal-Mart replacement has about a hundred people making half that living wage, a half-dozen making a good wage, and one person that's well off; the manager. He's at about the same level as the poorer of the former business owners.
Those business owners lived there, and that extra money, even if temporarily concentrated in their greedy rich hands, stayed in or near Senatobia. And it was eventually re-spent there, taxed both before and after the fact.
Wal-Mart's business model is to tap those local pockets of wealth and siphon it to Bentonville. The way they do it so cheaply, is to burn through desperate employees and local benefits. Also, they leave a little in the pockets of us consumers through lower prices, which is what buys us off so that we allow this to happen.
Why would you spend more on the exact same shampoo?
Because you should be honest, and pay a fair price for goods, and not take advantage of your fellow man. Don't live off the charity of others. Wal-Mart's gig is eventually unsustainable in its' current form. (See the Henry Ford reference above.)
In 1973 my parent's got a Clarinette 85. That stereo lasted forever. I'm still using the speakers. I gave away the receiver/8 track/phono to a poor lady in 1988, still working wonderfully. It was replaced by a 1988 Realistic, which I'm using now.
That was a reason to go to Radio Shack. Why they got rid of their brands is beyond me.
That's some weak sauce man, although the Forbes rebuttal is even weaker.
They're counting the fact that dividends are taxed lower than wages. They're counting accelerated depreciation too. That's tax law, and it's no different for Wally World than it is for anybody else.
The big number is the shit wages that make employees rely on food stamps, school lunch; all those Federal subsidies. That argument actually has some legs. But is that Wal-Mart's fault? All those Federal subsidies were already there, thus creating the environment that Wal-Mart could survive in. Then they move in, take advantage of it, and get rich. If not an Arkansas hillbilly, then somebody would have.
Let me ask you this: On the day Wal-Mart opened in your town, there was still a hardware store, and an independent grocery store, clothing and shoe stores,... Did you still go to those places, and never go to Wal-Mart? Myself, I resisted, but soon those stores were gone. And one by one those employees went to work at Wal-Mart for half the money.
Maybe you didn't go in. Everybody else did. You sure it's just 'The Government' that's at fault here?
You think you're enlightened, but you're a foot soldier for 'the people in charge'.
Down with the rich eh? That's what the French did. The Russians did it too. They finally got fed up. I mean, that's what you actually have to do in the end, if you really want to take the rich people's money. You have to kill them all, and their families. Then, the next day, you and I report to new rich people, albeit with less taste.
Did you really just envision a society without charity? Can you hear yourself?
That was exactly my thought. I believe creationism and religion has had an influence on the big bang theory, as it has on everything else in our society.
The haters up there don't see that their reaction to having the big bang questioned is the same reaction the religious have to having their stuff questioned.
Einstein's gut was steady state, and he had to be convinced of the big bang. I'm just trying to keep my mind open.
It's the price we pay to prevent WWIII. We're going to pay either way. You say it's not worth it.
I say the jury is still out. The globalists attempt to ride that fine line of draining our wealth out to them, just enough, but not too much at once.
China is getting out of hand. $100+ per barrel of oil kept them down a bit, but then the Russians start getting out of hand. We can take it (barely), but they (the globalists) are hurting Europe a bit more than they'd like. It's a complicated game. Let's suck some wealth back out of the Middle East, and regroup...
That's a good point; it's not nearly as simple as opening up the bidding. The janitor and break room vending machine guy now have to have some level of background checks. I can't imagine the changes that have to occur in SpaceX's procedures and operations. What if they have a Russian in engineering management? The list goes on...
So it's a big deal, and I'm not too shocked that my government had to be made to it. Still, the right thing to do would have been to get started the moment SpaceX was capable. and it's shame that Elon had to file a lawsuit. But I guess nothing much happens in this country until the lawyers get paid first.
I also agree with the evidence, and will be shocked if I win that dollar. But I do find the speculation interesting.
I'll disagree with piling up. We got red shift and the CMB, as far as evidence goes. That's about it.
Not everything would change with steady state, you'd just have to start with explaining those two things. And yes, a few theories of interest to nerds would change from those changes.
