Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
I thought that so called "chi" was actually just electrical impulses and that the "chi flow diagrams" roughly match up to nerve diagrams?
Is this not the case. I never put much stock in it, so I never investigated.
I'm not sure what claims are made by chiropractors, but when I hurt my back as a boy (15 years old) and couldn't walk without unbearable amounts of pain, a trip to the family chiropractor fixed me up. The "cracking" relieved the pain enough so that I could walk unassisted. Unfortunately he died a couple of years ago, so I can't call him to ask him about his work. It seems like realigning the bones and major nerves could help with pain, but I don't think you could really make any claims beyond that. I don't know, I only went a few times.
Right, because there have been so many new nuclear reactors built in the last thirty years.
If it weren't for the DoE, we'd probably get 50%+ of our energy from nuclear now, and we'd be reprocessing our spent fuel rods, giving us an unending energy supply for the next 10000 odd years.
Instead we're going to war for oil and choking on CO2. Good job, Big Gubamint!
Well, one need not limit themselves to having only one climber going up at a time. You may only be shedding a few hundred yards of material for each launch. I don't know about the QA parts, but I think they could probably come up with a continuous production method, especially given that each piece may only need to be a few hundred yards long, and then coupled to the payloads. I'd have to leave it to the engineers to work that out, though.
As to the other problem, one of the first payloads to go up a space elevator will generally be another space elevator, just for situations like that. It's also possible to have one (or more) permanent tether(s) and one (or more) for payloads. I could envision one space complex servicing a dozen elevators.
It's better to have a single obstacle (so long as it can be overcome) rather than a bunch of them. Keep it simple (stupid). It is likely going to be a lot easier to develop a method to create ultra-high tensile strength materials than it is going to be to create a 100% reliable climber that can go through 100 miles of atmosphere, and another 22,000 miles to GEO without breaking down. THAT sounds like an impossible task to me. I can't even imagine the material requirements for such a system, nevermind the weight.
There wouldn't really be a need to place the entire mass of the counterweight at the end of the ribbon. You could probably use rollers to keep it at the same orbit (slightly above GEO) while the ribbon stays straight and goes out into space. Hell, if you didn't want to do that, you could just send up a climber with a new counterweight and cut the end of the cable when it gets out there, flinging off the older part of the ribbon into space. If it becomes a simple thing to produce large amounts of ribbon material, that might end up being a nice, cheap way to go (lifting 100K tons of material while sacrificing $30million of ribbon and counterweight). That would eliminate the need for the powerful "reeling" mechanism on the ground, as it would only go up (in fact, you could use it to generate electricity--there's a hell of a force pulling upwards), and it would work out to requiring only a slightly stronger ribbon. Depending on the amount of electricity it produced, it could well pay for itself.
Kites are held up by wind. Space elevators are held up by centripetal force. That's like comparing a submarine to a space station. A better analogy would be to try taking a piece of string with something attached to the end, and whirl it around your head. Now, what would be the easiest way to move something from your hand out to some orbit around your head? You could either a. build a crawler that could break down before it reaches the end, leaving you totally boned, and that would have to be pretty small, so as not to damage the string, while still holding the climbing machinery, or b. attach the payload to the string, and let out more length, which removes the extra weight from the climber, and allows you to make it larger without risking damage to the string. Hell, you could send up a payload almost as large as the counterweight on the end, if your string is strong enough. You are now limited ONLY by the tensile strength of the string and your ability to attach a weight to it.
As to the pulley system idea, it's a bit more complex. There would probably actually be THREE ribbons rather than two. One with the payload, one with a counterweight, and one that would remain fixed (no climbers--except maybe small ones for repair), anchoring the whole thing to the Earth.
Then why don't we use that amazingly simple technology for building elevators? Why on Earth would you want to put the machinery that is doing the lifting on the climber, when you could put it on the ground, or in space and make it 100X larger and more powerful, allowing for quicker transit to GEO or beyond, while simultaneously reducing the weight of the vessel? You would also avoid putting local pressure on the ribbon, which could wear it out or tear it at some point.
I like the idea about using water, though. I hadn't heard of it before now. That just makes the design that much simpler.
Honestly, why use climbers? Do we use climbers to go up and down regular elevators? No, because that would be stupid. We have cables attached to the tops of cars, and a counterweight. We should do the same thing with the space elevator. That has the added advantage of keeping all of the moving parts up on the space station (or on the ground, depending on your design), which prevents breakdowns in areas inaccessible repair crews.
