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#476 Re: Not So Free Chat » The Chinese economy is set to implode... » 2016-12-05 22:35:20
I make this prediction based upon a number of lines of evidence.
1. China now has one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world, some 250%, and rising fast.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 … ent-expert2. Chinese coal production appears to have peaked in 2014/2015. This provides 80% of the non-transport energy supply for the domestic economy.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/06/20/c … s-problem/3. Chinese oil production has peaked and appears to be declining at 4% per year.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-decl … 14721223934. Saudia oil production now appears to have plateaud, despite a 35% increase in drilling rates in the past couple of years. Saudi oil exports are falling fast as domestic consumption growth is 7% per year.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/co … 1895380679These facts, taken together suggest that a perfect storm is approaching for China. To keep its exports competitive, the Rembini is kept at artificially low values. That worked a treat as long as the Chinese had abundant low-cost domestic energy sources. As the country's energy imports increase rapidly, a weak currency will tend to fuel inflation. A stronger currency would impact upon the competitiveness of exports, which account for something like 70% of China's GDP. Higher inflation would put pressure on the government to raise wages. Caught between this and an already high level of government debt, investment in infrastructure and industry will be squeezed, sapping economic growth.
In a vain attempt to hold off domestic inflation, Chinese leaders are likely to draw down on their huge foreign exchange reserves. The result would be downward pressure on the value of the dollar, which would tend to push up the price of importsled commodities even further, as most are dollar traded. Against this backdrop, the fall in Saudi production suggests that global oil production is likely to come under increasing strain in years ahead. That suggests higher oil prices on global markets. Good news for US shale producers. Lousy news for just about everyone else.
When China hits this crisis it will be a re-run of the 2008 Great Depression. The difference is that we faced that recession with far lower debt levels than we have now. In the longer term, the weaker dollar and Chinese turmoil will mean tyat Trump can probably make good on his promise of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. The same factor will increase the price of consumer goods. On balance, the US will fare better than most. A weaker China is likely to turn to Russia for more and more of its energy. With higher global oil prices, Russia will be less effected by sanctions and will become more of a threat to Eastern Europe than it is already. China will be its ally.
Does Russia want that? We have time to hand out the nukes to Eastern European countries. Ukraine gets some, so does Poland, the Baltic Republics and so on! Russia gains nothing from a nuclear war, and also Putin will be missing his greatest asset, Barack Obama as President. We simply need a US President to stand up to Putin and say to him, "If you do X, we will do Y!"
#477 Re: Not So Free Chat » NAFTA nation for lack of a better name » 2016-12-05 22:27:44
The Alaskan oil pipeline has leaked many times and that is what they fear.....
thousands of gallons of crude oil to spill onto the frozen tundra in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay
here is another time: BP pipeline leaks oily mixture onto Alaskan tundra
The pipeline system presents major environmental and design challenges. It crosses more than 800 rivers and streams, three mountain ranges, and three major active faults. Three-quarters of it traverses fragile permafrost. It is built in zigzag fashion to allow for expansion and contraction during temperature changes as well as movement from possible earthquakes.
So adding more length to a pipeline does not make it worse....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudhoe_Bay_oil_spill
Pipeline vs a railroad, which is more dangerous? Do you want railroad cars crossing that same country, containing crude oil? What if one derails, what if it explodes or spills its contents on the ground? What if people die in the accident?
#478 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-05 22:24:55
Here is the run down on Petraeus and hillary for comparison.
Retired Army general David Petraeus, who stepped down as CIA chief amid the scandal of an extramarital affair and pleaded guilty to divulging classified information. He admitted to spilling a massive amount of sensitive information to Broadwell and lying to FBI agents about it. Petraeus wasn’t sloppy with classified information. He purposely gave it away to his lover and biographer and sought to cover that up by lying to federal investigators, according to the plea deal. Petraeus delivered to Broadwell eight black books containing classified and unclassified notes he took during meetings, conferences and briefings he took as a military commander. The notebooks he forwarded contained a trove of the nation’s most guarded secrets, including secret code words, the names of covert operatives, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, and discussions at the highest levels of the national security establishment, including the president. The federal court levied a fine of $100,000 against him, $60,000 more than prosecutors had sought, and placed him on probation in the plea deal.This what everyone is mad about with Hillary as she did the same thing as Petraeus which is “unlawfully and knowingly” removed classified materials and kept them in unauthorized locations. His was in notebooks and her's was on a privae email server.
In recent months, Petraeus' case has become a rallying point for both sides in the roiling debate over Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server found to contain classified information.In the current controversy over Clinton's use of a private email server, her critics have often described her actions as far more serious than Petraeus'. They argue that her receipt and transmission on an unsecure system of emails now deemed classified may have allowed foreign governments or hackers to gain access to American government secrets. Some observers have noted that the public charges against Petraeus only indicated that he shared classified information with Broadwell, who had a security clearance but appeared to lack the required need-to-know. Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
How about we make a deal? If Clinton goes to jail, Petraeus goes to jail, if Clinton is pardoned, then so to is Petraeus. If Clinton gets a "Get out of Jail Free" card, then so does Petraeus! We can't have "Justice" work one way for Democrats and another way for Republicans, now can we!
