What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone thats your buisness. If you want to have freedom to go to any network you want you have to pay a premium. I don't necessarily see a problem with the buisness model...
Is this one of those things where it must be bad because it contains the worst of the slashdot four letter words (DMCA)?
This isn't a slippery slope, technology hasn't changed enforcement, and obsenity laws are enforced.
Obsenity Laws don't filter consumption, they go after producers. If a DA has an obsenity producer in their jurisdiction they are free to spend the money (from their budget) to track him down if they see fit. If they press charges this isn't like an RIAA threat, they actually have to provide the material to the grand jury/judge/jury. The ACLU will represent you - thats what they do. If the material fails the Miller test you can be held accountable whether this is your profession, of you are an amature blogging obscene material. (Note its damn near impossible for written works to be found obscene under the Miller test)
That being said I still think obscenity enforcement should be limited to local government, not the federal level. The reason is twofold, first the Miller test depends on "community standards," and second if the USDA gets overzealous there are fewer avenues of recourse for the accused.
In Slashbot-land, this happens only because evil RIAA whores have stitched up radio airplay outlets and tricked naive, fawn-like artists into pernicious contracts. In real-world-land, though, it has more to do with the fact that artists are perfectly happy to have this sort of ancilliary activity done for them by a third party, just as we might pay an accountant to do our tax return.
I don't think the RIAA has tricked the artists, but I do think that in the current situation it's impossible to "make it" on a national level without the labels. Personally I think that slashdot worlds take it much more reasonable than an artist sucessfully lobbying clear channel and MTV for airtime, and borrowing enough money to play a national tour of venues that seat more than 200.
Exactly! We generations younger than the Baby Boomers might be ok for the time being, but I don't see how Social Security, Pensions, and the National Debt will survive when the baby boomers are 75-90...
IMO the worst thing that can happen to our society is a transportation breakdown. What happens if there is a trucker strike that lasts a week, how long will you still be able to get food? When you deprive millions of people of food (who are used to eating) all kinds of bad things tend to happen...
I read your linked article, and found it interesting, but it overstated its case. There is a legal (IMHO valid) difference between porn and obsenity, and obsenity is not protected by your first ammendment rights. The difference is determined using the Miller Test, which the article does an excellent job of explaining includes, among other things, community standards. He then goes on to express dismay that the government is judging whether something is art or not, completely ignoring that the Miller test explicitly involves the community.
Community standards are determined by calling people in your community and asking them what they find exceptable - which is more than you might suspect.
My concern, like the author's is that this is a high priority for the AG. I also wonder about charging someone on a federal level, when it seems to me that it should be left to local law enforcement where the content is produced.
I'm not a romantic. I don't think that everything used to be better. But I think this, "There has never in history been anytime which could be described as better than now." is streching it.
I do think that things tend to get better every year, but I also think that we are at the beginning of a decline. Personally I think that the baby boomers have a better quality of living than any generation since. I hope that this is a local maximum though and we're not entering a long term slide.
The fact that you can find evidence of an atrocity somewhere in the woeld isn't proof that the world used to be worse. I fully expect that in the future atrocities will continue at approximately the same pace at which they have occured in the past. I can't really understand why the threat of nuclear war is so bad either. Sure Nuclear war itself would be bad, but the most direct effect of the cold war was fervent period of scientific advances ever.
Marx may have taught that the proletariat cannot expect to be taken care of by anyone, but he would hardly fault them for being poor and being unable to escape. That is the foundation on which his theory lies.
The proletariat is expected to change their own lot in life, but Marx also taught that the only way this will happen is through bloody revolution, not by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. You correctly assert that the working class is many times part of the middle class, but you extend this thought to mean that the revolution will not be between lower and middle class, but rather between laborers and everyone else. I would interpret the elevation of the working class differently.
The problem is that the industrial revolution has moved beyond the horizon that Marx saw and he could not have predicted the state of affairs today. The reason that the proletariat need to be the force of change is that they have the nothing to loose. Now when laborers have pensions, own property, and have health insurance they are closer to bourgeois than proletariat.
One of the defining characteristics of a proletariat in Rome was that he didn't own property. Marx's revolution can only be carried out by the poorest. Today the proletariat is largely unskilled workers in the service industry, not the factory labor class Marx was writing about.
