I was pretty surprised by the moderating . Some of the worst I've seen in a while. I've had statements downmodded where i thought, "What? Oh, I guess I can see it. Stupid but I can see it". In this case, I can't imagine why it was downmodded.
But either folks will mod it up or they won't. No skin off my nose.
I didn't say I liked him or he was perfect. I said he *might* be a fiscal conservative.
Your pointing out that he is making spending cuts only agrees with that perception.
Everyone can say "oh we need cuts but in some other area".
In the end, the cut has to happen somewhere. We have a huge deficit coming up because of overspending and lack of wisdom about the economy never getting worse.
Oil still provides a lot of residential, commercial, and industrial electricity.
Ignoring electric cars, if we could cut out residential and industrial electricity from oil, that would reduce our total oil consumption by 10%. That's a lot of oil.
I'm not sure electric cars are going to scale well unless we get a new form of battery technology.
I like the bacteria to produce oil idea. Even if that particular one doesn't work, the basic concept is sound.
However, home power systems are down to about $15k with subsidies. A $10k system will "pay" off about $1k a year in reduced electricity bills without using batteries in most "A/C" states (producing about 1kilowatt during the day so all your daytime electricity needs are "free".)
So using the Fox News figure of 1.4 trillion (ignoring future costs that will total to 2.5 trillion to 3.5 trillion dollars)
1,400,000,000,000 140,000,000 "$10k systems".
Of course there are only 130,000,000 stand alone houses in america.
And prices would drop as we installed that many systems.
So for the *conservative* cost of the war, we could have eliminated huge portions of our electrical needs, improved our resiliency in times of war and natural disaster, driven down the cost of solar technology, and denied a bunch of money to the oil states and military industrial complex.
The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.[9][10]
Perhaps you are thinking of the current cost.. ignoring all future costs. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.[9][10]
The total war costs could grow to $3.5 trillion by 2017, the committee estimated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Trillion_Dollar_War The total cost of $3 trillion is consistent with numerous government studies. These include the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which estimated that the war will cost $3.5 trillion,[2] and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has projected that the total cost will reach between $1.4 and $2.2 trillion.[
Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as âoebaloneyâ by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction could pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries.... From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions.
Hell, even FOX NEWS says it's going to be at least 1.5 trillion.
Different sources give different numbers. I get that. 3 trillion is a widely used figure. Over 3 trillion isn't uncommon. The figures blow away the figures which Rumsfield used to justify the war by a factor of 15 (using your numbers) to a factor of over 60 (using the highest end 3.5 Trillion dollar costs).
A lot of this is also "off books"- who knows what's happening in the black ops budget.
I remember going 7 days on a charge. Now I have a charger at home, a charger at work, a charger in my car.
It is easier to text.
My monthly cell bill has gone from $35 to $95. That's $780 a year. That's like $1500 pretax. That's $7800 every 10 years-- two european vacations, two nights with an eliot spitzer french maid, half of a solar power system which would lower my electricity bills by $1000 a year.
Makes me wonder... What if we had spent the THREE TRILLION (and counting) dollars on renewable power? Would it have reduced demand enough that it would have driving down the price of oil?
Well this is an app for a cell phone right (presumably the iphone).
iPhone GPS (even aGPS) accuracy varies wildly. In the city it can get confused.
Perhaps I don't have it turned on and it is only using cell phone towers but I read that getting confused in the city is common because of reflections off buildings. I don't see any settings to "turn on real GPS".
95% is not 100%... but what I see isn't 95%. The best it's ever reported was 17 meters and that is rare. 45 meters is much more common. 450 meters is common and 1500 meters occurs at least a few times a day.
The most accurate I've seen is 47 meters but often my phone is 1500 meters off. At times, when using google maps, I'm driving somewhere a half a mile off the road until it snaps back on.
I wish it were more accurate.
Oh and get this...
It reports my location like (this is not my actual location hackers)
How about this? Eliminate all taxes on income, individual or corporate. Place taxes on assets and capital appropriate to cover the costs of the government (we aren't looking for behavior modification). Eliminate the rules and fees that make hiring people such a chore, like Social Security, Medicare taxes, and minimum wage. Simplify excessively bureaucratic or complex regulation. This removes the perverse incentive to invest in capital rather than hire more people.
Well the claim is that people would then take their capital and go elsewhere. "We'll all leave your country and set up shop in "no taxcountry" ". So I think (as bad as it was with smoot hawley) that we may need to start considering shortcuts taken in manufacturing. If you want to make your products in a country with no taxes, workers, environmental laws, then you pay a penalty tariff on every product.
