A professor at my university was recently asked by a British TV program to calculate the cost of retrieving data from the HST, and it came out quite a lot cheaper than sending text messages.
Its valid I suppose to say I can't judge the entire field on a few - but where are the good economists? Other sciences manage to push through the quacks and the shills and get a few real guys front and centre (e.g. Stephen Hawking). I have seen a lot of economists, I have read books published by economists, and I have yet to see one break the mould.
Modded 'Informative' are you kidding me? This is just regurgitated libertarian political rhetoric
Yet it has been proven time and again that it is our governments that restrict our ability to make our lives better. Look at deathanol, which is being added to fuels against many consumers' wishes. The scientific proof that corn-ethanol is worthless is there, but still the corn lobby gets it done. Anti-consumer, anti-nourishment, anti-poverty and it exists. Why?
Only in your pathetic little mind it has. The market has never been able to provide universal literacy, healthcare or nourishment.
Actually, it was the market that provided decreased malnourishment in the 19th century. Look at the investors who bought more boats to ship food from the West to England. Soon it was discovered (1880?) that the meat had disease, which caused new investors and farmers and produce makers to find ways to make the meat safe for consumption. If you dig deep into England's malnourishment in the 1800s, you'll see WHY it happened, and it wasn't the free market that caused it. There were a great many food regulations at the time. Thankfully, the market wanted to sell food, and in order to do so they had to learn how to NOT kill those they were selling to. So they found ways to combat airborne bacteria before the USDA and FDA even came into being.
Wrong once more. Take your head out of your arse and look at the real world for once. Enclosure (based on the principles of property markets) is what drove people to famine in the first place.
Please provide a link to this blatant bold-faced lie. I did a simple Google search and came up with this link [nutrition.org], which to paraphrase says the proportion of malnourished children in the world is on a decline, as I said. The actual number might be increasing in total, but this is do to the poor having kids when they shouldn't be. Duh. If overall the percentage of hungry is going down, but the number overall is going up, it is due to population booms, not due to the inability to feed them properly. Farming, transporting and storing food is a process that points to longevity of the market you'll sell to. Hungry people should be reducing their offspring during hardship, not increasing more hungry children.
First you accuse me of a lie, then you admit what I said was true and then you try and backtrack on your original statement with a little casual racism.
Economics relies on supply being flexible to correct prices. The amount the Earth can supply is ultimately not flexible. Therefore your precious economic theories are just ideological head flapping.
Fibre optics had fuck all to do with copper shortages. Aluminium is used for completely different applications than steel (you wouldn't make a railway bridge out of aluminium nor a plane out of steel).
And the idea that the value of raw materials 'always DROPS' is laughably stupid. Thermodynamics is king here; if there is a certain amount of energy binding the Iron atom to the Oxgyen atom in an ore then you've got to use that quantity of energy to get it out - market forces have no relevance.
Modded 'Informative' are you kidding me? This is just regurgitated libertarian political rhetoric:
1. Who creates the biggest food shortages in the world? Your governments do. They subsidize production of the wrong products (subsidizing means going against the market's forces), causing price increases for the wrong reason. They restrict growing of certain crops in certain areas, or monopolize which crops can be grown.
So in the 19th century, when there was little or no government interference in the economy, people didn't starve?
2. If you're living in poverty and are hungry, doesn't it make sense to cut back on producing offspring? Yet when I've traveled the world for work, I always tend to try to seek out the poverished areas. They're spending more time on replicating DNA than they are on devising new ways to grow food. Sad. Usually they're living under a fascist or communist regime, which means revolution is their only probably solution. I know that Professor Popkin (University of North Carolina) said in 2005 or 2006 that the world's obese are growing in number while the malnourished are shrinking.
Then he, like you was wrong. The number of malnourished people in the world is increasing, has been constantly since the end of the cold war when pretty much the entire world subscribed to American-style capitalism, and you can check that fact for yourself.
3. Market economic theory may be predicated on supply and demand, but many people are ignorant of those who hamper both (again, usually governments). To me, the people who best stabilize markets are the speculators, who can often times stabilize pricing enough for farmers to weather bad seasons or deal with oversupply. If it wasn't for the speculators, pricing would be much more peak-and-valley, causing more hardship for those on relatively fixed or declining incomes.
