If the music and movie industry could rest with any reasonable assurance that they are going to continue receiving any revenue at all, there might be a compromise reachable.
Fortunately, this isn't the case at all. The goal of folks like The Pirate Bay is to spread the word of downloading for free far and wide. In every school across the US every day the students are pretty much shown the benefits of downloading stuff for free - the teachers do it and their fellow students do it.
There are some people that pay for digital media, but mostly these are people that either (a) can't download because of a slow connection, (b) don't know how, or (c) have some Catholic-level guilt upon them that says they need to pay. These people are a small fraction of the marketplace today and will become even smaller in a few years.
Without something changing, the idea of downloading for free is going to win out over paying. Nobody will pay. The music and movie companies can see this on the horizon and it frightens them - a day without revenue. You can say they must adapt to a new business model, but the new model is zero revenue. It isn't a question of revenue from other sources, it is how to manage with zero revenue. Frankly, I don't see a model that allows for this other than maybe making everything ad-supported. It works for Google, AM radio and Network television so why can't it work for music?
Probably because nobody wants a free MP3 file with 12 minutes of advertising and 3 minutes of music. Or a DVD with six hours of ads and 90 minutes of movie. If you think this is absurd listen to AM radio sometime - just for a few minutes and you will hear nothing but ads. Listen for a half an hour and you will get maybe five minutes of program and 25 minutes of ads. The ads are for pretty scammy stuff because they are so incredibly cheap.
I think a much more reasonable model is that the last 60 years of music, movies, books and everything else will just continually be available for free and nothing new is going to be produced after a few years by any major company. Promotion ends. Lots of privately-produced stuff will continue of varying quality but few will really know about it. Sales of the old heavily-promoted stuff will continue because people are familiar with it and until they get their shiny new 100Mbps connection it is all they can get.
Kiddie porn pictures are not a substitute for "the real thing". If anything, there is considerable evidence that kiddie porn pictures incent the possessor to go and get the real thing.
Also, in most cases these pictures are sold, not given away freely. If there is a demand and a marketplace there will be folks that will supply it. All you need is a camera and a child or two. And children are pretty easy to get. If a child isn't interested in cooperating, they will be after a few slaps.
Just having such a marketplace is incredibly destructive to children. If it was all about just passing pictures around for free and children freely taking them for people's enjoyment that would be a completely different matter.
Do you really think it would be a good idea to have to renew Social Security every 10 years? I know a lot of people that would seriously be in favor of changing the way it works with current workers paying for a growing number of retirees and looking forward to the day when current workers are paying for newly minted citizens from immigration reform.
How about civil rights laws being renewed? Do you believe they would stay the same? I would say we would end up with every single possible alternative to "Christian White Male" being a protected class by law. Do you believe it would make sense for it to be illegal to dismiss workers because they were abused as children or because they were unable to complete college? These things and more would likely be worked in to Civil Rights v2.0.
You get the idea. Some laws, maybe. The bulk of them, not such a good idea.
All this would do is make it even easier for there to be bought-and-paid-for laws.
Instead of having one Congressperson to say "No thanks." there would be millions of people that would have to say "No thanks." End result - lots and lots of people would volunteer their vote for payment. I suspect the overall price per vote would go down, probably way, way down making government far more attractive for "collective bargaining" of the sort that is done by lobbying today.
Think about it, if you reduce the US Government to American Idol what do you really get? One TV ad that says "Vote Yes on Bill 12345 and we will send you a $25 gift card."
Well, I hate to break it to you, but more than a few people are of the opinion that people in the US and companies should start paying for their impact on the climate, i.e., a carbon tax. Oh, and with that little hiccup in the Gulf they want companies to pay for their potential environmental impact as well. This would be a pre-emptive strike against coal and oil.
Today, that would mean $10 a gallon gasoline and similarly doubling or tripling the cost of coal.
I suspect it will be a difficult measure to pass, but it is very likely to do so in the near future. Certainly Obama is on the side of a carbon tax.
Considering we haven't built a big power plant in decades and are on the edges of running out of electric power, I don't see this getting any cheaper anytime soon either. There are proposals to build new nuclear plants, but they will likely sit for years and years as the environmental battles go on and on. Even if we pushed the environmentalists out of the way it would be 10 years before a large plant came online.
I keep hearing about building new transmission lines to improve the grid? Where? Maybe in the middle of Montana or in Death Valley. I know anyone proposing building such a thing near a populated area is just being stupid - every such proposal lately has been shot down. This is why they are thinking of building a new transmission line through a lake because there are no homes at the bottom of the lake.
We are likely to see rationing of electricity within the next few years. Transportation is going to get a lot more expensive and this will push the price of everything up. It might make cheap stuff from China impractical to ship to the US which would be a net benefit, but it will also make farm goods from the state next door much more expensive.
You seem to be under the impression that 50% of the cost of a paperback book involves printing and distribution. Well, hardly.
