The moon is rich in valuable resources (water: hydrogen, oxygen) that are hard to find elsewhere in Earth orbit. These resources are much cheaper (in an asymptotic sense) to get from the moon than from Earth due to the weaker gravity. The moon will be a practical location for a base for as long as demand for fuel, air, and water in Earth orbit remains high.
I find it hilarious that Fox News would be putting out so many pro-space articles. Aren't they usually the champion of smaller government, arguing that funding space missions is a waste of invaluable taxpayer dollars?
More than half of Americans believe in some form of creationism... The percentage in many other countries is even higher.
No. It's not. The percentage in an overwhelming majority of the developed world is lower. Much lower.
The USA is unique in this regard. Nowhere else can you find such a technologically advanced country populated by such backwards people.
Fellow Americans, we're rapidly becoming the laughing stock of the modern world. The pervasiveness of supernatural and mythological beliefs in this country is truly astounding. Ignoring these people may or may not be working out, but it's dangerous to think that "the percentage in many other countries is even higher". It's not, and we're leading the pack in terms of ignorance.
You are paying with personal information that they can then sell to others who want to advertise to you.
Google doesn't sell your personal information to anyone. They retain this information and use it to provide targeted advertising to their customers. If they sold your personal information, their customers wouldn't need to buy Google's targeted advertising services.
If you're going to be pedantic about Google Docs not being "free", you should be equally pedantic about the rest. Otherwise, you risk coming across as biased against Google, and not an impartial commenter.
I was only trying to highlight the difference between profit and creation of value. In practice, they almost always go hand in hand, since people aren't generally eager to work for [literally] nothing. However, there's nothing that logically necessitates this. Value can still be created when there is no profit, and profit can still be had when no value is created.
I consider "charging enough to make a living" to be a necessary evil. I feel that it is immoral to demand compensation for one's labor, as it fosters a quid pro quo mentality which is at odds with the virtues of justice and temperance. However, "ya gotta eat", and since society isn't virtuous enough to support those of us who would eschew profit, we're forced into the same profit-chasing rat race as everyone nelse. However, we're digressing, as none of this has any bearing on the distinction between profit and creation of value.
Indeed, I'm further downstream than the Raritan-Millstone confluence, past the end of the Delaware&Raritan Canal. Additionally, the signs do look quite old.
Offtopic: I'm planning a weekend bike ride down the full length of the D&R Canal this summer. New Brunswick to New Hope on Saturday, return trip on Sunday. ~70 miles each way. Any takers?
Burglary is the entry of a person into a structure without the owner's permission. Source: I was once arrested and charged with burglary (third degree), a felony (but charges were eventually dropped), despite having allegedly been in a structure that contained nothing more than air (charges were dropped due to me getting a lawyer that was close friends with both the judge and the prosecutor).
Burglary is to a structure as trespass is to land.
Perhaps you get money from charity or social welfare programs. Perhaps you don't get money and you starve or freeze to death. Either way, that's not relevant. Profit is orthogonal to creation of value.
The Raritan River in central New Jersey has signs like that. Except that the warning is addressed to all people, not just pregnant women. You don't need coal or gold to fuck up a waterway.
What's even funnier is that, according to Wikipedia, this river "is an important source of drinking water for the central portion of New Jersey". Well, that explains why my tap water has a delicious flavor (I'm not joking).
OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles.
Perhaps we can apply this sort of logic to nuclear waste? Instead of keeping it in storage, we could simply blow it out the smokestacks in trace amounts, much like what we do with the radioactive contaminants in coal?
Indeed, a whole semester, and with only three students in the class. It was one of the most serious classes I've ever taken. The paper itself was a reasonable size, about six or eight pages if I remember correctly. However, formally proving it all, well, it took countless hours. The goal of the class was to teach us how to properly read literature in the field in preparation for having us make our own contributions. Of course, I dropped out before I was anywhere near publishing.
Thank you. That actually brings us down to 3 billion people @ 12.2 acres per person, or 3 billion people @ 1.13 arable acres per person, barely enough. But then of course, global population is already more than double that, so it seems that the food forest idea is a non-starter until we figure out how to grow apples at the south pole.
