Going lower than LEO is not really practical. There's already enough air resistance there as it is.
If that's how you define "LEO" then of course -- you've defined the orbital debris problem out of existence by adopting my proposed solution. Accepted definitions of "LEO" do, however, vary from altitudes where resistance from upper atmosphere is significant to altitudes where it is _not_ significant.
And the cost of additional altitude is not actually that low; gravity in LEO is still 88% of what it is on earth. Sure air resistance is a big factor, but that doesn't make drastic orbit changes free, especially considering installations already in place (such as the ISS) are not fitted to just move around.
No one said "free" but the cost is "very low" to gain altitude. The cost to place mass in a 200km LEO orbit is about 1/2 the cost to place mass in a 20,000km GEO orbit. Do the math. Moreover, the potential gains in economy are even greater by using higher Isp technologies with lower thrust and yes this is directly due to the absence of atmosphere at perigee, where you do the transfer burns.
People seem to have a very Star-Trek view of orbital dynamics. You can't just drive around willy-nilly. You said it yourself: Space is big... really really big.
Much of this can be ameliorated if not solved outright by launching only to lower and higher orbits. Lower orbits will be in the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere which will clean out debris naturally. The orbital decay of the satellites can be matched to their expected operational lives and if launch costs can be brought down then additional station-keeping fuel can be placed aboard to help maintain the operational life until it is time for burn-up. Higher orbits will be in a volume of space that is vastly larger than the LEO shell now being threatened with overpopulation by debris. Space is big... really really big... All you need is to extend the orbital altitude and you reduce the problem as a cube of the orbital radius -- but the cost of additional altitude is _very_ low compared to simply getting to LEO altitude. Once again, lowering launch costs helps here.
Ever since the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 (PL101-611) NASA has been required by LAW to purchase all launch services from the private sector that could be reasonably provided by the private sector. As the person who testified before Congress about the passage of that grass-roots law I was fairly galled by the invitation I received a few years later from NASA to sit in the VIP stand and watch them launch the Advanced Communication Technology Satellite upon a shuttle. Well, actually, by that time I had somewhat come to expect that it was hopeless for a grass-roots legislative effort to actually have an impact on a governmental behavior but to actually receive an invitation to see them blatantly violate the clear intent of the law was still annoying.
You make what appears to be a good point... but there is an algorithm in the case of the Coral Cache. When the Coral server receives a URL it doesn't already have cached, it does execute a different code path than when the URL is already cached. It is the caching path of the Coral server algorithm that should parse and correct the absolute URLs.
The Coralizer algorithm doesn't Coralize links if they have the domain name in them. e.g.: it will Coralize href=lc-4.html but not href=http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/lc-4.html
It's profoundly disturbing that the US is willing to spend a trillion dollars on war in the middle east getting negative results and not willing to devote even one tenth of one percent of that to fusion energy prize legislation that pays for positive results only.
Thus the posterior superior temporal cortex should be the target of many evolutionary arms races seeking to gain or prevent extended phenotypic control of altruistic behavior.
I said: There is every reason to charge a use fee for property rights that would not exist in the absence of government
You said: Perhaps you intended to suggest that it's reasonable to charge a use fee for services that wouldn't happen without government, but it came out backwards.
No I said it correctly and you read it backwards.
"Property rights that would not exist in the absence of government" are, collectively, the service that "wouldn't happen without government".
That's what I said the use fee, aka net asset tax, should be applied to. Once you understand this it is clear why it is the proper basis for revenue for the government.
I should add that once the government assesses your property, it is putting up a bid price and you can force the government to fork over the bid price in exchange for the loss of ownership of your property. Presumably the government wouldn't bid a price that it couldn't immediately get in liquidation itself unless it was trying to overassess you.
Also, the way the definition of "subsistence assets" would be defined ultimately would be a single dollar amount, independent of any specific location's cost of living. With the citizen's dividend you are far less constrained in where you can locate so you subsistence basically becomes median price of a house for a household of your type, plus the median capitalization of a job.
