http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast /archive/The_True_Cost_0720723.html Kiplinger says about 2.5 billion per week: The war in Iraq is exacting a large taxpayer toll that will fuel much debate and affect the ability of Congress to find funding for popular domestic programs. With 158,000 troops in Iraq, at least until September and probably much longer, the war costs $300 million a day -- or almost $10 billion a month.
It looks like 1kw is 22,000 (for a non battery backed up system) so that's $33,000 for a non battery backed up 1.5kw system. That's lower than the $50k per house subsidized ($100k per house raw cost) I was using a couple years ago.
Its not clear that this is unsubsidized but I think it is before subsidies (and is MUCH cheaper than when I did my last rough calculation).
So say $40k for a battery backed system (and 7k per 10 years for replacing batteries and inverters but ignoring that).
At 40k, you'd get 6,200 houses per week or about 322k houses per year.
Per wiki.. In the year 2005, there were approximately 113,146,000 households in the United States.
So it would take 3 centuries to give them solar power.
Drop the cost factor to a 10th of what it is now and it would take 30 years (exciting!).
I think they are going to bottom out at about $5k per system + batteries if you want those and then inflate up after that.
The cool thing about solar is that it doesn't add energy to the environment. Burning coal/Nuclear/Fusion adds energy that was stored in the past. Solar just converts current energy that was shining on the house anyway.
You are correct. They do not draw and quarter them. They do not slice them with razors each day and pour salt water in the wounds.
However what they do IS illegal in the target (but corrupt) companies and IS illegal for walmart to knowingly engage in (even over there) for products to be shipped to the U.S.
I did a napkin calculation a year or so ago and at that time, you could give 100k houses free 1.5mw solar power (with inverters, trackers, and batteries) each year for the cost of the Iraq war.
Sounds like a lot- but it's really not.
However... the price is dropping. At some point very soon- you could give 1 million houses free solar power each year. And then they question is why are we wasting blood and treasure in a foreign land.
OTH- I think that solar will not get much cheaper than oil for a long time.
If solar is cheaper, the producers, or the government will be more likely to take extra profits or taxes. So if oil power is $2 bucks a unit, then solar power is going to be roughly $2 bucks per unit.
Here the worst thing they do is cut out bloated middle men by selling at a loss or slight profit and then sometimes jack the prices back up (and use the excessive profits to sell somewhere else at a loss).
However, in other countries they employ companies that treat their workers horribly. In ways that are inhumane and in ways that would be illegal here. The workers are coached to lie and the walmart managers are coached to accept those lies. There are specials on TV right now with ex-walmart executives testifying to this and saying how ashamed they were to let it pass. They knew - but it was never in black and white so they could ignore it for several years if they tried really hard. Likewise they have workers talking about the mistreatment and how they are coached to lie to inspectors.
This is a fundamental challenge for America with regard to all business- not just Walmart. If a product costs $1.00 to produce in a way that would be illegal in america for humane and ecological reasons, then how can we compete when creating the same item ethically and safely costs $2.00 and the middleman can hide the dirt overseas? All we see is "shirt 1: $13.00" vs "shirt 2: $15.00" and we buy the $13.00 shirt.
If not for some very stupid Japanese moves america probably wouldn't have intervened either because of a lot of isolationists, German and Italian Americans who sympathized with the axis, and American communists who sympathized with Russia (who was allied with Germany until Hitler got stupid).
I understand that millions of soviets and germans died on the eastern front and this may form the basis for your opinion that America was a minor part of the war. I mean we "only" lost over 407,000 men fighting vs 10 million soviets and 5 million germans. However soviet and german casualties were heightened by suicidal policies and irrational leadership and very poor equipment.
I think you are being extremely unrealistic if you think western europe had a snowball's chance without the financial, material, and military assistance of the United States. You say what ever you need to say and we'll close this one. I think you need to separate your justified dislike of america and american policies today from the events of world war 2. I think you are doing a great injustice a lot of heroic young americans who died to save people they didn't know and to fight real evil.
