Slashdot Commies Oppose Private Lunar Missions?
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While Slashdot has run two stories recently regarding NASA's attempt to recover its glory days, it rejected the following story about private lunar launches. What's the deal? Has Slashdot gone Commie?
Baldrson writes "Peter
Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private
companies may beat NASA back to the Moon:
"In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital
flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way
to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human
orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people
stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If
Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's
$50M America's Space Prize
is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot
less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed,
someone like Paul
Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged
down with funding
cycle politics again."
Since jobs requring college degrees are going where college degrees are cheap, college really isn't a good return on investment for residents of countries where college degrees are expensive -- as they most certainly are here.
Basically, for the debt you incur you can buy a house in a red State.
If natural monopoly isn't the correct term, then what is the correct term for the situation where Microsoft's operating system is in demand not because of its high quality but because the information industry's infrastructure must use it as a standard means of communication?
This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical utility because to extend the reach of the grid requires interoperation with that utility's existing grid.
Please point me to an article that draws the distinction between these two and has the proper term for the Microsoft case.
Google isn't much of a natural monopoly so they can't hold onto their dominant position the way Microsoft can.
The first kid who hacks a better search engine and is offered more money by Microsoft than by Google will make Microsoft a major contender against Google. Google's market cap will plummet.
If they want to stay competitive while fighting against evil, Google should use their political influence as a high market capitalization company to lobby for a shift of corporate taxes away from income and capital gains as a basis and toward market capitalizaton as the basis for corporate tax. The rate of taxation of market capitalization should be the interest rate on the national debt. That would tend to cancel out the economic rent value of corporations -- and since Microsoft's value is entirely due to its natural monopoly position, almost all of its market capitalization would evaporate.
The OECD's efforts to standardize tax global tax policy has the wrong basis. Since an objective is the avoid double taxation of international investment, all taxation (not including import/export tariffs) and the cost of maintaining the social construct of property rights belongs to the jurisdiction within which those property rights are exercised, the single taxation objective can be achieved by taxing net assets thereby eliminating other forms of taxation.
While there may need be exemptions for such basic assets as home and tools of the trade, as there is during bankruptcy procedings, there is another asset that should be protected from taxation and respected by all nations:
Inventor-owned IP.
The point of this is quite simple: At present, acquisition of assets is subsidized by taxing things other than assets for the maintanence of the social construct of property rights. The only asset that is taxed is the patent of invention -- a situation that forces frequently-capital-poor inventors to assign their inventions to acquisitors who have been subsidized.
This is the opposite of what should be subsidized. Creation, not acquisition, should be subsidized. Inventors should be more capable of independent capitalization of their own ideas so that the world has more positive sum options and fewer forces driving it to resource conflicts.
Come now, anonymous coward, you know there is no guarantee people will use deodorants let alone use effective deodorants. Why should they if it is to their evolutionary disadvantage? Should there be a deodorant law requiring all possible routes of sociopathic manipulation via pheromones be suppressed? Sure. Right. That law will work about as well as the immigration laws work on the southern border.
Besides which the primary mode of manipulation of oxytocin is more likely to be audiovisual stimulation since those are the most easily accessed routes of access to human brain function.
Theater, motion pictures, religious gatherings, etc. are the likely sources of these sorts of manipulations.
Oh, and let me know if I misspelled any words, would you?
They claim
autism may be treated with this drug. I am highly skeptical. While this
drug affects the amygdala, which is also implicated in autism, the
asocial behavior of autism seems less to do with critical thinking than
to do with destruction of the amygdala's function -- which seems more
to do with male territorial behavior. The amygdala is the organ that
shrinks the most upon castration of adult males, and its development
during adolescence is debilitated in autists. This may create more
problems than it solves for autists.