The universe doesn't run on market forces. Speculators can't make your soil more fertile or you crops flourish. Your market rhetoric is both tiresome and misguided.
I'm doing physics. I know thermodynamics, and I know that any theory which goes against it is necessarily bullshit. Economics makes claims about demand driving up efficiency and thus correcting prices as if it can go on forever, thus I call bullshit.
Economists generally start from the assumption they are right about things and try to rationalise it by interpreting the evidence. That is the way of sociologists and crackpots, not scientists.
Economics generally can only explain things after they happen, and when it tries to explain things before they happen and gets it wrong, nobody changes their views on things.
Asteroid mining to supply earth with materials is, and always will be, a ridiculous proposal. It is simply a question of how much energy involved, and once again that is a matter of physics.
Why does this crap keep getting modded 'Insightful'? Presumably its by fellow armchair economists who agree that the atomic composition of the Earth responds to supply and demand. Retards.
Its been said you could pile up gold bricks on the moon and it would still be a huge loss bringing them back. This isn't going to change, unless you somehow think that the required delta-V is going to respond to market forces, and I've already had to tear some fool a new one for that.
Space will never be profitable, so to look to space we need to look beyond profit.
You are not qualified to speak for the scientific community. Whilst they do model the human consumption of oil economically (fair enough) the idea that the market will conjure up an alternative when it needs to is a pure libertarian fantasy.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything. Stop treating it like it is theory at all in fact, because it has as much in common with real science as reading tea leaves does.
You are one of these dolts who thinks austrian economics can overrule the laws of physics, aren't you?
The invisible hand isn't some sort of benevolent god-of-the-technological-harvests. Simply because there is a market for something does not mean that the universe will conjure it up for you.
Stop reading your ideology-sodden essays on how the market is The Best Thing EVAR and learn yourself some proper science.
True. People who think they know a robust system from their work on websites and computer games have been somewhat shocked at how easy it is to make a big fireball instead of a working rocket.
I know someone who was peripherally involved with HOTOL, and he believes it was canceled in order to help maintain the monopoly on space launches enjoyed by certain US corporations. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a sovereign nation?
Having read more about this man and his previous 'efforts' to break altitude records that had already been broken and to showcase part of a cement mixer as a space capsule... I feel that Wallace and Gromit are a more serious prospect for commercial space flight in this country.
As nice as this is to see, it is shocking how far behind we are. I'm at Leicester University, and the pinnacle of British commercial rocket techology (A Skylark, a small payload sounding rocket) sits in the middle of our foyer. Meanwhile, the French with a similar sized population and a similar sized economy (and coming from a similar state of total-fucked-upness after the war) have a commercially successful 20t launcher flying regularly.
Tory fanboys perpetually bleat that what Thatcher did to our heavy industry was a necessary evil - but it wasn't necessary for the frogs and they were in as bad a state as we were in the 1970s. We voluntarily gave up our capacity to engage in any project on a larger scale than a new shopping mall.
Slashdot Mirror
A professor at my university was recently asked by a British TV program to calculate the cost of retrieving data from the HST, and it came out quite a lot cheaper than sending text messages.
Its valid I suppose to say I can't judge the entire field on a few - but where are the good economists? Other sciences manage to push through the quacks and the shills and get a few real guys front and centre (e.g. Stephen Hawking). I have seen a lot of economists, I have read books published by economists, and I have yet to see one break the mould.
Only in your pathetic little mind it has. The market has never been able to provide universal literacy, healthcare or nourishment.
Wrong once more. Take your head out of your arse and look at the real world for once. Enclosure (based on the principles of property markets) is what drove people to famine in the first place.
First you accuse me of a lie, then you admit what I said was true and then you try and backtrack on your original statement with a little casual racism.
I'm done with you, you right-wing tosser.
You know cornflakes were originally designed to stop you wanking, don't you?
What are you banking on, fucking warp drive?
There is a cost associated with traveling between each point in the solar system. It isn't an economists sort of cost because it NEVER changes.
