The elusive secret to regulation is to derive it without undue influence. A playing field is only as level as the referees are interested in making it. The referees may study the game, but they may never be involved with the playing of it.
From what I've read it seems that the launch was pretty much as you described, not exactly novel, but requiring a lot of energy to achieve the required trajectory. (The Falcon Heavy actually produces about twice as much oomph, in the sense that it can lift about twice as much payload to geostationary orbit, were that the objective. But the Delta IV Heavy obviously can do the job required though, and it's currently far more proven.)
I'm guessing that folks from NASA, Johns Hopkins APL, and pretty much everyone else who could credibly provide input, were all involved in mapping out the trajectory and timeline to get to a reasonable elliptical solar orbit that could approach that close. I think it's going to take 7 flybys of Venus to slow it down, and orbit the Sun a planned 24 times. Because the orbit is fairly elliptical, it's going to be hauling ass on each perihelion (700K km/h).
I agree that it a very unique mission. But as for "just fall[ing] into the gravity well of the Sun", it requires many times more energy to accomplish that "fall" than it takes to put a similar mass in orbit around Mars. In terms of delta-V, it's a launch from Earth followed by a very costly, highly gravity-assisted, highly choreographed, de-orbit burn.
These features make it closely analogous to the mining of gold or other precious metal on Earth.
1) It requires effort to get new coinage.
2) There is an upper limit to the amount available, and it becomes probabilistically more difficult to acquire each increment.
But even when there are effectively no more bitcoins, or when there is no more gold to be found (for simplicity, let's ignore the gold content of the rest of the universe for now) the gold and bitcoins will still have value -- provided primarily that the consensus is that they are stores of value -- it must be deemed "precious". If such a consensus is maintained for bitcoin, then each fraction of a bitcoin would represent a certain amount of value (possibly increasing over time, almost certainly speculated upon.)
I sort of agree with you and sort of do not. The difference in the pitfalls of a UBI-like scheme are different than those of a scheme where one proves that life is unfair to them, that they have nothing, and are willing to show up and fill out form XYZ attesting to their nothing-havingness. It is actually less intrusive than welfare. It's "Here's your damn cash, like everyone else is getting. Now go away." You would get it. I would get it too, though as circumstances are I'd pay more than it back by some margin. It contains no stigma, and if you work you get to keep a major fraction of what you earn, and I don't think people would choose to just play video games all day and fuck off. Some will to be sure, but if we were predominantly like that we'd still be on an African savanna counting the days until we were a lion's lunch. A UBI might keep you off the street, but you'll want more, if only to improve your chances of getting laid. (The way in which healthcare is broadly financed are a whole huge 'nother discussion, which I'd like to table for the time being.)
But I totally agree with your objection to the government having too much power. Every rule, every power or authority, that we cede to a government carries a cost for us as individuals. No matter how minor, each constraint on a person's behavior carries a cost. And those costs can add up to more than even the optimistic estimation of the benefits sought. (Hence, the TSA, and the NSA, and "thinking of the children" as the conclusion to any argument.) But if it's done correctly, the benefits over time can exceed the sum of the individual costs. It's like playing with fire -- fire is very useful, but you have to remember that it can burn you.
In any conceivable scenario though, we'll still have constraints, that's a certainty that comes right after death and taxes. Some constraints, and some safety nets, are inevitable in a complex society. To me, the question is where to draw the line, and how to do it with the least inefficiencies for the most benefit. An equal question in my mind would be to ask what we can afford, and how we might get from here to there. Abruptly implemented, a substantial UBI would be a terrible shock to our economy, and frankly is not going to happen. But over a span of decades, perhaps many decades, something like it will.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean but I think I agree. We don't know much about the causal relationships as far as productivity of the nation as a whole, or what would be gained vs. lost in human terms. There's no way this should be done all at once, and I can't see a way that it will be.