Of course there is nothing wrong with modifying the theory to fit today's social landscape, but you are more likely to be one of the overthrown rather than an over-thrower. I contend that the proletariat (poorest class not owning property) is the revolutionary force. When Marx was writing working class was a subset of proletariat, but this is no longer the case.
In the CM and Marxism as a whole there is no concern with classes but instead with the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat
The first line of the CM (after the prologue):
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are classes. The entire purpose of the CM is to entice the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie in class conflict.
Further proletariat doesn't contain the word working in any translation. Proletariat is the latin designation for the lowest citizen class. True it is typically taken to mean working class, but lowest class is both more correct, and more descriptive.
This goes directly against your next point that socialist programs should not be designed for people who aren't actually working. Marx's whole idea is that the capitalist system sets up the unjust imbalance which prevents the lower classes from excelling. Marx's ideas do not judge people based on their role in society; in fact they explicitly ignore them. The fact that some of the proletariat don't work isn't the problem, it's that they have to work, and for whatever reason that they can't. Marx would be very angry that you are attributing the belief that poverty is a self-imposed condition to him.
Ok, I definitely over-stated my point in saying that the US is socialist, I meant to indicate that the US is not truly a capitalistic society, and I chose the word socialist in contrast to both capitalist and communist. The US is much closer to Adam Smith's ideas than Karl Marx's.
It is my opinion that Marx did not really believe that his system was a solution. The all to obvious flaws in Marxism, such as failure to motivation, and diffusion of responsibility are too large to have gone unnoticed by someone as intelligent as Marx.
Marx was greatly influenced by Kant, especially his dialectic process. It is my opinion that Marx set up socialism as a philosophical Kantian antithesis to laissez fiare system that was in place at the time. Marx set forth his socialism deliberately opposed to capitalism so that in the future a more desirable synthesis could result.
After reading through this thread (and wondering what I started) I've come to conclude that xero is not a socialist by any contemporary definition, but rather a would be communist. It is true that Marx et al. referred to that particular system of government as socialist, but the definitions have evolved to communism on the far left, socialism to the right of communism, capitalism to the right of socialism, and fascism at the extreme right.
I'm with you killjoe that the US is in fact a socialist nation, and has been since the New Deal, although we are less socialist than Europe (Scandinavia in particular.)
What boggles my mind is that xero seems to have very inconsistent socialist views. First there is this
I believe in socialist (actually fascist because I believe in the good of a government and not that it is just a necessary evil) Ideals
I'm no expert, but I could have sworn that fascist and socialist ideals are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Fundamentally in socialism property is owned "by the people," and in fascism property is owned "by the state." In practice there may not be a whole lot of difference, but philosophically nothing could be further apart.
The US is a Constitutional, Capitalist, Republic, which measn what FEMA should be doing is not letting people back into New Orleans and spending some resources getting them set up in productive jobs in a place that isn't bound to flood by design.
It is clear that Xero misunderstands capitalist almost to the degree he misunderstands socialist. If we were do follow strict capitalist doctrine not only would there not be a FEMA, but the government would never had mandated an evacuation, and would impose no limits on access to any personal property.
Then he dismisses the US's socialist policies because he isn't eligible. In a fully established Marxist socialism it may be true that everyone is eligible for all government programs, but as a society is transforming to more socialist the way you eliminate the class conflict is by spending money on projects that the lower classes are eligible for.
We steal from the middle class to give to the poor to spend on services that benefit rich
Xero needs to read the Communist manifesto more carefully. Marx takes issue not with the upper class (royalty), but rather with the bourgeoisie (middle class). In fact Marx sees the bourgeoisie as the source of all class conflict and his system proposes to eliminate them in favor of the proletariat (blue collar workers.)
Given this I think it's ludicrous that a socialist would see poverty as a self imposed condition, and a socialist living in a prosperous economy should be more outraged about lack of emergency measures more so than a capitalist.
There is no such thing as "more socialist."
Here it is then... Xero's own twisted socio-economic theory (I can't call it socialism with a straight face) is the only proper one. Every other system either is or is not Xeroism. There aren't degrees of Xeroism.
Meanwhile here in the real world there is no such thing as a pure system. Every system borrows the things that work from the other systems. This is why the US isn't laissez faire capitalism, this is why China has free trade zones. To deny that something can be more or less socialist is the most absurd statement I have heard in some time.
I read "..and other information critical to deciding how to allocate marketing dollars" as information critical to pushing out the next Britney Spears album...