For me, it is more about being in a pool the size of the US or a pool that you can be dropped from the second you get sick.
However, the problem is that a 10 million dollar treatment is a 10 million dollar treatment by either system. There are some people you cannot afford to save because it bankrupts the system.
If you push their buttons right- they are heroes. If you push their buttons wrong- they can be the worst kind of villains.
Even my otherwise extremely nice nephew has told gloating stories about lording power over civilians and was so far gone he no longer realizes he sounds like a thug when he does so.
Likewise- good cops usually side with bad cops. So you have a problem there. If there is one bad cop in a department, then you have the good cops oppressing civilians that the bad cop crosses.
---
With regard to this article... I think it's good police work and in line with our constitutional values. Someone deserves a bonus.
However that graph with the associated article is far from clear. It was colder in 1980 than any other time in the century. A lot of the rest of it looks like a random walk.
I think people are over-reacting and over-committing before the facts are in.
The Mohs scale is a scale for classifying minerals based on relative hardness, determined by the ability of harder minerals to scratch softer ones. The scale includes the following minerals, in order from softest to hardest: 1. talc; 2. gypsum; 3. calcite; 4. fluorite; 5. apatite; 6. orthoclase; 7. quartz; 8. topaz; 9. corundum; 10. diamond.
Granite is harder than apatite and softer than topaz.
---
I hope you agree with my underlying point however. Facts are very discrete things. Something like evolution or gravity can never be a fact. Theories are explanations of sets of facts. A new fact that contradicts them would falsify them.
Let my try to switch this around to your perspective.
People have a fixed amount of money they will spend on music.
They can give 100% to one artist or 1% to one hundred artists.
The current setup is increasingly towards giving 100% to one artist.
Given a potential market of billions of consumers, I would rather give.1% to 1,000 artists (each of whom gets to make a few years salary for a few months work) than 10% to nine artists and.001% to the other 90 artists (each of whom starves on a few months income per year).
The current system is increasingly biased towards the "winner take all" scenario. The current entertainment industry is trying hard to suppress artists who make $40 grand or so. Because that is $40 grand less in their pockets.
And under the current system-- a few artists make 2 or 3 million (seems good) while the "industry" makes $97 or $98 million (really horrific rate of return).
Better to have a fair compensation rate for artists (at least 50%) but lower total compensation by cutting out the middle layers.
The only way I can do this personally is to a) Pirate the music. b) Buy gear from the artist's web site. c) Go to their concerts.
I would be showing greater support for them if I just sent them a dollar a year than if i bought their CD for 20 bucks. Because they typically get under a dollar off of their cd after all the funny accounting is finished.
$2,663.14 using the Consumer Price Index
$2,002.92 using the GDP deflator
using the value of consumer bundle *
$19,367.27 using the unskilled wage
$40,044.15 using the nominal GDP per capita $515,417.97 using the relative share of GDP
--- A trivial search for 1860 to 1880 salaries reveals annual salaries of $150. So $100 was not too bad for one song. He was paid 4 to 6 month's income for it.
---
Regardless, when I say "filthy rich" I mean earning more money that the average person earns in a lifetime for writing one song. And in many cases, several people earn that level of income, and many more make a year's income ($41,000) off of the song. It's irrationally high.
However, unlimited greed leads to slavery (sometimes called debtor's prison, company stores, "share-cropping") as those with wealth have laws passed which lock in their gains.
Eventually- the masses agree that the wealthy have "won" and then they rise up and either kill them or pass 99% income tax laws.
You do not want unlimited capitalism. It leads to social unrest. The wealthy would be just as happy with a fraction of their current wealth but many millions of other people would be much happier with only a few thousand more dollars a year.
The artists get rewarded because they have an increasingly artificial set of laws passed because the entertainment industry basically "owns" several congressmen at this point. People will stay pushed down a long time- but it will not last forever.
A scientific fact is something real. "Granite is hard" "Water is soft" "Non-saline water freezes at 32 degrees celcius under 15 atmospheres of pressure".