There’s also the difference of intent; Petraeus knew the information contained classified information; it’s unclear whether Hillary did. (However, the statutes being looked at in Clinton’s case required either intent or gross negligence, according to Comey.) Comey did say a few of the emails in the Clinton case had classified markers but others did not; however, he also said in his statement that someone in Clinton’s position should have known better and that she was extremely careless.
While the email server could have been hacked as others say it was not, but for those that are of governement service there servers have been hacked. So whom is the one's that should be punished for those hacks......
I'd say we give Hillary a break, she can retire like all other first ladies with her husband instead of going to jail, we avoid the partisan Rancor, and in exchange David Petraeus gets another chance too. One reason I'm suspicious is this whole affair occurred under Obama, the justice system got all screwed up and corrupted, so lets make clean break, both get second chances, we let bygones be bygones, and we'll let Trump decide who should be the secretary of state based on qualifications.
#479 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-05 22:15:52
We are past the point where it matters how good Trump looks compared to Hillary. Before the election, keeping Hillary out of power was one of Trump's biggest saving graces. For all his faults, at least he wasn't her. She lost the election and whatever she might have done is an irrelevance to all but a few dusty political historians. She is about as important to us now as Michael Dukakis was in 1989. In a few years she will be forgotten.
Now, we cannot excuse any problems there may be with Trump just because there could have been a bigger turd in the Whitehouse. What he does after 20th January matters enormously, peoples lives will be made or broken by his decisions and a lot of people could die if he makes the wrong decisions. It may be that the concerns I raised are unjustified and he has a cunning masterplan. I hope so. How he deals with Russia will define how his presidency is remembered and whether half the people reading this site are still alive in 10 years time.
You talk about 'giving' Putin a piece of Ukraine. Does nothing about that not sound eerily familiar to you? 78 years ago a British prime minister brokered just such a deal with a German imperialist. It is remembered as the 1938 Appeasement. We all know what happened just 1 year later.
I'm talking a trade, Putin doesn't get it for free! One possible price is Ukraine gets nukes in exchange for letting Russia keep the part it took. If Ukraine gets nukes, Russia dare not take any more, after all Russia violated its agreement, therefore Ukraine gets nukes, and all things go back to normal between Russia and the West, Russia has to accept a nuclear Ukraine, it gets its warm water port it always wanted without paying rent, and we can put an end to this cold war. Is that really such a bad deal? The way you negotiate a piece is you have each side give up something and each side gain something, so neither side goes away humiliated and seeking revenge.
Or Russia can simply give back the land and say Sorry!
#480 Terraformation » Terraforming Race: Mars vs Venus » 2016-12-05 22:09:35
- Tom Kalbfus
- Replies: 26
Mars and Venus have interesting attributes, both have pluses and minuses.
Mars lacks nitrogen, Venus has more than enough
Venus lacks water, Mars has more
Mars does not recycle its crust, Venus has an active geology with volcanism
Mars has a near 24-hour day, Venus has a slow retrograde rotation
Mars has strengths, Venus has strengths.
If there was a contest, which planet can we terraform first, which one would cross the finish line first?
Where should we place the finish line? I think ultimately Venus can get more Earthlike than Mars, because it has a greater mass, and a more Earthlike gravity. Mars can maybe be made habitable sooner than Venus, depending on which standard of habitability we hold. Both projects will take longer than a single human generation to complete, barring miracles such as nanotechnology.
#481 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-05 22:01:03
Methane would probably combust over time, even in trace amounts, it won't stay in an atmosphere that contains substantial amounts of oxygen. You will have to keep on making more! I'd say, maybe we could start with an atmosphere like that and keep on throwing globs of liquid nitrogen at it contained within water ice capsules, and we give it a nice reflective coating, so the Sun won't warm it up and cause it to explode before it impacts Mars. I think nitrogen allows for more permanency, and besides, what good is the nitrogen if it stays on Titan? That is a waste of good nitrogen to be an atmosphere over a frozen world. This leads to an interesting idea for another thread.
#482 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-05 21:33:43
Tom Kalbfus wrote:What's the challenge to global warming? All we have to do is block sunlight!
That is kind of the point I was trying to make. Solving the global warming problem is abount a million times easier than importing an atmosphere to Mars. Yet we don't appear able to do it, even though there are technical solutions. Basically, human beings cannot look beyond their own noses and stump up the comparatively modest sums of money necessarily to solve this problem. They would rather lie to themselves and ignore reality. Apparently, when we move to Mars human beings will become completely different creatures.?
One word: Nanotechnology!
#483 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-05 13:35:52
I would forget about making nitrogen using nucleosynethis. A 1-GWe fusion reactor will burn through about 100kg of fuel per year. To make enough nitrogen from other elements to make up for Mars' shortfall in a timescale that matters to human beings, would release enough energy to melt the planet. Good luck affording it too. Oh and by the way, the sharp reduction in binding energy for elements beyond helium would make synthesis of nitrogen a very difficult task for fusion reactors. Kind of like trying to heat your house by burning wet grass.
Importing nitrogen from other planets is at least technically achievable. But we are talking a lot of material, like moving a sizable chunk of the mass of Earth's atmosphere from Titan or some other body to Mars. Whether that will ever be affordable is an open question. And you would be paying huge sums of money for something that might improve the planet's habitability centuries hence. Kind of like the challenge we face with mitigating global warming today. And likely to face the same kind of problems. No one wants to pay for it.