The problem though isn't with the production side of things, it's with the distribution and promotion side. As long as radio stations (clear channel and MTV) only play major label artists if you want to be able to make a living as a musician you have to sign up with a label.
The problem is that the big record labels have a strangle hold on the distribution and radio networks. If you are new talent and hope to be discovered you practically need to sign a record deal with a major label if you ever hope to break out of playing home town bars. Hell you probably can't even get on tour opening for a moderately large band if you don't have a record company.
The fact of the matter is that the record labels coerce talent into signing exclusive recording and distribution contracts. And while Sony has certainly benefited from this system, they did not create it.
The only real way that I see that this system can be overturned is if the courts start striking down the label's contracts, or if clearchannel self destructs and we see some actual independent radio stations willing to take risks and play something other than the top 40.
Actually I am behind Bush's nuclear policy. It's a good thing he's not pushing it too hard or I might find myself saying crazy things like "I agree with Bush"
Yes methane is a more powerful greenhouse ga, but since there is so much less of it than CO2 it is a smaller contributer overall. What I'm worried about is the massive amount of water vapor in the air. That contributes several times more to global warming than methane and carbon dioxide combined. We need to find some way to get that pesky water out of the sky!
Even if EtOH production is energy positive (I find the energy credits portion of the calculations suspect.) As long as a pound of corn is more valuable than the equivalent in EtOH it does not make economic sence to put EtOH in our gasoline. EtOH may be energy positive, but it is economically negative.
The cost of EtOH is held artifically low by government subsidies, then lowered even more by the tax credit on EtOH blended fuels. When the cost of gas is high enough to make farmers want to grow EtOH feed stock without the government paying them to do so then I'll stop complaining (or at least complain about something else.)
The American coalition for ethanol is basically a lobby of Midwest corn farmers who really like their ethanol subsidies.
The talking points are a very slanted and biased. For example the claim that EtOH has a Net Energy Value (NEV) of 1.67 is so generous to be absurd. See http://zfacts.com/p/83.html
Now while EtOH may not impact the cost of gasoline the fact that EtOH production needs to be subsidized with tax money means that it is not an economically viable solution (yet.) The ONLY reason EtOH fuel is not more expensive than $3/gal gasoline is that it is subsadized.
Now the sterling engine you linked to is indeed interesting, and i wish them the best of luck, but I withhold judgment until something is actually mass-produced. In my opinion the best short-term solution is small turbo diesel powered vehicles, and the worst is hydrogen fuel cells.
It kind of bothers me when people blame NO for being below sea level, the people that live there now didn't build the city, and most live there because that is where they were born.
Furthermore, if you were in a position to relocate, and were offered a better job in NO, would you really turn it down because it's below sea level? What about California, Florida, or Tornado ally?
Most people aren't fortunate enough to be able to choose what city they live in, and those with a choice will rarely consider natural disasters as a factor in that decision.
That said if you build a mansion on a cliff that is eroding at the rate of feet/year, and your house is destroyed I have no sympathy for you.
From my understanding most of the byproducts are things like lignins, glycerol, and vegetable oil, none of which are particularly valuable, especially from an energy standpoint. Lignins are created already in large quantities by the paper and timber industries, and while they have found some creative ways of selling this waste product, its not really suitable for energy production. The other products might be saleable as well, but that doesn't mean they contribute to the energy balance.
That being said I do think there are legitimate reasons to issue energy credits to the process, I just think the tendency is to apply them too liberally. If a by-product can and does directly supply energy then I'm all for giving it an energy credit, (e.g. oil -> biodiesel) if not I don't think its legit. I feel the same should be true of a petrolium refinery, products that are not suitable for energy should be viewed as waste, and not somehow positively factored into the plants's efficicy.
The reason I talk about corn ethanol is that it is far and away the largest source of bioethanol. If wheat and cane are shown to contribute significant amounts of ethanol then I'll consider them. However, corn is the most prevelent for a reason, it is likely the easiest crop to convert to ethanol. I would expect wheat especially to produce a much lower net energy value.
Personally I'm with you, and think the best solution to our energy issues is small turbo diesel engines running on biodiesel. While biodiesel has its own issues I think it's a much more scalable solution.
In the US at least bioethanol is just a reason to throw money at farmers under the guise that it is eco-friendly - but then again there are worse things we could be spending that money on.
