You overestimate what we humans can achieve in comparison of the sheer scale of cosmic objects.
If an asteroid is big enough to be a threat to Earth, it's too massive to move. And the moon is 400000km from the Earth. Taking dirt from the inside and throwing it on the surface will not change its gravitational pull one iota.
Coupled with some sort of scoop/intake device to harness those particles and use their energy at every stop?
On a completely crazed spinoff, this effect might prompt the development of extremely destructive FTL weapons. Imagine a weapon that will fry a planet as big as the distance it traveled? Stuff of nightmares.
'economic growth' doesn't mean growth as in a cake growing in the oven.
it simply means an improvement in the standard of living of the population. that is ALWAYS possible, and it uses LESS resources to be made possible.
growth %ages applied to 'GDP' are make-believe bullshit that means absolutely jack except to Keynesian loonies who have been wrong from the moment they stepped out of school with their diplomas. that stupid number made this retarded meme that 'growth is limited' possible. a superficial understanding of economics dispels this naive notion.
remember microchips? they used much more resources, cost much more and were slower. telephone cables? they were made of tons of copper, now we use sand and make optic fiber, and in a while, we'll just go full wireless and fuck using ANY resources to link point A to point B. next generation cars will be electric, with batteries that we ALREADY recycle, basically EVERYTHING we do better and cheaper, and I dont just mean price tag cheaper, I mean ACTUAL resources utilized cheaper.
1- Sponsor study showing some people never used the internet/has lower bandwidth internet, pointing out as to how this disparity in such a developed continent is baaaaad.
2- ???
3- PROFIT!
So was the East India Company. But it had so many GOVERNMENT GRANTED monopolies and special privileges ( that part is important, read it again ), which meant it was de facto government entity.
On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones. Is it because of discrimination in the granting of NFL contracts to black guys over the whites?
Or it could be that genes that favor physical prowess over raw intellectual aptitude are more present in individuals with dark skin than those who are paler? Maybe the corollary is also possible, that the 'bookworm genes' are about 10% more present in people with white skin.
No, that would be politically incorrect - hell, criminal - to utter, ergo, discrimination on basis of race must be the issue here.
Another example of the 'opressed/opressor ideology' and collectivism that is being the downfall of western civilization on display, nothing to see here folks.
What's really funny is how this process of 'stealing coins from people who keep their wallet in plain text' is carried out by central banks worldwide in a incomensurably larger scale and nobody seems to mind it, at least not/.ers, to whom money derives its value from its magical property of being accepted by the government to pay taxes with. *muffled laughter*
But to the point, this is hardly the end of Bitcoin, much like the crash of 1929 or of 2008 ( by itself, that is ) weren't the end of the US dollar. It's a new technology, hell its a new concept, its gonna stumble a lot until it enjoys even a moderate adoption.
As for Mt.Gox though, they will have to bend over backwards about a gazillion times before anyone will trade there again.
Ok, some quick googling and it turns out the first plant is at $3,500 / kW, so we're talking about 3,5 billion for a gigawatt plant, they ESTIMATE they will get it down to $1k/kW, the 1 billion for a 1GW plant, so I was about 350% wrong.:D
China has already ordered quite a few of these reactors. I believe they cost less than a billion dollars for a GW capacity, but that was some old news I read so I can't really be sure or have a link.:S
Its what they did NOT! impeed!, like enforcing stricter safety protocols on UC...see perfect freedom, but UC had all the profit motive to make sure that didnt happen RIGHT?!
Alas the hubris of man.
Another one of those insights that you can reach by sitting in a corner and thinking: if a company, which has the monetary incentive to, does not have the perfect information as to which is the best safety protocol, a government who knows absolutely NOTHING about the production of pesticide does not.
The main problem I see with your argument is that it is a religious, not a rational one. You don't see government as a collection of people who direct an apparatus of coercion and compulsion; you see a God cometh down to Earth, doted with perfect knowledge on how to make every human endeavour safe from hurting third parties: from rocket launching to pesticide production.
If you just think of the wide array of human activities and apply your 'like enforcing stricter safety protocols on *insert company name here*' you will hopefully see the utter absurdity of your way of thinking.
Jesus christ....what i said was its not just the one or the either!
