Given all that we know about GM, can someone explain (aside from the obvious political reasons / TBTF), why this company was bailed out? Romney was correct, it should have been allowed to go bankrupt. In addition, the taxpayer still had to eat a $10 billion loss. GM management was incompetent to the core. This idea is yet another example of it for all of the reasons you list and more.
The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?
Further down in the linked article is "On all TARP investments to date, including the sale of Treasury’s shares in AIG, the government has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on $421.8 billion disbursed. " so overall, it doesn't look like all the TARP funds were such a bad investment even from a straight purchase-sale calculation.
Of course, it is much harder to figure out if, long term, this was a good policy - would the economy have been better off to "kill off" the sick or better off in "healing" the sick? Have any of the "sick" been healed or are they still "sick"? Have we ensured similar things don't happen in the future?
I don't have high hopes for answers to these sorts of questions.
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Who's predictions? I would really be interested in links to these findings. Are these 0.5 degrees below predictions outside the range of the predictions (the prediction uncertainties) or just lower than the single value of the "most likely" prediction? For the 25 and 13 year predictions, is this 0.5 degree "error" for just a single year or for all of them?
Most of the "predictions" I have seen have certainly had uncertainties much larger than 0.5 degrees, and many have entire ranges depending on the level of "optimism" or "pessimism" in terms of the model assumptions. Are you saying that the most "optimistic" predictions were 0.5 degrees higher than the actual measurements? Are you saying that the last 25 years of data (or 13) is inconsistent with human driven climate change?
The argument that black cabs are making is that Uber is using a taxi-meter for their fares and its illegal to have a taxi-meter installed (in London) unless you are a black cab.
(I'm making no comment about whether that rule is reasonable, I don't know why it exists other than, presumably, to deter non-black cabs from answering hails - the price needs to be agreed which should be done at booking time)
Black cab drivers are complaining that that law isn't being enforced for Uber, hence their protest. TfL have said that they don't consider using an app, having a meter installed.
At the end of the day this can only be decided by:
a) repealing the law - Uber is welcome to lobby to get that done - but they haven't. b) bringing a test case - this is where I suspect the black cab drivers problem is. It's probably TfL who has to bring the test case. The courts will then have to decide whether an app is an "installed taxi-meter"
After (or possibly before) b, parliament can decide to clarify the law. Generally parliament doesn't act unless there's a perceived problem though - so it won't be until: 1) The courts rule that an app isn't an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that they intended to catch the Uber case - the law will be modified to make it explicit that an app counts as a taxi-meter. 2) The courts rule that an app is an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that that wasn't intended to be caught and clarify the law (probably after lobbying) 3) There are a series of high profile assaults/robberies/etc by Uber drivers so parliament clarifies the law so then TfL prosecutes Uber drivers.
Black-cab and mini-cab services coexist in London. I've used both and no doubt will again in the future.
Uber appears to be treading the line between a mini-cab service (which would be legal) and a black-cab service (which would be illegal). One of the great things about London is that, late at night, when you're the worse for drink, you can get into some random strangers car and be as confident as it's possible to be that that person will deliver the promised service.
There's quite a lot of (TfL) advertising warning people that "unless it's pre-booked it's a stranger's car".
Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.)
If the software were to fail in any of these cases, the car maker will be sued as happened to Toyota with their cars doing unintended acceleration.
Yep, but not until enough insurance companies paid out and they realized it was an actual problem. I don't think we are really disagreeing. I don't think that autonomous cars change the landscape that much from what we currently have: people's insurance pay for accidents and when the problems are seen to be not the fault of the insured, the insurance people go ofter the responsible parties to recover costs. The same thing will (and does) happen for non-auto insurance when visitors get killed by your Roomba running amuck.
Good points, but I expect there will not be a transfer of liability to the "taxi driver" unless you are actually hiring the ride from someone else. You bought it, you hit the start button, you end up "paying" and let your insurance company fight it out with the manufacturer when things go pear-shaped (what does that even mean?) Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.) and when that is "at fault" it is your insurance company for the most part that takes care of laying the blame on the builder - I figure the same will be true here.