The cost of books is pretty much divided between the (re)seller and the publisher with a thin little sliver for the author. The publisher has the editorial and preparation costs which are pretty high, a well as the promotion and placement of the book. There is some profit there, but books aren't all that high-margin for the publisher.
The seller tends to get a big chunk, as much as 30 percent because they have to stock the books.
Printing? For a paperback book it is less than $1. Shipping? You put 50 books in a box and it costs $8 to ship across the country. That works out to about $0.16 a book.
So when Amazon is selling a paperback book for $7.99 and the Kindle version is $4.99 that is a discount well below what the printing and distribution would have cost. With hardcover books at $24.99 and the Kindle version at $9.99 it is even a more significant difference. Today, I believe the publisher is eating most of this discount and Amazon is still making out very well on the books. There are a few they are making almost nothing on, but they are doing it to keep the Kindle supply chain stocked up.
What is very interesting is the number of free books that Amazon is distributing for the Kindle. These cost them real money on a per-sale basis with both the server load and the wireless charges. But there are always 10-15 books that are free available and these aren't the public-domain ones.
The last bunch of 100 DVD-R discs I bought cost $0.17 each.
I am anxiously awaiting information where I can buy USB flash drives for anything near that price. Heck, I will be extremely excited if I can get some 512MB ones for less than $1.
I would probably be interested in purchasing at least 100 of them.
Sadly, I think the price for a thumb drive is more like $10 for 512MB and $15 for 1GB. You might get it down to 512MB for $8 if you bought a lot of them. But nothing is going to compare to the $0.17 for a DVD.
So what do you do at that point? Remember, the blowout preventer is 5,000 feet down in an evironment where people can't work and there is over 100,000 PSI of pressure on it. Changing it out for a new one is not an option. Neither is disassembling the blowout preventer when it is connected to the wellhead.
So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best. Because the alternatives are damned few at that point. There is no valve to turn off, mostly because the blowout preventer is the valve. When it was damaged about the only thing that could be hoped for was that a blowout didn't happen because that hope is about all you have.
So you are suggesting that someone with experience with this create a computer model so that various approaches can be tested out before doing something to the wellhead itself?
Sounds like a really good idea. There is one minor problem with that idea though. Nothing like this has ever happened. Nobody has any idea of what the real conditions are at the wellhead other than with a few measurements and visual observation. A model could be constructed based on what is known, but that would be a very incomplete model indeed.
Nobody really knows anything about this situation and the only way anyone is going to learn about it is to try out some stuff that sounds like it might work. It is quite true that there may be conditions at the wellhead that make this "top kill" approach completely unviable. But the problem is that nobody has any idea what those conditions might be until they try it and see what happens.
The pressures involved are completely beyond the experience of almost everyone. It is also very, very cold down there which is why the first containment failed rather unexpectedly.
You have falling into the Stallman trap. It is where you believe that everyone is a programmer, or could be if they only spent a little time at it.
Most of the world finds programming computers to be a complete bore. They don't want to learn. So, no matter how much the source is available to them, they will never "Be assured that there is no spy code in what they are using." Ever. Nor can they "Customize it to meet their specific needs and agenda" because they don't understand it. So they can't "Build on something that can grow" either.
Until you are prepared to come to terms with this and escape the Stallman Trap, you are going to be viewing the world with an extremely bigoted view. Obviously, with this view there are two classes of people: Programmers and everyone else. And everyone else is only maybe a half a person, not even three fifths.
The vile teabaggers are the only ones that care about keeping all those poor, underprivileged workers out of the US where they can be happy and safe.
Everyone else wants either the cheap labor, their faithful votes (as soon as they are citizens) or just want to feel good about helping some underprivileged folks actually earn some money. When the lowest wage they can earn in the US is 10x what they could ever earn in a month in Mexico, it is awfully hard to keep them on their subsistance farms.
The new fact for people is there simply is no border. When 120,000 people a year (at least) are streaming through Arizona alone, you can't really call that a border, now can you?
Sorry, but there is nearly 100 years of catalog that will be worth copying and pirating for the next 200 years or so. Large companies - think Sony here - will be able to exploit the digital divide for a long time offering cheap digital goods to people that do not know how to pirate or simply don't have the internet connection to do it with.
Yes, that means the 1970s bands will live on forever. And the teen slasher movies will be endlessly available.
But new content is going to be the ShayTards and Darwin Reedy - ego-driven user-generated content and awful.
As long as trade with China, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. is possible manufacturing will never come back to the US. You can't pay a US worker $1 a day like you can in China, and the accessory expenses of having a worker are pretty much 100% of their wages. So paying someone $10,000 a year really costs $20,000 in direct costs.
Compare that with China where a software engineer gets $3,000 a year and a factory worker gets $300.
Sorry, but unless the trade tap gets turned off, manufacturing is never, ever coming back to the US. There is no point and anyone that tries is just being stupid. The fact that automobiles are being assembled in the US is a trade policy abberation that the WTO is still (somehow) allowing. We aren't going to get away with rules like that for other things.