What I find intriguing is
the possibility that groups that have lived in diaspora among others as minorities for 50 generations or so (E.O. Wilson's rule of thumb for human evolutionary traits to evolve under moderate selection pressure)
may have evolved mechanisms for manipulating oxytocin secretions to
which they are relatively immune. It would make perfect sense to do so.
They may have even evolved pheromonal secretions that stimulate,
simulate or actually are oxytocin aerosals such as those studied by the
Swiss researchers. How do various ethnic groups rate on scales of
"trust" of others?
When the Hatch Act was passed in response to rampant New Deal corruption, the kind of government contracting that exists now did not exist -- or they would have been included. But then if they had existed then the US would have lost WW II.
It wasn't until the X-Prize that you got the sort of private capital and diversity pursuing launch technologies that you had during the late 20s and early 30s pursuing aviation technologies.
For the last several decades the paradigm has been "Have government pick winners and hope for the best." The result has been no progress.
"Peter
Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private
companies may beat NASA back to the Moon:
"In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital
flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way
to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human
orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people
stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If
Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's
$50M America's Space Prize
is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot
less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed,
someone like Paul
Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged
down with funding
cycle politics again."
I agree with you about cost-plus accounting but when you have fiascos like what happened with Northrop financing its own fighter jet with performance superior to the F16 and getting the snub from the government you have to wonder if government is capable of doing anything but performing a positive feedback loop to itself until it devolves like the former Soviet Union.
Moreover, the real problem is the centralization of capital -- whether in government or private hands. Get things too centralized and the decision makers start making bad choices because they're too far removed from reality. This directly results from subsidizing property rights, a social construct maintained by the government, by taxing things other than assets.
Just set up a big prize for the first team to land a man on the moon and safely return him to the earth.
Cut out all this funding-cycle political crap for crissakes. Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people employed by NASA and its contractors who want the return of the glory days.
Go get a real job and stop destroying the US's pioneering heritage, and don't you dare lobby my Congressman with your time and travel paid for by my taxes.
The second part of the first sentence should be: "it is a pre-existing genetic susceptibility to an environmental insult brought into the West by south Asians."
In other words, people differ in the amount of damage they suffer when exposted to various diseases -- and some of these differences are heritable.
The numbers say that while autism has a genetic component, the reason it has exploded in recent years isn't a population explosion among geeks, it is a pre-existing genetic susceptibility an environmental insult brought into the West by south Asians. It might be an intestinal bug spread in Indian restaurants by low caste workers or it might be something less obvious.
Of the thousands of 2-variable combinations involving biologically relevant
variables, the combination with the highest Pearson correlation with autism
(60%) rates was the one I predicted based on my experiences observing children developing autism in Silicon Valley:
(Please note that "autism spectrum disorders" is a poorly standardized diagnostic category whose reproducibility may be little better than 60%. Even if one identified the specific pathogenic agent causing autism, to which a specific set of genes were susceptible, and were able to test the entire population, it is quite plausible that present diagnostic standards would be little better than 60% at predicting who would have those factors and who wouldn't.)
Furthermore, both of these demographies, alone have a Pearson correlation of
only 42%(+-1%) which is again what one would expect if the
conjunction of two variables were required for the etiology of autism.
(Oregon and Massachusetts are excluded as data points due to their being the
States with the highest and lowest autism percapita rates respectively. Failing to exclude these datapoints creates the impression that the best correlation is with nonWestern immigration to industrial regions, rather than immigration from India per se to regions of Finnish ancestry.)
Adding economic data there was only one combination of variables that
exceeded this and it did so by just 1% (r=61%). It is weakly supportive of
the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis. It is not strongly supportive due to
the fact that while working parents percapita was one of the 2 variables,
the other variable was public education expenditure per student which had,
by itself, a Pearson correlation of 54% whereas working parents percapita
was only 25% -- indicating the vast majority of the variance in autism rates
was explained by public education expenditure per student rather than
working parents. There are a number of possible explanations for why public education expenditure per student would be correlated with autism percapita, among them the most obvious being simply that a high cost of education is associated with autism spectrum disorders.