Yes hun. And I am disputing that. Even with a lot of state run enterprises, so long as there is a stock market and private property in the means of production we have a market economy guided by the profit motive, otherwise we have a planned socialistic economy. There is no 'third way'. You say 'its not just the one or the other' but you fail to actually demonstrate it. Its not much to ask you to give substance to your fantastic claims.
You have not actually answered ANY of my contentions, just evaded everything. You're not really equipped for this kind of discussion. Read up on Marx and his critics before you accuse others of being 'nutters as the marxists'.
stop...i meant politics in the general sense...getting big by making licensing deal with IBM using an CPM close is not my idea of innovative.
That is not politics, but business. He had a window of opportunity and missed it. What the hell does Microsoft have to do with it anyway? It wasn't even in the OS business at the time. They already had their deal with IBM.
Which is why i specifically mentioned Lord Russel which entered cabinet in the middle of the crisis, you can't deny that his acts was in reality the biggest Laissez faire experiment in the world.
Actually, yes, I can. Lets try a thought experiment: the people in North Korea get all their goods from the government. Suppose that government decides to stop feeding their population tomorrow, and they begin to starve, predictably since all the other restrictions that come with a planned communist economy are still in place.
Would you call THAT the new 'biggest Laissez faire experiment in the world'?
But i brough this up because you moved the goal post, apparently...somehow India impeeded Union Carbadide somehow to make the example moot.
What would India 'impeeded UC' from doing? Leaking the poisonous gas? I think you are confusing a government staffed with flawed, ordinary men with some kind of a god. The USSR was no laissez faire and nobody 'impeeded' Chernobyl from melting down.
It sucks, but accidents do happen.
Yeeaeh...thats what we call a false dichotomy.
Well, we have a cutting edge social scientist here then! Which is this new form of social production that is neither guided by the profit motive or central planning? Please do tell.
So most innovative individual was phased out duo to politics, yet Bill Gates is the indispensable superman?
Well, if he was phased out due to politics then indeed we are talking about state coercion picking winners and losers instead of the competitive outcome of a market. What, did Gates or IBM buy a Congressman or something? I'm not intimately familiar with the story.
And I'm not saying Bill Gates is a superman or anything, just that Microsoft under his direction has suceeded in giving the consumers what they want for a long time and for that they made him filthy rich. And he is unique in the respect that his company really didn't spend any dime on lobbying for special privileges or anything until the DoJ started to eye his company with greedy, greedy eyes.
While he is far from the mythical Randroid ubermensch, for he is a _real person_, there are much much worse cases of crony businessmen that conspired with the state for private gain at the expense of everyone else.
I really don't know what you mean by 'a complete capitalistic economy'. By 'market equilibrium' I assume you mean the mental construct of the state of equilibrium, where supply meets demand, or in Mises' work the 'evenly rotating economy'. It is just a thinking aid that has no counterpart in the real world.
About the potato famine in Ireland, I really think you should read up more on the subject, the historical context, the English domination, the laws that were in effect at the time that protected local English farmers from competition, o on and so forth. On the other hand, just by sitting with coffee and a cigarette you can reach an interesting insight: crop failures do not cause famine in the same way that I don't starve to death because I ( or an entire country even ) don't grow my own food.
Finally, what is social democracy? Or social liberalism? These aren't alternatives to a form of social organization like 'private property, prices and markets' as opposed to 'common ownership of property and a planned economy'. This 'social democracy' is simply this little forum where these ideas clash. Eventually you will end up with either laissez-faire or full blown socialism, that just happens in small baby steps instead of the Marx's revolutionary 'socialism by one fell swoop'.
Bill Gates is the first to admit that his success is largely due to being at the right place at the right time, attleast when it comes to MS DOS and Windows, CPM and OS2 could easily have taken both DOS and Windows place.
I'm not denigrated Gates industriousness either, his years as an obsessive hacker is an inspiration to me, but so did Gary Killdal....who did alot more groundwork for the PC revolution then Bill Gates ever did.
He's a humble chap. Thing is, Killdal was a great technician, but was a poor entrepreneur.
Technicians are skilled at producing things in their areas of expertise. Entrepreneurs are skilled at guessing the future right.