If the globe is warmer (on average or specifically) then that is a fact. WHY it is warmer will always be a theory.
There are many hypothesis about why we are measuring warmer temperatures.
Right now, in my opinion, there is too much money and political pressure involved to get good science.
As used in science, a theory is an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena.
Any scientific theory must be based on a careful and rational examination of the facts. A clear distinction needs to be made between facts (things which can be observed and/or measured) and theories (explanations which correlate and interpret the facts.
A fact is something that is supported by unmistakeable evidence. For example, the Grand Canyon cuts through layers of different kinds of rock, such as the Coconino sandstone, Hermit shale, and Redwall limestone. These rock layers often contain fossils that are found only in certain layers. Those are the facts.
And here: http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawth eory.htm Hypothesis A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation. Usually, a hypothesis can be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. A hypothesis can be disproven, but not proven to be true.
Theory A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis.
Law A law generalizes a body of observations. At the time it is made, no exceptions have been found to a law. Scientific laws explain things, but they do not describe them. One way to tell a law and a theory apart is to ask if the description gives you a means to explain 'why'.
Example: Consider Newton's Law of Gravity. Newton could use this law to predict the behavior of a dropped object, but he couldn't explain why it happened.
---
I have also read elsewhere that really Newton's "laws" are only called laws because of history. If they were formulated today, they would be called Newton's theory of gravity.
I think any reasonable person would agree that piracy does lower sales. Some people who would have bought a copy of the song pirate it instead.
However, I think any reasonable person would agree that a person with 10,000 songs on their mp3 player would probably only bought a few hundred of those if they had to pay full fair.
So the loss to the industry is not $10,000 bucks. It is more like $300. And since people usually do buy a CD or song or two from the bands they really like (to support them- to get the WAV quality level- random whim) the loss is probably at most more like $100 to $200 (per customer).
I have friends that do not pirate still. I personally think that songs over 28 years old are fair game (so anything 1980 or older now).
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year? Why is it reasonable to pay executives so much?
I mean the average person earns $41k a year. The answer is- it's not reasonable. We got tons of music (and movies) in the 30's... 40's... and 50's... (and most of the 60's...) when everyone on the food chain made a lot less.
We got more of them because the artists had to produce more to make a living. And the idea of getting filthy rich didn't really start until the 70's.
There is no reason in today's world that we need 15 to 20 people feeding 200k+ per year incomes off of each song. This is why songs (and movies) cost so much. Because a parasitic industry has grown up around them due to their unique government protected monopoly.
Is there any reasonable way you can justify an author getting richer than the queen of england- becoming worth over a billion dollars in such a short period of time? Is there any other kind of work which pays that kind of compensation?
Clearly copyright is currently broken. It forces society to pay grossly inflated prices compared to most of the rest of history.
Slashdot Mirror
I was using 89 billion per year...
h ardt.html?ex=1326690000&en=7f221bfce7a6408c&ei=509 0
t /archive/The_True_Cost_0720723.html
o lar_t.php
I looked around for your 6.5 billion per week figure and could not find it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leon
The Times is known as a liberal paper and they are saying 700 billion total- at a rate of about 2 billion per week.
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecas
Kiplinger says about 2.5 billion per week:
The war in Iraq is exacting a large taxpayer toll that will fuel much debate and affect the ability of Congress to find funding for popular domestic programs. With 158,000 troops in Iraq, at least until September and probably much longer, the war costs $300 million a day -- or almost $10 billion a month.
Here...
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/selling_s
It looks like 1kw is 22,000 (for a non battery backed up system) so that's $33,000 for a non battery backed up 1.5kw system. That's lower than the $50k per house subsidized ($100k per house raw cost) I was using a couple years ago.
Its not clear that this is unsubsidized but I think it is before subsidies (and is MUCH cheaper than when I did my last rough calculation).
So say $40k for a battery backed system (and 7k per 10 years for replacing batteries and inverters but ignoring that).
At 40k, you'd get 6,200 houses per week or about 322k houses per year.
Per wiki..