MMR vaccination rates show virtually zero correspondence with autism rates. When viewed in combinations with other demographic variables, it came in combinations far from the top -- far enough
from the top that it is plausible that such correlations are due to chance or due solely to the other variable.
I brought up the numbers for per acre coverage since it is going to be cheaper per area to cover than to create a bioreactor. Even with this optimistic assumption it looks uneconomic given current conditions.
You should understand that the reason I have done this calculation is because I got serious enough about biodiesel to actually come up some ideas about how to make it economic.
No one would be happier than me if I turned out to be too pessimistic about this bioreactor design but the numbers look pretty bad.
My calculations have led me to pursue a different system:
Arthrospira may not be optimal for algae slurry diesel fuel but it is comparable with other algae for turning solar into slurry fuel so, given the other well established uses of arthrospira its my best bet.
I just, literally while the parent was being rated up, verified with a $10 microscope from ebay (shipping was more) that my culture of arthrospira platensis is exponentiating in some bottled water from Wally World! (I added some NaHCO3 and nutrients)
Please check for any errors, but it appears that under optimal conditions, meaning a sunny desert with warm nights year round and algae production consistently at the height achieved by ASP during their 20 year study, using a species modified to produce optimal oil and a consistently high price for oil, one can get $1000 per acre per month.
We have $1000/month to make this realistic and to pay the rest of the expenses of the operation per acre.
A covering will eat into that $1000 in two ways:
1) Amortization (which has to be fast)
2) Solar flux reduction
Let's take out the solar flux from the covering first and say we lose 30% leaving us with $700 for the rest of the operation. Let's further say that we need half of that for expenses other than structure amortization, leaving us with $350. If we assume commercial lending rates of around 12% and zero amortization -- just debt service, we can afford $35,000 to cover an acre so with amortization it drops to sometning more like $10,000 to cover an acre.
Covering these ponds sounds problematic under optimal conditions, let alone constructing bioreactors -- and we haven't even gone to climates with less total solar flux.
What
this says is that the best you can expect, under optimal species and
growth conditions, of any algae-oil system that relies on the sun for
its energy, is for each square yard of solar-exposed pond to produce
just over a fifth of a gallon of pressed lipid oil each month -- which
you must then process into biodiesel through the normal methods. If you
find other energy sources you can feed to algae, you might beat this
but algae are optimized to consume solar energy so you have to be very
skeptical of any claims that exceed this productivity level and really
find out where the energy is coming from and how the algae are
metabolizing it.
Let me try to break down the parameters of the calculation:
50gm_dry_algae/(m^2*day) This
is the target productivity figure given by the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory's review of the last 25 years of algae biodiesel
work. It basically says for a given area, how much dry algae you should
be able to get out of an _optimal_ system per day -- optimal climate,
species, solar flux at pond surface, etc. If you can economically
create these conditions in your "back yard" then you can get that level
of productivity. Find the NREL's review at: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf
.8gm_oil/cm^3; This
is the density, or specific gravity of diesel. Diesel isn't quite as
dense as water. This probably should have been the density of lipid oil
but I didn't have that figure handy.
.6gm_prepressed_oil/gm_dry_algae; The
_highest_ oil content, of oil-producing algae reported by the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory's review, was 60%. This presumes algae
grown under their high rate goal of
50gm_dry_algae/(m^2*day) but this growth rate has yet to be achieved
with this high, 60% oil content (to the best of my current reading of
the NREL report).
.7gm_oil/gm_prepressed_oil This is a fairly optimistic 70% fig
I don't think it was a good idea to put this up at slashdot. Not all of us are open about how much we dislike Bill Gates. Gates thinks his call for unlimited h-1b visas is just a business move or political posture -- that the social environment for technologists who built the civilization that protects his property rights isn't leaving many of them with nothing to lose.