The same way bankruptcy courts assess it for the purpose of chapter 13 bankruptcy wherein your subsistence assets (home and tools of the trade) are protected from confiscation.
Tax net assets, in excess of subsistence, at the same rate as the rate of interest on the national debt. All other domestic taxes are repealed.
Net assets are calculated as assets minus liabilities. Asset value is are assessed at the liquidation value. Liability value is assessed as the liquidation value of the debt instrument representing the liability. Liquidation value is set to the higher of either the government's bid for an asset or the owner's ask value. The government is required to take ownership at its bid and the owner is required to relinquish ownership at the owner's ask value. Liquidation value is also used in eminent domain proceedings to define fair compensation.
Citizen's Dividend
All funding of government programs are terminated except for national defense. The budget surplus paid out as a monthly citizen's dividend equally to all citizens. Children born to noncitizen residents are no longer considered US citizens.
Yes, and for that reason the only assets that are taxed are those assets that should not be taxed while those assets that should be taxed aren't taxed at all.
When I said "property rights that would not exist in the absence of government" I implicitly stated that the property rights relied upon by a yeoman class would not be taxed. Subsistence properties are maintained by their occupants prior to government support of those property rights. Its why things like chapter 13 bankruptcy protection cannot confiscate home and tools of the trade, or why there are institutions like the FDIC or why the SEC has a minimum net asset level of around the same amount to qualify as a risk investor.
The tax is necessary since the economic rent of wealth holders amounts to welfare for the wealthy -- a much worse policy than welfare for the poor since the wealthy are the economy's primary decision makers and we can ill afford to corrupt them through welfare. If the rent thereby taken is more than sufficient to support property rights then the remainder should not be held under the control of an elite few politicians lest we end up with the equivalent of central economic planning. Just disperse it evenly and the corruption is minimized while tending to create a yeoman class interested, to that extent, in the common welfare of all.
People keep targeting the wrong problems since they can't get to the root problem: Concentration of wealth.
There is every reason to charge a use fee for property rights that would not exist in the absence of government and very little reason to tax domestic economic activities.
The failure to tax the right thing results in an accumulation of wealth in the hands of those already wealthiest and this results in increased centralization of ownership of everything including the means of indoctrinating the populous.
Moreover, as people increasingly recognize on both the right and left, it is important to avoid replacing centralization of wealth with centralization of political control. Tax revenues should be evenly dispersed to the citizens without any prejudice in a citizens dividend so they can enjoy the kind of yeoman class independence that created people like Newton and the Wright Brothers.
"Systematically
create and execute all programs for a universal computer, such as a Turing
machine or a CA; the first program is run for one instruction every second
step on average, the next for one instruction every second of the remaining
steps on average, and so on."
This actually computes all universes
-- not just ours. It also computes what might be thought of as nested universes, giving rise to the idea promoted by Smolin that some universes might be more prolific than others. Among the consequences of this hypothesis is:
"Large scale
quantum computation will not work well, essentially because it would require
too many exponentially growing computational resources in interfering
'parallel universes'".
Prize awards are only as good as their award criteria. Nobel prizes aren't awarded according to an objective criterion so using them in a metric like this is hazardous to say the least. Worse, the Nobel prize committee is subject to no feedback controls. If they start engaging in some sort of nepotism, there is nothing to stop them. Its not like there is a marketplace of comprehensive prize awards on the scale of the Nobel.
Far better for lots of individuals to specify their own, objective, criteria for prize awards and back them with their own money, however small that amount might be.