In the year 2005, there were approximately 113,146,000 households in the United States.
So it would take 3 centuries to give them solar power.
Drop the cost factor to a 10th of what it is now and it would take 30 years (exciting!).
I think they are going to bottom out at about $5k per system + batteries if you want those and then inflate up after that.
The cool thing about solar is that it doesn't add energy to the environment. Burning coal/Nuclear/Fusion adds energy that was stored in the past. Solar just converts current energy that was shining on the house anyway.
You are correct.
They do not draw and quarter them.
They do not slice them with razors each day and pour salt water in the wounds.
However what they do IS illegal in the target (but corrupt) companies and IS illegal for walmart to knowingly engage in (even over there) for products to be shipped to the U.S.
I did a napkin calculation a year or so ago and at that time, you could give 100k houses free 1.5mw solar power (with inverters, trackers, and batteries) each year for the cost of the Iraq war.
Sounds like a lot- but it's really not.
However... the price is dropping. At some point very soon- you could give 1 million houses free solar power each year. And then they question is why are we wasting blood and treasure in a foreign land.
OTH- I think that solar will not get much cheaper than oil for a long time.
If solar is cheaper, the producers, or the government will be more likely to take extra profits or taxes. So if oil power is $2 bucks a unit, then solar power is going to be roughly $2 bucks per unit.
My question is-- what is going to be the effect of putting those huge areas into shade?
Would they turn back from desert to green in time?
It is not what they do here.
Here the worst thing they do is cut out bloated middle men by selling at a loss or slight profit and then sometimes jack the prices back up (and use the excessive profits to sell somewhere else at a loss).
However, in other countries they employ companies that treat their workers horribly. In ways that are inhumane and in ways that would be illegal here. The workers are coached to lie and the walmart managers are coached to accept those lies. There are specials on TV right now with ex-walmart executives testifying to this and saying how ashamed they were to let it pass. They knew - but it was never in black and white so they could ignore it for several years if they tried really hard. Likewise they have workers talking about the mistreatment and how they are coached to lie to inspectors.
This is a fundamental challenge for America with regard to all business- not just Walmart. If a product costs $1.00 to produce in a way that would be illegal in america for humane and ecological reasons, then how can we compete when creating the same item ethically and safely costs $2.00 and the middleman can hide the dirt overseas? All we see is "shirt 1: $13.00" vs "shirt 2: $15.00" and we buy the $13.00 shirt.
In theory yes.
But in practice, you often end up with a mixture of cool stuff you like and a lot of bloat you have no use for that would be difficult to fork.
You said it best in that software is not a scarce commodity so everyone cannot eat/consume/use all of it.
The more you use, the bigger your network effect.
I can see conflict as the number of interested developers grows. You might "over develop" a lightweight simple tool into something bloated.
Listen Dude,
If not for some very stupid Japanese moves america probably wouldn't have intervened either because of a lot of isolationists, German and Italian Americans who sympathized with the axis, and American communists who sympathized with Russia (who was allied with Germany until Hitler got stupid).
I understand that millions of soviets and germans died on the eastern front and this may form the basis for your opinion that America was a minor part of the war. I mean we "only" lost over 407,000 men fighting vs 10 million soviets and 5 million germans. However soviet and german casualties were heightened by suicidal policies and irrational leadership and very poor equipment.
I think you are being extremely unrealistic if you think western europe had a snowball's chance without the financial, material, and military assistance of the United States. You say what ever you need to say and we'll close this one. I think you need to separate your justified dislike of america and american policies today from the events of world war 2. I think you are doing a great injustice a lot of heroic young americans who died to save people they didn't know and to fight real evil.
Thank you! I spent 15 minutes trying to google it but my memory had mangled it too badly to google.
I think the SF author who said the future is mankind with a boot on the back of it's neck forever predicted it best.
The only thing that will stop it is massive chaos and breakdown brought on by a large war.
Chickenshit modding won't change the truth guys.
Our grandfather's were heroes in WWII in the finest sense of the word.