But our current system, while it has a great many merits, stands a chance of falling apart as far as its basic tenets. This is actually something we WANT. Goods produced without human effort.
It won't happen today. It won't happen in ten years, or twenty at an obvious scale. But it will happen. The rate at which jobs are automated, and the increases in that rate, are likely to go up. The first and second derivatives will be positive. We had transitional trouble when this kind of thing happened every 50 years. What happens when it happens every 5 years? Every 2? Faster and faster?
This kind of change is something we should actually welcome, actually seek -- if we are prepared for it. It's not happening in the immediate term perceptibly, but it's coming, and it could bite us.
For the exact same reason you do so today, often without any action on your part at all. So the IRS doesn't put you in jail. It would be handled as part of tax reporting. Lie if you wish, I'd not advise it.
I suppose you could also call our current tax structure "means tested", in that the marginal rate depends on the amount of money you make. But it operates upon a continuum, wherein each incremental increase in earnings is an actual increase in earnings.
That would create a discontinuity of the very type I think should be avoided. One where gainful employment can actually reduce income, which is not the way it should work. Working should get you more. Conversely, not working might become attractive, because the UBI comes back. Free lunch, with beer!
Say there's a person getting $1500/month on UBI (as some number yanked from my ass). Say there's no minimum wage, at all, which in this scenario there should not be. Employers are free to pay any pittance they choose, and perhaps take a chance, because people get about 9 bucks/hour doing nothing at all so it's no longer on them. Prospective employees get to pick a job they might actually tolerate doing, or even make into a career. This reduces the bargaining power of the employer, and they'll only attract employees to jobs that are rewarding for some other reason, or who'd just love that extra $3/hr to spend. It also reduces the employer's constraints, since the risk to their cash flow and profit margins are less.
What would these rewarding reasons be? Throughout history, things like apprenticeship have been the kind that has shown to be important. "Come, do this poorly paying job, but if you're good at it then it will turn into a good paying job because it has a future. Decide on your own if it seems right for you, and I'll decide the same."
But it's not based on whether you have a job or not. It's not based on any test of means or deservedness. It's just taken back more as you make more, incrementally in a graduated manner. At every point, making more is better. The government does not create a discontinuous distinction between having a job and not having a job, it just sets the taxation so that by the time you make enough not to need your UBI dividend it's all going back to the government anyway.
You make $10K on top of that $18K, you still get to keep almost all of the UBI, and the money you made. You make $30K on top of it, you still get to keep most of it. $60K? Ok, well a lesser amount of it. $100K, none of it, you pay it all back in taxes above and beyond what you'd otherwise pay, so the UBI is a wash for you. $250K, you're paying it back and paying for 1-2 other people too. But at each point, earning more pre-tax means earning more after tax. And not just a tiny bit more, but an amount more that is pretty much in line with the graduated tax rates typical of a competitive western economy. Again, the numbers would have to be worked out, and second-order effects would have to be considered and adjusted for.
That is a very good point. Any suggestions? I'd ask you to consider while making them that "automating all our jobs away" might actually be a good thing if an efficient way was found for citizens of a country to have an investment stake in the (putative) productivity gains that came from it.
Other jobs would be defined by the market, as long as the distribution of wealth made it so that there was a market. And the gains in productivity could, partially, be harvested to increase a nation's social safety net. IOW, "Here, you get your X dollars, just like every other citizen, so you won't starve, you can work it out so you have a place to live. But you don't get any guaranteed minimum wage. If you want, you can get that shit-paying apprentice job that'll be low-risk for the employer and you might prove yourself worthy of moving up to a decent-paying job if you show your mettle."
This is not going to happen overnight, more like over decades. And it wouldn't affect me personally even if it did, except for a tax increase that I can, all things considered, handle without much pain. And it will take a lot of thought if it is ever to evolve in a functional way, reasonably free of perverse incentives and without too many unintended consequences. The avoidance of those was what I meant in referencing your very good point. The math and the incentives need to work out, or we table it for later consideration.