Hell, you could probably get away with simply having a big rock somewhere past geostationary orbit tethered to a (very heavy) base station, and simply roll the whole array in and out, with the payload fixed to the ribbon. It would be kept straight by the centripetal force, despite any other forces acting on it. If you HAD to keep it PERFECTLY straight all the time, you could put boosters on the counterweight, but that hardly seems necessary.
Yes, but if cocaine is cheap, there is no need. I mean, I could set up a still can make moonshine from beer, but why would I when I can go and buy much higher quality stuff for far less than the cost of the materials?
If you have access to cheap, safe, and high quality drugs, there is no need to make it in home laboratories.
Cocaine isn't much worse than alcohol in terms of behavior changes. Legalize it, and those seeking hard drugs will use it (or heroine) rather than the highly dangerous stuff like meth, or the highly addictive stuff like crack.
What you are advocating is like relegalizing beer, schnapps, and vodka in emergencies because of the bad reputation that bathtub gin has. Legalize them all, and people will use the best stuff (much like gin drinkers today don't make stuff in their bathtubs with methanol).
I'd like to see something to back that up. I can't imagine ANY nation paying another to have their troops sited on their sovereign territory without compelling reason (like a border with a powerful, hostile nation lined with tanks ready to invade--not so much the case anymore).
That's because we didn't have that many people or that many cars at the time. As our population got larger, our infrastructure would have grown with it. Hell, it probably would have been a lot greener too, as trains would likely have predominated due to their inherent utility.
When did the government fix health care? All I see is a mass o intervention driving doctors away from practice. Fire and police protection are local and are not paid for by income tax.
You are misguided and ill-educated. Give a study of Austrian economics, and you will see that common sense does in fact prevail over the long term.
A better water based analogy would be a company or the municipal government owning the pipes, and leasing space to water companies. The innovation can come from the purification (how to make the water clean for less). This would impact prices as your water bill would consist of pipe lease rates+cost of water inputs. The former is pretty much constant, while the latter is variable based on the technology used.
Municipal water isn't very good overall because it doesn't deal well with shortages. They just limit total usage, rather than making it more expensive. In a free market, if someone wants to have a green lawn in the middle of a drought, they can, but it will cost them. It may seem superfluous, but there may be cases where water usage directly impacts profits (industry comes to mind).
Electricity could work much the same way. One party owns the lines, while electricity companies provide the juice. Its the same with sewer, again, one party owns the lines, and is responsible for their maintenance, and another is responsible for treatment of wastewater (that may be stretching it, as sewer usage isn't easily metered, and people can push all kinds of poisonous crap (lol) down the toilet).
From where I stand, it seems that the absolute best that a monopoly can do is get close to what would happen in a free market system. Anything else leads to waste and malinvestment.
You can't just break up a huge monopolistic corporation into smaller monopolistic corporations. That wouldn't make any sense (and didn't, as with your example). There must be competition, and it WOULD work in this case, since there are so many different ways of serving internet content (cable, DSL, wireless, etc).
The very most the government should do is seize the infrastructure and lease it out to companies on a competitive basis, although privately held infrastructure would be better. Maybe that's the way to go, grant one company the right to build infrastructure within a given area, and that company leases the bandwidth to ISPs in big blocks, which they would use to provide access to their customers. then you can regulate those who hold the infrastructure without trampling the first amendment.
That's pretty interesting, but I would think that that would create a strong evolutionary pressure on the squirrels to get smarter and remember where ALL of their acorns are. The ones who remembered would have an advantage during the sparse times.
TV stations and utilities are two very different beasts.
Most ISPs will end up going out of business as the government backed monopoly steals their market share. Once the government creates a monopoly, that market is essentially closed to competition, even if they open it back up at a later date. Sure, you might have a few providers targeting high end (commercial) users, but you and I will be out of luck, unless you want to pay $120/month for satellite.
The private sector doesn't really run the healthcare industry. It is up to its eyeballs in government regulation and intervention. Already, many doctors are wanting to leave. There is almost no-one willing to be a general practitioner. This is all because of paperwork forced on them by government backed corporations and governmental and semi governmental organizations.
There isn't an industry in the USA that isn't covered in the greasy fingerprints of the government. If they get more control, things will probably only get worse, as they will never force the (government created) corporate monopolies away from the public feeding trough.