Looking at per capita middle income households ($25k-$45k) we see some interesting ecological correlations. Take note of where the "-" minus signs show up (anti correlations):
http://tinyurl.com/ygsr48
77 with -FamiliesWithIncome125000to149999PercapitaIn1990 (sqrt) 75 with -FamiliesWithIncome150000ormorePercapitaIn1990 (log) 75 with -sqrt(AIDSTotalPercapitaThru2001)
75 with log(FamiliesWithIncome20000to22499PercapitaIn1990) (log) 75 with WhitePercapita1990 (log) 75 with WhitesPercapita1990
74 with -FamiliesWithIncome100000to124999PercapitaIn1990 (sqrt) 73 with -ImmigrantsNonWesternPercapita1998 (log) 70 with -AlcoholConsumptionPercapita1986 (log) 70 with -JewishPercentOfWhites (log) 69 with -DoctorsPercapita1990
68 with log(FamiliesWithIncome17500to19999PercapitaIn1990)
67 with -FamiliesWithIncome75000to99999PercapitaIn1990
67 with -ImmigrantsTotalPercapita1998 (log) 66 with -RobberyPercapita2001 (log) 66 with log(GSPIndustriesPerGSP1999) (log) 66 with sqrt(RuralPercapita1990) (log) 66 with -BlacksOrHispanicsPercapita1990 (log) 66 with log(SuicidesPercapita1999) (log) 65 with -IncarceratedPercapita1993 (log) 65 with -AlcoholConsumedPerDrinker1986 (log) 65 with -WhiteYearsSchooling2000
64 with -log(West_IndianPercapita1990)... etc.
To get a real idea of the displacement of American IT workers, you need merely look at the ratio of US citizen IT worker salaries to the cost of real estate where they work.
This has a real and vicious impact on the families (assuming they can even form families) of American IT workers.
The rigor of the benchmark is the key. The Turing Test really only benchmarks human mimicry -- not intelligence per se. The new theoretic basis of universal intelligence allows a mathematically rigorous approach to AI that is reviving the field after nearly 50 years of drifting in a stagnant pool of inadequate concepts.
The Wall Street Journal is carrying a report on immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs. According to the piece, nearly a quarter of all California startups which went into business between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant as a founding member. These businesses, together, employ almost half a million workers and generated about $50 billion in sales in the year 2005.
And how do we know how big the total pie would have been without such immigration?
Where are the control experiments?
Here's what really happened:
The American people were unwillingly subjected to an experiment by an industry lobby criminally bent on lowering wages of US IT workers for the short term bottom lines of the Fortune 1000 execs -- the folks to whom the WSJ panders. Yes criminal. It is criminal to knowingly use the H-1b visa to lower US wages and that is clearly what happened from 1995 to 2005: A lowering of real wages, ie: wages adjusted for the cost of reproduction (survival is mere existence, reproduction is life).
The DotCon bubble raised and then lowered wages back to their pre-1995 levels but at the same time real estate -- the primary cost of reproduction component -- went through the roof driven largely by demand placed on real estate by "temporary" workers who, due to better ethnic networking to hold onto scarce jobs during hte the purging of US workers that occurred during the DotCon bubble collapse, have now virtually take over the US IT industry and are becoming permanent real estate holders.
If I were from India working in the US after this kind of horrendous abuse of US citizens, I would count on no more than 5 years of this party before I'd have my gold, women and children back in India.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's how you define "LEO" then of course -- you've defined the orbital debris problem out of existence by adopting my proposed solution. Accepted definitions of "LEO" do, however, vary from altitudes where resistance from upper atmosphere is significant to altitudes where it is _not_ significant.
And the cost of additional altitude is not actually that low; gravity in LEO is still 88% of what it is on earth. Sure air resistance is a big factor, but that doesn't make drastic orbit changes free, especially considering installations already in place (such as the ISS) are not fitted to just move around.
No one said "free" but the cost is "very low" to gain altitude. The cost to place mass in a 200km LEO orbit is about 1/2 the cost to place mass in a 20,000km GEO orbit. Do the math. Moreover, the potential gains in economy are even greater by using higher Isp technologies with lower thrust and yes this is directly due to the absence of atmosphere at perigee, where you do the transfer burns.
People seem to have a very Star-Trek view of orbital dynamics. You can't just drive around willy-nilly. You said it yourself: Space is big... really really big.
Grow up.
Much of this can be ameliorated if not solved outright by launching only to lower and higher orbits. Lower orbits will be in the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere which will clean out debris naturally. The orbital decay of the satellites can be matched to their expected operational lives and if launch costs can be brought down then additional station-keeping fuel can be placed aboard to help maintain the operational life until it is time for burn-up. Higher orbits will be in a volume of space that is vastly larger than the LEO shell now being threatened with overpopulation by debris. Space is big... really really big... All you need is to extend the orbital altitude and you reduce the problem as a cube of the orbital radius -- but the cost of additional altitude is _very_ low compared to simply getting to LEO altitude. Once again, lowering launch costs helps here.