This spring, thousands of
young Americans are graduating from college.
They and their
tuition-strapped parents regard the degree as a
good investment--a ticket to financial
independence and a better life. Unfortunately, the
labor market no longer seems to share this view.
The real wages of young college
graduates (ages 25 to 35) fell in 2004 for the third
consecutive year. According to figures complied by the
Economic Policy Institute,"Young College
Graduates Face Weak Labor Market,"
Job Watch, May 6, 2005.] Between 2001 and 2004,
the real wages of young college graduates dropped from
$23.04 per hour to $22.41 per hour.
Employment is finally turning
around, but not fast enough to soak up the influx of
new college grads. Thus the employment rate of young
graduates in 2004 was 85.2 percent, down from 87.4
percent in 2000. It has been 20 years since the fraction
of young college graduates with jobs has been as low as
it was in 2003 and 2004.
It's trendy to blame the declining
economic fortunes of the college-educated on
outsourcing or the
post-bubble collapse of high-tech. But immigration
may be, as usual, the factor that dare not speak its
name.
Immigrants represent a rapidly
growing share of the college educated workforce--and an
even larger fraction of the educated unemployed.
(Table 1.)
From 2000 to 2003 (the latest year
of available data):
The college-educated labor
force grew by 10.3 percent
The foreign-born
college educated labor force grew 24.6 percent
The U.S.-born college
educated labor force grew 8.2 percent
This occurred despite the
post 911 slowdown in student visa processing. This
also occurred despite a doubling of the unemployment
rate of college-educated foreigners.
Economists call this a
"supply-shock"--a situation where excess labor
causes wages to fall.
The role of college-educated
foreigners in depressing wages of U.S. natives is
brought home by Harvard economist (and Cuban immigrant)
George Borjas. In his seminal Quarterly Journal of
Economics paper [The
Labor Demand Curve Is
Downward Sloping:] Borjas
concludes that immigration 1980-2000 reduced wages
of the average U.S.-born worker by 3.2 percent in 2000.
The reduction varied dramatically
among education levels. Native high-school dropouts
suffered an 8.9 percent wage reduction. But even
college-educated natives suffered an above-average
reduction of 4.9 percent.
When you turn the design of your information infrastructure over to armies of hackers worldwide you are essentially asking to be put out of business for the same reason that offshoring Congress would cause a collapse of the governed society -- through takeover if not negligence. Programming is ultimately the formalization of a business's logic, just as laws are the formalization of a government's logic. Throwing more bodies at the problem of coming up with the rules isn't the way you get an organization to work.
Probably the most obvious way this is reflected in code production is the attention paid to lines of code as a metric of productivity without constraints on how poorly factored the code is.
Good factoring is simply another way of saying "good theorizing". Ockham's Razor works for a lot of reasons and is the basis for the best measure of code quality: algorithmic information which is computer science's Ockham's Razor.
Slashdot Mirror
Baldrson writes "Peter Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private companies may beat NASA back to the Moon: "In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed, someone like Paul Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged down with funding cycle politics again."
Like I said before: Tax market capitalization and get rid of other corporate taxes like income and capital gains.
Basically, for the debt you incur you can buy a house in a red State.
The real reason Space Shuttle (is this thing related to Space Ghost by any chance?) is because they can't afford to kill another Shuttle.
This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical utility because to extend the reach of the grid requires interoperation with that utility's existing grid.
Please point me to an article that draws the distinction between these two and has the proper term for the Microsoft case.
The first kid who hacks a better search engine and is offered more money by Microsoft than by Google will make Microsoft a major contender against Google. Google's market cap will plummet.
If they want to stay competitive while fighting against evil, Google should use their political influence as a high market capitalization company to lobby for a shift of corporate taxes away from income and capital gains as a basis and toward market capitalizaton as the basis for corporate tax. The rate of taxation of market capitalization should be the interest rate on the national debt. That would tend to cancel out the economic rent value of corporations -- and since Microsoft's value is entirely due to its natural monopoly position, almost all of its market capitalization would evaporate.