Here's a thought, the gravitational constant was part of Einstein's steady state universe. He was convinced otherwise, yet we still have it. What if it's not constant? What if 'tired light' is the result of travelling through varying values of g? It should be a constant. We even named it that. But we don't know that to be a fact. It's a theoretical value that appears to measure up when we test it here on Earth.
On the CMB, yeah I got nothing. Teh big bang explains it pretty well. Which is why this is only fit to post on/.:) Perhaps a steady state infinite universe would also have background noise...
But a lot of it is theory. I hope we are not painted into an academic corner so that any physics breakthrough has to break everything. I hope that science is not stuck in a rut the same way society is.
Also, I got Einstein's initial gut feeling helping me win that $1. That's not nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a good browser. It was second best on the Mac.
Fine. Back against the wall, he had to jerk Billy off a little. I don't think he sucked his dick. He may have.
He did what he had to do. Let it go, man.
Is it really, in the longer term? I mean, the total amount of available solar, compared to the eventual population of the Earth. All the people, with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, central heat and air, with two electric cars in the garage. Ten billion electric cars, commuting every morning on the planet Earth.
Will solar do that? I see big figures for daily solar radiation, but doesn't the planet need most of that? Will it ever be feasible to store newly generated electrons on that level? It certainly isn't now.
What we have now, is two forms of energy stored in the Earth's crust. One is carbon, of which we are realizing the costs. The other is nuclear, of which we are as afraid as medieval peasants were of witches and omens.
Don't talk to me about costs; you make it cost that much, with your triple certified inspections and permits and years of studies to tie up the capital. You mean to kill it, and that's how you do it. Concrete and steel and welders and a truckload of cobalt pipe or whatever does not cost that much. All you have to do is mine some uranium or thorium.
Oh wait, we already did that. It's sitting around as really bad (seriously) nuclear waste at various sites throughout the country. Too hot and poisonous even, to bury under Yucca mountain, apparently. What are you going to do with that, btw?
You burn it up in a nuclear reactor, in case I have to spell it out. I just did I guess. Your plan is to leave it sitting around for 10,000 years. That's a bad plan.
Sorry if I yelled at you. Nuclear power. Love it.
Your point is well taken; Apple is simply making a smart financial move, albeit with some small amount of risk in an area that is not their specialty. Just a nerd worthy bit of cool news.
But I'm correcting you on the 3/4 trillion and even the 160 billion figures; they mean far less than you think they do. It's not like Apple is an Exxon, or even a Sears back in the day. They can crash and burn with very little notice, and also go in a slow motion spiraling arc; they've done both. They know this about themselves; that's why they hoard and stockpile.
When, not if, things start going badly for them again, then they have $160 billion only, which they will burn through pretty quickly. And I doubt Steve can come and save them again. But maybe..
They got out of those taxes by doing without the money. I'll repeat: they didn't take the money. It's literally sitting in a vault overseas somewhere. If and when they take it, they will then have to pay the tax on it.
Why don't they take it? Aren't they greedy? It's not making them any more money sitting there; interest rates are near zero. Now they've lost some because of oil and the strong dollar. What are they waiting for?
If the greedy rich won't take their own money, simply because of the tax, that's your best indicator that the tax is too damn high.
OPEC Is done man. Seriously, fracking has done that. New technology, in the end, always destroys monopolies and cartels.
While one can't help but worry about longer term environmental issues, everyone must appreciate the shorter term benefits. Not just cheap gas; that's one of the manifestations, but OPEC has been soaking us for many many years now. All those shiny new cites and ports and resorts; that's all our money. Some from Europe, most of it US. Think about what our economy would look like now, if that money had stayed here these last 30-40 years. *That's* the price we paid for a political alliance with them. Seems high...
At any rate, no; now is not a good time to invest in solar research and production. Probably a decent time to buy a big lot of solar panels though.
It's nice that Apple can carve out a niche of sanity in an insane land.
But it apparently costs a pretty penny to buy sanity in CA.
Oh no, zero population growth is a perfectly good reason to criticize them.