Also, as I responded elsewhere in this thread, milking the rich, be it a little or a lot, isn't really where the funding for a UBI would come from. Increases in capital gains taxes are more to prevent our nation's wealth disparity from growing exponentially out of control, which it's doing now to an extent.
But I don't think the diametrically opposing alternatives will lead too much good at all. I'd rather send cash and say you're on your own than strangle you with means-testing and social control to see if you were worthy of my pious pity. An increasingly disaffected and disillusioned society, dystopian wealth distribution disparities, dysfunctional bureaucracies like the ones our social safety nets have become -- these aren't the emblems of a society I want to live in. Even in my gated enclave, I like it better when those outside the gates can have a decent life.
No, taxes on the very wealthy will not cover anywhere near the expenditures. I should have made a more complete response, but I was being lazy and I wanted to get something to eat. The majority of the funding for such a program will come from taking the money back from a lot of the people you just gave it to, in the form of a graduated increase in taxes. Now this by itself doesn't mean that taxpayers are going to be just giving money to the poor, though I suspect that will come into play.
What it means is if, say, the UBI was $1500/month for a US Citizen. $18,000/year. And say you were making $100K/year before you counted it (so you now make $118K with it) your tax bill would be increased by an amount that wound up taking all that $18K back. (These numbers are just made up, they'd be different, based upon the distribution of income in the population, and calibrated and adjusted to be what our productivity allowed us to afford without undue burden on our efficiency.) The point is that for many people, it would be close to a wash. At higher income levels you'd be paying more in than you took out, and at lower levels of income, it would be a net gain. At the lowest levels, you'd get to keep all the money from that little job you got for some spending cash.
But at no point along the income distribution curve would earning more pre-tax income leave you with less after-tax income. If you're scraping along on UBI, then some shit job would give you more, and at these lowest levels it'd hardly be taxed at all, just like today. As you moved up the scale Uncle Sam would take a larger and larger bite, and at some income level you'd be paying more out than you had gotten in, maybe significantly more as you entered the upper quintile or decile of income. We do a lot of that already with the tax structure we have in place.
But it wouldn't have the perverse incentives we see in means-tested income assistance, where pursuing gainful employment might mean you're barely better off, with the added downside of having to work a grinding meaningless job. And it would get the government out of the business of monitoring whether you were still properly beat down enough, and had jumped through enough bureaucratic hoops, to justify its pity. It's just "prove you're a citizen, with a pulse, tell us where to send the direct deposit, then go away, fix your shit on your own. We might take some or all of it or maybe even more back next April."
Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.
No, that's ridiculous. Just make sure your veggies use WPA2. And for God's sake, don't leave the default password in use, on your broccoli, especially.
Wrong basically everywhere. First, the Earth's oceans are not 4 billion tons, that's the estimated quantity of yellowcake in the Earth's oceans. The Earth's oceans are about 1.4 quintillion metric tons, so you were off by about 9 orders of magnitude. Second, see drinkypoo's reply.
Actually, neither is correct. The study found that 30% of Alzheimer's patients had abnormally high quantities of HHV6/HHV7 in their brain tissue. Further that the quantity of the virus in the brain had a strong positive correlation with the amount of dementia clinically observed. The vast majority of people have been exposed to HHV6/7 and some viral load might show in the blood, but because of the BBB that would not mean a similar amount, or any amount, would be present in the CSF.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, a bad pun. That's the whole reason I clicked on this story.
"Deuce and a Quarter". I drove one of those back in high school. We called it the White Whale. Huge.
The elusive secret to regulation is to derive it without undue influence. A playing field is only as level as the referees are interested in making it. The referees may study the game, but they may never be involved with the playing of it.