While there may need be exemptions for such basic assets as home and tools of the trade, as there is during bankruptcy procedings, there is another asset that should be protected from taxation and respected by all nations:
Inventor-owned IP.
The point of this is quite simple: At present, acquisition of assets is subsidized by taxing things other than assets for the maintanence of the social construct of property rights. The only asset that is taxed is the patent of invention -- a situation that forces frequently-capital-poor inventors to assign their inventions to acquisitors who have been subsidized.
This is the opposite of what should be subsidized. Creation, not acquisition, should be subsidized. Inventors should be more capable of independent capitalization of their own ideas so that the world has more positive sum options and fewer forces driving it to resource conflicts.
Besides which the primary mode of manipulation of oxytocin is more likely to be audiovisual stimulation since those are the most easily accessed routes of access to human brain function.
Theater, motion pictures, religious gatherings, etc. are the likely sources of these sorts of manipulations.
Oh, and let me know if I misspelled any words, would you?
Thanks.
They claim autism may be treated with this drug. I am highly skeptical. While this drug affects the amygdala, which is also implicated in autism, the asocial behavior of autism seems less to do with critical thinking than to do with destruction of the amygdala's function -- which seems more to do with male territorial behavior. The amygdala is the organ that shrinks the most upon castration of adult males, and its development during adolescence is debilitated in autists. This may create more problems than it solves for autists.
What I find intriguing is the possibility that groups that have lived in diaspora among others as minorities for 50 generations or so (E.O. Wilson's rule of thumb for human evolutionary traits to evolve under moderate selection pressure) may have evolved mechanisms for manipulating oxytocin secretions to which they are relatively immune. It would make perfect sense to do so. They may have even evolved pheromonal secretions that stimulate, simulate or actually are oxytocin aerosals such as those studied by the Swiss researchers. How do various ethnic groups rate on scales of "trust" of others?
We can't let the capitalists beat us to the Moon!
When the Hatch Act was passed in response to rampant New Deal corruption, the kind of government contracting that exists now did not exist -- or they would have been included. But then if they had existed then the US would have lost WW II.
For the last several decades the paradigm has been "Have government pick winners and hope for the best." The result has been no progress.
"Peter Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private companies may beat NASA back to the Moon: "In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed, someone like Paul Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged down with funding cycle politics again."
Moreover, the real problem is the centralization of capital -- whether in government or private hands. Get things too centralized and the decision makers start making bad choices because they're too far removed from reality. This directly results from subsidizing property rights, a social construct maintained by the government, by taxing things other than assets.
Cut out all this funding-cycle political crap for crissakes. Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people employed by NASA and its contractors who want the return of the glory days.
Go get a real job and stop destroying the US's pioneering heritage, and don't you dare lobby my Congressman with your time and travel paid for by my taxes.
In other words, people differ in the amount of damage they suffer when exposted to various diseases -- and some of these differences are heritable.
Of the thousands of 2-variable combinations involving biologically relevant variables, the combination with the highest Pearson correlation with autism (60%) rates was the one I predicted based on my experiences observing children developing autism in Silicon Valley:
Finns Percapita * Immigrants from India Percapita
(Please note that "autism spectrum disorders" is a poorly standardized diagnostic category whose reproducibility may be little better than 60%. Even if one identified the specific pathogenic agent causing autism, to which a specific set of genes were susceptible, and were able to test the entire population, it is quite plausible that present diagnostic standards would be little better than 60% at predicting who would have those factors and who wouldn't.)
Furthermore, both of these demographies, alone have a Pearson correlation of only 42%(+-1%) which is again what one would expect if the conjunction of two variables were required for the etiology of autism.
See this link.