Gahh my bad the USDA does indeed report 1.34. I was reading reports the night before my post, and was quoting from memory, without double checking the link. Bad form I know. While I don't think bio-ethanol is currently viable due to the fact that subsidies have to be provided in order for farmers to be persuaded to grow ethanol feed stock, I did not intentianally mis-quote the article. I apologize.
Anyway after re-reading the USDA report I have a few issues, firstly with energy credits. It is entirely possible that I am missing something here since I don't work in the field, but it seems to me that the energy credit is just a fudge factor, used to artificially inflate the NEV. I think I understand the premise of using one, that is that co-products of the refining process take energy to make, and do have value. I do not think that it makes sense to subtract their value from the energy figures since there is no way to make ethanol without producing them. Since the co-prodicts do not contribute energy back to the process I think they should be viewed as wasted energy. I don't think it is the case that these products would have to be made another way if not in EtOH production, often times they would just be replaced by a byproduct of another process that would be perfomed anyway, such as corn meal production. In this case the NEV drops to 1.08.
Secondly, and again I could be missing something here, EtOH additives to gasoline decrease fuel efficiency. I'm not certain if this is taken into accoun using the density, and the heating value of EtOH, but the efficiency decrease is significant, and should be accounted for.
Basically I will continue to think that EtOH gasoline additives are a bad idea until you can convince a farmer to grow corn for EtOH production without offering him subsidies.
No, no one has really answered my question. My problem is that I have some understanding of relativity, so I know that any explination involving two objects moving apart at greater than the speed of light is bunk.
As far as coordinate systems go sure you can set them to change in any way you like, but it is also useless to have them change at a rate greater than c.
What I'm really wondering about is it possible that the boundry of the universe is different from the boundry of the observable univers, given that at the time of the big bang, our point in space was coincident with everyother point, and that no point could ever move away from us at a speed greater than the speed of light. I suppose since the universe was optically opaque to photons and neutrons before a certain point, and that objects moved away from us during that time, it stands to reason that there is a band of universe outside of what is visible to us. But I'm not sure if this band will become visible to us, or if it will always be outside of our observable range.
No the ant won't ever make it. If the rubber band is streched at the velocity for an infinite amount of time, the ant will never be able to keep pace, and hence will never reach the end.
If you think of the ant's position as a percentage the ant's position will shrink to zero as the length of the rubberband gets very long. So not only will the ant never get to the end, he will never leave the beginning!
The reason we are talking about relativity, is that the statement that objects are moving away from eachother at a speed greater than light, a condition that relativity says cannot exist.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone thats your buisness. If you want to have freedom to go to any network you want you have to pay a premium. I don't necessarily see a problem with the buisness model...
Is this one of those things where it must be bad because it contains the worst of the slashdot four letter words (DMCA)?
This isn't a slippery slope, technology hasn't changed enforcement, and obsenity laws are enforced.
Obsenity Laws don't filter consumption, they go after producers. If a DA has an obsenity producer in their jurisdiction they are free to spend the money (from their budget) to track him down if they see fit. If they press charges this isn't like an RIAA threat, they actually have to provide the material to the grand jury/judge/jury. The ACLU will represent you - thats what they do. If the material fails the Miller test you can be held accountable whether this is your profession, of you are an amature blogging obscene material. (Note its damn near impossible for written works to be found obscene under the Miller test)
That being said I still think obscenity enforcement should be limited to local government, not the federal level. The reason is twofold, first the Miller test depends on "community standards," and second if the USDA gets overzealous there are fewer avenues of recourse for the accused.
I don't think the RIAA has tricked the artists, but I do think that in the current situation it's impossible to "make it" on a national level without the labels. Personally I think that slashdot worlds take it much more reasonable than an artist sucessfully lobbying clear channel and MTV for airtime, and borrowing enough money to play a national tour of venues that seat more than 200.
Exactly!
We generations younger than the Baby Boomers might be ok for the time being, but I don't see how Social Security, Pensions, and the National Debt will survive when the baby boomers are 75-90...
How about some more concrete institutions?
1.) Transportation
2.) Agriculture
3.) Water Purification/Waste Removal
If you can't grow food, get it to the table, and have something to wash it down with society will be in real trouble.
IMO the worst thing that can happen to our society is a transportation breakdown. What happens if there is a trucker strike that lasts a week, how long will you still be able to get food? When you deprive millions of people of food (who are used to eating) all kinds of bad things tend to happen...