Economics relies on supply being flexible to correct prices. The amount the Earth can supply is ultimately not flexible. Therefore your precious economic theories are just ideological head flapping.
Fibre optics had fuck all to do with copper shortages. Aluminium is used for completely different applications than steel (you wouldn't make a railway bridge out of aluminium nor a plane out of steel).
And the idea that the value of raw materials 'always DROPS' is laughably stupid. Thermodynamics is king here; if there is a certain amount of energy binding the Iron atom to the Oxgyen atom in an ore then you've got to use that quantity of energy to get it out - market forces have no relevance.
Modded 'Informative' are you kidding me? This is just regurgitated libertarian political rhetoric:
So in the 19th century, when there was little or no government interference in the economy, people didn't starve?
Then he, like you was wrong. The number of malnourished people in the world is increasing, has been constantly since the end of the cold war when pretty much the entire world subscribed to American-style capitalism, and you can check that fact for yourself.
The universe doesn't run on market forces. Speculators can't make your soil more fertile or you crops flourish. Your market rhetoric is both tiresome and misguided.
I'm doing physics. I know thermodynamics, and I know that any theory which goes against it is necessarily bullshit. Economics makes claims about demand driving up efficiency and thus correcting prices as if it can go on forever, thus I call bullshit.
Assuming we have enough resources to create the solution when the market gets 'desperate' enough to register a serious problem at all.
Inventiveness cannot conjure atoms from nothingness. Economics does not override physics, get used to that.
But at some point you run out of oil, and at some point you run out of gallium. Increased demand isn't going to make more of it.
Economists generally start from the assumption they are right about things and try to rationalise it by interpreting the evidence. That is the way of sociologists and crackpots, not scientists.
Economics generally can only explain things after they happen, and when it tries to explain things before they happen and gets it wrong, nobody changes their views on things.
Asteroid mining to supply earth with materials is, and always will be, a ridiculous proposal. It is simply a question of how much energy involved, and once again that is a matter of physics.
Why does this crap keep getting modded 'Insightful'? Presumably its by fellow armchair economists who agree that the atomic composition of the Earth responds to supply and demand. Retards.
Its been said you could pile up gold bricks on the moon and it would still be a huge loss bringing them back. This isn't going to change, unless you somehow think that the required delta-V is going to respond to market forces, and I've already had to tear some fool a new one for that.
Space will never be profitable, so to look to space we need to look beyond profit.
You are not qualified to speak for the scientific community. Whilst they do model the human consumption of oil economically (fair enough) the idea that the market will conjure up an alternative when it needs to is a pure libertarian fantasy.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything. Stop treating it like it is theory at all in fact, because it has as much in common with real science as reading tea leaves does.
You are one of these dolts who thinks austrian economics can overrule the laws of physics, aren't you?
The invisible hand isn't some sort of benevolent god-of-the-technological-harvests. Simply because there is a market for something does not mean that the universe will conjure it up for you.
Stop reading your ideology-sodden essays on how the market is The Best Thing EVAR and learn yourself some proper science.
*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*
True. People who think they know a robust system from their work on websites and computer games have been somewhat shocked at how easy it is to make a big fireball instead of a working rocket.
I know someone who was peripherally involved with HOTOL, and he believes it was canceled in order to help maintain the monopoly on space launches enjoyed by certain US corporations. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a sovereign nation?
Having read more about this man and his previous 'efforts' to break altitude records that had already been broken and to showcase part of a cement mixer as a space capsule... I feel that Wallace and Gromit are a more serious prospect for commercial space flight in this country.
As nice as this is to see, it is shocking how far behind we are. I'm at Leicester University, and the pinnacle of British commercial rocket techology (A Skylark, a small payload sounding rocket) sits in the middle of our foyer. Meanwhile, the French with a similar sized population and a similar sized economy (and coming from a similar state of total-fucked-upness after the war) have a commercially successful 20t launcher flying regularly.
Tory fanboys perpetually bleat that what Thatcher did to our heavy industry was a necessary evil - but it wasn't necessary for the frogs and they were in as bad a state as we were in the 1970s. We voluntarily gave up our capacity to engage in any project on a larger scale than a new shopping mall.