(Oregon and Massachusetts are excluded as data points due to their being the States with the highest and lowest autism percapita rates respectively. Failing to exclude these datapoints creates the impression that the best correlation is with nonWestern immigration to industrial regions, rather than immigration from India per se to regions of Finnish ancestry.)
Adding economic data there was only one combination of variables that exceeded this and it did so by just 1% (r=61%). It is weakly supportive of the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis. It is not strongly supportive due to the fact that while working parents percapita was one of the 2 variables, the other variable was public education expenditure per student which had, by itself, a Pearson correlation of 54% whereas working parents percapita was only 25% -- indicating the vast majority of the variance in autism rates was explained by public education expenditure per student rather than working parents. There are a number of possible explanations for why public education expenditure per student would be correlated with autism percapita, among them the most obvious being simply that a high cost of education is associated with autism spectrum disorders.
See this link.
MMR vaccination rates show virtually zero correspondence with autism rates. When viewed in combinations with other demographic variables, it came in combinations far from the top -- far enough from the top that it is plausible that such correlations are due to chance or due solely to the other variable.
Mercury has also been hypothesized as a factor in autism, however data from the Environmental Protection Agency on percapita water-way mercury pollution by State fails to show a significant correlation with autism.
You should understand that the reason I have done this calculation is because I got serious enough about biodiesel to actually come up some ideas about how to make it economic.
No one would be happier than me if I turned out to be too pessimistic about this bioreactor design but the numbers look pretty bad.
My calculations have led me to pursue a different system:
Grow arthrospira and:
Arthrospira may not be optimal for algae slurry diesel fuel but it is comparable with other algae for turning solar into slurry fuel so, given the other well established uses of arthrospira its my best bet.
Desert solar flux is about 1.3kW/m^2 at noon.
Looks to me the reaction is energy limited.
W00T!
What I have see are numbers that make the whole proposition somewhat marginal without advances in genetics of algae.
To get an idea of what you are going to get out an optimal system (using Calchemy's Unicalc):
.8gm_oil/cm^3; .6gm_prepressed_oil/gm_algae; .7gm_oil/gm_prepressed_oil?$/(acre*month)
50$/barrel_oil; 50gm_algae/(m^2*day);
= 1016.17 $/(acre*month)
Please check for any errors, but it appears that under optimal conditions, meaning a sunny desert with warm nights year round and algae production consistently at the height achieved by ASP during their 20 year study, using a species modified to produce optimal oil and a consistently high price for oil, one can get $1000 per acre per month.
We have $1000/month to make this realistic and to pay the rest of the expenses of the operation per acre.
A covering will eat into that $1000 in two ways:
1) Amortization (which has to be fast)
2) Solar flux reduction
Let's take out the solar flux from the covering first and say we lose 30% leaving us with $700 for the rest of the operation. Let's further say that we need half of that for expenses other than structure amortization, leaving us with $350. If we assume commercial lending rates of around 12% and zero amortization -- just debt service, we can afford $35,000 to cover an acre so with amortization it drops to sometning more like $10,000 to cover an acre.
Covering these ponds sounds problematic under optimal conditions, let alone constructing bioreactors -- and we haven't even gone to climates with less total solar flux.
Recalculating for volumetric production of oil:
50gm_dry_algae/(m^2*day); .8gm_oil/cm^3; .6gm_prepressed_oil/gm_dry_algae; .7gm_oil/gm_prepressed_oil?gal/(yard^2*month)
= 0.17636 gal/(yard^2*month)
What this says is that the best you can expect, under optimal species and growth conditions, of any algae-oil system that relies on the sun for its energy, is for each square yard of solar-exposed pond to produce just over a fifth of a gallon of pressed lipid oil each month -- which you must then process into biodiesel through the normal methods. If you find other energy sources you can feed to algae, you might beat this but algae are optimized to consume solar energy so you have to be very skeptical of any claims that exceed this productivity level and really find out where the energy is coming from and how the algae are metabolizing it.