So you might as well get used to the idea of no manufacturing and 25% unemployment. The rest of the folks doing manufacturing in the US are starting to get the message and the employment situation isn't going to get any better. Especially for unskilled factory workers.
The problem is the only real resolution to the US debt with China is for the US to repudiate the debt. This would probably make China terminate all trade with the US.
Well and good, I say.
There is no way the US will ever pay this money back and with the current balance of trade with China, there is no way we can buy our way out. China is happy with this because they have to be thinking that the US is their colony. Except historically the US has made a really bad colony.
It is just a matter of time until someone decides to pull the plug on China. WalMart won't be happy. Neither will anyone that counts on Chinese manufacturing. But it would mean that the unemployment rate would probably drop to a more reasonable level and there would once again be manufacturing in the US. Because nobody else will do it for us cheap enough.
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
You can't just put a cork in the damaged pipes - the pressures are on the scale of being unbelivable. I believe it is around 150,000 PSI. Virtually nothing is going to withstand that sort of pressure without a lot of help.
Similarly, I keep seeing posts about how TransOcean should have "fixed" the blowout preventer when it was apparent that some seals were breaking down. Or when one of the redundant controllers failed. The problem is, it was a mile underwater. I do not believe anyone in the area had a means of working at that depth. Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
On land, you could (possibly) remove everything from the well head and accept the massive leak that would occur. I do not believe there are many land-based wells where the outflow pressure is anywhere near 150,000 PSI. So changing the blowout preventor is nasty, going to spew oil everywhere but is at least possible. At 5000+ feet of water and with the entire Gulf squeezing the oil out through that pipe changing the blowout preventer is simply not possible.
You folks do understand that the weight of the water above the well is what is causing this problem, right?
Another silly point people seem to be hung up on is that BP is working on this and the government isn't. Well, the government as a regulator has some involvement but about all they can do is make rules. There is no government oil well rescue service. The facilities do not exist within the US government, and probably for good reason - it doesn't happen all that much. The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this. The problem with that idea is that a lot of other companies, oil and otherwise, would take this as an immediate indication that any US presence was no longer safe. The same thing happened in a lot of Central and South American countries upon nationalizing companies. The reason a lot of companies are in the US is because it is convenient to be close to a large market and a well educated labor force. Make noises like assets aren't safe from being nationalized and a lot of companies will take their assets elsewhere.
You folks also understand that this well is in international waters, right? The US can drill there or any other country. The US has attempted to claim 200 mile nautical boundaries before, but that is pretty much a joke today. The fact that the oil is there means it will be taken out by someone. We get to choose whether it is the US or someone else. I'd say Venezuela or Mexico are likely candidates if we abandon drilling in the Gulf. At this point I would say complete abandonment of US offshore drilling is likely, regardless of the economic consequences.
This is another one of those schemes whereby you take a waste product with zero value (and zero cost) and use it for something productive. Sounds exciting because you are getting something for nothing. Two examples of this kind of thinking come immediately to mind, with the first being biodiesel from waste restaurant oil. The second from a bit further back in history is bird guano.
Bird guano was originally viewed as just a nuisance - a substance without purpose. Only it is rich in potassium which is needed for gunpowder and other explosives. Oddly and for no apparent reason when this was discovered all sorts of people came forth trying to actively sell this former nuisance substance. Entire companies were formed to collect and process this. There is a famous movie showing the logo U.S. Guano, for example. It is worth belaboring the point that once a use was found for bird guano it became a valuable commodity. The price didn't stay at zero for very long.
Similarly today with waste restaurant oil. Today, fast food restaurants pay special waste haulers to take their used vegetable oil away. Should conversion to biodiesel be practical on a large scale this waste product will suddenly become quite valuable and restaurants will no longer give it away. This pretty much destroys the "economics of free" touted by many biodiesel supporters. It works as long as there is no market - as soon as there is a market for it, it won't be free any longer and will be priced according to its new value. This will be a significant hurdle for biodiesel production and probably is one reason why it hasn't gone anywhere but small-time individual production.
So while today animal manure is often considered a waste product with zero value the moment this changes you can expect it to be priced in accordance with its new value. This means that even a small pilot plant that was getting free manure will have to start paying for it, likely drastically changing the economics of using manure.
This is the sort of thing that looks great on the surface and can even work in a very isolated small-scale implementation. If a bunch of data centers started having digesters, methane extractors and generating systems put in place to run off manure it would quickly become far more costly than being grid-tied. It isn't even that it doesn't scale - it is that you are counting on a temporary economic condition which is assured to be very temporary.
Basically because everyone knows that nuclear plants kill people.
Ask anyone about Chernobyl and they will tell you about the thousands of people that died because of it all across Europe. And how the entire state of Pennsylvania was nearly wiped out because of Three Mile Island. Then there are all those poor Japanese people that died because of a radiation release in Japan.