Let's look at the United States. If we ignore Alaska (not exactly prime farmland), there's about 6.4 acres of land per person, total (it would be 7.7 acres if we include Alaska). If we look at current land use statistics, however, there's already 2.9 acres of farmland per person. That is, nearly half of our available land (available, not arable) is already used for agriculture, despite that agriculture accounts for less than 2% of the economy. This is with highly efficient, disgusting, industrial farming practices that are widespread today. We are a net exporter of food, but I can't find any statistics on what percentage of our food production is destined for the domestic market.
Your proposal seems like it would increase the amount of land used for agriculture (since it's unlikely that subsistence farmers will enjoy the same economy of scale common for industrial farms), perhaps significantly so. Even if we have the land to support such an undertaking, it would result in a dramatic increase in demand for land. Since land is a finite resource, this would necessarily drive up land costs, which would have significant effects throughout the economy.
I'm willing to compromise to some extent. I'll grant that your proposal is feasible. But I still don't think it's practical.
Look, I'm not knocking your idea. I think growing your own food is great. I make my own pasta sauce from scratch, including growing the tomatoes and herbs myself.
However, your numbers are simply misleading. There are 36.7 trillion acres of land area on this planet, sure. However, that does include Antarctica, the Himalayas, the Sahara, and other locations generally considered to be unsuitable for agriculture. Of course, you can grow food crops in these locations, but there's a reason why your food forest is not located in Antarctica. If we had 3 trillion people, that would mean 12.2 acres of land for each person. Of course, not all 12.2 acres could be allocated to agriculture, since people need land to live, to work, and to extract mineral resources from. And really, only 1.13 acres of this land is arable anyway, now just barely enough to squeeze by on. Of course, food can be grown on the other 11 acres, but at great cost. The picture you paint of people walking around picking apples from trees looks a little different when the setting is a heated, artificial-light-augmented, high-tech greenhouse of sorts. Not exactly sustainable now, it seems. When you talk of squeezing everyone into the tropics to avoid freezing temperatures, you don't realize that this would further decrease available land area by an order of magnitude. Any other solutions consisting primarily of restricting the population to a smaller land area only exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile, solutions relying on technology take us further away from your sustainable "food forest" idea.
I'm all for people regaining a sense of where their food comes from by getting involved in agriculture themselves. There's nothing like having fresh vegetables that you grew yourself. However, to suggest that every person on the planet can be a subsistence farmer (while supporting a population in the trillions) without incurring significant financial hardship is simply out of touch with reality. We simply don't have the space or the cash for this to be realistic.
Does your "36.7 trillion acres" figure include all that wonderful arable land in Antarctica? Is that where you're building your food forest?
Because 9.3% of the world's land area is considered arable. You may want to shift that decimal place over to the left, as you're an order of magnitude off.
Also, many people enjoy eating plants year round. They're not likely to find your food forest idea very appealing.
Indeed, prior to Citizens United, the "media" commentators really didn't talk politics. Thank god for this court case, otherwise Rachel would still be an NFL commentator and Chris would still be stuck doing human interest stories.
Thank you for the morning chuckle. If you feel that the Citizens United decision makes this country a better place, you must be either very rich or very stupid. In any case, most Americans don't see any irony in wanting to get money out of politics. It's unlikely that most Americans are regurgitating whatever Rachel and Chris blather on about, as Fox News leads the pack in terms of ratings.
So then if you sell the cabinet for the price as you bought the pile of lumber for, you didn't create any value? The cabinet is only more valuable than the pile of lumber if you charge more for it?
This is the fundamental disconnect between greedy fucks and reality. The cabinet is more valuable than the pile of wood, even if the carpenter chooses to sell it for the same price as a pile of wood. That people are greedy and will always sell the cabinet for more has no bearing on this fact. It is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Kickstarter raised $10M for a wristwatch.
Perhaps $150M isn't out of reach?
Solution: have your kids pay for college themselves (grants, scholarships, loans), and reallocate those funds towards sending people to the moon.
Also, advocating for single-payer healthcare might solve your medical bills problem.
Perhaps an expansion of social welfare programs might alleviate the burden of supporting your family as well.
Somehow, I don't think these are the answers you wanted to hear.