What's the challenge to global warming? All we have to do is block sunlight!
remember these? These towers were to be 20 kilometer high, which is above most of the weather. What if we built a bunch of these at even interval all over the planet, just as I suggested for Venus, and created clouds over the Earth to reflect sunlight back into space? That ought to cool the planet! But as I look out my window, it just snowed, it doesn't seem to be getting substantially warmer, so I think the need to construct these towers all over the planet isn't there yet, but just remember we could if we have to, we might not need to, so I suggest we don't impoverish ourselves with drastic measures to combat global warming that might not work, such as deindustrialization to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. if Global Warming is happening anyway, we might still need to build those towers, making ourselves poor is not he way to get ready for that.
As for Transporting nitrogen off of Titan, its a lot easier than getting it off of Venus. The escape velocity for Titan is 8,658 feet/s (2,639 m/s), the escape velocity for Venus is 33,793 feet/s (10,300 m/s), you need 15.7 times the energy to accelerate a given amount of mass to Venus escape velocity as you do from Titan, That means for every kilogram of nitrogen you lift out of Venus, you could hurl almost 16 kilograms out of Titan.
Titan has an average orbital velocity of 5.57 km/sec at a distance of 1221870 km, Saturn has a radius of 58,232 km and a mass of 5.6836×10^26 kg, The gravitational constant is 6.674×10 N⋅m²/kg²
Orbital Speed is Vo=square root(G*m/r) = square root(6.674×10^-11 N⋅m²/kg² * 5.6836×10^26 kg/1.221870*10^9 m)=5571.76 m/sec
Escape velocity is Ve=square root(2*G*m/r) = square root(2*6.674×10^-11 N⋅m²/kg² * 5.6836×10^26 kg/1.221870*10^9 m)=7879.65 m/sec.
The difference is 2307.9 meters per second, adding that to the escape velocity of TItan we get 4946.9 meters per second to escape the combined gravitational influence of both Saturn and Titan, less than half the escape velocity of Venus, So you can get approximately 4 kg off of Titan and free of Saturn's gravitational influence for every 1 kg you can get off of Venus. Orbital speed is 9.69 km/s around the Sun, we need to slow this down so that it falls toward Mars.
#484 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-05 11:29:39
I'm confused, what do you need Beryllium-10 for? To make nitrogen? Might it be easier just to import some from Titan? What if we packaged frozen Nitrogen within a sphere of water ice and sent it on a collision course with Mars?
#485 Re: Not So Free Chat » Election Meddling » 2016-12-05 09:06:05
Tom Kalbfus wrote:Where is Hillary Clinton now? Where is Obama now? At least Petraeus did not give the Russians nuclear weapons! Who are more our enemies, the Russians or the Iranians? I think we can make a deal with the Russians, we just have to make sure they pay a price for whatever land they take, and we tell them where to take the land from! If Turkey misbehaves, we could give the Russians a call, say, "Hey, would you like some land?" This threat will keep Turkey from going on any Jihads against the West. We could arm Ukraine with nuclear weapons, and if Russia complains, we just tell them, "If you don't want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons, just give back the land, or pay Ukraine for the land you took! That is all! he agreement was that you respect Ukraine's borders in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. You did not respect Ukraine's borders, so therefore there is a price to pay! Now you can give back the land and we can forget about nuking up Ukraine, how about it?"
Tom,
If this allegation against Petraeus is true, then it raises serious concerns about the judgement of the president elect.
Compared to Hillary Clinton? If you question Trump's Judgment, then why don't you see if you can get into the hotel and resort business and do a better job than he is. Do you think also that you can swim faster than Michael Phelps? Lets see you try!
In my opinion Trump has some admirable qualities, he is a nationalist that wishes to restore his country to greatness and he is not part of the den of traitors and thieves that have plagued the western world for as long as I can remember. But he is also politically inexperienced.
That is why he won the election.
A lot of what he has to say (about global warming for example) make him sound downright naïve.
Do you know what a tautology is? Something that is assumed to be true, Trump is making no such assumption, and also it got him elected. Trump is not going to abandon his base, when it got him elected! The choices are:
1) We can take drastic action now with our imperfect knowledge and technology or
2) We can do something better later when our technology improves or
3) Maybe we don't need to do anything because there isn't really a problem.
A lot of the scientists who push global warming are Democrats, and they have the Media on their side, and te Media just did everything in their power to prevent Donald Trump from getting elected, but he got elected anyway, so Trump is not too friendly with them right now.
There is a light-year of difference between a nationalist and an imperialist.
When was the last time we had an imperialist as president? was it?
Thomas Jefferson?
Andrew Jackson?
James Monroe?
or how about Ulysses S Grant?
Where would our country be without these people?
There people made our country bigger.
A nationalist makes hard hearted decisions that ultimately serve a greater good and understands that good fences make good neighbours. A true nationalist respects the right of others to do the same. An imperialist is a different beast entirely. He may show nationalist tendencies, but ultimately he lacks any interest in the good of humanity. He does what he does without compassion or understanding and looks upon the possessions of others as resources that he can exploit, he doesn't care about the consequences for the people that live there. I suspect Trump is a nationalist, Putin is an Imperialist. A lot of people don't understand the difference between the two philosophies, that one is good, the other is evil. I suspect that Trump may not understand either and that would be exceptionally dangerous when dealing with Russia.