I suspect that overall we are only going to get to the autonomous vehicle stage when they are better than the "average" human driver by a factor of ten or more, so the cost of having to re-examine "who pays?" issues are probably going to be equally reduced.
And that insurance is paid by the driver -- so it's a small monthly fee instead of a settlement. Therefore, the car manufacturers should pay insurance periodically during a year. Why should the driver be liable for software/hardware bugs of the car?
I don't see why it would not be handled the same way hardware defects are right now: the manufacturers hide the problem until the death toll is high enough or someone spills the beans, then the insurers and victims go after them in a class action lawsuit.
Everyone steers away? Sure , so long as there isn't a concrete divider or 100 foot drop or oncoming vehicles or pedestrians for the cars at the edge to worry about. And this only works if all the cars are computer controlled because if only one is being driven manually then there'll be a massive pile up.
"So we can only make it better"
For simple collisions maybe, for anything more complex forget it. These are vehicles in the real world, not balls on a pool table.
But how common are these occurrences? A bunch of autonomous cars in communication should all be able to stop safely without crashing as soon as one of them sees the toddler step onto the roadway. Yes, the toddler might get wiped out, but there should be no cascade of rear-enders because all the cars apply max braking in unison, and none were following closer then their reaction time and braking distances would allow.
I don't think it's a design problem to fit external airbags. It seems that Volvo is the only company that's actually got a real-life example of that, so it's most likely a cost issue rather than a design problem. Most people don't want to pay extra to protect other people.
Pop-up bonnets are an easy to design protective measure, but again, no-one is making them due to the lack of demand. Face it - car drivers are not willing to invest in protecting other people from their own vehicle.
Car buyers are not willing to invest in protecting themselves either, unless convinced by advertising, government regulations, and other incentives - basically it is hard to imagine that "I" am going to have an accident, so spending an extra $50 for seat belts rather than using that extra $50 for a fancier sound system never had much success in getting people to put seat belts in their cars until seat belts were made mandatory. Then we had to give out tickets to make people wear them....
Maybe. How much of your spare change have you devoted to rescuing those all over the world dieing from hunger, disease, natural disaster, etc? I don't know if I would all all of us who are "killing someone by inaction" every day, murderers.
I don't disagree that failing to do something like press the button to turn off the "automatic drop a tonne of bricks on the schoolyard" device would be murder, but somehow as the inaction and the deaths get farther away from each other, the moral certainty seems to fade too.
What if the crash were avoidable but the car just hit a cat (because the car went berserk for some unknown reason)? Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
There's nothing worse than seeing an animal suffer, even if that animal is considered by many to be vermin.
That's why the car ethics algorithm, besides heading into the cat, need to accelerate as well.:D
[Disclaimer: Although I dislike cats as a pet, I respect them as animals and would never (and have never) hurt them.)]
I recall a bit from some medical drama way back (St Elsewhere perhaps? All TV shows are just dreams - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) where the doctor is sewing up some mean tough looking biker dude and asks what caused his injuries. He explains that he was driving his motorbike along when a cute furry animal darted across the road (a squirrel, bunny, or cat; I don't recall) and the crash happened "when I swerved". "Did you hit the cat?" "No, he got away." Leaving the viewer to understand that the accident was caused by the rider trying to HIT, rather than avoid, the animal. The delivery made it pretty funny as I recall.
That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money
Why would they want to raise more money if they didn't think it bought them more votes? Hint: Money buys votes. The politicians themselves think so too.
Just because people THINK that pressing the elevator button more times will make the elevator come faster, does not mean that it actually does. I have no doubt that politicians themselves think that more money -> winner, that does not mean that winner->more money.
There is a nice bit at the end: "These findings may be surprising at first blush, but the intuition isn’t that hard to grasp. After all, how many people do you know who ever change their minds on something important like their political beliefs (well, other than liberal Republicans who find themselves running for national office)? People just aren’t that malleable; and for that reason, campaign spending is far less important in determining election outcomes than many people believe (or fear)."
You can't just pick one example and claim it proves a point. If you look across a large sample size of elections, I HIGHLY suspect you will find that the candidate with the most money wins a disproportionate amount of the time.
That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money - people tend to want to support the winning side, and are not as enthusiastic about being involved with the side that they think is going to lose.