Killdal guessed wrong. Bill Gates guessed right.
Bhopol called, they want a word with you.
Ya, India circa 1980. The libertarian Eldorado of sacred property rights and individual liberties.
I love solar for that. If panels cost low enough, I'll be the first person to install panels on my roof an live in bliss.
I don't want to see solar banned, I just want to see the chokes on nuclear development lifted. Just require plants to be insured for catastrophic failure to internalize the risks and let the competition between manufacturers produce better and safer designs.
You have to approach the issue from a calm and rational perspective. If you go about ignoring these things, then all you do is appear to be a zealot and diminish nuclear power.
Thats a very good point. Problem is, I AM a zealot. I think it takes a bit of aging to calm down and realize that u have a better chance at convincing people if you don't act like one.
Computers and the software they run (like everything else) are the sum total of the contributions of tens of thousands of people. Some contributed much more than others, but none were indispensable. There is no single person without whom you would not be sitting at a personal computer right now.
So you mean that, if Bill Gates were a janitor we would still have Microsoft Windows today. He's simply another cog in the wheel, historically irrelevant, whose role would simply be played by another replaceable individual in that scenario?
That is textbook collectivist ideology. I don't believe it, I'm afraid. Some people are more industrious than others. Maybe some OTHER rather workaholic fella would do a similar venture, but I wouldn't take that chance. Like all resources, inventiveness is scarce. Most people just go through the motions, get a 9 to 5 job, get old and die.
Nuclear power wouldn't have a prayer in a truly libertarian society, because strip-mining coal will be the cheapest energy source for decades if not centuries to come.
You can't know that. Sorry, but even without factoring the cost of the externality of pollution, a nuclear plant is much more cost effective than burning tons of coal a minute. Now, if you remove the regulatory costs from the State? Wow. Then its just a landslide. But again, I can't see the future just as much as you can. But think about it.
Protecting commons (e.g., air) is a problem that individualism simply does not solve.
Oh, and statism does? Are not government officials individuals, who pursue their own ends like all of us?
Commons can't be protected unless they're privately owned. And that is true regardless of individualism or collectivism. Pollution is/was worse in China and the Soviet Union than it is in even radically individualist nations by comparison.
Of course they do. Who do you think invented, produced and sold you the creature comforts you enjoy every day?
Whether you're typing this on a Linux or Windows machine, it was brought to you by a superhero of the real world, be it Torvalds or Gates. Just to name ONE example.
If this were an Ayn Rand novel, there WOULD be a breakthrough energy source, but they would be forbidden, regulated and stifled to the point that everyone has to make do with older and more polluting sources, coincidentally owned by older, more entrenched special interests.
1. 1,4Kw/m2 is LAUGHABLE. And that's a given, unless we get Earth's orbit closer to the sun.
2. Nuclear failures are not catastrophic, unless you live in the Soviet Union or get hit by a 9 degree earthquake. Thankfully, the US isn't Japan and is lucky to have many areas in which plants will be built by a communistic State and/or isn't located over any dangerous faults.
3. Nuclear plants have simple designs as compared to this particular solar project, since, you said it yourself pilots systems cost a lot of money due to R&D costs, i.e., there isn't a design yet. You can't really have it both ways in your argument, can you?
4. Er, nuclear plants need refueling every couple of decades. In the case of the cutting edge of breeder reactors, they don't need refueling at all, they just burn their waste.
5. The talk about 'not needing skilled labor to operate' is completely spurious. It doesn't matter if nuclear needs 20 nuclear physicists on site if it produces enough energy at a low enough cost to pay for their salaries and still turn a profit. The world isn't run from 'a purely engineering standpoint', but from monetary calculations of profit and loss.
Nuclear energy has ONE drawback: very expensive failsafes. The thing is, it is still orders of magnitude more cost-effective than solar even after that.
There is one reason the government is spending this shitload of money on this project, which, coincidentally is the same reason government spends money on everything: politics and favoring special interests at the expense of the rest of the citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
The profit motive.
You overestimate what we humans can achieve in comparison of the sheer scale of cosmic objects.
If an asteroid is big enough to be a threat to Earth, it's too massive to move. And the moon is 400000km from the Earth. Taking dirt from the inside and throwing it on the surface will not change its gravitational pull one iota.