Yes, but most companies don't have the ability to take your money at gunpoint and do whatever they want with it. If you don't pay, you get killed or put into a cage for a long period of time.
The problem here is that government has the ability to enforce it's will with deadly force, where private entities do not. It is best not to have the guys with guns involved in every aspect of your life, because you start to look an awful lot like a slave.
Or we could BREAK the monopolies and let the free market handle it. Stop showing favoritism to big corporations, and the little guys will outperform them most of the time.
Who cares what the report would say? The MOST it can save is their total budget, which is miniscule compared to their current spending (which isn't doing a damn thing to help anybody except for a few fat-cats, and postponing and worsening the pain for the average worker).
If you want to cut spending in a significant manner, pull our troops from abroad back home. That's not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but places like Germany, Japan, and Korea. Does Germany really need our help defending itself anymore? Come on...
Ummm, we had roads and police before a national income tax was instated. In fact, a good freeway system wasn't built until nearly 40 years after the income tax was instated. Police existed before that, and they don't recieve that much funding from the federal level anyways.
What we have now is a gigantic, ever expanding bureaucracy that doesn't really do much, which amounts to a massive misallocation of resources. Hell, as the owner of a business, I have had to hire a bloody bureaucrat (think Hermes Conrad) to handle compliance issues, even though 100% of my business is conducted in-state.
The government can't fix anything well. The only thing it does is force everyone to do what some politician THINKS they ought to do. The income tax, along with the federal reserve act, have basically destroyed the American free market. What we had for years was a semi-fascist system with privatized bank profits and socialized bank losses. Now we are moving into an all-out fascist (or as Mussolini put it: corporatist) economic system. Obama might lead us out of it, but he is likely to take us to a socialist system.
The takeaway message is, big government, along with government granted and enforced monopolies, lead to a misallocation of resources, and stifle economic growth. We saw that in the Great Depression, and we will see that over the next (few?) decades, with what will likely be known as the Greater Depression.
Honestly, you're the one that needs to grow up. Maybe give a study of Austrian economics, members of whose school have predicted every major movement of the economy well in advance over the last century.
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I thought that so called "chi" was actually just electrical impulses and that the "chi flow diagrams" roughly match up to nerve diagrams? Is this not the case. I never put much stock in it, so I never investigated. I'm not sure what claims are made by chiropractors, but when I hurt my back as a boy (15 years old) and couldn't walk without unbearable amounts of pain, a trip to the family chiropractor fixed me up. The "cracking" relieved the pain enough so that I could walk unassisted. Unfortunately he died a couple of years ago, so I can't call him to ask him about his work. It seems like realigning the bones and major nerves could help with pain, but I don't think you could really make any claims beyond that. I don't know, I only went a few times.
Afterwards, reporters could not be reached for comment on the lack of comments from the researchers.
Right, because there have been so many new nuclear reactors built in the last thirty years.
If it weren't for the DoE, we'd probably get 50%+ of our energy from nuclear now, and we'd be reprocessing our spent fuel rods, giving us an unending energy supply for the next 10000 odd years.
Instead we're going to war for oil and choking on CO2. Good job, Big Gubamint!
Yeah, I bought Al's because he needed the money to pay his electric bill.
Well, one need not limit themselves to having only one climber going up at a time. You may only be shedding a few hundred yards of material for each launch. I don't know about the QA parts, but I think they could probably come up with a continuous production method, especially given that each piece may only need to be a few hundred yards long, and then coupled to the payloads. I'd have to leave it to the engineers to work that out, though.
As to the other problem, one of the first payloads to go up a space elevator will generally be another space elevator, just for situations like that. It's also possible to have one (or more) permanent tether(s) and one (or more) for payloads. I could envision one space complex servicing a dozen elevators.
It's better to have a single obstacle (so long as it can be overcome) rather than a bunch of them. Keep it simple (stupid). It is likely going to be a lot easier to develop a method to create ultra-high tensile strength materials than it is going to be to create a 100% reliable climber that can go through 100 miles of atmosphere, and another 22,000 miles to GEO without breaking down. THAT sounds like an impossible task to me. I can't even imagine the material requirements for such a system, nevermind the weight.