There are certainly MANY candidates that are unelectable no matter how much money they raise and spend in comparison to their opponents.
It looks like the article writer may have completely misunderstood the research. It looks like Prof. Davies is saying that the end of the republic and the start of the empire was a result of concrete usage. In the article she is quoted as saying "One could even say that it played a significant role in bringing down the Republic." and mentioned Julius Caesar and Pompey using concrete in their building to help shore up their political power by building permanent structures.
Everything other than the article's writer synopsis points to the era of the end of the republic, not the end of the western empire some 400-500 years later.
The air pressure sets a limit on the height of both suction pumps and siphons.
For such a pedantic dialogue as this thread, I was hoping to see someone write "the air pressure and internal fluid tension set a limit..." before I reached my pettifogger deFUDer saturation point, but it was not to be.
Good point, but since I was talking about a height of "about 10 metres" for water (not the most accurate of heights) and the internal fluid tension supports I would guess less than a centimetre, I figured the internal fluid tension was more of a rounding error than anything that needed to be explicitly stated. But epine is correct, the internal fluid tension does add some (small for water at least) height to the effective max for suction pumps and siphons.
Certainly the trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" does not look like it is going to be very consistent with the published comics.
From what I've been reading, it is consistent, with the most recent version of the Guardians, not the Martinex/Charlie-27/Vance Astro/etc etc Guardians you're probably thinking of.
Which is, I guess, an indication that being "consistent with the comics" at best can be understood to mean "consistent with some group of comics picked from fifty plus years of inconsistent storylines, restarts and re-imagings".
Disney hasn't done this with any of the Marvel movies; why do people assume they are with the Star Wars movies?
The Marvel movies are not completely consistent with the huge comic "continuity", in fact the published comics themselves do not always maintain continuity. I don't know that trying to be thusly consistent is a good goal.
At best, the Marvel movies have been fairly self consistent with the movie storylines. Certainly the trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" does not look like it is going to be very consistent with the published comics.
Under normal atmospheric pressure you cannot siphon over a hump of about 10m.
But why is that? Is it because you need atmospheric pressure to exert any force at all upon the siphon? Or is it in fact because when you try to siphon further than that, you create sufficient pressure drop to cause degassing of the water in the top of the tube, which breaks the siphon? This precise question is the reason why I would have preferred to see this experiment performed with another liquid.
One atmosphere (70km? how high is the atmosphere) of air pressure is about equal to the pressure of 76cm of mercury or about 10m of water. If you take a (tall) container and open the bottom to let the water out, the air pressure outside will hold up 10m of water, above which will be a vacuum (with a fair bit of water vapour). If you use mercury you get only 76cm of mercury with a vacuum above that (with only a bit of mercury vapour since the vapour pressure of mercury at room temperature is pretty low). The reason a siphon works is that the falling liquid on the low side (pulled by gravity) acts as a suction pump or vacuum pump to pull the liquid over the hump. As we all should know, "suction" is just a way of talking about air pressure pushing up.
There is no need for "degassing of the water" to "break the siphon", a pure vacuum at the top would "break" it just as effectively.
Supposedly the accompanying videos show that decreasing the air pressure decreases the max height the siphons work at. Gravity is certainly driving the motion, but absent external air pressure, the adhesion of water for itself can only support drip sizes against gravity, not multi-centimetres (let alone metre) columns of water.
People do not use suction pumps to raise water beyond 10m in one stage. They can use various pump designs to push water from the bottom to much higher heights, but you can't "pull" it up more than about 10m without changing the local air pressure.
I would be interested to see any references or examples to the contrary.
Of course it's both forces (pressure and gravity). This is simply a pedantic attack at the way the dictionary defines the process.
Dictionary definition:
"A pipe or tube of glass, metal or other material, bent so that one leg is longer than the other, and used for drawing off liquids by means of atmospheric pressure, which forces the liquid up the shorter leg and over the bend in the pipe."
This definition is correct as atmospheric pressure differences start the process. However the dictionary doesn't explain that gravity eventually takes over. Dr. Hughes sums up:
As any petrol thief knows, to get the liquid over the "hump" of the tube you have to suck the other end or, more pedantically, lower the pressure in your lungs to beneath atmospheric pressure by expanding them. Once the liquid has passed the highest point in the tube, the continuous chain of cohesive bonds between the liquid molecules in the tube, and the force of gravity, do the rest.