Coupled with some sort of scoop/intake device to harness those particles and use their energy at every stop?
On a completely crazed spinoff, this effect might prompt the development of extremely destructive FTL weapons. Imagine a weapon that will fry a planet as big as the distance it traveled? Stuff of nightmares.
choke on this, weasel.
'economic growth' doesn't mean growth as in a cake growing in the oven.
it simply means an improvement in the standard of living of the population. that is ALWAYS possible, and it uses LESS resources to be made possible.
growth %ages applied to 'GDP' are make-believe bullshit that means absolutely jack except to Keynesian loonies who have been wrong from the moment they stepped out of school with their diplomas. that stupid number made this retarded meme that 'growth is limited' possible. a superficial understanding of economics dispels this naive notion.
remember microchips? they used much more resources, cost much more and were slower. telephone cables? they were made of tons of copper, now we use sand and make optic fiber, and in a while, we'll just go full wireless and fuck using ANY resources to link point A to point B. next generation cars will be electric, with batteries that we ALREADY recycle, basically EVERYTHING we do better and cheaper, and I dont just mean price tag cheaper, I mean ACTUAL resources utilized cheaper.
1- Sponsor study showing some people never used the internet/has lower bandwidth internet, pointing out as to how this disparity in such a developed continent is baaaaad. 2- ??? 3- PROFIT!
So I can troll my friends by telling Facebook I think they might be suicidal and get the counselors to go 'Please, don't kill yourself' on them.
Its gonna be a blast.
Dr. House looks at you and says: "You idiot."
So was the East India Company. But it had so many GOVERNMENT GRANTED monopolies and special privileges ( that part is important, read it again ), which meant it was de facto government entity.
... are EMP grenades
That makes no sense whatsoever. Makes sense to post as an AC tho.
On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones. Is it because of discrimination in the granting of NFL contracts to black guys over the whites?
Or it could be that genes that favor physical prowess over raw intellectual aptitude are more present in individuals with dark skin than those who are paler? Maybe the corollary is also possible, that the 'bookworm genes' are about 10% more present in people with white skin.
No, that would be politically incorrect - hell, criminal - to utter, ergo, discrimination on basis of race must be the issue here.
Another example of the 'opressed/opressor ideology' and collectivism that is being the downfall of western civilization on display, nothing to see here folks.
Bitcoin _does not_ have a centralized guarantor.
What's really funny is how this process of 'stealing coins from people who keep their wallet in plain text' is carried out by central banks worldwide in a incomensurably larger scale and nobody seems to mind it, at least not /.ers, to whom money derives its value from its magical property of being accepted by the government to pay taxes with. *muffled laughter*
But to the point, this is hardly the end of Bitcoin, much like the crash of 1929 or of 2008 ( by itself, that is ) weren't the end of the US dollar. It's a new technology, hell its a new concept, its gonna stumble a lot until it enjoys even a moderate adoption.
As for Mt.Gox though, they will have to bend over backwards about a gazillion times before anyone will trade there again.
Ok, some quick googling and it turns out the first plant is at $3,500 / kW, so we're talking about 3,5 billion for a gigawatt plant, they ESTIMATE they will get it down to $1k /kW, the 1 billion for a 1GW plant, so I was about 350% wrong. :D
China has already ordered quite a few of these reactors. I believe they cost less than a billion dollars for a GW capacity, but that was some old news I read so I can't really be sure or have a link. :S
Its what they did NOT! impeed!, like enforcing stricter safety protocols on UC...see perfect freedom, but UC had all the profit motive to make sure that didnt happen RIGHT?! Alas the hubris of man.
Another one of those insights that you can reach by sitting in a corner and thinking: if a company, which has the monetary incentive to, does not have the perfect information as to which is the best safety protocol, a government who knows absolutely NOTHING about the production of pesticide does not.
The main problem I see with your argument is that it is a religious, not a rational one. You don't see government as a collection of people who direct an apparatus of coercion and compulsion; you see a God cometh down to Earth, doted with perfect knowledge on how to make every human endeavour safe from hurting third parties: from rocket launching to pesticide production.
If you just think of the wide array of human activities and apply your 'like enforcing stricter safety protocols on *insert company name here*' you will hopefully see the utter absurdity of your way of thinking.