Completely off topic but
I read your linked article, and found it interesting, but it overstated its case. There is a legal (IMHO valid) difference between porn and obsenity, and obsenity is not protected by your first ammendment rights. The difference is determined using the Miller Test, which the article does an excellent job of explaining includes, among other things, community standards. He then goes on to express dismay that the government is judging whether something is art or not, completely ignoring that the Miller test explicitly involves the community.
Community standards are determined by calling people in your community and asking them what they find exceptable - which is more than you might suspect.
My concern, like the author's is that this is a high priority for the AG. I also wonder about charging someone on a federal level, when it seems to me that it should be left to local law enforcement where the content is produced.
I'm not a romantic. I don't think that everything used to be better. But I think this, "There has never in history been anytime which could be described as better than now." is streching it.
I do think that things tend to get better every year, but I also think that we are at the beginning of a decline. Personally I think that the baby boomers have a better quality of living than any generation since. I hope that this is a local maximum though and we're not entering a long term slide.
The fact that you can find evidence of an atrocity somewhere in the woeld isn't proof that the world used to be worse. I fully expect that in the future atrocities will continue at approximately the same pace at which they have occured in the past. I can't really understand why the threat of nuclear war is so bad either. Sure Nuclear war itself would be bad, but the most direct effect of the cold war was fervent period of scientific advances ever.
Marx may have taught that the proletariat cannot expect to be taken care of by anyone, but he would hardly fault them for being poor and being unable to escape. That is the foundation on which his theory lies.
The proletariat is expected to change their own lot in life, but Marx also taught that the only way this will happen is through bloody revolution, not by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. You correctly assert that the working class is many times part of the middle class, but you extend this thought to mean that the revolution will not be between lower and middle class, but rather between laborers and everyone else. I would interpret the elevation of the working class differently.
The problem is that the industrial revolution has moved beyond the horizon that Marx saw and he could not have predicted the state of affairs today. The reason that the proletariat need to be the force of change is that they have the nothing to loose. Now when laborers have pensions, own property, and have health insurance they are closer to bourgeois than proletariat.
One of the defining characteristics of a proletariat in Rome was that he didn't own property. Marx's revolution can only be carried out by the poorest. Today the proletariat is largely unskilled workers in the service industry, not the factory labor class Marx was writing about.
Of course there is nothing wrong with modifying the theory to fit today's social landscape, but you are more likely to be one of the overthrown rather than an over-thrower. I contend that the proletariat (poorest class not owning property) is the revolutionary force. When Marx was writing working class was a subset of proletariat, but this is no longer the case.
The first line of the CM (after the prologue):
The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are classes. The entire purpose of the CM is to entice the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie in class conflict.
Further proletariat doesn't contain the word working in any translation. Proletariat is the latin designation for the lowest citizen class. True it is typically taken to mean working class, but lowest class is both more correct, and more descriptive.
This goes directly against your next point that socialist programs should not be designed for people who aren't actually working. Marx's whole idea is that the capitalist system sets up the unjust imbalance which prevents the lower classes from excelling. Marx's ideas do not judge people based on their role in society; in fact they explicitly ignore them. The fact that some of the proletariat don't work isn't the problem, it's that they have to work, and for whatever reason that they can't. Marx would be very angry that you are attributing the belief that poverty is a self-imposed condition to him.
Ok, I definitely over-stated my point in saying that the US is socialist, I meant to indicate that the US is not truly a capitalistic society, and I chose the word socialist in contrast to both capitalist and communist. The US is much closer to Adam Smith's ideas than Karl Marx's.
It is my opinion that Marx did not really believe that his system was a solution. The all to obvious flaws in Marxism, such as failure to motivation, and diffusion of responsibility are too large to have gone unnoticed by someone as intelligent as Marx.
Marx was greatly influenced by Kant, especially his dialectic process. It is my opinion that Marx set up socialism as a philosophical Kantian antithesis to laissez fiare system that was in place at the time. Marx set forth his socialism deliberately opposed to capitalism so that in the future a more desirable synthesis could result.
I'm with you killjoe that the US is in fact a socialist nation, and has been since the New Deal, although we are less socialist than Europe (Scandinavia in particular.)
What boggles my mind is that xero seems to have very inconsistent socialist views. First there is this I'm no expert, but I could have sworn that fascist and socialist ideals are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Fundamentally in socialism property is owned "by the people," and in fascism property is owned "by the state." In practice there may not be a whole lot of difference, but philosophically nothing could be further apart.