Achieving better relations with the Russians is a laudable goal and one that I hope we achieve. But any sort of capitulation to these people, any weakening or perceived weakening of defences in Eastern Europe, risks starting WW3. An imperialist would see it as permission to take. When dealing with Putin, you need an iron fist in a silk glove.
What you do is give Putin a range of options, if he wants a piece of Ukraine, give him a price he can pay to have it, make it clear to him, his country is going to pay a price no matter what it is, and include among those possible options giving back the land he stole
#486 Re: Not So Free Chat » NAFTA nation for lack of a better name » 2016-12-05 08:44:54
Tom,
You are correct there are no perfect solutions. And perhaps a pipeline across their land is the best solution, when all detriments and benefits are considered. The problem arises when they get the detriments and you get the benefits. I am sure BP didn't intend to contaminate the Gulf of Mexico with oil and were very sorry when it happened. But it did. These people don't want those sorts of consequences for what should be understandable reasons. Their concerns should be addressed and a compromise reached, they should not simply be trampled upon just because big money happens to be involved.
Well is that the shortest route this pipeline could take? Just wondering, because if we divert around the reservation, and that was the case, we'd have to make the pipeline longer, a longer pipeline has more surface area compared to he volume of oil, and thus a greater chance of leakage. Does someone else deserve to have polluted drinking water more than the Indians, and if we make he pipeline longer, there will more likely be a spill, but there is even more likely to be a spill if we use railroad cars to ship the oil, so really the safest way to ship the oil is through a pipeline, the whole country would benefit from cheaper oil, if the Indians don't like it, perhaps they can be bought out, if not there is something called eminent domain. Can we address the Indian's concerns without funding terrorists? The question is are they really worried about the water supply or are they working for he Arabs or the Russians to set up roadblocks to our energy independence? Solar power is nice but its not ready, fusion isn't ready, wind power has its own NIMBY problem and its more expensive, Nuclear power is a problem too in that regard. If the Indians are really worried, we can buy them out and they can live someplace else, is that really a problem?
#487 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-05 08:35:41
How many examples of earthlike planets do we have other than earth? Also Mars is going to need a thick atmosphere to provide for a greenhouse effect, the gas used to bulk up Mars' atmosphere can't be oxygen, you are not going to want to have 1 bar of oxygen, it can't be carbon-dioxide, as too much carbon dioxide would be toxic to us. Nitrogen s what we evolved under, so Nitrogen is what we'll have to get. Pluto has nitrogen as well, but maybe it is more convenient to obtain it from an atmosphere rather than the ground.
#488 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-05 03:38:49
Where is Hillary Clinton now? Where is Obama now? At least Petraeus did not give the Russians nuclear weapons! Who are more our enemies, the Russians or the Iranians? I think we can make a deal with the Russians, we just have to make sure they pay a price for whatever land they take, and we tell them where to take the land from! If Turkey misbehaves, we could give the Russians a call, say, "Hey, would you like some land?" This threat will keep Turkey from going on any Jihads against the West. We could arm Ukraine with nuclear weapons, and if Russia complains, we just tell them, "If you don't want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons, just give back the land, or pay Ukraine for the land you took! That is all! he agreement was that you respect Ukraine's borders in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. You did not respect Ukraine's borders, so therefore there is a price to pay! Now you can give back the land and we can forget about nuking up Ukraine, how about it?"
#489 Re: Not So Free Chat » NAFTA nation for lack of a better name » 2016-12-05 03:17:24
Do you think the oil companies want to spill oil or sell it? Do you think they would intentionally build a leaky pipeline so they would lose some of that oil for the purpose of polluting someone's drinking water? Also consider the number of people that would be affected by an accidental oil spill versus the number of people that would be affected by higher oil prices and the number of people that would be affected by the terrorist attacks financed by those higher oil prices. Not many people live in the affected region and that is only if the pipes leak. I am all for defeating OPEC. I don't want to pay people for praying to Allah as part of the cost for getting my gasoline. I don't want anything to do with the Middle East, and their crazy fanatical hate filled ways, and I don't want to pay these people for oil, I dn't want the price of oil going up to benefit them! Anything we can do to bring the price of oil down, we should be doing, if the Native Americans are afraid of oil spills they can move, there is plenty of land to either side of the oil pipeline that won't be affected in case the pipeline spills, there are more people who would be affected by terrorist attacks or a higher price of gasoline. I'd rather pay people to drill for oil in Canada than to pay for people to pray to Allah, it is as simple as that!
Also the alternative to an oil pipeline is a fleet of tanker trucks shuttling back and forth from the oil fields of Canada to the refineries in America. Do you remember the television show Ice Road Truckers? Each one of those trucks has a chance of having an accident and spilling their load of oil, this is inevitable, because there are a lot of trucks on the road, or in the case of ice road truckers on the ice, These trucks move at around 60 miles per hour, and everyday there is an accident on the highway, several in fact, I wake up each morning to find several highways blocked by various accidents, now what if some of those accidents involve oil tanker trucks? A pipeline only spills if it leaks, and a pipeline does not leak every day, if it does leak, someone fixes it. Pipelines spill less oil per amount shipped than a fleet of oil tanker trucks moving the same amount of oil! Do the Indians want a fleet of oil tanker trucks moving through their area, having accidents, and spilling their oil?