Gravity is acting as a suction pump, which requires the air pressure to push the water - get rid of the air pressure and you can't "suck" the stuff up in the first place or keep it flowing. The "cohesive bonds between the liquid molecules" are pretty darn weak compared to the forces involved in stealing "petrol" or siphoning most other fluids. Under normal atmospheric pressure you cannot siphon over a hump of about 10m.
For those who didn't read the article well: the paper actually does show that the flow stops when there isn't enough pressure. The water column still needs to be supported, and this happens by a combination of atmospheric pressure (the dominant force at 1atm) and molecular cohesion.
Also, NO, this paper does NOT show a water siphon working in a vacuum. (Reference is made to another study, but not at similat water column heights)
The key point being made here is that although atmospheric pressure is required to maintain a certain siphon height, the force causing the water to flow is due to the potential energy difference.
If the top of the siphon is too high for a vacuum pump, some other method must be used, but the siphon action will work at much greater heights because, as the article points out, the siphon action itself does not depend on pressure. What are the height limits, I wonder? Redwood trees are about as tall as trees can get with the capillary action method they use to raise water. I expect siphons work at much greater heights than that.
Just because you call your tall u-shaped tube a "siphon" does not mean it will behave differently than the tall u-shaped tube someone else calls a "barometer". Once your siphon hump is more than about 10 *meters* (10.3m or about 34 feet) high, the water falls down on each side of the hump, leaving a vacuum (with some water vapour) at the op. The air pressure sets a limit on the height of both suction pumps and siphons.
Moving water over a mountain is easy in a pipe. Say you have a reservoir at height, like a mountain lake, and you want to pump it to a city in the valley below. You need only get it over the ridge. Once the flow to the lower height starts, it will continue. The problem with your suggestion is that you can't get the siphon started. All this guy is saying is that the flow continues due to gravity. Which makes good sense. The atmospheric pressure at the lower basin is actually slightly higher than at the higher basin, so it's clearly not atmospherically driven.
Sure, but you can't use "suction" to lift the water higher than about 10m. You can push the water over the 10m high side of the reservoir, but if you stop the pusher pumps, the "siphon effect" won't magically keep it going, the water will just drop down the pipes away from the top of the hump on both sides leaving just a bit of water vapour in the created vacuum. You will have created a big barometer.
no way man. if you have a siphon that is 2 inches tall, there is no way there's a meaningful difference in atmospheric pressure between the top and the bottom. if that were the case you could hold a straw vertically and wind would rush through it.
it's like a chain hanging from a ladder, just gravity.
Well, not exactly. A column of water does not have the cohesion or tensile strength of a chain. Remember, vacuums don't "suck", rather fluid pressure differences provide pushes.
A mercury column in a sealed tube open at the bottom can be about 76cm in height, when under 1 atm of pressure. The volume above that height will be a vacuum (with a bit of mercury vapour I suppose). Can you get a mercury siphon to work in the atmosphere to lift over a hump greater than 76cm? No, because unlike a chain, the mercury would split at the top of the hump as soon as the height of the hump is higher than the 76cm corresponding to 1 atm of pressure. If you lower the atmospheric pressure, the max height of the hump will decrease.
With that said, it is the force of gravity on the fluid driving the motion, not the difference in air pressure between the two ends of the siphon pipe, so as long as the air pressure is high enough to prevent the fluid from splitting at the top of the hump, different air pressures will not have much effect on the siphon's operation - the fluid flow rate for example would be constant for all workable air pressures.
Of course I have not read the linked papers or watched the videos. Maybe I'm totally wrong and siphons work just fine in vacuums, but that has never stoped me from spouting off before, so why now?
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Given all that we know about GM, can someone explain (aside from the obvious political reasons / TBTF), why this company was bailed out? Romney was correct, it should have been allowed to go bankrupt. In addition, the taxpayer still had to eat a $10 billion loss. GM management was incompetent to the core. This idea is yet another example of it for all of the reasons you list and more.