If you then show these people that (a) Zero people died because of Three Mile Island, (b) 46 firefighters died in the Cherynobyl accident, and (c) nobody died in Japan you will be branded a liar and some kind of anti-environmental kook. Probably a REPUBLICAN that believes in wierd religious stuff and wants money, not family.
We are about 40 years too late to educate people and the tabloids have taken over the job.
The first thing is to shut down the coal-fired power plants. This will immediately decrease the CO2 emissions.
In 10 years or so we can have some nuclear plants built, but by then there will be far less need. Anyone that needs electricity to survive will have died off and the entire US food distribution system will have been reshaped - no refrigeration, no frozen food.
Besides, unless we can convince Mexico to get on board, just exactly where would we build a nuclear plant? Nobody in the environmental movement is going to allow one to be built within the continental US today. The procedures for preventing this from happening are well defined and have been used for the last 40 years or so. Any attempt to inject reality (like TMI where 0 people died and Chernobyl where 46 firefighters died) into the discussion will simply have result in being branded as an uncaring, environment-destroying fool.
I do not even believe that in the face of some pending shutdown of coal plants that a single nuclear plant would be built. It isn't going to happen, ever.
Likely within the next 20 years we are going to see electric power become extremely unreliable and costly for most of the US. It might be even less than that. We are probably completely out of time to build anything before there are serious consequences, even if the environmental folks would get out of the way, which they aren't going to do.
You are of course basing this on the fact that the true nature of DNA is hidden from the population at large. The five people that really know about DNA are aware there are only fourteen different variations of the DNA markers that are being used by law enforcement today.
So you have a one-in-fourteen chance of having your DNA convict you of any crime involving DNA.
This is similar to the camp in western Texas where the hundred or so people are kept that know there are only about 50 different fingerprint patterns.
Yes, but we aren't building any of those plants either.
We haven't added to the real grid capacity in the last 40 years or so. We have built small "peaker" plants to try to keep up with periodic loads and with the shutting down of most industry in the US we have managed to rearrange the load pretty well. But we are pretty close to the edge now, as the whole deregulation scene showed in California. Yes, it can be managed better than they were doing, but electricity doesn't grow on trees.
Oh, and whatever the plan was with the peeker plants it didn't turn out that way. They have been enlarged as much as they can and run continuously now.
If only we could get China to make electricity for us as well as everything else.
Without oil-based fertilizer, pesticides and oil-powered farm equipment no real decision needs to be made about who is going to starve - approximately 90% of the current population will starve. The crops that are grown can't be transported to markets either.
If you live in a city, you are pretty much doomed should this come to pass. The cities without food are simply deathtraps. Worse, before you actually starve you will either be swept up into a gang searching for the last few scraps or killed by such a gang.
The only people that will survive are those in suburban and rural locations with arable land. If you can't grow a garden and keep chickens you are going to be in big trouble. No, I don't think a barter system will quickly evolve. I expect a lot of people to be standing around waiting for the government to "do something" only to be very, very disappointed.
I think the electricity will be the first to go - we haven't built a power plant in 40 years of any real capacity and we are unlikely to really "conserve" our way out of needing more and more. Electric cars might just be the load that pushes the grid down - there is no way that we could support having cars plugged in during the day or until around 9PM in most of the US. So I would expect the grid to collapse within the next couple of years. No electricity means no gasoline pumps, so you can't fill up your gas-powered car either. Without transportation, the cities start to die from panic, lack of food and violence.
Well, we pretty much stopped building nuclear plants after TMI and started decommissioning the ones that were running. I seriously doubt the US will ever build a nuclear plant within the next 50 years. We almost certainly aren't going to build a coal-fired power plant either.
There are plenty of people that want to stop all coal mining right now because of mine accidents. They say it is just to risky to continue to allow people to be killed for coal.
Have you tried to build a chemical plant since Bhopal? No? The answer is pretty much "No." We haven't built a refinery since the 1970s and are on track to never building another one of those either.
Overall, we have put ourselves into a really nice corner and the environmental movement stands to ensure that things go steadily downhill from here on out. Hopefully, someone will find a really clean way to make solar cells so that we can figure out how to power computers with 1/100th of the current electric supply, during the day.
Remember, living sustainably on this one planet means getting the population down to around 200 million really fast.
There is no way food production can be done in anything like a "sustainable" manner and still feed over 6 billion people. Just that one fact alone should make it clear what has to happen.
Don't seem to have the stomach for killing over 5.8 billion people? Then stop using the word "sustainable" as it is not something that can be achieved without that niggling little step first.
Just because nobody has done it yet, please do not discount it.
I am sure I could garner 9% of the popular vote in the US with a Tittie Party. I suspect unless the turnout was heavily in favor of gays and women it might be close to 20%.
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But how much would you spend when you knew you could get everything you wanted for free?
Most of the people I know that aren't independently wealthy or having just won the lottery would answer "Zero!"