Everything has a price of a cost, I figure the Indians who are so afraid of oil spills can move, and that is a lesser cost than a city being nuked by a bomb financed by oil sales from the Middle East.
#490 Re: Terraformation » Mars Needs Nitrogen » 2016-12-04 20:58:13
What is the best source of Nitrogen for Mars? Is it Titan?
#491 Re: Not So Free Chat » NAFTA nation for lack of a better name » 2016-12-04 20:56:36
I hear OPEC has been cutting back on production ad the price of crude is going up! You think any Arab countries will be making any donations to native American tribes in the future?
#492 Re: Not So Free Chat » Trump and the Fourth Turning » 2016-12-04 20:49:26
There is an issue that most people keep ignoring. There was a major problem growing, that no one knew how to deal with. The disparity between very rich nations vs very poor ones.
You know why there are poor nations? Bad policies lead to poverty! Nations compete with each other, and nations such s North Korea make themselves poor because the government can't stop interfering! Other countries have dictators that follow terrible policies to enrich themselves, they are not accountable to their citizens, that is why such countries are poor! In other cases you have democratically elected government that like to play "Robin Hood" to make themselves popular and get elected, the rich are driven out of the country and you are left with nothing but poor people and no jobs.
In some poor nations, people lived on $4 per month. That's right, per month. Foreign aid attempted to deal with this, but it was a drop in the bucket. And most of the aid got redirected: rich warlords used it to support their military, or reward their supporters.
I would say the warlords are just a bunch of bandits, who use their control of the military to rob and steal, and that is why they are rich, the real rich people were driven out of these countries a long time ago, because they did not want to get robbed by these warlords and their armies!
Most wars have been fought over resources. Extreme disparity between rich and poor is exactly what causes wars.
Wars are caused by people who want to seize power, they use their control over the militaries to rob people makin those they rob poor, and naturally no one wants to start a business in these countries because they will be robbed by these warlords too. The wars and the warlords create the poverty, they are motivated by greed, and they use their command over those militaries to steal and make themselves rich, since they don't produce anything, they contribute nothing to te economy and only make the country poorer!
There were raids, convoys of foreign aid were often attacked and the aid stolen. Most people didn't worry about that because that aid was supposed to help poor people in that country anyway. But there hasn't been an organized war by poor countries on rich countries. Not yet, but many analysts feared it was coming.
And they would lose big time! Wars are started by people who "smell victory" no war was ever started by somebody who thought he would lose!
But then multi-nationals decided to start moving factories to third-world countries. They didn't do this for altruistic reasons, they were being purely selfish.
Irrelevant why they did it, they are providing jobs. Most businesses I heard of were started for he purely selfish reason to accumulate wealth, that applies to Microsoft, Apple, any for profit business, and the majority of jobs come from those businesses that were started for those selfish reasons!
As one extreme example, car assembly line workers were paid $75 per hour! That's insane. Just for a factory worker, not a medical doctor or engineer or someone who spent multiple years in university getting an advanced degree. Paying for that degree is why individuals with an advanced degree are so expensive. But factory workers? So they moved factories to third world countries. They paid $30 per day. That was a major improvement over $4 per month! And the factories used the latest equipment, producing stuff for sale in our country, so manufacturing cars or laptop computers or smart phones. This was a massive technology transfer from industrial first world countries to third world, as well as massive increase in their income. People could actually afford to buy stuff.
So the brewing world war, poor vs rich, has been avoided. Politicians had no clue, this was done by greedy multi-national corporations. They didn't do it for any altruistic reason, they did it so they could pay workers $30 per day instead of $75 per hour. But the good thing is the disparity between rich nations vs poor nations is being resolved.
But that does have negative consequences. This now means workers in Canada and the US have to compete with third world countries. That drives down our wages, and takes away our jobs. We have massive job loss, so much that people now blame illegal immigrants. But it's not their fault. America uses slaves of one type or another since the 1500s. After slavery was ostensibly abolished, illegal immigrants were used for cheap labour. These were jobs so nasty, so difficult, so poorly paid that no American wanted them. So don't blame illegal immigrants. It's those outside the country who are taking your jobs.
Americans don't want slaves, and they don't want Third Worlders coming to their country and complaining about their working conditions and then demanding Revolution, and not the one of 1776, but more like the one of 1918 in Russia! You see the problem is Third Worlders eventually become citizens and they will vote in the type of people that ran their countries and made them poor in the first place. I'd rather have American companies build factories in Third World countries than to bring Third World people here to exploit! I don't think brining is slaves did a lot of good either, the slaves were better kept out or sent back to Africa! We don't want no lower classes, no serfs, peasants or whatever. France had a lot of peasants during the French Civil War and because of that, their revolution was a disaster!
I kept shaking my head at Bernie's $15/hour federal minimum wage. Most states, not just a few but most states, have laws that allow employers to pay less than federal minimum wage. Raising the federal minimum wage is meaningless when it isn't minimum. Not even close. But raising wages will result in even more employers moving operations out of the country: to Mexico or overseas.
Well maybe you heard what Trump is going to do about that!
Protectionism is one of the things that brought on the Great Depression. Closing trade is not good. But the current Global system means competing with third world nations for factory jobs. And now India has set up call centres, software development, and even I.T. support. I don't know what the solution is.