It is clear that Xero misunderstands capitalist almost to the degree he misunderstands socialist. If we were do follow strict capitalist doctrine not only would there not be a FEMA, but the government would never had mandated an evacuation, and would impose no limits on access to any personal property.
Then he dismisses the US's socialist policies because he isn't eligible. In a fully established Marxist socialism it may be true that everyone is eligible for all government programs, but as a society is transforming to more socialist the way you eliminate the class conflict is by spending money on projects that the lower classes are eligible for.
Xero needs to read the Communist manifesto more carefully. Marx takes issue not with the upper class (royalty), but rather with the bourgeoisie (middle class). In fact Marx sees the bourgeoisie as the source of all class conflict and his system proposes to eliminate them in favor of the proletariat (blue collar workers.)
Given this I think it's ludicrous that a socialist would see poverty as a self imposed condition, and a socialist living in a prosperous economy should be more outraged about lack of emergency measures more so than a capitalist.
Here it is then... Xero's own twisted socio-economic theory (I can't call it socialism with a straight face) is the only proper one. Every other system either is or is not Xeroism. There aren't degrees of Xeroism.
Meanwhile here in the real world there is no such thing as a pure system. Every system borrows the things that work from the other systems. This is why the US isn't laissez faire capitalism, this is why China has free trade zones. To deny that something can be more or less socialist is the most absurd statement I have heard in some time.
I read "..and other information critical to deciding how to allocate marketing dollars" as information critical to pushing out the next Britney Spears album...
The problem though isn't with the production side of things, it's with the distribution and promotion side. As long as radio stations (clear channel and MTV) only play major label artists if you want to be able to make a living as a musician you have to sign up with a label.
The problem is that the big record labels have a strangle hold on the distribution and radio networks. If you are new talent and hope to be discovered you practically need to sign a record deal with a major label if you ever hope to break out of playing home town bars. Hell you probably can't even get on tour opening for a moderately large band if you don't have a record company.
The fact of the matter is that the record labels coerce talent into signing exclusive recording and distribution contracts. And while Sony has certainly benefited from this system, they did not create it.
The only real way that I see that this system can be overturned is if the courts start striking down the label's contracts, or if clearchannel self destructs and we see some actual independent radio stations willing to take risks and play something other than the top 40.
Actually I am behind Bush's nuclear policy. It's a good thing he's not pushing it too hard or I might find myself saying crazy things like "I agree with Bush"
Yes methane is a more powerful greenhouse ga, but since there is so much less of it than CO2 it is a smaller contributer overall. What I'm worried about is the massive amount of water vapor in the air. That contributes several times more to global warming than methane and carbon dioxide combined. We need to find some way to get that pesky water out of the sky!
Even if EtOH production is energy positive (I find the energy credits portion of the calculations suspect.) As long as a pound of corn is more valuable than the equivalent in EtOH it does not make economic sence to put EtOH in our gasoline. EtOH may be energy positive, but it is economically negative.
The cost of EtOH is held artifically low by government subsidies, then lowered even more by the tax credit on EtOH blended fuels. When the cost of gas is high enough to make farmers want to grow EtOH feed stock without the government paying them to do so then I'll stop complaining (or at least complain about something else.)
Holy propaganda batman!
The American coalition for ethanol is basically a lobby of Midwest corn farmers who really like their ethanol subsidies.
The talking points are a very slanted and biased. For example the claim that EtOH has a Net Energy Value (NEV) of 1.67 is so generous to be absurd. See http://zfacts.com/p/83.html
Now while EtOH may not impact the cost of gasoline the fact that EtOH production needs to be subsidized with tax money means that it is not an economically viable solution (yet.) The ONLY reason EtOH fuel is not more expensive than $3/gal gasoline is that it is subsadized.
Now the sterling engine you linked to is indeed interesting, and i wish them the best of luck, but I withhold judgment until something is actually mass-produced. In my opinion the best short-term solution is small turbo diesel powered vehicles, and the worst is hydrogen fuel cells.
It kind of bothers me when people blame NO for being below sea level, the people that live there now didn't build the city, and most live there because that is where they were born.
Furthermore, if you were in a position to relocate, and were offered a better job in NO, would you really turn it down because it's below sea level? What about California, Florida, or Tornado ally?
Most people aren't fortunate enough to be able to choose what city they live in, and those with a choice will rarely consider natural disasters as a factor in that decision.