That makes about three times America has gotten it right in 200+ years.
and next they discover the wonders of "general liability", "class action lawsuits" and then they begin their decline as an empire.
For me, it is more about being in a pool the size of the US or a pool that you can be dropped from the second you get sick.
However, the problem is that a 10 million dollar treatment is a 10 million dollar treatment by either system. There are some people you cannot afford to save because it bankrupts the system.
1) We really did pull Europe's bacon out of the fire.
2) We really did lose control of the military industrial complex during the cold war.
I think of most cops as heroic fascists.
If you push their buttons right- they are heroes.
If you push their buttons wrong- they can be the worst kind of villains.
Even my otherwise extremely nice nephew has told gloating stories about lording power over civilians and was so far gone he no longer realizes he sounds like a thug when he does so.
Likewise- good cops usually side with bad cops. So you have a problem there. If there is one bad cop in a department, then you have the good cops oppressing civilians that the bad cop crosses.
---
With regard to this article... I think it's good police work and in line with our constitutional values. Someone deserves a bonus.
A lot of crime in the US occurs because people are poisoned on the idea of being extremely wealthy.
The idea of just working and living an average life seems like a kind of death to some people.
They'd rather burn fast- get easy money- and die young than live a normal life.
Some people are just more aggressive and/or greedy than others.
Some people do nothing bad. I do some bad things . A lot of people do a lot of bad things that I don't.
I agree.
However that graph with the associated article is far from clear.
It was colder in 1980 than any other time in the century.
A lot of the rest of it looks like a random walk.
I think people are over-reacting and over-committing before the facts are in.
Good point.
I was a bit loose there.
The Mohs Hardness of granite is from 5.5 to 7.
The Mohs scale is a scale for classifying minerals based on relative hardness, determined by the ability of harder minerals to scratch softer ones. The scale includes the following minerals, in order from softest to hardest: 1. talc; 2. gypsum; 3. calcite; 4. fluorite; 5. apatite; 6. orthoclase; 7. quartz; 8. topaz; 9. corundum; 10. diamond.
Granite is harder than apatite and softer than topaz.
---
I hope you agree with my underlying point however. Facts are very discrete things. Something like evolution or gravity can never be a fact. Theories are explanations of sets of facts. A new fact that contradicts them would falsify them.
His model (unfortunately) really does work for things like Wine and clothing.
A hammer is a hammer (it nails stuff in or not).
But for a lot of things- if you raise the price, you raise the number of items being sold. Humans are stupid that way.
Let my try to switch this around to your perspective.
.1% to 1,000 artists (each of whom gets to make a few years salary for a few months work) than 10% to nine artists and .001% to the other 90 artists (each of whom starves on a few months income per year).
People have a fixed amount of money they will spend on music.
They can give 100% to one artist or 1% to one hundred artists.
The current setup is increasingly towards giving 100% to one artist.
Given a potential market of billions of consumers, I would rather give
The current system is increasingly biased towards the "winner take all" scenario. The current entertainment industry is trying hard to suppress artists who make $40 grand or so. Because that is $40 grand less in their pockets.
And under the current system-- a few artists make 2 or 3 million (seems good) while the "industry" makes $97 or $98 million (really horrific rate of return).
Better to have a fair compensation rate for artists (at least 50%) but lower total compensation by cutting out the middle layers.
The only way I can do this personally is to
a) Pirate the music.
b) Buy gear from the artist's web site.
c) Go to their concerts.
I would be showing greater support for them if I just sent them a dollar a year than if i bought their CD for 20 bucks. Because they typically get under a dollar off of their cd after all the funny accounting is finished.
You really need to keep inflation in mind when quoting old dollars.
r e/result.php
http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompa
In 2006, $100.00 from 1850 is worth:
$2,663.14 using the Consumer Price Index
$2,002.92 using the GDP deflator
using the value of consumer bundle *
$19,367.27 using the unskilled wage
$40,044.15 using the nominal GDP per capita
$515,417.97 using the relative share of GDP
---
A trivial search for 1860 to 1880 salaries reveals annual salaries of $150.