But even thinking about that- I see it spirals down to nothing- because even with a tariff the people here have no money without a job.
According to Aethon, one TUG robot working two shifts a day, seven days a week, does the equivalent labor of 2.8 full time employees, but costs less than one full time employee. Their case studies seem to back up their claims. Variations on the TUG system have been in hospitals for several years now as you can see in the following segments:
http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/02/hospital-to-lay-off-workers-hiring-new-robots/ Hospital To Lay Off Workers, Hires Robots Instead According to a hospital administrator quoted in the Businessweek article the 19 TUGs perform $1 million of human labor per year, but only cost $350,000. A 65% reduction in labor costs? Thatâ(TM)s very appealing.
On the subject of Forklifts...not yet on the market.. but just a question of how long. http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/14/the-autonomous-forklift/ The Autonomous Forklift This forklift, however, is being designed to move pallets for the military in a variable environment where humans work and interact with the machine as coworkers.
FYI, right now robots that can do simple human labor 24 hours a day currently run $15,000 a year. That's pretty low.
Diapers.com is using "hundreds" of warehouse robots. I've read articles where other companies have bought a couple dozen.
My billion dollar company has not had a human receptionist for 8 years.
I think somehow this is a tax issue. I'm just not sure where or how to phrase the taxes.
I mean, it would be great to have a billion dollar profit company with lots of robots paying 800 million in taxes which provide all kinds of benefits to people who mostly get to do fun stuff-- the owner still gets 200 million in profits to split between themselves and the investors.
The fundamental problem is-- without workers, the mass market itself collapses. Who do you sell your product to?
People have to have income to spend. So they have to have jobs. If all the manual jobs go away... not everyone can do brain or creative work.
The rest are private companies... hard to dig out.. but from the recent census.. There were 17M companies with no employees which produced 770B income.
Limiting it to companies with 10-19 employees or less was 1.8 trillion dollars.
companies with 500 or more employees only totaled 2.3 trillion.
Diapers.com, instead of having 400 workers has 89 workers and 300 robotic warehouse workers. That's where we are headed. Lots of automation. Fewer jobs for humans.
CHK $953M net income. $113M Compensation to CEO (salary $975k, base compensation 18M) $?50M Compensation to COO (Salary, ???, base compensation 9M so 50M total?) $?50M Compensation to roughly a dozen more executives (Base compensation about $4 million each for those with a visible base compensation).
1% Dividend to shareholders ($0.075 share) -20% to -50% Return to Shareholders over the last 5 years (There is a return from 6 years ago.. but no net return from 1996-1997 when it was at the same price).
Most of the rest of the employees make normal salaries. Lot of them (5,000+)
The trend is here SEMGROUP $20.17 bil 60.4 $3.56 bil $239 mil $388 mil 1,622 Dec
That's a huge amount of money for a tiny number of employees. Privately held. And most of the beneit almost certainly goes to a few executives the same as CHK above.
--- Our tax structure creates a huge incentive to reduce the number of workers. And to move the employees you do have to staffing companies instead of keeping them as employees. And to move jobs to other countries.
yet the executives still want to live here where you don't get shot for breaking environmental laws.
In fact, it is possible and plausible that we'll have many billion dollar corporation with less than a dozen employees within the next 10 years.
It's called "capital intensive". Lots of machines and automated processes. A few short term jobs setting it up. Some slave wage offshore labor.
But otherwise a nearly pure pump of wealth from the mass market into the hands of a few people. Even out of that dozen, probably half of them will just make "good" salaries while almost all the benefit of the corporation is gained by a few people.
That's really the pattern now. Multi billion dollar corporations where most of the profits go to a few employees-- not even to the shareholders.
If you know the watermark technique, then you can erase the original watermark and write a new unified watermark.
In fakes (including Tron 2), the main issue is that the lighting is never right.
In reality, the mouse cable is reflecting dark grey light at you. Each key on the keyboard is reflecting a mixture of black and and white at you. The screen is shining orange, green, blue, large masses of white, and grey on you.
If the person next to you has a blue dress, that blue is reflecting off you.
It's unholy ridiculously complicated and all they can do is "model" it and get close.
But it looks fake.
I was thinking for Tron 2, they should have had the young actor standing in for bridges (who had dots on his face) should have had white face makeup which would pick up the real room lighting and that could be used to adjust the lighting on the simulated young jeff face.
Flying at 35 milies an hour with 30' off freedom would be awesome. You could travel up to 70 miles with this. I assume the mileage per gallon of fuel is pretty terrible (maybe 2 miles per gallon?)