The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?
Further down in the linked article is "On all TARP investments to date, including the sale of Treasury’s shares in AIG, the government has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on $421.8 billion disbursed. " so overall, it doesn't look like all the TARP funds were such a bad investment even from a straight purchase-sale calculation.
Of course, it is much harder to figure out if, long term, this was a good policy - would the economy have been better off to "kill off" the sick or better off in "healing" the sick? Have any of the "sick" been healed or are they still "sick"? Have we ensured similar things don't happen in the future?
I don't have high hopes for answers to these sorts of questions.
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Who's predictions? I would really be interested in links to these findings. Are these 0.5 degrees below predictions outside the range of the predictions (the prediction uncertainties) or just lower than the single value of the "most likely" prediction? For the 25 and 13 year predictions, is this 0.5 degree "error" for just a single year or for all of them?
Most of the "predictions" I have seen have certainly had uncertainties much larger than 0.5 degrees, and many have entire ranges depending on the level of "optimism" or "pessimism" in terms of the model assumptions. Are you saying that the most "optimistic" predictions were 0.5 degrees higher than the actual measurements? Are you saying that the last 25 years of data (or 13) is inconsistent with human driven climate change?
The argument that black cabs are making is that Uber is using a taxi-meter for their fares and its illegal to have a taxi-meter installed (in London) unless you are a black cab.
(I'm making no comment about whether that rule is reasonable, I don't know why it exists other than, presumably, to deter non-black cabs from answering hails - the price needs to be agreed which should be done at booking time)
Black cab drivers are complaining that that law isn't being enforced for Uber, hence their protest. TfL have said that they don't consider using an app, having a meter installed.
At the end of the day this can only be decided by:
a) repealing the law - Uber is welcome to lobby to get that done - but they haven't.
b) bringing a test case - this is where I suspect the black cab drivers problem is. It's probably TfL who has to bring the test case. The courts will then have to decide whether an app is an "installed taxi-meter"
After (or possibly before) b, parliament can decide to clarify the law. Generally parliament doesn't act unless there's a perceived problem though - so it won't be until: 1) The courts rule that an app isn't an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that they intended to catch the Uber case - the law will be modified to make it explicit that an app counts as a taxi-meter.
2) The courts rule that an app is an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that that wasn't intended to be caught and clarify the law (probably after lobbying)
3) There are a series of high profile assaults/robberies/etc by Uber drivers so parliament clarifies the law so then TfL prosecutes Uber drivers.
Black-cab and mini-cab services coexist in London. I've used both and no doubt will again in the future.
Uber appears to be treading the line between a mini-cab service (which would be legal) and a black-cab service (which would be illegal). One of the great things about London is that, late at night, when you're the worse for drink, you can get into some random strangers car and be as confident as it's possible to be that that person will deliver the promised service.
There's quite a lot of (TfL) advertising warning people that "unless it's pre-booked it's a stranger's car".
excellent summation!
Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.)
If the software were to fail in any of these cases, the car maker will be sued as happened to Toyota with their cars doing unintended acceleration.
Yep, but not until enough insurance companies paid out and they realized it was an actual problem. I don't think we are really disagreeing. I don't think that autonomous cars change the landscape that much from what we currently have: people's insurance pay for accidents and when the problems are seen to be not the fault of the insured, the insurance people go ofter the responsible parties to recover costs. The same thing will (and does) happen for non-auto insurance when visitors get killed by your Roomba running amuck.
Good points, but I expect there will not be a transfer of liability to the "taxi driver" unless you are actually hiring the ride from someone else. You bought it, you hit the start button, you end up "paying" and let your insurance company fight it out with the manufacturer when things go pear-shaped (what does that even mean?) Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.) and when that is "at fault" it is your insurance company for the most part that takes care of laying the blame on the builder - I figure the same will be true here.
I suspect that overall we are only going to get to the autonomous vehicle stage when they are better than the "average" human driver by a factor of ten or more, so the cost of having to re-examine "who pays?" issues are probably going to be equally reduced.
And that insurance is paid by the driver -- so it's a small monthly fee instead of a settlement. Therefore, the car manufacturers should pay insurance periodically during a year. Why should the driver be liable for software/hardware bugs of the car?