From what I've read it seems that the launch was pretty much as you described, not exactly novel, but requiring a lot of energy to achieve the required trajectory. (The Falcon Heavy actually produces about twice as much oomph, in the sense that it can lift about twice as much payload to geostationary orbit, were that the objective. But the Delta IV Heavy obviously can do the job required though, and it's currently far more proven.)
I'm guessing that folks from NASA, Johns Hopkins APL, and pretty much everyone else who could credibly provide input, were all involved in mapping out the trajectory and timeline to get to a reasonable elliptical solar orbit that could approach that close. I think it's going to take 7 flybys of Venus to slow it down, and orbit the Sun a planned 24 times. Because the orbit is fairly elliptical, it's going to be hauling ass on each perihelion (700K km/h).
It just falls in to the gravity well of the Sun.
I agree that it a very unique mission. But as for "just fall[ing] into the gravity well of the Sun", it requires many times more energy to accomplish that "fall" than it takes to put a similar mass in orbit around Mars. In terms of delta-V, it's a launch from Earth followed by a very costly, highly gravity-assisted, highly choreographed, de-orbit burn.
Mescaline, with a soupçon of Special K.
Starbucks was going to get involved with blockchain technology eventually. Starbucks is a chain, and there's one on every block. Synergy.
These features make it closely analogous to the mining of gold or other precious metal on Earth. 1) It requires effort to get new coinage. 2) There is an upper limit to the amount available, and it becomes probabilistically more difficult to acquire each increment. But even when there are effectively no more bitcoins, or when there is no more gold to be found (for simplicity, let's ignore the gold content of the rest of the universe for now) the gold and bitcoins will still have value -- provided primarily that the consensus is that they are stores of value -- it must be deemed "precious". If such a consensus is maintained for bitcoin, then each fraction of a bitcoin would represent a certain amount of value (possibly increasing over time, almost certainly speculated upon.)
Was just about to make that same observation.
They should just use the Richter Scale as it is right now, given this startling fact that's really true and not a conspiracy theory at all and I have proof I swear.
I sort of agree with you and sort of do not. The difference in the pitfalls of a UBI-like scheme are different than those of a scheme where one proves that life is unfair to them, that they have nothing, and are willing to show up and fill out form XYZ attesting to their nothing-havingness. It is actually less intrusive than welfare. It's "Here's your damn cash, like everyone else is getting. Now go away." You would get it. I would get it too, though as circumstances are I'd pay more than it back by some margin. It contains no stigma, and if you work you get to keep a major fraction of what you earn, and I don't think people would choose to just play video games all day and fuck off. Some will to be sure, but if we were predominantly like that we'd still be on an African savanna counting the days until we were a lion's lunch. A UBI might keep you off the street, but you'll want more, if only to improve your chances of getting laid. (The way in which healthcare is broadly financed are a whole huge 'nother discussion, which I'd like to table for the time being.)
But I totally agree with your objection to the government having too much power. Every rule, every power or authority, that we cede to a government carries a cost for us as individuals. No matter how minor, each constraint on a person's behavior carries a cost. And those costs can add up to more than even the optimistic estimation of the benefits sought. (Hence, the TSA, and the NSA, and "thinking of the children" as the conclusion to any argument.) But if it's done correctly, the benefits over time can exceed the sum of the individual costs. It's like playing with fire -- fire is very useful, but you have to remember that it can burn you.
In any conceivable scenario though, we'll still have constraints, that's a certainty that comes right after death and taxes. Some constraints, and some safety nets, are inevitable in a complex society. To me, the question is where to draw the line, and how to do it with the least inefficiencies for the most benefit. An equal question in my mind would be to ask what we can afford, and how we might get from here to there. Abruptly implemented, a substantial UBI would be a terrible shock to our economy, and frankly is not going to happen. But over a span of decades, perhaps many decades, something like it will.
And.. I responded to the wrong thread. So much for posting whilst half asleep.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean but I think I agree. We don't know much about the causal relationships as far as productivity of the nation as a whole, or what would be gained vs. lost in human terms. There's no way this should be done all at once, and I can't see a way that it will be.