Jesus christ....what i said was its not just the one or the either!
Yes hun. And I am disputing that. Even with a lot of state run enterprises, so long as there is a stock market and private property in the means of production we have a market economy guided by the profit motive, otherwise we have a planned socialistic economy. There is no 'third way'. You say 'its not just the one or the other' but you fail to actually demonstrate it. Its not much to ask you to give substance to your fantastic claims.
You have not actually answered ANY of my contentions, just evaded everything. You're not really equipped for this kind of discussion. Read up on Marx and his critics before you accuse others of being 'nutters as the marxists'.
stop...i meant politics in the general sense...getting big by making licensing deal with IBM using an CPM close is not my idea of innovative.
That is not politics, but business. He had a window of opportunity and missed it. What the hell does Microsoft have to do with it anyway? It wasn't even in the OS business at the time. They already had their deal with IBM.
Which is why i specifically mentioned Lord Russel which entered cabinet in the middle of the crisis, you can't deny that his acts was in reality the biggest Laissez faire experiment in the world.
Actually, yes, I can. Lets try a thought experiment: the people in North Korea get all their goods from the government. Suppose that government decides to stop feeding their population tomorrow, and they begin to starve, predictably since all the other restrictions that come with a planned communist economy are still in place.
Would you call THAT the new 'biggest Laissez faire experiment in the world'?
But i brough this up because you moved the goal post, apparently ...somehow India impeeded Union Carbadide somehow to make the example moot.
What would India 'impeeded UC' from doing? Leaking the poisonous gas? I think you are confusing a government staffed with flawed, ordinary men with some kind of a god. The USSR was no laissez faire and nobody 'impeeded' Chernobyl from melting down.
It sucks, but accidents do happen.
Yeeaeh...thats what we call a false dichotomy.
Well, we have a cutting edge social scientist here then! Which is this new form of social production that is neither guided by the profit motive or central planning? Please do tell.
So most innovative individual was phased out duo to politics, yet Bill Gates is the indispensable superman?
Well, if he was phased out due to politics then indeed we are talking about state coercion picking winners and losers instead of the competitive outcome of a market. What, did Gates or IBM buy a Congressman or something? I'm not intimately familiar with the story.
And I'm not saying Bill Gates is a superman or anything, just that Microsoft under his direction has suceeded in giving the consumers what they want for a long time and for that they made him filthy rich. And he is unique in the respect that his company really didn't spend any dime on lobbying for special privileges or anything until the DoJ started to eye his company with greedy, greedy eyes.
While he is far from the mythical Randroid ubermensch, for he is a _real person_, there are much much worse cases of crony businessmen that conspired with the state for private gain at the expense of everyone else.
I really don't know what you mean by 'a complete capitalistic economy'. By 'market equilibrium' I assume you mean the mental construct of the state of equilibrium, where supply meets demand, or in Mises' work the 'evenly rotating economy'. It is just a thinking aid that has no counterpart in the real world.
About the potato famine in Ireland, I really think you should read up more on the subject, the historical context, the English domination, the laws that were in effect at the time that protected local English farmers from competition, o on and so forth. On the other hand, just by sitting with coffee and a cigarette you can reach an interesting insight: crop failures do not cause famine in the same way that I don't starve to death because I ( or an entire country even ) don't grow my own food.
Finally, what is social democracy? Or social liberalism? These aren't alternatives to a form of social organization like 'private property, prices and markets' as opposed to 'common ownership of property and a planned economy'. This 'social democracy' is simply this little forum where these ideas clash. Eventually you will end up with either laissez-faire or full blown socialism, that just happens in small baby steps instead of the Marx's revolutionary 'socialism by one fell swoop'.
Bill Gates is the first to admit that his success is largely due to being at the right place at the right time, attleast when it comes to MS DOS and Windows, CPM and OS2 could easily have taken both DOS and Windows place. I'm not denigrated Gates industriousness either, his years as an obsessive hacker is an inspiration to me, but so did Gary Killdal....who did alot more groundwork for the PC revolution then Bill Gates ever did.
He's a humble chap. Thing is, Killdal was a great technician, but was a poor entrepreneur.