Myself, I like people, and I'm very suspicious of people that hate people. Why would someone want to deny new people their existence? Well, greed would be the only answer.
It's only 7 billion anyway. Possibly around 40ish billion, something cool will have to be invented to sustain us all. But then we'll have 33 billion new people, one of which will have been smart enough to think of it.
Feral cats do great harm. They have no real predators. Not sure about Germany, but 'rouge' perfectly describes feral cats in US wilderness areas.
Squirrels can get out of hand in an area where all their predators and competition are gone. (Cats often killed that competition btw.) The squirrels themselves will then start murdering each other; it's an awful sight to see. And hear too; young squirrels scream and sound a lot like tiny children as the adult males go around killing them.
But I sort of agree with your sentiment; I cooked and ate the few squirrels that I have shot. Tasty. :)
Jeb disqualified himself from being President on Terry Schiavo.
AC is a coverup minion for them. Every good consipiracy buff knows that tin indeed blocks the mind control rays, as opposed to aluminum. Which is why they did away with tin foil, and replaced it with aluminum. Go ahead, try to find some tin foil nowadays...
I wasn't defending the King.
I submit that the French did it wrong. You can have a revolution without guillotines. The French were worse off for longer than they had to be because of the over the top bloody way they did it. They disrupted their economy terribly, and a lot of good and innocent people died.
But eventually, yes, they were better off.
Those inbred idiots invariably squander those fortunes by spending it. Which is the best thing a rich man can do for me. Giving it to the government helps me indirectly, and I never said no or ridiculously low taxes (not saying you said I did).
But coming to my place of business and buying something is the best and most direct way for me to get my hands on rich people's money.
My premise was that you try and try to tax the rich more, and you just end up empowering them more with multi-thousand page tax laws that only they understand. The rich really are in charge, and we will never legislate their money away. There is only one way to truly take it from them.
Instead of taking it, wouldn't it be better if they just freely spent it? Why aren't they doing that? If they did that, then they don't have that money anymore and we do. And it gets taxed, again. Why are they parking $4+ trillion in the Caymans and Ireland? Keep in mind, while they are hiding their money overseas, they themselves have to do without it in the meantime.
The Caymans and Ireland and Switzerland were there before this wealth gap, and yet the rich used to take the income, pay the tax, and spent or invested the rest. What has changed? Well, that could be a book right there.
Use the greed of the rich as your indicator: If they are willing to do without their own money to avoid the tax, then the tax is too high. It's also way, way too complicated. It should be a reasonable rate that nobody gets out of.
Senatobia Mississippi had a different experience. The Tru-Value, the Western Auto, most of the little dress shops; gone. 3 grocery stores became one and a half. At least a dozen businesses went under soon after Wal-Mart arrived.
Sure, the stores were charging more than they could have before Wal-Mart. That extra money went for higher than apparently necessary wages and the remainder stayed in the pockets of business owners. In this example, that's about a dozen slightly rich people and a hundred making a living wage.
The Wal-Mart replacement has about a hundred people making half that living wage, a half-dozen making a good wage, and one person that's well off; the manager. He's at about the same level as the poorer of the former business owners.
Those business owners lived there, and that extra money, even if temporarily concentrated in their greedy rich hands, stayed in or near Senatobia. And it was eventually re-spent there, taxed both before and after the fact.
Wal-Mart's business model is to tap those local pockets of wealth and siphon it to Bentonville. The way they do it so cheaply, is to burn through desperate employees and local benefits. Also, they leave a little in the pockets of us consumers through lower prices, which is what buys us off so that we allow this to happen.
Why would you spend more on the exact same shampoo?
Because you should be honest, and pay a fair price for goods, and not take advantage of your fellow man. Don't live off the charity of others. Wal-Mart's gig is eventually unsustainable in its' current form. (See the Henry Ford reference above.)
Heh.
Stereos? Not anything of note for years now.
In 1973 my parent's got a Clarinette 85. That stereo lasted forever. I'm still using the speakers. I gave away the receiver/8 track/phono to a poor lady in 1988, still working wonderfully. It was replaced by a 1988 Realistic, which I'm using now.