Until that changes, a subscription idea is dead. Can you imagine the outcry if every ISP was required to pay it and just built it into their prices?
If the music and movie industry could rest with any reasonable assurance that they are going to continue receiving any revenue at all, there might be a compromise reachable.
Fortunately, this isn't the case at all. The goal of folks like The Pirate Bay is to spread the word of downloading for free far and wide. In every school across the US every day the students are pretty much shown the benefits of downloading stuff for free - the teachers do it and their fellow students do it.
There are some people that pay for digital media, but mostly these are people that either (a) can't download because of a slow connection, (b) don't know how, or (c) have some Catholic-level guilt upon them that says they need to pay. These people are a small fraction of the marketplace today and will become even smaller in a few years.
Without something changing, the idea of downloading for free is going to win out over paying. Nobody will pay. The music and movie companies can see this on the horizon and it frightens them - a day without revenue. You can say they must adapt to a new business model, but the new model is zero revenue. It isn't a question of revenue from other sources, it is how to manage with zero revenue. Frankly, I don't see a model that allows for this other than maybe making everything ad-supported. It works for Google, AM radio and Network television so why can't it work for music?
Probably because nobody wants a free MP3 file with 12 minutes of advertising and 3 minutes of music. Or a DVD with six hours of ads and 90 minutes of movie. If you think this is absurd listen to AM radio sometime - just for a few minutes and you will hear nothing but ads. Listen for a half an hour and you will get maybe five minutes of program and 25 minutes of ads. The ads are for pretty scammy stuff because they are so incredibly cheap.
I think a much more reasonable model is that the last 60 years of music, movies, books and everything else will just continually be available for free and nothing new is going to be produced after a few years by any major company. Promotion ends. Lots of privately-produced stuff will continue of varying quality but few will really know about it. Sales of the old heavily-promoted stuff will continue because people are familiar with it and until they get their shiny new 100Mbps connection it is all they can get.
Kiddie porn pictures are not a substitute for "the real thing". If anything, there is considerable evidence that kiddie porn pictures incent the possessor to go and get the real thing.
Also, in most cases these pictures are sold, not given away freely. If there is a demand and a marketplace there will be folks that will supply it. All you need is a camera and a child or two. And children are pretty easy to get. If a child isn't interested in cooperating, they will be after a few slaps.
Just having such a marketplace is incredibly destructive to children. If it was all about just passing pictures around for free and children freely taking them for people's enjoyment that would be a completely different matter.
Do you really think it would be a good idea to have to renew Social Security every 10 years? I know a lot of people that would seriously be in favor of changing the way it works with current workers paying for a growing number of retirees and looking forward to the day when current workers are paying for newly minted citizens from immigration reform.
How about civil rights laws being renewed? Do you believe they would stay the same? I would say we would end up with every single possible alternative to "Christian White Male" being a protected class by law. Do you believe it would make sense for it to be illegal to dismiss workers because they were abused as children or because they were unable to complete college? These things and more would likely be worked in to Civil Rights v2.0.
You get the idea. Some laws, maybe. The bulk of them, not such a good idea.
All this would do is make it even easier for there to be bought-and-paid-for laws.
Instead of having one Congressperson to say "No thanks." there would be millions of people that would have to say "No thanks." End result - lots and lots of people would volunteer their vote for payment. I suspect the overall price per vote would go down, probably way, way down making government far more attractive for "collective bargaining" of the sort that is done by lobbying today.
Think about it, if you reduce the US Government to American Idol what do you really get? One TV ad that says "Vote Yes on Bill 12345 and we will send you a $25 gift card."
Well, I hate to break it to you, but more than a few people are of the opinion that people in the US and companies should start paying for their impact on the climate, i.e., a carbon tax. Oh, and with that little hiccup in the Gulf they want companies to pay for their potential environmental impact as well. This would be a pre-emptive strike against coal and oil.
Today, that would mean $10 a gallon gasoline and similarly doubling or tripling the cost of coal.
I suspect it will be a difficult measure to pass, but it is very likely to do so in the near future. Certainly Obama is on the side of a carbon tax.
Considering we haven't built a big power plant in decades and are on the edges of running out of electric power, I don't see this getting any cheaper anytime soon either. There are proposals to build new nuclear plants, but they will likely sit for years and years as the environmental battles go on and on. Even if we pushed the environmentalists out of the way it would be 10 years before a large plant came online.
I keep hearing about building new transmission lines to improve the grid? Where? Maybe in the middle of Montana or in Death Valley. I know anyone proposing building such a thing near a populated area is just being stupid - every such proposal lately has been shot down. This is why they are thinking of building a new transmission line through a lake because there are no homes at the bottom of the lake.
We are likely to see rationing of electricity within the next few years. Transportation is going to get a lot more expensive and this will push the price of everything up. It might make cheap stuff from China impractical to ship to the US which would be a net benefit, but it will also make farm goods from the state next door much more expensive.