The moon is rich in valuable resources (water: hydrogen, oxygen) that are hard to find elsewhere in Earth orbit. These resources are much cheaper (in an asymptotic sense) to get from the moon than from Earth due to the weaker gravity. The moon will be a practical location for a base for as long as demand for fuel, air, and water in Earth orbit remains high.
I find it hilarious that Fox News would be putting out so many pro-space articles. Aren't they usually the champion of smaller government, arguing that funding space missions is a waste of invaluable taxpayer dollars?
Astrophysics is a subset of science, which is a subset of natural philosophy, which in turn is a subset of philosophy.
More than half of Americans believe in some form of creationism... The percentage in many other countries is even higher.
No. It's not. The percentage in an overwhelming majority of the developed world is lower. Much lower.
The USA is unique in this regard. Nowhere else can you find such a technologically advanced country populated by such backwards people.
Fellow Americans, we're rapidly becoming the laughing stock of the modern world. The pervasiveness of supernatural and mythological beliefs in this country is truly astounding. Ignoring these people may or may not be working out, but it's dangerous to think that "the percentage in many other countries is even higher". It's not, and we're leading the pack in terms of ignorance.
A lighting strike to the phone lines would end in tears? What the fuck do you plug into your phone jacks?!
You never know if Google will data mine your data
On the contrary, anyone with half a brain always knows that Google will mine their data. That's their entire business model, not some wild secret.
You are paying with personal information that they can then sell to others who want to advertise to you.
Google doesn't sell your personal information to anyone. They retain this information and use it to provide targeted advertising to their customers. If they sold your personal information, their customers wouldn't need to buy Google's targeted advertising services.
If you're going to be pedantic about Google Docs not being "free", you should be equally pedantic about the rest. Otherwise, you risk coming across as biased against Google, and not an impartial commenter.
Virtual +1, Funny
That's an entirely reasonable stance to have.
I was only trying to highlight the difference between profit and creation of value. In practice, they almost always go hand in hand, since people aren't generally eager to work for [literally] nothing. However, there's nothing that logically necessitates this. Value can still be created when there is no profit, and profit can still be had when no value is created.
I consider "charging enough to make a living" to be a necessary evil. I feel that it is immoral to demand compensation for one's labor, as it fosters a quid pro quo mentality which is at odds with the virtues of justice and temperance. However, "ya gotta eat", and since society isn't virtuous enough to support those of us who would eschew profit, we're forced into the same profit-chasing rat race as everyone nelse. However, we're digressing, as none of this has any bearing on the distinction between profit and creation of value.
Indeed, I'm further downstream than the Raritan-Millstone confluence, past the end of the Delaware&Raritan Canal. Additionally, the signs do look quite old.
Offtopic: I'm planning a weekend bike ride down the full length of the D&R Canal this summer. New Brunswick to New Hope on Saturday, return trip on Sunday. ~70 miles each way. Any takers?
Burglary is the entry of a person into a structure without the owner's permission. Source: I was once arrested and charged with burglary (third degree), a felony (but charges were eventually dropped), despite having allegedly been in a structure that contained nothing more than air (charges were dropped due to me getting a lawyer that was close friends with both the judge and the prosecutor).
Burglary is to a structure as trespass is to land.
Perhaps you get money from charity or social welfare programs. Perhaps you don't get money and you starve or freeze to death. Either way, that's not relevant. Profit is orthogonal to creation of value.
The Raritan River in central New Jersey has signs like that. Except that the warning is addressed to all people, not just pregnant women. You don't need coal or gold to fuck up a waterway.
What's even funnier is that, according to Wikipedia, this river "is an important source of drinking water for the central portion of New Jersey". Well, that explains why my tap water has a delicious flavor (I'm not joking).
OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles.
Perhaps we can apply this sort of logic to nuclear waste? Instead of keeping it in storage, we could simply blow it out the smokestacks in trace amounts, much like what we do with the radioactive contaminants in coal?
Indeed, a whole semester, and with only three students in the class. It was one of the most serious classes I've ever taken. The paper itself was a reasonable size, about six or eight pages if I remember correctly. However, formally proving it all, well, it took countless hours. The goal of the class was to teach us how to properly read literature in the field in preparation for having us make our own contributions. Of course, I dropped out before I was anywhere near publishing.
Also, it's spelled dafuq.