Well you know, we have no trade with Alpha Centauri, if there are any sort of intelligent creatures on any of the planets orbiting Alpha Centauri, we aren't trading with them, does that hurt the economy?
#493 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-04 20:23:38
A realistic Star Trek Style utopia would not have crewed starships. To provide everything for free to humans would require than machines do all the work. Any humans onboard starships would all be passengers.
#494 Re: Terraformation » The Moon » 2016-12-04 20:20:08
Until such time, we can freeze people. I figure we can freeze people and charge them a fee to be reconstituted on the Moon after we've completed terraforming it. Getting back to the subject, I think we can put shutters on the roof of the Moon, so that we can shut off light from the Sun when I suits us, and provide artificial lights on the ceiling above the part of the Moon facing away from the Sun.
#495 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-04 09:10:11
The flawed system, such that it is, produced a Trump victory, and now that Trump has won, and is setting up his new Administration, liberals are finding fault with the voting because it produced a Trump victory, and are trying to recount and find the extra votes to make Hillary the winner, but the recount is only in three states, there are 50 of them, so if you find the extra votes to make Hillary the President by flipping three states, what about the other 47 states? How do we know there wasn't vote fraud in California or New York to produce a Hillary victory there? Trump won in spite of the opposition of most of the press, I don't think the vote would have been as cloe as it was if it weren't for press bias, they so badly wanted Hillary to be the next president, they pulled out all the stops for her, and if everything had gone on as they wanted Hillary would be the President elect now, but is it the press that is supposed to determine who the next president is by propagandizing us into believing that Trump is terrible and Hillary is good? Are they supposed to control the information we receive so we can't make educated choices?
The Media is a monolith, it is non competitive for the most part, it speaks with one voice and it has one chosen candidate in Hillary Clinton, and it was trying to make us vote fr her by telling us what a terrible person Donald Trump is. Now Hillary is a terrible candidate, so what the press was doing was trying to steer us toward the worst candidate they supposed the Republican party could nominate, who had a realistic chance o becoming president because he is a billionaire and one he won the nomination, it tried to convince us that he was even worse than Hillary so therefore we had no choice but to vote for Hillary as terrible as she was! I don't like being railroaded! For me its very simple, Trump represents change and Hillary is more of the same failed policies of 2% economic growth or recession that got us here in the first place, so I'd rather take a risk on Trump than vote for Hillary and expect a different policy from Obama's. Things are not going satisfactory in this country, so therefore Trump is the change candidate since he represents the party that has been out of power for the past 8 years. How much change, I don't know, we'll just have to see. But the people trying to install Hillary in the White House just want power, that is all they care about, they want their jobs and their security, they don't care about the future of this country, they just want their jobs and perks, and they want things to stay the same, whether its a downward course for this country or not, and those same people want a recount, hoping that Hillary will be found to be the winner so they can keep their jobs and cozy relationship with the government, and not have to endure chance, which for them and their careers is a negative thing!
#496 Re: Terraformation » The Moon » 2016-12-04 08:48:01
elderflower wrote:But you cannot guarantee the turnover of generations if ageing is greatly extended, without introducing compulsory euthanasia. That raises all sorts of possibilities for potential power abuses.
I get the feeling that it will never be a problem. My suspicion is that human lifespan will never be much more than it is now. There are certain basic limits that we will never get over without becoming a completely different thing to what we are. Like I said, an immortal man is a paradox. He cannot be alive in any real sense.
Although technological innovation has done a spectacular job of reducing infant mortality and deaths due to infection, childbirth and industrial accidents, adult life expectancy has not increased so much in the past century as we are generally led to believe. In fact, mid Victorians who lived on whole foods and had much higher nutrient loads than we do, had about the same adult life expectancy as we do now. We die of different things, but we do not live any longer.
I am inclined to share Tom's scepticism in the reality of an immortal sole. As we learn more and more about the human brain and its workings, there is progressively less room for a sole in the essence of what a man is. There are certain types of brain injury that will change not just a man's abilities but the very essence of his character. He will be a completely different person afterwards compared to who he was before. This tells us that who we are is a function of the architecture of our brains. It is difficult to see how a soul fits into this arrangement. When that man dies, who gets to go to heaven? The man he was before or the man he became? If what we are is a function of our brains, what does the sole actually consist of? It cannot be a record of a previous existence, for non of us have such memories. It cannot be our basic character, as this too is a function of physical development. What then can it be? Are we also to believe that only human's have soles? A dog has character. A dog has emotions, can feel sad, upset, embarrassed, ashamed, contented and happy. They even have rudimentary language. Some breeds are as intelligent as a small child. Does a dog then have a sole? How far down the evolutionary scale does a creature have to go, before it stops having a sole? Does a rat have a sole? We evolved from rat-like creatures after all. Does a cockroach have a sole? How about a bacteria?
What is a soul? A soul is information, it is the way our brains are organized to make us who we are, it is not the brain cells themselves. Some people have another definition of a soul, that is a kind of ghost that we can neither see touch or feel, something that superimposes itself on our bodies and manipulates them like a puppet, the closest real thing to the religious definition of a soul is software, or information. The information needs a machine to act on otherwise it can't have real experiences, we are basically organic machines created by the random actions o the Universe, we can find ways to preserve our souls I suppose, just as we find ways to store information.