I don't see why it would not be handled the same way hardware defects are right now: the manufacturers hide the problem until the death toll is high enough or someone spills the beans, then the insurers and victims go after them in a class action lawsuit.
Everyone steers away? Sure , so long as there isn't a concrete divider or 100 foot drop or oncoming vehicles or pedestrians for the cars at the edge to worry about. And this only works if all the cars are computer controlled because if only one is being driven manually then there'll be a massive pile up.
"So we can only make it better"
For simple collisions maybe, for anything more complex forget it. These are vehicles in the real world, not balls on a pool table.
But how common are these occurrences? A bunch of autonomous cars in communication should all be able to stop safely without crashing as soon as one of them sees the toddler step onto the roadway. Yes, the toddler might get wiped out, but there should be no cascade of rear-enders because all the cars apply max braking in unison, and none were following closer then their reaction time and braking distances would allow.
I don't think it's a design problem to fit external airbags. It seems that Volvo is the only company that's actually got a real-life example of that, so it's most likely a cost issue rather than a design problem. Most people don't want to pay extra to protect other people.
Pop-up bonnets are an easy to design protective measure, but again, no-one is making them due to the lack of demand. Face it - car drivers are not willing to invest in protecting other people from their own vehicle.
Car buyers are not willing to invest in protecting themselves either, unless convinced by advertising, government regulations, and other incentives - basically it is hard to imagine that "I" am going to have an accident, so spending an extra $50 for seat belts rather than using that extra $50 for a fancier sound system never had much success in getting people to put seat belts in their cars until seat belts were made mandatory. Then we had to give out tickets to make people wear them....
Killing someone by inaction is also murder.
Maybe. How much of your spare change have you devoted to rescuing those all over the world dieing from hunger, disease, natural disaster, etc? I don't know if I would all all of us who are "killing someone by inaction" every day, murderers.
I don't disagree that failing to do something like press the button to turn off the "automatic drop a tonne of bricks on the schoolyard" device would be murder, but somehow as the inaction and the deaths get farther away from each other, the moral certainty seems to fade too.
What if the crash were avoidable but the car just hit a cat (because the car went berserk for some unknown reason)? Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
Neither, that's what mandatory insurance is for.
There's nothing worse than seeing an animal suffer, even if that animal is considered by many to be vermin.
That's why the car ethics algorithm, besides heading into the cat, need to accelerate as well. :D
[Disclaimer: Although I dislike cats as a pet, I respect them as animals and would never (and have never) hurt them.)]
I recall a bit from some medical drama way back (St Elsewhere perhaps? All TV shows are just dreams - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) where the doctor is sewing up some mean tough looking biker dude and asks what caused his injuries. He explains that he was driving his motorbike along when a cute furry animal darted across
the road (a squirrel, bunny, or cat; I don't recall) and the crash happened "when I swerved". "Did you hit the cat?" "No, he got away." Leaving the viewer to understand that the accident was caused by the rider trying to HIT, rather than avoid, the animal. The delivery made it pretty funny as I recall.
That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money
Why would they want to raise more money if they didn't think it bought them more votes?
Hint: Money buys votes. The politicians themselves think so too.
Just because people THINK that pressing the elevator button more times will make the elevator come faster, does not mean that it actually does. I have no doubt that politicians themselves think that more money -> winner, that does not mean that winner->more money.
There is some good stuff at http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...
There is a nice bit at the end: "These findings may be surprising at first blush, but the intuition isn’t that hard to grasp. After all, how many people do you know who ever change their minds on something important like their political beliefs (well, other than liberal Republicans who find themselves running for national office)? People just aren’t that malleable; and for that reason, campaign spending is far less important in determining election outcomes than many people believe (or fear)."
You can't just pick one example and claim it proves a point. If you look across a large sample size of elections, I HIGHLY suspect you will find that the candidate with the most money wins a disproportionate amount of the time.
That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money - people tend to want to support the winning side, and are not as enthusiastic about being involved with the side that they think is going to lose.
There are certainly MANY candidates that are unelectable no matter how much money they raise and spend in comparison to their opponents.