Technicians are skilled at producing things in their areas of expertise. Entrepreneurs are skilled at guessing the future right.
Killdal guessed wrong. Bill Gates guessed right.
Bhopol called, they want a word with you.
Ya, India circa 1980. The libertarian Eldorado of sacred property rights and individual liberties.
My argument lies shattered. Niggaplease... :-)
Loved the 'solar is nuclear with wireless distribution' quip, btw
I love solar for that. If panels cost low enough, I'll be the first person to install panels on my roof an live in bliss.
I don't want to see solar banned, I just want to see the chokes on nuclear development lifted. Just require plants to be insured for catastrophic failure to internalize the risks and let the competition between manufacturers produce better and safer designs.
You have to approach the issue from a calm and rational perspective. If you go about ignoring these things, then all you do is appear to be a zealot and diminish nuclear power.
Thats a very good point. Problem is, I AM a zealot. I think it takes a bit of aging to calm down and realize that u have a better chance at convincing people if you don't act like one.
Computers and the software they run (like everything else) are the sum total of the contributions of tens of thousands of people. Some contributed much more than others, but none were indispensable. There is no single person without whom you would not be sitting at a personal computer right now.
So you mean that, if Bill Gates were a janitor we would still have Microsoft Windows today. He's simply another cog in the wheel, historically irrelevant, whose role would simply be played by another replaceable individual in that scenario?
That is textbook collectivist ideology. I don't believe it, I'm afraid. Some people are more industrious than others. Maybe some OTHER rather workaholic fella would do a similar venture, but I wouldn't take that chance. Like all resources, inventiveness is scarce. Most people just go through the motions, get a 9 to 5 job, get old and die.
Nuclear power wouldn't have a prayer in a truly libertarian society, because strip-mining coal will be the cheapest energy source for decades if not centuries to come.
You can't know that. Sorry, but even without factoring the cost of the externality of pollution, a nuclear plant is much more cost effective than burning tons of coal a minute. Now, if you remove the regulatory costs from the State? Wow. Then its just a landslide. But again, I can't see the future just as much as you can. But think about it.
Protecting commons (e.g., air) is a problem that individualism simply does not solve.
Oh, and statism does? Are not government officials individuals, who pursue their own ends like all of us?
Commons can't be protected unless they're privately owned. And that is true regardless of individualism or collectivism. Pollution is/was worse in China and the Soviet Union than it is in even radically individualist nations by comparison.
Of course they do. Who do you think invented, produced and sold you the creature comforts you enjoy every day?
Whether you're typing this on a Linux or Windows machine, it was brought to you by a superhero of the real world, be it Torvalds or Gates. Just to name ONE example.
If this were an Ayn Rand novel, there WOULD be a breakthrough energy source, but they would be forbidden, regulated and stifled to the point that everyone has to make do with older and more polluting sources, coincidentally owned by older, more entrenched special interests.
Sound familiar?
1. 1,4Kw/m2 is LAUGHABLE. And that's a given, unless we get Earth's orbit closer to the sun.
2. Nuclear failures are not catastrophic, unless you live in the Soviet Union or get hit by a 9 degree earthquake. Thankfully, the US isn't Japan and is lucky to have many areas in which plants will be built by a communistic State and/or isn't located over any dangerous faults.
3. Nuclear plants have simple designs as compared to this particular solar project, since, you said it yourself pilots systems cost a lot of money due to R&D costs, i.e., there isn't a design yet. You can't really have it both ways in your argument, can you?
4. Er, nuclear plants need refueling every couple of decades. In the case of the cutting edge of breeder reactors, they don't need refueling at all, they just burn their waste.
5. The talk about 'not needing skilled labor to operate' is completely spurious. It doesn't matter if nuclear needs 20 nuclear physicists on site if it produces enough energy at a low enough cost to pay for their salaries and still turn a profit. The world isn't run from 'a purely engineering standpoint', but from monetary calculations of profit and loss.
Nuclear energy has ONE drawback: very expensive failsafes. The thing is, it is still orders of magnitude more cost-effective than solar even after that.
There is one reason the government is spending this shitload of money on this project, which, coincidentally is the same reason government spends money on everything: politics and favoring special interests at the expense of the rest of the citizens.