#497 Re: Terraformation » The Moon » 2016-12-04 08:30:07
elderflower wrote:Given the option of dying or of living the vast majority will surely pick the latter. I would. I want to see humans spreading beyond one planet.
Most people would. I would too. But it doesn't make immortality any less of a disaster. Look at how overpopulated our planet is already.
I am looking now, and I don't see standing room only, it is crowded if you live in a city, but most places aren't cities. Your solution for over crowding is that everybody dies, my solution is that we get off the planet. If all your interested in is maintaining one planet, then what are you doing here?
I am also inclined to believe that individual human beings are more like cells in an organism, the greater organism being society.
I don't feel like a cell in a superorganism, I feel like an individual, I don't see society as superior to the individual, I've seen society do a lot of stupid things, herd instinct doesn't always lead to the wisest course of action. Collectivization has been a disaster, and I don't view individual human beings as disposable, as some religions in the middle east has it, people sacrificing themselves for the "common good" of society is abhorrent, There have been too many suicide bomb attacks by people that want to view themselves as cells in a superorganism on a mission for God to kill a bunch of other people! And back during World War II, there were Japanese fighter pilots willing to sacrifice themselves for their Emperor. I don't think us individuals can coexist in a world with such "group think" people. A society with disposable humans that are just cogs in a great machine in society is not a society I want to live in. I don't want to be a cog or a disposable part!
We go through different stages in life, we are constantly changing, but as time goes on we become set in our ways and less adaptable.
That is because we learn from our experiences, young people are foolish and gullible, they are easily swayed by propaganda because their life experience is short and they don't know any different. Most of what a young person has learned about the world is what he has learned in school, not life experiences.
This is an inevitable result of having a living brain. It is not like a reprogrammable computer. It grows and adapts in certain ways but it is by its nature finite in its extent and longevity. Much of what we are is in our genetics. A smaller part of a man's 'soul' is defined in childhood and we progressively lose the ability to evolve our ideas and our thinking as we grow older. That is why in my opinion it is important to have a fresh generation every thirty years and the older ones to make way for them.
Our brains ages just as we do, it is assumed that if we can halt and reverse the aging process, we can do it for our brains as well, there is no reason to suppose why not.
The idea of an immortal man is something of an enigma. He cannot be human in any real sense, because beyond a certain point he cannot both grow and keep what he is with him. Do you think a 19th century man would really have the ability to adapt to the modern world in a way that would allow him to keep up with a man born afresh?
Yes, actually I do, we teach our children what they need to know to live in a 21st century society, and there are parts of this world that do not appear to be living in the 21st century, under the right circumstances they can adapt too.
His formative years would weigh him down more and more and his mind would be clogged with neural pathways that were increasingly redundant. To be effective as a man, he would in fact have to be nothing like a real human being as we would recognise it.
Not aging is not the same thing as immortality, people can still die from many causes, just not through the degradation of the human body through aging. You ever been to a nursing home? If you manage to live a long time, you get to spend the final years of your life in a nursing home, where you'll have people that will help you go to the bathroom, feed you, and comb your hair, this is the wonderful result of the aging process if you live long enough, and it is this disease that I want to see cured!
The way he reasoned and learned and adapted to the world would need to be fundamentally different. His brain could not be organic as each new wave of learning would need to overwrite part of what had come before. And organic brains do not work that way.
An immortal man could not be alive in the way we understand it. Nothing living can be immortal, as the act of being alive is the act of growing. And to be immortal presumes the ability to reach some kind of steady state, which is the antithesis of being alive. Living things are by their nature finite in both space and time. That is why we reproduce. There will never be an immortal man.
The Universe can take care of death, I just don't like to have it programmed into my cells, that is all. I don't like having to anticipate my death within the next 60 years, I want to be able to try and keep on living without my cells programmed to self-destruct after a certain number of divisions. I hope we learn enough about human cells to learn how to stop and reverse the aging process by for my body does its thing and self-destructs!
Also just let me add one more thing, for those of you who are concerned about global warming, I am skeptical about it myself, but if it were true, why should I change the way I live to combat it, if I'm going to be dead within 60 years? With bodies programmed to self destruct it is unnatural for people to think long term and plan for multiple generations. Having a finite life span prevents us from traveling to the stars, they easiest way to go there is by slow boat, but what stops us is the finite human life span. If the human life span wasn't limited, a voyage of several hundred years wouldn't be a deterrent to us. The greatest barrier to interstellar travel is time in combination with our finite human lifespan, preprogrammed into our cells to self destruct within about 100 years or so!
#498 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-03 15:52:18
SpaceNut wrote:Actually only partial jobs were kept and they still may move out of the US as there is no way to lower state taxes let alone Federal as the money needs to come from someone and it will not be the rich that could afford an increase. The other reason for being on the path to leaving has to do with manufacturing regulation, unions and wages they can not afford as profits will suffer, that is why more companies use contract agencies to pay less for wages plus taxes and by reducing full time employee counts. These things are the nature of doing business in America.
If I gave you the choice between keeping 1,000 of 2,000 American jobs or 0 American jobs, which would you rather keep?
SpaceNut wrote:As for private citizen Trump making deals as if he were president that is misrepersentation and fraudulent just not ethical to do.
By your logic, all politicians promising people things before they are sworn into office are also frauds.