However, I can also see this as a way to do certain kinds of maintenance work as well.
Falling 30' could kill you- the odds are slim. But it's possible. But fun!
I've bought several anime series because they became available on fansubs. I've also started watching some on TV because of fan subs.
However- I won't buy Anime which a) is overpriced (please-- $24 for 4 of 80 episodes? TV shows cost $20 for 18 to 24 episodes. That's a reasonable price for anime. Plus- do the math... $24*20 = $480 for one anime show. A bit unreasonable). b) I'm never going to watch again. I used to do this. I used to buy regular hollywood material too. But I realized I wasn't watching the DVD's for 90%. So I now only buy things I'm sure i'll watch a second time. I have a drawer full of stuff I won't watch again. I don't know... maybe I'll watch the Slayers again someday. It was fun. But so far, years and nope.
God- what is up with the inappropriate troll mods today.
What you are saying is correct. For electricity, they even charge a higher rate above 750kwh in my area. But it is like 10.5 then 12.5 cents.
The fine for going over was so high that it basically prohibited high usage except for wealthy people. ($200 a month is no big if you are making a million bucks a year).
Slashdot Mirror
I was pretty surprised by the moderating . Some of the worst I've seen in a while.
I've had statements downmodded where i thought, "What? Oh, I guess I can see it. Stupid but I can see it". In this case, I can't imagine why it was downmodded.
But either folks will mod it up or they won't. No skin off my nose.
I didn't say I liked him or he was perfect. I said he *might* be a fiscal conservative.
Your pointing out that he is making spending cuts only agrees with that perception.
Everyone can say "oh we need cuts but in some other area".
In the end, the cut has to happen somewhere. We have a huge deficit coming up because of overspending and lack of wisdom about the economy never getting worse.
The tax rate is 8.25% for many of the residents.
Plus property taxes are about $1,000 per $50,000 home value.
Our problem is the Perry sucks as governor in the same way Bush did.
Instead of being a true conservative, he was a spendthrift.
Dan Patrick (who is too socially conservative for my tastes) *may* be a true fiscal conservative which would be nice.
Oil still provides a lot of residential, commercial, and industrial electricity.
Ignoring electric cars, if we could cut out residential and industrial electricity from oil, that would reduce our total oil consumption by 10%. That's a lot of oil.
I'm not sure electric cars are going to scale well unless we get a new form of battery technology.
I like the bacteria to produce oil idea. Even if that particular one doesn't work, the basic concept is sound.
However, home power systems are down to about $15k with subsidies. A $10k system will "pay" off about $1k a year in reduced electricity bills without using batteries in most "A/C" states (producing about 1kilowatt during the day so all your daytime electricity needs are "free".)
So using the Fox News figure of 1.4 trillion (ignoring future costs that will total to 2.5 trillion to 3.5 trillion dollars)
1,400,000,000,000
140,000,000 "$10k systems".
Of course there are only
130,000,000 stand alone houses in america.
And prices would drop as we installed that many systems.
So for the *conservative* cost of the war, we could have eliminated huge portions of our electrical needs, improved our resiliency in times of war and natural disaster, driven down the cost of solar technology, and denied a bunch of money to the oil states and military industrial complex.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.[9][10]
Perhaps you are thinking of the current cost.. ignoring all future costs.
The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.[9][10]
http://articles.cnn.com/2007-11-13/politics/hidden.war.costs_1_war-costs-iraq-oil-prices?_s=PM:POLITICS
The total war costs could grow to $3.5 trillion by 2017, the committee estimated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Trillion_Dollar_War
The total cost of $3 trillion is consistent with numerous government studies. These include the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which estimated that the war will cost $3.5 trillion,[2] and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has projected that the total cost will reach between $1.4 and $2.2 trillion.[
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3419840.ece
Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as âoebaloneyâ by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction could pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. ...
From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions.
Hell, even FOX NEWS says it's going to be at least 1.5 trillion.
Different sources give different numbers. I get that. 3 trillion is a widely used figure. Over 3 trillion isn't uncommon. The figures blow away the figures which Rumsfield used to justify the war by a factor of 15 (using your numbers) to a factor of over 60 (using the highest end 3.5 Trillion dollar costs).
A lot of this is also "off books"- who knows what's happening in the black ops budget.
Smart phones have the battery life of a mayfly.
I remember going 7 days on a charge. Now I have a charger at home, a charger at work, a charger in my car.
It is easier to text.