You seem to be under the impression that 50% of the cost of a paperback book involves printing and distribution. Well, hardly.
The cost of books is pretty much divided between the (re)seller and the publisher with a thin little sliver for the author. The publisher has the editorial and preparation costs which are pretty high, a well as the promotion and placement of the book. There is some profit there, but books aren't all that high-margin for the publisher.
The seller tends to get a big chunk, as much as 30 percent because they have to stock the books.
Printing? For a paperback book it is less than $1. Shipping? You put 50 books in a box and it costs $8 to ship across the country. That works out to about $0.16 a book.
So when Amazon is selling a paperback book for $7.99 and the Kindle version is $4.99 that is a discount well below what the printing and distribution would have cost. With hardcover books at $24.99 and the Kindle version at $9.99 it is even a more significant difference. Today, I believe the publisher is eating most of this discount and Amazon is still making out very well on the books. There are a few they are making almost nothing on, but they are doing it to keep the Kindle supply chain stocked up.
What is very interesting is the number of free books that Amazon is distributing for the Kindle. These cost them real money on a per-sale basis with both the server load and the wireless charges. But there are always 10-15 books that are free available and these aren't the public-domain ones.
The last bunch of 100 DVD-R discs I bought cost $0.17 each.
I am anxiously awaiting information where I can buy USB flash drives for anything near that price. Heck, I will be extremely excited if I can get some 512MB ones for less than $1.
I would probably be interested in purchasing at least 100 of them.
Sadly, I think the price for a thumb drive is more like $10 for 512MB and $15 for 1GB. You might get it down to 512MB for $8 if you bought a lot of them. But nothing is going to compare to the $0.17 for a DVD.
So what do you do at that point? Remember, the blowout preventer is 5,000 feet down in an evironment where people can't work and there is over 100,000 PSI of pressure on it. Changing it out for a new one is not an option. Neither is disassembling the blowout preventer when it is connected to the wellhead.
So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best. Because the alternatives are damned few at that point. There is no valve to turn off, mostly because the blowout preventer is the valve. When it was damaged about the only thing that could be hoped for was that a blowout didn't happen because that hope is about all you have.
Which it sounds like is what did happen.
So you are suggesting that someone with experience with this create a computer model so that various approaches can be tested out before doing something to the wellhead itself?
Sounds like a really good idea. There is one minor problem with that idea though. Nothing like this has ever happened. Nobody has any idea of what the real conditions are at the wellhead other than with a few measurements and visual observation. A model could be constructed based on what is known, but that would be a very incomplete model indeed.
Nobody really knows anything about this situation and the only way anyone is going to learn about it is to try out some stuff that sounds like it might work. It is quite true that there may be conditions at the wellhead that make this "top kill" approach completely unviable. But the problem is that nobody has any idea what those conditions might be until they try it and see what happens.
The pressures involved are completely beyond the experience of almost everyone. It is also very, very cold down there which is why the first containment failed rather unexpectedly.
You have falling into the Stallman trap. It is where you believe that everyone is a programmer, or could be if they only spent a little time at it.
Most of the world finds programming computers to be a complete bore. They don't want to learn. So, no matter how much the source is available to them, they will never "Be assured that there is no spy code in what they are using." Ever. Nor can they "Customize it to meet their specific needs and agenda" because they don't understand it. So they can't "Build on something that can grow" either.
Until you are prepared to come to terms with this and escape the Stallman Trap, you are going to be viewing the world with an extremely bigoted view. Obviously, with this view there are two classes of people: Programmers and everyone else. And everyone else is only maybe a half a person, not even three fifths.
The vile teabaggers are the only ones that care about keeping all those poor, underprivileged workers out of the US where they can be happy and safe.
Everyone else wants either the cheap labor, their faithful votes (as soon as they are citizens) or just want to feel good about helping some underprivileged folks actually earn some money. When the lowest wage they can earn in the US is 10x what they could ever earn in a month in Mexico, it is awfully hard to keep them on their subsistance farms.
The new fact for people is there simply is no border. When 120,000 people a year (at least) are streaming through Arizona alone, you can't really call that a border, now can you?
Sorry, but there is nearly 100 years of catalog that will be worth copying and pirating for the next 200 years or so. Large companies - think Sony here - will be able to exploit the digital divide for a long time offering cheap digital goods to people that do not know how to pirate or simply don't have the internet connection to do it with.
Yes, that means the 1970s bands will live on forever. And the teen slasher movies will be endlessly available.
But new content is going to be the ShayTards and Darwin Reedy - ego-driven user-generated content and awful.
As long as trade with China, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. is possible manufacturing will never come back to the US. You can't pay a US worker $1 a day like you can in China, and the accessory expenses of having a worker are pretty much 100% of their wages. So paying someone $10,000 a year really costs $20,000 in direct costs.
Compare that with China where a software engineer gets $3,000 a year and a factory worker gets $300.