Solyndra deal good, Carrier deal bad. Got it.
SpaceNut wrote:The General made poor choices and there are better out there. This is not road blocking its asking to consider others just like all of his other cabinet choices.
Care to elaborate?
I don't know anything about this general, I haven't done independent research on him, and I don't trust the opinions of the Media that is reflexively opposed to everything Trump does, I do not trust the research they do on Trump's picks. I assume Trump is an intelligent man, he is a billionaire after all, I expect that his did intelligent research on all his candidates, just as the people he hired to run his company, and that he knows what he is doing most of the time. Since he has a record of success, and I don't, I would expect that he knows what he is doing, and I give him the benefit of the doubt, while all the Media does is doubt, it tries to find negative stuff on everything Trump does!
#499 Re: Not So Free Chat » Politics » 2016-12-03 15:44:56
Actually only partial jobs were kept and they still may move out of the US as there is no way to lower state taxes let alone Federal as the money needs to come from someone and it will not be the rich that could afford an increase.
Who's money will it come from if you don't have a job? If my job goes to Mexico, I won't have an income to pay taxes on regardless of what percentage it is.
The other reason for being on the path to leaving has to do with manufacturing regulation, unions and wages they can not afford as profits will suffer, that is why more companies use contract agencies to pay less for wages plus taxes and by reducing full time employee counts. These things are the nature of doing business in America.
As for private citizen Trump making deals as if he were president that is misrepersentation and fraudulent just not ethical to do.
The General made poor choices and there are better out there. This is not road blocking its asking to consider others just like all of his other cabinet choices.
I just have the feeling that whoever fill in the blank, Trump picks, you will have a problem with, has it occurred to you that maybe Trump could be right and you might be wrong? Trump was elected after all, if you don't agree with his choices on who should fill various positions, then accept that perhaps Trump might know something that you don't, let him have his people and then judge him by the results. If you get in his way, and don't allow him to fill out his cabinet they way he wants, he could then blame you for his failures, do you want that?
#500 Re: Terraformation » The Moon » 2016-12-03 15:33:48
Tom Kalbfus wrote:louis wrote:Well unless you die young, you'll wake old, so where's the sense in that! lol I suppose we might see age reversal technology in due course, but then it would be weird to have old memories in a young body...
Still, to stay on topic - I think ashes on the moon will be attractive for sentimental reasons: a comfort for loved ones left behind to look at the Moon and know some part of them is there.
Something like that will help kickstart lunar development as you will need a permanent base to service the necropolis.
Aging is a disease that awaits a cure! That is my take on it. Why does the human body self destruct? Fin d out why and we can fix it perhaps.
Imagine what a disaster it would be if people stopped dying. Ultimately it would mean that we would have to stop having children. Isn't it better for 10,000 people to live 100 years each, than 1 man living a million years? To live forever, would mean halting evoloution. Better to accept a finite existence and let a fresh generation follow us. I don't want to live at the expense of my children.
Would you like to be a pile of ash sitting on the Moon? What do you suppose happens when you die? For me I expected to colonize space during my lifetime, I was born in 1967, and living 80 years would bring me to 2047, and while it appears that the 80 years prior to my birth was full of technological accomplishments, the 80 years following it won't see much progress at all, since nearly 50 years of it have already been spent! I figure my best chance ever to go into space would be to freeze myself, not to incinerate myself, a pile of ash can't be reconstituted as a person just by adding water! So what's the point of sending it into outer space? Humans have constructed this fantasy world of an afterlife often involving angels with wings, harps and halos, lots of people believing in variations of the afterlife have been motivated to do destructive things in the here and now, such as terrorists blowing themselves up to kill others, as part of their admission to paradise! if people can be so easily deceived, what are the chances that what we learn in church isn't just wishful thinking so we can go on living our lives to the very end of our days, with the expectation that we will go on somehow after we die? I have seen no independent evidence in the existence of a God other than what's in the Bible.
If given a choice, I'd rather not die, how about you? Do you believe what you were told in Church or what ever belief system you grew up under? What is real? Does it matter to you what is actually real rather than what your society intends for you to believe? There are many cultures in the World that believe a bunch of different stuff, they can't all be right, and how do we know that any of them are right? The point is we don't? I'd rather go on living in this world if possible, I'm learning so much stuff and every thing I learned will be gone if I die! My memories my perception will all rot away with my death, is there a soul? There is no scientific reason to believe in one, the brain explains all that we are, and if that dies, we are gone, unless you believe that the information in our brain is somehow copied by a soul. Yes it is possible, but there is no evidence for it. Everything I see in this world tells me that what we see is all there is, there is no evidence of soul duality. Why should I have fait in what one person tells me than in what another person tells me, or in what I read in scripture that was written by a fallible human being thousands of years ago? Morality is one thing, belief in an afterlife is another. I don't know if there isn't one, but I don't know if there is either! One possible afterlife is freezing yourself and then being reconstituted later, I can envision how tht might happen, this soul/heaven/hell thing is a belief system, I've seen no evidence for it, I could imagine that life is a virtual reality and that when we die, we just wake up, but there is no evidence for that either, so I don't want to take any chances that it isn't true. So yes, Aging is a disease, even if we find a cure, something else will probably kill us in the fullness of time, but if the choice is between going on living and letting my body self-destruct in the natural way, I'd rather just go on living!