Then again, maybe it will be like the previous "Silk Road" and be all about opium and kitty porn and services to kill people.
Is kitty porn a large problem in your local? Meow.
It looks like the article writer may have completely misunderstood the research. It looks like Prof. Davies is saying that the end of the republic and the start of the empire was a result of concrete usage. In the article she is quoted as saying "One could even say that it played a significant role in bringing down the Republic." and mentioned Julius Caesar and Pompey using concrete in their building to help shore up their political power by building permanent structures.
Everything other than the article's writer synopsis points to the era of the end of the republic, not the end of the western empire some 400-500 years later.
Good point.
For such a pedantic dialogue as this thread, I was hoping to see someone write "the air pressure and internal fluid tension set a limit ..." before I reached my pettifogger deFUDer saturation point, but it was not to be.
Good point, but since I was talking about a height of "about 10 metres" for water (not the most accurate of heights) and the internal fluid tension supports I would guess less than a centimetre, I figured the internal fluid tension was more of a rounding error than anything that needed to be explicitly stated. But epine is correct, the internal fluid tension does add some (small for water at least) height to the effective max for suction pumps and siphons.
Certainly the trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" does not look like it is going to be very consistent with the published comics.
From what I've been reading, it is consistent, with the most recent version of the Guardians, not the Martinex/Charlie-27/Vance Astro/etc etc Guardians you're probably thinking of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Which is, I guess, an indication that being "consistent with the comics" at best can be understood to mean "consistent with some group of comics picked from fifty plus years of inconsistent storylines, restarts and re-imagings".
Disney hasn't done this with any of the Marvel movies; why do people assume they are with the Star Wars movies?
The Marvel movies are not completely consistent with the huge comic "continuity", in fact the published comics themselves do not always maintain continuity. I don't know that trying to be thusly consistent is a good goal.
At best, the Marvel movies have been fairly self consistent with the movie storylines. Certainly the trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" does not look like it is going to be very consistent with the published comics.
Under normal atmospheric pressure you cannot siphon over a hump of about 10m.
But why is that? Is it because you need atmospheric pressure to exert any force at all upon the siphon? Or is it in fact because when you try to siphon further than that, you create sufficient pressure drop to cause degassing of the water in the top of the tube, which breaks the siphon? This precise question is the reason why I would have preferred to see this experiment performed with another liquid.
One atmosphere (70km? how high is the atmosphere) of air pressure is about equal to the pressure of 76cm of mercury or about 10m of water. If you take a (tall) container and open the bottom to let the water out, the air pressure outside will hold up 10m of water, above which will be a vacuum (with a fair bit of water vapour). If you use mercury you get only 76cm of mercury with a vacuum above that (with only a bit of mercury vapour since the vapour pressure of mercury at room temperature is pretty low). The reason a siphon works is that the falling liquid on the low side (pulled by gravity) acts as a suction pump or vacuum pump to pull the liquid over the hump. As we all should know, "suction" is just a way of talking about air pressure pushing up.
There is no need for "degassing of the water" to "break the siphon", a pure vacuum at the top would "break" it just as effectively.
Supposedly the accompanying videos show that decreasing the air pressure decreases the max height the siphons work at. Gravity is certainly driving the motion, but absent external air pressure, the adhesion of water for itself can only support drip sizes against gravity, not multi-centimetres (let alone metre) columns of water.
Perhaps you misunderstood, due to my poor wording. I should have said "inverted U-formed pipe" or maybe an "n-formed pipe".
If that isn't what caused your "this is nonsense" statement, then perhaps you need to review simple mercury barometer construction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note the second paragraph on Siphons which discusses the maximum height:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here is another reference for the maximum height of a suction pump:
http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert...
People do not use suction pumps to raise water beyond 10m in one stage. They can use various pump designs to push water from the bottom to much higher heights, but you can't "pull" it up more than about 10m without changing the local air pressure.
I would be interested to see any references or examples to the contrary.
Of course it's both forces (pressure and gravity). This is simply a pedantic attack at the way the dictionary defines the process.
Dictionary definition:
"A pipe or tube of glass, metal or other material, bent so that one leg is longer than the other, and used for drawing off liquids by means of atmospheric pressure, which forces the liquid up the shorter leg and over the bend in the pipe."