But our current system, while it has a great many merits, stands a chance of falling apart as far as its basic tenets. This is actually something we WANT. Goods produced without human effort.
It won't happen today. It won't happen in ten years, or twenty at an obvious scale. But it will happen. The rate at which jobs are automated, and the increases in that rate, are likely to go up. The first and second derivatives will be positive. We had transitional trouble when this kind of thing happened every 50 years. What happens when it happens every 5 years? Every 2? Faster and faster?
This kind of change is something we should actually welcome, actually seek -- if we are prepared for it. It's not happening in the immediate term perceptibly, but it's coming, and it could bite us.
For the exact same reason you do so today, often without any action on your part at all. So the IRS doesn't put you in jail. It would be handled as part of tax reporting. Lie if you wish, I'd not advise it.
I suppose you could also call our current tax structure "means tested", in that the marginal rate depends on the amount of money you make. But it operates upon a continuum, wherein each incremental increase in earnings is an actual increase in earnings.
I see potential in this approach, and I will meditate on a solution. Ohmmmm..
That would create a discontinuity of the very type I think should be avoided. One where gainful employment can actually reduce income, which is not the way it should work. Working should get you more. Conversely, not working might become attractive, because the UBI comes back. Free lunch, with beer!
Say there's a person getting $1500/month on UBI (as some number yanked from my ass). Say there's no minimum wage, at all, which in this scenario there should not be. Employers are free to pay any pittance they choose, and perhaps take a chance, because people get about 9 bucks/hour doing nothing at all so it's no longer on them. Prospective employees get to pick a job they might actually tolerate doing, or even make into a career. This reduces the bargaining power of the employer, and they'll only attract employees to jobs that are rewarding for some other reason, or who'd just love that extra $3/hr to spend. It also reduces the employer's constraints, since the risk to their cash flow and profit margins are less.
What would these rewarding reasons be? Throughout history, things like apprenticeship have been the kind that has shown to be important. "Come, do this poorly paying job, but if you're good at it then it will turn into a good paying job because it has a future. Decide on your own if it seems right for you, and I'll decide the same."
But it's not based on whether you have a job or not. It's not based on any test of means or deservedness. It's just taken back more as you make more, incrementally in a graduated manner. At every point, making more is better. The government does not create a discontinuous distinction between having a job and not having a job, it just sets the taxation so that by the time you make enough not to need your UBI dividend it's all going back to the government anyway.
You make $10K on top of that $18K, you still get to keep almost all of the UBI, and the money you made. You make $30K on top of it, you still get to keep most of it. $60K? Ok, well a lesser amount of it. $100K, none of it, you pay it all back in taxes above and beyond what you'd otherwise pay, so the UBI is a wash for you. $250K, you're paying it back and paying for 1-2 other people too. But at each point, earning more pre-tax means earning more after tax. And not just a tiny bit more, but an amount more that is pretty much in line with the graduated tax rates typical of a competitive western economy. Again, the numbers would have to be worked out, and second-order effects would have to be considered and adjusted for.
That is a very good point. Any suggestions? I'd ask you to consider while making them that "automating all our jobs away" might actually be a good thing if an efficient way was found for citizens of a country to have an investment stake in the (putative) productivity gains that came from it.
Other jobs would be defined by the market, as long as the distribution of wealth made it so that there was a market. And the gains in productivity could, partially, be harvested to increase a nation's social safety net. IOW, "Here, you get your X dollars, just like every other citizen, so you won't starve, you can work it out so you have a place to live. But you don't get any guaranteed minimum wage. If you want, you can get that shit-paying apprentice job that'll be low-risk for the employer and you might prove yourself worthy of moving up to a decent-paying job if you show your mettle."