There wouldn't really be a need to place the entire mass of the counterweight at the end of the ribbon. You could probably use rollers to keep it at the same orbit (slightly above GEO) while the ribbon stays straight and goes out into space. Hell, if you didn't want to do that, you could just send up a climber with a new counterweight and cut the end of the cable when it gets out there, flinging off the older part of the ribbon into space. If it becomes a simple thing to produce large amounts of ribbon material, that might end up being a nice, cheap way to go (lifting 100K tons of material while sacrificing $30million of ribbon and counterweight). That would eliminate the need for the powerful "reeling" mechanism on the ground, as it would only go up (in fact, you could use it to generate electricity--there's a hell of a force pulling upwards), and it would work out to requiring only a slightly stronger ribbon. Depending on the amount of electricity it produced, it could well pay for itself.
Kites are held up by wind. Space elevators are held up by centripetal force. That's like comparing a submarine to a space station. A better analogy would be to try taking a piece of string with something attached to the end, and whirl it around your head. Now, what would be the easiest way to move something from your hand out to some orbit around your head? You could either a. build a crawler that could break down before it reaches the end, leaving you totally boned, and that would have to be pretty small, so as not to damage the string, while still holding the climbing machinery, or b. attach the payload to the string, and let out more length, which removes the extra weight from the climber, and allows you to make it larger without risking damage to the string. Hell, you could send up a payload almost as large as the counterweight on the end, if your string is strong enough. You are now limited ONLY by the tensile strength of the string and your ability to attach a weight to it.
As to the pulley system idea, it's a bit more complex. There would probably actually be THREE ribbons rather than two. One with the payload, one with a counterweight, and one that would remain fixed (no climbers--except maybe small ones for repair), anchoring the whole thing to the Earth.
Then why don't we use that amazingly simple technology for building elevators? Why on Earth would you want to put the machinery that is doing the lifting on the climber, when you could put it on the ground, or in space and make it 100X larger and more powerful, allowing for quicker transit to GEO or beyond, while simultaneously reducing the weight of the vessel? You would also avoid putting local pressure on the ribbon, which could wear it out or tear it at some point.
I like the idea about using water, though. I hadn't heard of it before now. That just makes the design that much simpler.
..a space escalator can never break, it can only become space stairs.
Honestly, why use climbers? Do we use climbers to go up and down regular elevators? No, because that would be stupid. We have cables attached to the tops of cars, and a counterweight. We should do the same thing with the space elevator. That has the added advantage of keeping all of the moving parts up on the space station (or on the ground, depending on your design), which prevents breakdowns in areas inaccessible repair crews.
Hell, you could probably get away with simply having a big rock somewhere past geostationary orbit tethered to a (very heavy) base station, and simply roll the whole array in and out, with the payload fixed to the ribbon. It would be kept straight by the centripetal force, despite any other forces acting on it. If you HAD to keep it PERFECTLY straight all the time, you could put boosters on the counterweight, but that hardly seems necessary.
Yes, but if cocaine is cheap, there is no need. I mean, I could set up a still can make moonshine from beer, but why would I when I can go and buy much higher quality stuff for far less than the cost of the materials?
If you have access to cheap, safe, and high quality drugs, there is no need to make it in home laboratories.
Cocaine isn't much worse than alcohol in terms of behavior changes. Legalize it, and those seeking hard drugs will use it (or heroine) rather than the highly dangerous stuff like meth, or the highly addictive stuff like crack.
What you are advocating is like relegalizing beer, schnapps, and vodka in emergencies because of the bad reputation that bathtub gin has. Legalize them all, and people will use the best stuff (much like gin drinkers today don't make stuff in their bathtubs with methanol).
I see you're new to Soviet America.
I'd like to see something to back that up. I can't imagine ANY nation paying another to have their troops sited on their sovereign territory without compelling reason (like a border with a powerful, hostile nation lined with tanks ready to invade--not so much the case anymore).
That's because we didn't have that many people or that many cars at the time. As our population got larger, our infrastructure would have grown with it. Hell, it probably would have been a lot greener too, as trains would likely have predominated due to their inherent utility.
When did the government fix health care? All I see is a mass o intervention driving doctors away from practice. Fire and police protection are local and are not paid for by income tax.
You are misguided and ill-educated. Give a study of Austrian economics, and you will see that common sense does in fact prevail over the long term.
A better water based analogy would be a company or the municipal government owning the pipes, and leasing space to water companies. The innovation can come from the purification (how to make the water clean for less). This would impact prices as your water bill would consist of pipe lease rates+cost of water inputs. The former is pretty much constant, while the latter is variable based on the technology used.