That was a reason to go to Radio Shack. Why they got rid of their brands is beyond me.
That's some weak sauce man, although the Forbes rebuttal is even weaker.
They're counting the fact that dividends are taxed lower than wages. They're counting accelerated depreciation too. That's tax law, and it's no different for Wally World than it is for anybody else.
The big number is the shit wages that make employees rely on food stamps, school lunch; all those Federal subsidies. That argument actually has some legs. But is that Wal-Mart's fault? All those Federal subsidies were already there, thus creating the environment that Wal-Mart could survive in. Then they move in, take advantage of it, and get rich. If not an Arkansas hillbilly, then somebody would have.
Let me ask you this: On the day Wal-Mart opened in your town, there was still a hardware store, and an independent grocery store, clothing and shoe stores, ...
Did you still go to those places, and never go to Wal-Mart? Myself, I resisted, but soon those stores were gone. And one by one those employees went to work at Wal-Mart for half the money.
Maybe you didn't go in. Everybody else did. You sure it's just 'The Government' that's at fault here?
You think you're enlightened, but you're a foot soldier for 'the people in charge'.
Down with the rich eh? That's what the French did. The Russians did it too. They finally got fed up. I mean, that's what you actually have to do in the end, if you really want to take the rich people's money. You have to kill them all, and their families. Then, the next day, you and I report to new rich people, albeit with less taste.
Did you really just envision a society without charity? Can you hear yourself?
The answer is not to oppress everybody equally.
That was exactly my thought. I believe creationism and religion has had an influence on the big bang theory, as it has on everything else in our society.
The haters up there don't see that their reaction to having the big bang questioned is the same reaction the religious have to having their stuff questioned.
Einstein's gut was steady state, and he had to be convinced of the big bang. I'm just trying to keep my mind open.
I just have this feeling...
It's the price we pay to prevent WWIII. We're going to pay either way. You say it's not worth it.
I say the jury is still out. The globalists attempt to ride that fine line of draining our wealth out to them, just enough, but not too much at once.
China is getting out of hand. $100+ per barrel of oil kept them down a bit, but then the Russians start getting out of hand. We can take it (barely), but they (the globalists) are hurting Europe a bit more than they'd like. It's a complicated game. Let's suck some wealth back out of the Middle East, and regroup...
Hm. Interesting times.
Ahh....thank you. A thousand times this. They could always....say no!
Wow. Reagan's meme. I wonder what he would have said.
60 hertz. not 50.
What's wrong with our electricity btw?
That's not quite the same thing as the Governor making a decree to all citizens.
That's a good point; it's not nearly as simple as opening up the bidding. The janitor and break room vending machine guy now have to have some level of background checks. I can't imagine the changes that have to occur in SpaceX's procedures and operations. What if they have a Russian in engineering management? The list goes on...
So it's a big deal, and I'm not too shocked that my government had to be made to it. Still, the right thing to do would have been to get started the moment SpaceX was capable. and it's shame that Elon had to file a lawsuit. But I guess nothing much happens in this country until the lawyers get paid first.
I also agree with the evidence, and will be shocked if I win that dollar. But I do find the speculation interesting.
I'll disagree with piling up. We got red shift and the CMB, as far as evidence goes. That's about it.
Not everything would change with steady state, you'd just have to start with explaining those two things. And yes, a few theories of interest to nerds would change from those changes.
Here's a thought, the gravitational constant was part of Einstein's steady state universe. He was convinced otherwise, yet we still have it. What if it's not constant? What if 'tired light' is the result of travelling through varying values of g? It should be a constant. We even named it that. But we don't know that to be a fact. It's a theoretical value that appears to measure up when we test it here on Earth.
On the CMB, yeah I got nothing. Teh big bang explains it pretty well. Which is why this is only fit to post on /. :) Perhaps a steady state infinite universe would also have background noise...
But a lot of it is theory. I hope we are not painted into an academic corner so that any physics breakthrough has to break everything. I hope that science is not stuck in a rut the same way society is.
Also, I got Einstein's initial gut feeling helping me win that $1. That's not nothing.