Ever since the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 (PL101-611) NASA has been required by LAW to purchase all launch services from the private sector that could be reasonably provided by the private sector. As the person who testified before Congress about the passage of that grass-roots law I was fairly galled by the invitation I received a few years later from NASA to sit in the VIP stand and watch them launch the Advanced Communication Technology Satellite upon a shuttle. Well, actually, by that time I had somewhat come to expect that it was hopeless for a grass-roots legislative effort to actually have an impact on a governmental behavior but to actually receive an invitation to see them blatantly violate the clear intent of the law was still annoying.
You make what appears to be a good point... but there is an algorithm in the case of the Coral Cache. When the Coral server receives a URL it doesn't already have cached, it does execute a different code path than when the URL is already cached. It is the caching path of the Coral server algorithm that should parse and correct the absolute URLs.
The Coralizer algorithm doesn't Coralize links if they have the domain name in them. e.g.: it will Coralize href=lc-4.html but not href=http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/lc-4.html
Here is the coral cache of the documents.
More recently, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google HQ about his currently favorite fusion technology and it has caused some commotion.
It's profoundly disturbing that the US is willing to spend a trillion dollars on war in the middle east getting negative results and not willing to devote even one tenth of one percent of that to fusion energy prize legislation that pays for positive results only.
Thus the posterior superior temporal cortex should be the target of many evolutionary arms races seeking to gain or prevent extended phenotypic control of altruistic behavior.
If you don't know what liquidation value is, read up a little.
You said: Perhaps you intended to suggest that it's reasonable to charge a use fee for services that wouldn't happen without government, but it came out backwards.
No I said it correctly and you read it backwards.
"Property rights that would not exist in the absence of government" are, collectively, the service that "wouldn't happen without government".
That's what I said the use fee, aka net asset tax, should be applied to. Once you understand this it is clear why it is the proper basis for revenue for the government.
Also, the way the definition of "subsistence assets" would be defined ultimately would be a single dollar amount, independent of any specific location's cost of living. With the citizen's dividend you are far less constrained in where you can locate so you subsistence basically becomes median price of a house for a household of your type, plus the median capitalization of a job.
The same way bankruptcy courts assess it for the purpose of chapter 13 bankruptcy wherein your subsistence assets (home and tools of the trade) are protected from confiscation.
Tax net assets, in excess of subsistence, at the same rate as the rate of interest on the national debt. All other domestic taxes are repealed. Net assets are calculated as assets minus liabilities. Asset value is are assessed at the liquidation value. Liability value is assessed as the liquidation value of the debt instrument representing the liability. Liquidation value is set to the higher of either the government's bid for an asset or the owner's ask value. The government is required to take ownership at its bid and the owner is required to relinquish ownership at the owner's ask value. Liquidation value is also used in eminent domain proceedings to define fair compensation.
Citizen's Dividend
All funding of government programs are terminated except for national defense. The budget surplus paid out as a monthly citizen's dividend equally to all citizens. Children born to noncitizen residents are no longer considered US citizens.
Yes, and for that reason the only assets that are taxed are those assets that should not be taxed while those assets that should be taxed aren't taxed at all.
The tax is necessary since the economic rent of wealth holders amounts to welfare for the wealthy -- a much worse policy than welfare for the poor since the wealthy are the economy's primary decision makers and we can ill afford to corrupt them through welfare. If the rent thereby taken is more than sufficient to support property rights then the remainder should not be held under the control of an elite few politicians lest we end up with the equivalent of central economic planning. Just disperse it evenly and the corruption is minimized while tending to create a yeoman class interested, to that extent, in the common welfare of all.
It is demonstrable that in the absence of government people maintain subsistence property rights.
There is every reason to charge a use fee for property rights that would not exist in the absence of government and very little reason to tax domestic economic activities.