Thank you. That actually brings us down to 3 billion people @ 12.2 acres per person, or 3 billion people @ 1.13 arable acres per person, barely enough. But then of course, global population is already more than double that, so it seems that the food forest idea is a non-starter until we figure out how to grow apples at the south pole.
Perhaps half a trillion could work, in theory.
Let's look at the United States. If we ignore Alaska (not exactly prime farmland), there's about 6.4 acres of land per person, total (it would be 7.7 acres if we include Alaska). If we look at current land use statistics, however, there's already 2.9 acres of farmland per person. That is, nearly half of our available land (available, not arable) is already used for agriculture, despite that agriculture accounts for less than 2% of the economy. This is with highly efficient, disgusting, industrial farming practices that are widespread today. We are a net exporter of food, but I can't find any statistics on what percentage of our food production is destined for the domestic market.
Your proposal seems like it would increase the amount of land used for agriculture (since it's unlikely that subsistence farmers will enjoy the same economy of scale common for industrial farms), perhaps significantly so. Even if we have the land to support such an undertaking, it would result in a dramatic increase in demand for land. Since land is a finite resource, this would necessarily drive up land costs, which would have significant effects throughout the economy.
I'm willing to compromise to some extent. I'll grant that your proposal is feasible. But I still don't think it's practical.
Look, I'm not knocking your idea. I think growing your own food is great. I make my own pasta sauce from scratch, including growing the tomatoes and herbs myself.
However, your numbers are simply misleading. There are 36.7 trillion acres of land area on this planet, sure. However, that does include Antarctica, the Himalayas, the Sahara, and other locations generally considered to be unsuitable for agriculture. Of course, you can grow food crops in these locations, but there's a reason why your food forest is not located in Antarctica. If we had 3 trillion people, that would mean 12.2 acres of land for each person. Of course, not all 12.2 acres could be allocated to agriculture, since people need land to live, to work, and to extract mineral resources from. And really, only 1.13 acres of this land is arable anyway, now just barely enough to squeeze by on. Of course, food can be grown on the other 11 acres, but at great cost. The picture you paint of people walking around picking apples from trees looks a little different when the setting is a heated, artificial-light-augmented, high-tech greenhouse of sorts. Not exactly sustainable now, it seems. When you talk of squeezing everyone into the tropics to avoid freezing temperatures, you don't realize that this would further decrease available land area by an order of magnitude. Any other solutions consisting primarily of restricting the population to a smaller land area only exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile, solutions relying on technology take us further away from your sustainable "food forest" idea.
I'm all for people regaining a sense of where their food comes from by getting involved in agriculture themselves. There's nothing like having fresh vegetables that you grew yourself. However, to suggest that every person on the planet can be a subsistence farmer (while supporting a population in the trillions) without incurring significant financial hardship is simply out of touch with reality. We simply don't have the space or the cash for this to be realistic.
Does your "36.7 trillion acres" figure include all that wonderful arable land in Antarctica? Is that where you're building your food forest?
Because 9.3% of the world's land area is considered arable. You may want to shift that decimal place over to the left, as you're an order of magnitude off.
Also, many people enjoy eating plants year round. They're not likely to find your food forest idea very appealing.
I spent a semester studying his "Logical Clocks" paper in grad school.
It really is brilliant and surprisingly accessible. You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to understand it, but it conveys some truly awesome ideas.
lol wat
Indeed, prior to Citizens United, the "media" commentators really didn't talk politics. Thank god for this court case, otherwise Rachel would still be an NFL commentator and Chris would still be stuck doing human interest stories.
Thank you for the morning chuckle. If you feel that the Citizens United decision makes this country a better place, you must be either very rich or very stupid. In any case, most Americans don't see any irony in wanting to get money out of politics. It's unlikely that most Americans are regurgitating whatever Rachel and Chris blather on about, as Fox News leads the pack in terms of ratings.
So then if you sell the cabinet for the price as you bought the pile of lumber for, you didn't create any value? The cabinet is only more valuable than the pile of lumber if you charge more for it?
This is the fundamental disconnect between greedy fucks and reality. The cabinet is more valuable than the pile of wood, even if the carpenter chooses to sell it for the same price as a pile of wood. That people are greedy and will always sell the cabinet for more has no bearing on this fact. It is irrelevant.