Municipal water isn't very good overall because it doesn't deal well with shortages. They just limit total usage, rather than making it more expensive. In a free market, if someone wants to have a green lawn in the middle of a drought, they can, but it will cost them. It may seem superfluous, but there may be cases where water usage directly impacts profits (industry comes to mind).
Electricity could work much the same way. One party owns the lines, while electricity companies provide the juice. Its the same with sewer, again, one party owns the lines, and is responsible for their maintenance, and another is responsible for treatment of wastewater (that may be stretching it, as sewer usage isn't easily metered, and people can push all kinds of poisonous crap (lol) down the toilet).
From where I stand, it seems that the absolute best that a monopoly can do is get close to what would happen in a free market system. Anything else leads to waste and malinvestment.
You can't just break up a huge monopolistic corporation into smaller monopolistic corporations. That wouldn't make any sense (and didn't, as with your example). There must be competition, and it WOULD work in this case, since there are so many different ways of serving internet content (cable, DSL, wireless, etc).
The very most the government should do is seize the infrastructure and lease it out to companies on a competitive basis, although privately held infrastructure would be better. Maybe that's the way to go, grant one company the right to build infrastructure within a given area, and that company leases the bandwidth to ISPs in big blocks, which they would use to provide access to their customers. then you can regulate those who hold the infrastructure without trampling the first amendment.
That's pretty interesting, but I would think that that would create a strong evolutionary pressure on the squirrels to get smarter and remember where ALL of their acorns are. The ones who remembered would have an advantage during the sparse times.
Obviously all we need to do is drop an ever-larger chunk of ice into the ocean every now and then. That'll fix the problem.
FOREVER!
TV stations and utilities are two very different beasts.
Most ISPs will end up going out of business as the government backed monopoly steals their market share. Once the government creates a monopoly, that market is essentially closed to competition, even if they open it back up at a later date. Sure, you might have a few providers targeting high end (commercial) users, but you and I will be out of luck, unless you want to pay $120/month for satellite.
The private sector doesn't really run the healthcare industry. It is up to its eyeballs in government regulation and intervention. Already, many doctors are wanting to leave. There is almost no-one willing to be a general practitioner. This is all because of paperwork forced on them by government backed corporations and governmental and semi governmental organizations.
There isn't an industry in the USA that isn't covered in the greasy fingerprints of the government. If they get more control, things will probably only get worse, as they will never force the (government created) corporate monopolies away from the public feeding trough.
Yes, but most companies don't have the ability to take your money at gunpoint and do whatever they want with it. If you don't pay, you get killed or put into a cage for a long period of time.
The problem here is that government has the ability to enforce it's will with deadly force, where private entities do not. It is best not to have the guys with guns involved in every aspect of your life, because you start to look an awful lot like a slave.
Or we could BREAK the monopolies and let the free market handle it. Stop showing favoritism to big corporations, and the little guys will outperform them most of the time.
Who cares what the report would say? The MOST it can save is their total budget, which is miniscule compared to their current spending (which isn't doing a damn thing to help anybody except for a few fat-cats, and postponing and worsening the pain for the average worker).
If you want to cut spending in a significant manner, pull our troops from abroad back home. That's not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but places like Germany, Japan, and Korea. Does Germany really need our help defending itself anymore? Come on...
Ummm, we had roads and police before a national income tax was instated. In fact, a good freeway system wasn't built until nearly 40 years after the income tax was instated. Police existed before that, and they don't recieve that much funding from the federal level anyways.
What we have now is a gigantic, ever expanding bureaucracy that doesn't really do much, which amounts to a massive misallocation of resources. Hell, as the owner of a business, I have had to hire a bloody bureaucrat (think Hermes Conrad) to handle compliance issues, even though 100% of my business is conducted in-state.
The government can't fix anything well. The only thing it does is force everyone to do what some politician THINKS they ought to do. The income tax, along with the federal reserve act, have basically destroyed the American free market. What we had for years was a semi-fascist system with privatized bank profits and socialized bank losses. Now we are moving into an all-out fascist (or as Mussolini put it: corporatist) economic system. Obama might lead us out of it, but he is likely to take us to a socialist system.
The takeaway message is, big government, along with government granted and enforced monopolies, lead to a misallocation of resources, and stifle economic growth. We saw that in the Great Depression, and we will see that over the next (few?) decades, with what will likely be known as the Greater Depression.
Honestly, you're the one that needs to grow up. Maybe give a study of Austrian economics, members of whose school have predicted every major movement of the economy well in advance over the last century.