Sorry, but unless the trade tap gets turned off, manufacturing is never, ever coming back to the US. There is no point and anyone that tries is just being stupid. The fact that automobiles are being assembled in the US is a trade policy abberation that the WTO is still (somehow) allowing. We aren't going to get away with rules like that for other things.
So you might as well get used to the idea of no manufacturing and 25% unemployment. The rest of the folks doing manufacturing in the US are starting to get the message and the employment situation isn't going to get any better. Especially for unskilled factory workers.
The problem is the only real resolution to the US debt with China is for the US to repudiate the debt. This would probably make China terminate all trade with the US.
Well and good, I say.
There is no way the US will ever pay this money back and with the current balance of trade with China, there is no way we can buy our way out. China is happy with this because they have to be thinking that the US is their colony. Except historically the US has made a really bad colony.
It is just a matter of time until someone decides to pull the plug on China. WalMart won't be happy. Neither will anyone that counts on Chinese manufacturing. But it would mean that the unemployment rate would probably drop to a more reasonable level and there would once again be manufacturing in the US. Because nobody else will do it for us cheap enough.
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
You can't just put a cork in the damaged pipes - the pressures are on the scale of being unbelivable. I believe it is around 150,000 PSI. Virtually nothing is going to withstand that sort of pressure without a lot of help.
Similarly, I keep seeing posts about how TransOcean should have "fixed" the blowout preventer when it was apparent that some seals were breaking down. Or when one of the redundant controllers failed. The problem is, it was a mile underwater. I do not believe anyone in the area had a means of working at that depth. Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
On land, you could (possibly) remove everything from the well head and accept the massive leak that would occur. I do not believe there are many land-based wells where the outflow pressure is anywhere near 150,000 PSI. So changing the blowout preventor is nasty, going to spew oil everywhere but is at least possible. At 5000+ feet of water and with the entire Gulf squeezing the oil out through that pipe changing the blowout preventer is simply not possible.
You folks do understand that the weight of the water above the well is what is causing this problem, right?
Another silly point people seem to be hung up on is that BP is working on this and the government isn't. Well, the government as a regulator has some involvement but about all they can do is make rules. There is no government oil well rescue service. The facilities do not exist within the US government, and probably for good reason - it doesn't happen all that much. The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this. The problem with that idea is that a lot of other companies, oil and otherwise, would take this as an immediate indication that any US presence was no longer safe. The same thing happened in a lot of Central and South American countries upon nationalizing companies. The reason a lot of companies are in the US is because it is convenient to be close to a large market and a well educated labor force. Make noises like assets aren't safe from being nationalized and a lot of companies will take their assets elsewhere.
You folks also understand that this well is in international waters, right? The US can drill there or any other country. The US has attempted to claim 200 mile nautical boundaries before, but that is pretty much a joke today. The fact that the oil is there means it will be taken out by someone. We get to choose whether it is the US or someone else. I'd say Venezuela or Mexico are likely candidates if we abandon drilling in the Gulf. At this point I would say complete abandonment of US offshore drilling is likely, regardless of the economic consequences.
This is another one of those schemes whereby you take a waste product with zero value (and zero cost) and use it for something productive. Sounds exciting because you are getting something for nothing. Two examples of this kind of thinking come immediately to mind, with the first being biodiesel from waste restaurant oil. The second from a bit further back in history is bird guano.
Bird guano was originally viewed as just a nuisance - a substance without purpose. Only it is rich in potassium which is needed for gunpowder and other explosives. Oddly and for no apparent reason when this was discovered all sorts of people came forth trying to actively sell this former nuisance substance. Entire companies were formed to collect and process this. There is a famous movie showing the logo U.S. Guano, for example. It is worth belaboring the point that once a use was found for bird guano it became a valuable commodity. The price didn't stay at zero for very long.
Similarly today with waste restaurant oil. Today, fast food restaurants pay special waste haulers to take their used vegetable oil away. Should conversion to biodiesel be practical on a large scale this waste product will suddenly become quite valuable and restaurants will no longer give it away. This pretty much destroys the "economics of free" touted by many biodiesel supporters. It works as long as there is no market - as soon as there is a market for it, it won't be free any longer and will be priced according to its new value. This will be a significant hurdle for biodiesel production and probably is one reason why it hasn't gone anywhere but small-time individual production.
So while today animal manure is often considered a waste product with zero value the moment this changes you can expect it to be priced in accordance with its new value. This means that even a small pilot plant that was getting free manure will have to start paying for it, likely drastically changing the economics of using manure.
This is the sort of thing that looks great on the surface and can even work in a very isolated small-scale implementation. If a bunch of data centers started having digesters, methane extractors and generating systems put in place to run off manure it would quickly become far more costly than being grid-tied. It isn't even that it doesn't scale - it is that you are counting on a temporary economic condition which is assured to be very temporary.
Basically because everyone knows that nuclear plants kill people.