So $100 was not too bad for one song. He was paid 4 to 6 month's income for it.
---
Regardless, when I say "filthy rich" I mean earning more money that the average person earns in a lifetime for writing one song. And in many cases, several people earn that level of income, and many more make a year's income ($41,000) off of the song. It's irrationally high.
Capitalism is neutral and recognizes human greed.
However, unlimited greed leads to slavery (sometimes called debtor's prison, company stores, "share-cropping") as those with wealth have laws passed which lock in their gains.
Eventually- the masses agree that the wealthy have "won" and then they rise up and either kill them or pass 99% income tax laws.
You do not want unlimited capitalism. It leads to social unrest. The wealthy would be just as happy with a fraction of their current wealth but many millions of other people would be much happier with only a few thousand more dollars a year.
The artists get rewarded because they have an increasingly artificial set of laws passed because the entertainment industry basically "owns" several congressmen at this point. People will stay pushed down a long time- but it will not last forever.
A scientific fact is something real. "Granite is hard" "Water is soft" "Non-saline water freezes at 32 degrees celcius under 15 atmospheres of pressure".
h eory.htm
If the globe is warmer (on average or specifically) then that is a fact.
WHY it is warmer will always be a theory.
There are many hypothesis about why we are measuring warmer temperatures.
Right now, in my opinion, there is too much money and political pressure involved to get good science.
anyway...
Definitions:
Theories, Laws, Hypothesis...
They say it well here: http://home.comcast.net/~fsteiger/theory.htm
As used in science, a theory is an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena.
Any scientific theory must be based on a careful and rational examination of the facts. A clear distinction needs to be made between facts (things which can be observed and/or measured) and theories (explanations which correlate and interpret the facts.
A fact is something that is supported by unmistakeable evidence. For example, the Grand Canyon cuts through layers of different kinds of rock, such as the Coconino sandstone, Hermit shale, and Redwall limestone. These rock layers often contain fossils that are found only in certain layers. Those are the facts.
And here: http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawt
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation. Usually, a hypothesis can be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. A hypothesis can be disproven, but not proven to be true.
Theory
A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis.
Law
A law generalizes a body of observations. At the time it is made, no exceptions have been found to a law. Scientific laws explain things, but they do not describe them. One way to tell a law and a theory apart is to ask if the description gives you a means to explain 'why'.
Example: Consider Newton's Law of Gravity. Newton could use this law to predict the behavior of a dropped object, but he couldn't explain why it happened.
---
I have also read elsewhere that really Newton's "laws" are only called laws because of history. If they were formulated today, they would be called Newton's theory of gravity.
I think any reasonable person would agree that piracy does lower sales.
Some people who would have bought a copy of the song pirate it instead.
However, I think any reasonable person would agree that a person with 10,000 songs on their mp3 player would probably only bought a few hundred of those if they had to pay full fair.
So the loss to the industry is not $10,000 bucks. It is more like $300. And since people usually do buy a CD or song or two from the bands they really like (to support them- to get the WAV quality level- random whim) the loss is probably at most more like $100 to $200 (per customer).
I have friends that do not pirate still. I personally think that songs over 28 years old are fair game (so anything 1980 or older now).
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year? Why is it reasonable to pay executives so much?
I mean the average person earns $41k a year. The answer is- it's not reasonable. We got tons of music (and movies) in the 30's... 40's... and 50's... (and most of the 60's...) when everyone on the food chain made a lot less.
We got more of them because the artists had to produce more to make a living. And the idea of getting filthy rich didn't really start until the 70's.
There is no reason in today's world that we need 15 to 20 people feeding 200k+ per year incomes off of each song. This is why songs (and movies) cost so much. Because a parasitic industry has grown up around them due to their unique government protected monopoly.
Is there any reasonable way you can justify an author getting richer than the queen of england- becoming worth over a billion dollars in such a short period of time? Is there any other kind of work which pays that kind of compensation?
Clearly copyright is currently broken. It forces society to pay grossly inflated prices compared to most of the rest of history.