This definition is correct as atmospheric pressure differences start the process. However the dictionary doesn't explain that gravity eventually takes over. Dr. Hughes sums up:
As any petrol thief knows, to get the liquid over the "hump" of the tube you have to suck the other end or, more pedantically, lower the pressure in your lungs to beneath atmospheric pressure by expanding them. Once the liquid has passed the highest point in the tube, the continuous chain of cohesive bonds between the liquid molecules in the tube, and the force of gravity, do the rest.
Gravity is acting as a suction pump, which requires the air pressure to push the water - get rid of the air pressure and you can't "suck" the stuff up in the first place or keep it flowing. The "cohesive bonds between the liquid molecules" are pretty darn weak compared to the forces involved in stealing "petrol" or siphoning most other fluids. Under normal atmospheric pressure you cannot siphon over a hump of about 10m.
For those who didn't read the article well: the paper actually does show that the flow stops when there isn't enough pressure. The water column still needs to be supported, and this happens by a combination of atmospheric pressure (the dominant force at 1atm) and molecular cohesion.
Also, NO, this paper does NOT show a water siphon working in a vacuum. (Reference is made to another study, but not at similat water column heights)
The key point being made here is that although atmospheric pressure is required to maintain a certain siphon height, the force causing the water to flow is due to the potential energy difference.
good point
If the top of the siphon is too high for a vacuum pump, some other method must be used, but the siphon action will work at much greater heights because, as the article points out, the siphon action itself does not depend on pressure. What are the height limits, I wonder? Redwood trees are about as tall as trees can get with the capillary action method they use to raise water. I expect siphons work at much greater heights than that.
Just because you call your tall u-shaped tube a "siphon" does not mean it will behave differently than the tall u-shaped tube someone else calls a "barometer". Once your siphon hump is more than about 10 *meters* (10.3m or about 34 feet) high, the water falls down on each side of the hump, leaving a vacuum (with some water vapour) at the op. The air pressure sets a limit on the height of both suction pumps and siphons.
Moving water over a mountain is easy in a pipe. Say you have a reservoir at height, like a mountain lake, and you want to pump it to a city in the valley below. You need only get it over the ridge. Once the flow to the lower height starts, it will continue. The problem with your suggestion is that you can't get the siphon started. All this guy is saying is that the flow continues due to gravity. Which makes good sense. The atmospheric pressure at the lower basin is actually slightly higher than at the higher basin, so it's clearly not atmospherically driven.
Sure, but you can't use "suction" to lift the water higher than about 10m. You can push the water over the 10m high side of the reservoir, but if you stop the pusher pumps, the "siphon effect" won't magically keep it going, the water will just drop down the pipes away from the top of the hump on both sides leaving just a bit of water vapour in the created vacuum. You will have created a big barometer.
no way man. if you have a siphon that is 2 inches tall, there is no way there's a meaningful difference in atmospheric pressure between the top and the bottom. if that were the case you could hold a straw vertically and wind would rush through it.
it's like a chain hanging from a ladder, just gravity.
Well, not exactly. A column of water does not have the cohesion or tensile strength of a chain. Remember, vacuums don't "suck", rather fluid pressure differences provide pushes.
A mercury column in a sealed tube open at the bottom can be about 76cm in height, when under 1 atm of pressure. The volume above that height will be a vacuum (with a bit of mercury vapour I suppose). Can you get a mercury siphon to work in the atmosphere to lift over a hump greater than 76cm? No, because unlike a chain, the mercury would split at the top of the hump as soon as the height of the hump is higher than the 76cm corresponding to 1 atm of pressure. If you lower the atmospheric pressure, the max height of the hump will decrease.
With that said, it is the force of gravity on the fluid driving the motion, not the difference in air pressure between the two ends of the siphon pipe, so as long as the air pressure is high enough to prevent the fluid from splitting at the top of the hump, different air pressures will not have much effect on the siphon's operation - the fluid flow rate for example would be constant for all workable air pressures.
Of course I have not read the linked papers or watched the videos. Maybe I'm totally wrong and siphons work just fine in vacuums, but that has never stoped me from spouting off before, so why now?