Ask anyone about Chernobyl and they will tell you about the thousands of people that died because of it all across Europe. And how the entire state of Pennsylvania was nearly wiped out because of Three Mile Island. Then there are all those poor Japanese people that died because of a radiation release in Japan.
If you then show these people that (a) Zero people died because of Three Mile Island, (b) 46 firefighters died in the Cherynobyl accident, and (c) nobody died in Japan you will be branded a liar and some kind of anti-environmental kook. Probably a REPUBLICAN that believes in wierd religious stuff and wants money, not family.
We are about 40 years too late to educate people and the tabloids have taken over the job.
The first thing is to shut down the coal-fired power plants. This will immediately decrease the CO2 emissions.
In 10 years or so we can have some nuclear plants built, but by then there will be far less need. Anyone that needs electricity to survive will have died off and the entire US food distribution system will have been reshaped - no refrigeration, no frozen food.
Besides, unless we can convince Mexico to get on board, just exactly where would we build a nuclear plant? Nobody in the environmental movement is going to allow one to be built within the continental US today. The procedures for preventing this from happening are well defined and have been used for the last 40 years or so. Any attempt to inject reality (like TMI where 0 people died and Chernobyl where 46 firefighters died) into the discussion will simply have result in being branded as an uncaring, environment-destroying fool.
I do not even believe that in the face of some pending shutdown of coal plants that a single nuclear plant would be built. It isn't going to happen, ever.
Likely within the next 20 years we are going to see electric power become extremely unreliable and costly for most of the US. It might be even less than that. We are probably completely out of time to build anything before there are serious consequences, even if the environmental folks would get out of the way, which they aren't going to do.
You are of course basing this on the fact that the true nature of DNA is hidden from the population at large. The five people that really know about DNA are aware there are only fourteen different variations of the DNA markers that are being used by law enforcement today.
So you have a one-in-fourteen chance of having your DNA convict you of any crime involving DNA.
This is similar to the camp in western Texas where the hundred or so people are kept that know there are only about 50 different fingerprint patterns.
Yes, but we aren't building any of those plants either.
We haven't added to the real grid capacity in the last 40 years or so. We have built small "peaker" plants to try to keep up with periodic loads and with the shutting down of most industry in the US we have managed to rearrange the load pretty well. But we are pretty close to the edge now, as the whole deregulation scene showed in California. Yes, it can be managed better than they were doing, but electricity doesn't grow on trees.
Oh, and whatever the plan was with the peeker plants it didn't turn out that way. They have been enlarged as much as they can and run continuously now.
If only we could get China to make electricity for us as well as everything else.
Without oil-based fertilizer, pesticides and oil-powered farm equipment no real decision needs to be made about who is going to starve - approximately 90% of the current population will starve. The crops that are grown can't be transported to markets either.
If you live in a city, you are pretty much doomed should this come to pass. The cities without food are simply deathtraps. Worse, before you actually starve you will either be swept up into a gang searching for the last few scraps or killed by such a gang.
The only people that will survive are those in suburban and rural locations with arable land. If you can't grow a garden and keep chickens you are going to be in big trouble. No, I don't think a barter system will quickly evolve. I expect a lot of people to be standing around waiting for the government to "do something" only to be very, very disappointed.
I think the electricity will be the first to go - we haven't built a power plant in 40 years of any real capacity and we are unlikely to really "conserve" our way out of needing more and more. Electric cars might just be the load that pushes the grid down - there is no way that we could support having cars plugged in during the day or until around 9PM in most of the US. So I would expect the grid to collapse within the next couple of years. No electricity means no gasoline pumps, so you can't fill up your gas-powered car either. Without transportation, the cities start to die from panic, lack of food and violence.
Well, we pretty much stopped building nuclear plants after TMI and started decommissioning the ones that were running. I seriously doubt the US will ever build a nuclear plant within the next 50 years. We almost certainly aren't going to build a coal-fired power plant either.
There are plenty of people that want to stop all coal mining right now because of mine accidents. They say it is just to risky to continue to allow people to be killed for coal.
Have you tried to build a chemical plant since Bhopal? No? The answer is pretty much "No." We haven't built a refinery since the 1970s and are on track to never building another one of those either.
Overall, we have put ourselves into a really nice corner and the environmental movement stands to ensure that things go steadily downhill from here on out. Hopefully, someone will find a really clean way to make solar cells so that we can figure out how to power computers with 1/100th of the current electric supply, during the day.
Remember, living sustainably on this one planet means getting the population down to around 200 million really fast.
There is no way food production can be done in anything like a "sustainable" manner and still feed over 6 billion people. Just that one fact alone should make it clear what has to happen.
Don't seem to have the stomach for killing over 5.8 billion people? Then stop using the word "sustainable" as it is not something that can be achieved without that niggling little step first.
Just because nobody has done it yet, please do not discount it.
I am sure I could garner 9% of the popular vote in the US with a Tittie Party. I suspect unless the turnout was heavily in favor of gays and women it might be close to 20%.
The Pirate Party having 9% means nothing.