The failure to tax the right thing results in an accumulation of wealth in the hands of those already wealthiest and this results in increased centralization of ownership of everything including the means of indoctrinating the populous.
Moreover, as people increasingly recognize on both the right and left, it is important to avoid replacing centralization of wealth with centralization of political control. Tax revenues should be evenly dispersed to the citizens without any prejudice in a citizens dividend so they can enjoy the kind of yeoman class independence that created people like Newton and the Wright Brothers.
Prize awards are only as good as their award criteria. Nobel prizes aren't awarded according to an objective criterion so using them in a metric like this is hazardous to say the least. Worse, the Nobel prize committee is subject to no feedback controls. If they start engaging in some sort of nepotism, there is nothing to stop them. Its not like there is a marketplace of comprehensive prize awards on the scale of the Nobel. Far better for lots of individuals to specify their own, objective, criteria for prize awards and back them with their own money, however small that amount might be.
David Lynch?
Looking at per capita middle income households ($25k-$45k) we see some interesting ecological correlations. Take note of where the "-" minus signs show up (anti correlations):
) ) ...
http://tinyurl.com/ygsr48
77 with -FamiliesWithIncome125000to149999PercapitaIn1990
(sqrt) 75 with -FamiliesWithIncome150000ormorePercapitaIn1990
(log) 75 with -sqrt(AIDSTotalPercapitaThru2001)
75 with log(FamiliesWithIncome20000to22499PercapitaIn1990
(log) 75 with WhitePercapita1990
(log) 75 with WhitesPercapita1990
74 with -FamiliesWithIncome100000to124999PercapitaIn1990
(sqrt) 73 with -ImmigrantsNonWesternPercapita1998
(log) 70 with -AlcoholConsumptionPercapita1986
(log) 70 with -JewishPercentOfWhites
(log) 69 with -DoctorsPercapita1990
68 with log(FamiliesWithIncome17500to19999PercapitaIn1990
67 with -FamiliesWithIncome75000to99999PercapitaIn1990
67 with -ImmigrantsTotalPercapita1998
(log) 66 with -RobberyPercapita2001
(log) 66 with log(GSPIndustriesPerGSP1999)
(log) 66 with sqrt(RuralPercapita1990)
(log) 66 with -BlacksOrHispanicsPercapita1990
(log) 66 with log(SuicidesPercapita1999)
(log) 65 with -IncarceratedPercapita1993
(log) 65 with -AlcoholConsumedPerDrinker1986
(log) 65 with -WhiteYearsSchooling2000
64 with -log(West_IndianPercapita1990)
etc.
This has a real and vicious impact on the families (assuming they can even form families) of American IT workers.
The rigor of the benchmark is the key. The Turing Test really only benchmarks human mimicry -- not intelligence per se. The new theoretic basis of universal intelligence allows a mathematically rigorous approach to AI that is reviving the field after nearly 50 years of drifting in a stagnant pool of inadequate concepts.
Dude, let me know when your social development progresses beyond two year olds.
And how do we know how big the total pie would have been without such immigration?
Where are the control experiments?
Here's what really happened:
The American people were unwillingly subjected to an experiment by an industry lobby criminally bent on lowering wages of US IT workers for the short term bottom lines of the Fortune 1000 execs -- the folks to whom the WSJ panders. Yes criminal. It is criminal to knowingly use the H-1b visa to lower US wages and that is clearly what happened from 1995 to 2005: A lowering of real wages, ie: wages adjusted for the cost of reproduction (survival is mere existence, reproduction is life).
The DotCon bubble raised and then lowered wages back to their pre-1995 levels but at the same time real estate -- the primary cost of reproduction component -- went through the roof driven largely by demand placed on real estate by "temporary" workers who, due to better ethnic networking to hold onto scarce jobs during hte the purging of US workers that occurred during the DotCon bubble collapse, have now virtually take over the US IT industry and are becoming permanent real estate holders.
If I were from India working in the US after this kind of horrendous abuse of US citizens, I would count on no more than 5 years of this party before I'd have my gold, women and children back in India.