That said if you build a mansion on a cliff that is eroding at the rate of feet/year, and your house is destroyed I have no sympathy for you.
From my understanding most of the byproducts are things like lignins, glycerol, and vegetable oil, none of which are particularly valuable, especially from an energy standpoint. Lignins are created already in large quantities by the paper and timber industries, and while they have found some creative ways of selling this waste product, its not really suitable for energy production. The other products might be saleable as well, but that doesn't mean they contribute to the energy balance.
That being said I do think there are legitimate reasons to issue energy credits to the process, I just think the tendency is to apply them too liberally. If a by-product can and does directly supply energy then I'm all for giving it an energy credit, (e.g. oil -> biodiesel) if not I don't think its legit. I feel the same should be true of a petrolium refinery, products that are not suitable for energy should be viewed as waste, and not somehow positively factored into the plants's efficicy.
The reason I talk about corn ethanol is that it is far and away the largest source of bioethanol. If wheat and cane are shown to contribute significant amounts of ethanol then I'll consider them. However, corn is the most prevelent for a reason, it is likely the easiest crop to convert to ethanol. I would expect wheat especially to produce a much lower net energy value.
Personally I'm with you, and think the best solution to our energy issues is small turbo diesel engines running on biodiesel. While biodiesel has its own issues I think it's a much more scalable solution.
In the US at least bioethanol is just a reason to throw money at farmers under the guise that it is eco-friendly - but then again there are worse things we could be spending that money on.
oO i didn't know you could close a tab that way.
One of my bigger beefs is that it was too hard to close tabs in the background, but apperently I just didn't know there was an easier way.
I always use middle click to open in new tabs too
So thanks for the tip!
Gahh my bad the USDA does indeed report 1.34. I was reading reports the night before my post, and was quoting from memory, without double checking the link. Bad form I know. While I don't think bio-ethanol is currently viable due to the fact that subsidies have to be provided in order for farmers to be persuaded to grow ethanol feed stock, I did not intentianally mis-quote the article. I apologize.
Anyway after re-reading the USDA report I have a few issues, firstly with energy credits. It is entirely possible that I am missing something here since I don't work in the field, but it seems to me that the energy credit is just a fudge factor, used to artificially inflate the NEV. I think I understand the premise of using one, that is that co-products of the refining process take energy to make, and do have value. I do not think that it makes sense to subtract their value from the energy figures since there is no way to make ethanol without producing them. Since the co-prodicts do not contribute energy back to the process I think they should be viewed as wasted energy. I don't think it is the case that these products would have to be made another way if not in EtOH production, often times they would just be replaced by a byproduct of another process that would be perfomed anyway, such as corn meal production. In this case the NEV drops to 1.08.
Secondly, and again I could be missing something here, EtOH additives to gasoline decrease fuel efficiency. I'm not certain if this is taken into accoun using the density, and the heating value of EtOH, but the efficiency decrease is significant, and should be accounted for.
Basically I will continue to think that EtOH gasoline additives are a bad idea until you can convince a farmer to grow corn for EtOH production without offering him subsidies.
Yeah it can, sort of, but you end up putting so many slices in that you end up distorting it a different way, by inserting discontinuities.
No, no one has really answered my question. My problem is that I have some understanding of relativity, so I know that any explination involving two objects moving apart at greater than the speed of light is bunk.
As far as coordinate systems go sure you can set them to change in any way you like, but it is also useless to have them change at a rate greater than c.
What I'm really wondering about is it possible that the boundry of the universe is different from the boundry of the observable univers, given that at the time of the big bang, our point in space was coincident with everyother point, and that no point could ever move away from us at a speed greater than the speed of light. I suppose since the universe was optically opaque to photons and neutrons before a certain point, and that objects moved away from us during that time, it stands to reason that there is a band of universe outside of what is visible to us. But I'm not sure if this band will become visible to us, or if it will always be outside of our observable range.
Now I've gone and confused myself
No the ant won't ever make it. If the rubber band is streched at the velocity for an infinite amount of time, the ant will never be able to keep pace, and hence will never reach the end.
If you think of the ant's position as a percentage the ant's position will shrink to zero as the length of the rubberband gets very long. So not only will the ant never get to the end, he will never leave the beginning!
The reason we are talking about relativity, is that the statement that objects are moving away from eachother at a speed greater than light, a condition that relativity says cannot exist.