This is not going to happen overnight, more like over decades. And it wouldn't affect me personally even if it did, except for a tax increase that I can, all things considered, handle without much pain. And it will take a lot of thought if it is ever to evolve in a functional way, reasonably free of perverse incentives and without too many unintended consequences. The avoidance of those was what I meant in referencing your very good point. The math and the incentives need to work out, or we table it for later consideration.
Also, as I responded elsewhere in this thread, milking the rich, be it a little or a lot, isn't really where the funding for a UBI would come from. Increases in capital gains taxes are more to prevent our nation's wealth disparity from growing exponentially out of control, which it's doing now to an extent.
But I don't think the diametrically opposing alternatives will lead too much good at all. I'd rather send cash and say you're on your own than strangle you with means-testing and social control to see if you were worthy of my pious pity. An increasingly disaffected and disillusioned society, dystopian wealth distribution disparities, dysfunctional bureaucracies like the ones our social safety nets have become -- these aren't the emblems of a society I want to live in. Even in my gated enclave, I like it better when those outside the gates can have a decent life.
No, taxes on the very wealthy will not cover anywhere near the expenditures. I should have made a more complete response, but I was being lazy and I wanted to get something to eat. The majority of the funding for such a program will come from taking the money back from a lot of the people you just gave it to, in the form of a graduated increase in taxes. Now this by itself doesn't mean that taxpayers are going to be just giving money to the poor, though I suspect that will come into play.
What it means is if, say, the UBI was $1500/month for a US Citizen. $18,000/year. And say you were making $100K/year before you counted it (so you now make $118K with it) your tax bill would be increased by an amount that wound up taking all that $18K back. (These numbers are just made up, they'd be different, based upon the distribution of income in the population, and calibrated and adjusted to be what our productivity allowed us to afford without undue burden on our efficiency.) The point is that for many people, it would be close to a wash. At higher income levels you'd be paying more in than you took out, and at lower levels of income, it would be a net gain. At the lowest levels, you'd get to keep all the money from that little job you got for some spending cash.
But at no point along the income distribution curve would earning more pre-tax income leave you with less after-tax income. If you're scraping along on UBI, then some shit job would give you more, and at these lowest levels it'd hardly be taxed at all, just like today. As you moved up the scale Uncle Sam would take a larger and larger bite, and at some income level you'd be paying more out than you had gotten in, maybe significantly more as you entered the upper quintile or decile of income. We do a lot of that already with the tax structure we have in place.
But it wouldn't have the perverse incentives we see in means-tested income assistance, where pursuing gainful employment might mean you're barely better off, with the added downside of having to work a grinding meaningless job. And it would get the government out of the business of monitoring whether you were still properly beat down enough, and had jumped through enough bureaucratic hoops, to justify its pity. It's just "prove you're a citizen, with a pulse, tell us where to send the direct deposit, then go away, fix your shit on your own. We might take some or all of it or maybe even more back next April."
Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.
Now certified Organic.
No, that's ridiculous. Just make sure your veggies use WPA2. And for God's sake, don't leave the default password in use, on your broccoli, especially.
If you think that an opioid antagonist is going to have an effect on a dopamine agonist, maybe you should go retake some of your med school classes?
You need to study up on frickin' sharks with lasers. Studies have shown that they are not good things.
Wrong basically everywhere. First, the Earth's oceans are not 4 billion tons, that's the estimated quantity of yellowcake in the Earth's oceans. The Earth's oceans are about 1.4 quintillion metric tons, so you were off by about 9 orders of magnitude. Second, see drinkypoo's reply.
Actually, neither is correct. The study found that 30% of Alzheimer's patients had abnormally high quantities of HHV6/HHV7 in their brain tissue. Further that the quantity of the virus in the brain had a strong positive correlation with the amount of dementia clinically observed. The vast majority of people have been exposed to HHV6/7 and some viral load might show in the blood, but because of the BBB that would not mean a similar amount, or any amount, would be present in the CSF.