Let me try to break down the parameters of the calculation:
50gm_dry_algae/(m^2*day)
This is the target productivity figure given by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's review of the last 25 years of algae biodiesel work. It basically says for a given area, how much dry algae you should be able to get out of an _optimal_ system per day -- optimal climate, species, solar flux at pond surface, etc. If you can economically create these conditions in your "back yard" then you can get that level of productivity. Find the NREL's review at:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf
.8gm_oil/cm^3;
This is the density, or specific gravity of diesel. Diesel isn't quite as dense as water. This probably should have been the density of lipid oil but I didn't have that figure handy.
.6gm_prepressed_oil/gm_dry_algae;
The _highest_ oil content, of oil-producing algae reported by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's review, was 60%. This presumes algae grown under their high rate goal of 50gm_dry_algae/(m^2*day) but this growth rate has yet to be achieved with this high, 60% oil content (to the best of my current reading of the NREL report).
.7gm_oil/gm_prepressed_oil
This is a fairly optimistic 70% fig
The government needs to reserve ethnic prisoner gang rape for the truly deserving.
I don't think it was a good idea to put this up at slashdot. Not all of us are open about how much we dislike Bill Gates. Gates thinks his call for unlimited h-1b visas is just a business move or political posture -- that the social environment for technologists who built the civilization that protects his property rights isn't leaving many of them with nothing to lose.
Young College Graduates Are Struggling. Guess One (Unmentionable) Reason
This spring, thousands of young Americans are graduating from college. They and their tuition-strapped parents regard the degree as a good investment--a ticket to financial independence and a better life. Unfortunately, the labor market no longer seems to share this view.
The real wages of young college graduates (ages 25 to 35) fell in 2004 for the third consecutive year. According to figures complied by the Economic Policy Institute, "Young College Graduates Face Weak Labor Market," Job Watch, May 6, 2005.] Between 2001 and 2004, the real wages of young college graduates dropped from $23.04 per hour to $22.41 per hour.
Employment is finally turning around, but not fast enough to soak up the influx of new college grads. Thus the employment rate of young graduates in 2004 was 85.2 percent, down from 87.4 percent in 2000. It has been 20 years since the fraction of young college graduates with jobs has been as low as it was in 2003 and 2004.
It's trendy to blame the declining economic fortunes of the college-educated on outsourcing or the post-bubble collapse of high-tech. But immigration may be, as usual, the factor that dare not speak its name.
Immigrants represent a rapidly growing share of the college educated workforce--and an even larger fraction of the educated unemployed. (Table 1.)
From 2000 to 2003 (the latest year of available data):
The growth rate of college-educated immigrants was three-times that of college-educated natives.
This occurred despite the post 911 slowdown in student visa processing. This also occurred despite a doubling of the unemployment rate of college-educated foreigners.
Economists call this a "supply-shock" --a situation where excess labor causes wages to fall.
The role of college-educated foreigners in depressing wages of U.S. natives is brought home by Harvard economist (and Cuban immigrant) George Borjas. In his seminal Quarterly Journal of Economics paper [The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping: ] Borjas concludes that immigration 1980-2000 reduced wages of the average U.S.-born worker by 3.2 percent in 2000.
The reduction varied dramatically among education levels. Native high-school dropouts suffered an 8.9 percent wage reduction. But even college-educated natives suffered an above-average reduction of 4.9 percent.
The impact was greatest on college graduates with 11-15 years of work experience - i.e., most likely to have
Probably the most obvious way this is reflected in code production is the attention paid to lines of code as a metric of productivity without constraints on how poorly factored the code is.
Good factoring is simply another way of saying "good theorizing". Ockham's Razor works for a lot of reasons and is the basis for the best measure of code quality: algorithmic information which is computer science's Ockham's Razor.
As warned of by Tacitus:
The same goes for scientific theory, business rules and software quality.
Too many cheap programmers spells death -- not life -- for IT.