My monthly cell bill has gone from $35 to $95. That's $780 a year. That's like $1500 pretax. That's $7800 every 10 years-- two european vacations, two nights with an eliot spitzer french maid, half of a solar power system which would lower my electricity bills by $1000 a year.
Makes me wonder...
What if we had spent the THREE TRILLION (and counting) dollars on renewable power? Would it have reduced demand enough that it would have driving down the price of oil?
Well this is an app for a cell phone right (presumably the iphone).
iPhone GPS (even aGPS) accuracy varies wildly. In the city it can get confused.
Perhaps I don't have it turned on and it is only using cell phone towers but I read that getting confused in the city is common because of reflections off buildings. I don't see any settings to "turn on real GPS".
95% is not 100%... but what I see isn't 95%. The best it's ever reported was 17 meters and that is rare. 45 meters is much more common. 450 meters is common and 1500 meters occurs at least a few times a day.
Does the iphone 3g have an actual GPS?
Does the iphone 4g have an actual GPS?
I'm using mine with the default settings. Is there a way to turn on the real GPS vs the cell phone tower GPS?
I think you missed my point.
The reported accuracy (4 digits) is less than the actual accuracy (within 450 meters).
So it gives two highly accurate numbers... which are only accurate to within 450 meters. It might as well say, "you are at 21.23, -92.71"
The most accurate I've seen is 47 meters but often my phone is 1500 meters off.
At times, when using google maps, I'm driving somewhere a half a mile off the road until it snaps back on.
I wish it were more accurate.
Oh and get this...
It reports my location like (this is not my actual location hackers)
21.7324
-92.7823
within 450 meters.
LOL. 4 digit precision... within 450 meters..
How about this? Eliminate all taxes on income, individual or corporate. Place taxes on assets and capital appropriate to cover the costs of the government (we aren't looking for behavior modification). Eliminate the rules and fees that make hiring people such a chore, like Social Security, Medicare taxes, and minimum wage. Simplify excessively bureaucratic or complex regulation. This removes the perverse incentive to invest in capital rather than hire more people.
Well the claim is that people would then take their capital and go elsewhere. "We'll all leave your country and set up shop in "no taxcountry" ".
So I think (as bad as it was with smoot hawley) that we may need to start considering shortcuts taken in manufacturing. If you want to make your products in a country with no taxes, workers, environmental laws, then you pay a penalty tariff on every product.
But even thinking about that- I see it spirals down to nothing- because even with a tariff the people here have no money without a job.
You may find these interesting...
http://singularityhub.com/2010/06/06/incredible-tug-robots-automate-delivery-in-hospitals-video/
According to Aethon, one TUG robot working two shifts a day, seven days a week, does the equivalent labor of 2.8 full time employees, but costs less than one full time employee. Their case studies seem to back up their claims. Variations on the TUG system have been in hospitals for several years now as you can see in the following segments:
http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/02/hospital-to-lay-off-workers-hiring-new-robots/
Hospital To Lay Off Workers, Hires Robots Instead
According to a hospital administrator quoted in the Businessweek article the 19 TUGs perform $1 million of human labor per year, but only cost $350,000. A 65% reduction in labor costs? Thatâ(TM)s very appealing.
http://singularityhub.com/2010/06/10/whats-the-secret-behind-diapers-com-success-a-kiva-robot-warehouse-video/
Whatâ(TM)s The Secret Behind Diapers.com Success? A Kiva Robot Warehouse
On the subject of Forklifts...not yet on the market.. but just a question of how long.
http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/14/the-autonomous-forklift/
The Autonomous Forklift
This forklift, however, is being designed to move pallets for the military in a variable environment where humans work and interact with the machine as coworkers.
---
thanks.
Wish I could have found those private companies
FYI, right now robots that can do simple human labor 24 hours a day currently run $15,000 a year. That's pretty low.
Diapers.com is using "hundreds" of warehouse robots. I've read articles where other companies have bought a couple dozen.
My billion dollar company has not had a human receptionist for 8 years.
I think somehow this is a tax issue. I'm just not sure where or how to phrase the taxes.
I mean, it would be great to have a billion dollar profit company with lots of robots paying 800 million in taxes which provide all kinds of benefits to people who mostly get to do fun stuff-- the owner still gets 200 million in profits to split between themselves and the investors.
The fundamental problem is-- without workers, the mass market itself collapses. Who do you sell your product to?
People have to have income to spend. So they have to have jobs.
If all the manual jobs go away... not everyone can do brain or creative work.
I said both.
The rest are private companies... hard to dig out .. but from the recent census..
There were 17M companies with no employees which produced 770B income.
Limiting it to companies with 10-19 employees or less was 1.8 trillion dollars.
companies with 500 or more employees only totaled 2.3 trillion.
and then this...
http://sierravoices.com/2011/02/terrifying-truth-american-business-no-longer-needs-american-workers/
But even that article misses the basic premise.
Diapers.com, instead of having 400 workers has 89 workers and 300 robotic warehouse workers. That's where we are headed. Lots of automation. Fewer jobs for humans.
CHK
$953M net income.
$113M Compensation to CEO (salary $975k, base compensation 18M)
$?50M Compensation to COO (Salary, ???, base compensation 9M so 50M total?)
$?50M Compensation to roughly a dozen more executives (Base compensation about $4 million each for those with a visible base compensation).
1% Dividend to shareholders ($0.075 share)
-20% to -50% Return to Shareholders over the last 5 years
(There is a return from 6 years ago.. but no net return from 1996-1997 when it was at the same price).
Most of the rest of the employees make normal salaries.
Lot of them (5,000+)
But this is where we are headed...
http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/17/internet-companies-with-few-employees-but-millions-of-users/
And CHK is more of an old school company...
The trend is here
SEMGROUP
$20.17 bil 60.4 $3.56 bil $239 mil $388 mil 1,622 Dec
That's a huge amount of money for a tiny number of employees. Privately held. And most of the beneit almost certainly goes to a few executives the same as CHK above.
---
Our tax structure creates a huge incentive to reduce the number of workers.
And to move the employees you do have to staffing companies instead of keeping them as employees.
And to move jobs to other countries.
yet the executives still want to live here where you don't get shot for breaking environmental laws.
Less true with each passing day.
In fact, it is possible and plausible that we'll have many billion dollar corporation with less than a dozen employees within the next 10 years.
It's called "capital intensive". Lots of machines and automated processes. A few short term jobs setting it up. Some slave wage offshore labor.
But otherwise a nearly pure pump of wealth from the mass market into the hands of a few people. Even out of that dozen, probably half of them will just make "good" salaries while almost all the benefit of the corporation is gained by a few people.
That's really the pattern now. Multi billion dollar corporations where most of the profits go to a few employees-- not even to the shareholders.
If you know the watermark technique, then you can erase the original watermark and write a new unified watermark.
In fakes (including Tron 2), the main issue is that the lighting is never right.
In reality, the mouse cable is reflecting dark grey light at you. Each key on the keyboard is reflecting a mixture of black and and white at you. The screen is shining orange, green, blue, large masses of white, and grey on you.
If the person next to you has a blue dress, that blue is reflecting off you.
It's unholy ridiculously complicated and all they can do is "model" it and get close.
But it looks fake.
I was thinking for Tron 2, they should have had the young actor standing in for bridges (who had dots on his face) should have had white face makeup which would pick up the real room lighting and that could be used to adjust the lighting on the simulated young jeff face.
Flying at 35 milies an hour with 30' off freedom would be awesome. You could travel up to 70 miles with this. I assume the mileage per gallon of fuel is pretty terrible (maybe 2 miles per gallon?)
However, I can also see this as a way to do certain kinds of maintenance work as well.
Falling 30' could kill you- the odds are slim. But it's possible. But fun!
Well. If you think so...
then it must be universally true!
I've bought several anime series because they became available on fansubs.
I've also started watching some on TV because of fan subs.
However- I won't buy Anime which
a) is overpriced (please-- $24 for 4 of 80 episodes? TV shows cost $20 for 18 to 24 episodes. That's a reasonable price for anime. Plus- do the math... $24*20 = $480 for one anime show. A bit unreasonable).
b) I'm never going to watch again. I used to do this. I used to buy regular hollywood material too. But I realized I wasn't watching the DVD's for 90%. So I now only buy things I'm sure i'll watch a second time. I have a drawer full of stuff I won't watch again. I don't know... maybe I'll watch the Slayers again someday. It was fun. But so far, years and nope.
God- what is up with the inappropriate troll mods today.
What you are saying is correct. For electricity, they even charge a higher rate above 750kwh in my area. But it is like 10.5 then 12.5 cents.
The fine for going over was so high that it basically prohibited high usage except for wealthy people. ($200 a month is no big if you are making a million bucks a year).
That's just a statement of fact in many municipalities.
However, we do not provide police and fire too far away from town for free or in some cases at all.
Wireless or Satellite makes this easier for internet of course.
So, you are saying you never lie to your family or friends?
Quite frankly, I find that hard to believe.