While I agree with your sentiment the problem is that solar panels in populated urban areas that are perpetually blanketed by geoengeering spraying practices are not going to be nearly as efficient as ones in dedicated remote areas not being sprayed.
While you present a compelling argument, I must respectfully disagree. I may catch some flack for saying it, and many people refuse to believe it, but the U.S. is insolvent. The value of the U.S. dollar is artificially propped-up. How long do you truly believe the Russias and Chinas of the world are going to keep using greenbacks? They will feign WWIII, Israel will expand to encompass 'Greater Israel' and U.N. will formally install global government, and USD will cease to be de-facto global currency.
Insolvent you say? The US owns 45% of all global wealth (per Allianz's global wealth studies, it was ~50% pre great recession, fell to about ~39% in 2010 as the US suffered heavy asset declines, and has rebounded back to around ~45% with the recovery in the US economy, that gap is mostly the arrival of China's wealth). The US is massively solvent in fact. Furthering this point, the US is now growing as fast as China in real terms (given pretty much every credible study indicates China is at least lying about half of their growth); the US is also gaining substantially against most of Europe, as its economy continues to grow faster than Europe even with a stronger dollar. South America and most emerging markets have been thrown into near-depression status, due to the stronger dollar. The US economy is likely to enjoy a very nice 10 or 20 year run in fact.
Russia's economy is now - as of the latest 2015 numbers - 1/12th the size of the US economy. It no longer matters as a global economic power (it still matters as a global commodity player). Its economy is smaller than Canada's now.
China will continue to use greenbacks because they will never have any other choice, the same as they'll continue using Euros. The US is back to being China's biggest trade customer (with the dollar having gained so much value): that trade is mostly done in dollars and that will continue.
You're talking about public debt, which is a small fraction of all US wealth holdings (household + corporate + government), and can be trivially managed. Further, unlike a lot of countries, the US has significant spare taxing capability (it rests in the middle tier globally on taxation). The US could easily raise $200 billion in new annual income taxes on the top 25% and not miss a beat - that single move alone would handle any potential issues from the public debt cost. Or better yet: the US can constrain its spending growth (as it has been), allowing income and assets to continue to outrun the problem.
And of course the US owns the global reserve currency, which enables it to export inflation to the rest of the world as a means to reduce the domestic hit of things like QE (which is why the Eurozone's QE hasn't been as effective). When the US uses the dollar to improve its fiscal circumstances, the rest of the world foots a big part of the bill. While that's sort of like cheating, it's an advantage the US possesses that nobody else does.
A sovereign currency issuing government doesn't need to raise taxes in order to spend, and the US government only issues USD denominated "debt" in order to target the overnight interest rate. The "debt" people talk about is not a borrowing operation.
My argument rests on the fact that the US economy is the world's #2 manufacturing economy, has among the highest median incomes (and median disposable incomes), has one of the most productive economies with one of the highest GDP per capita numbers, does not have a demographic bomb going off (Europe, Japan, China), is capable of being fully self-reliant on energy (which very few nations are), has a boom coming in energy exports via natural gas, continues to have one of the most innovative and dynamic economies, is growing as fast as or faster than competing major economies, owns 45% of all global wealth, has significant spare taxing capacity, US households dramatically reduced their debt to income ratio over the last five years (while most competing economies have seen increases in that ratio), and is the global leader across numerous major industries.
You picked out the one thing that is the easy trump card: the global reserve currency makes it all that much easier for the US.
I must disagree. The US has a shortage of employable workers as evidenced by the current unemployment rate relative to wages; it has a demographic imbalance where too few young people earn enough to support resources drawn by a much larger aging population; and there is no realistic excess taxing capacity for political and economic reasons outside the scope of this reply.
You're wrong. I believe you're referring to this statistic: "... 0.7% of the global adult population, and they account for 45% of global wealth"[1] The U.S., ON PAPER, holds about 1/4(25.40%) of global wealth not half. [2]
Allianz's 2015 report indicates North America holds 45% of all global financial assets. Unless you're pretending that Canada and Mexico hold 20% of all global assets, your figures are wildly off the mark (Canada is less rich than the US per capita on average, and Mexico is far less so); at a minimum the US holds 40% to 42% of all global wealth.
The US only has "debt" in USD and pays interest in USD which it creates. It deosn't even really have "debt" in the sense that it hasn't "borrowed" to fund any spending. The bond market just allows USD account holders at the fed to earn interest on reserves and is used as a tool to target the overnight interest rate. Nothing more.
No the Federal Reserve issues USD, not the US government, most people don't realise this fact and it is the difference between a sovereign nation and whatever the fuck North American countries have become today. Canada, where I'm from, had control of our central banking authority up until 1974, what little sovereignty we had(we are still a constitutional monarchy) was relinquished to international banking interests.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Firstly, anyone who mentions the name Rothschild in a conversation about economics cannot be taken seriously.
Secondly, the government creates dollars by spending -- when the US government spends, money is created. When the US government taxes, money is destroyed[1].
Same is true for the RBA in australia, it's even on their website[2]:
"As the Australian Government is a customer of the Reserve Bank, these payment flows can be very large. Expenditure by the Government adds ES funds to the account of the recipient (or their financial institution), while tax receipts have the opposite effect."
The US has several bizarre, self-imposed constraints like the "debt limit" and some crazy mechanism for the fed to buy treasury bills from the government that goes via the private banking system for no good reason but the net effect is the same. Government spending creates money and taxation destroys it.
In terms of ownership and control, the RBA is owned by the Commonwealth (probably the same for Canada) and the Fed is owned by private companies because of concerns about government control when it was setup (even though the Fed and the Treasury co-operate so much they might as well be the same institution) but ownership is very different from ownership of a normal company[3].
I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla documentation.
That's encouraging news, this is something I've wanted to tinker with. The only time I tried to get into extension making (which, to be fair to them, was 6 or 7 years ago), it seemed a complicated thing with rather poor documentation.
How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?
I don't know much about Jetpack or Elrolysis, next to nothing in fact. Best place to begin would be with the "Getting Started" tutorial https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge... Installation instructions here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#In.... Caveat I haven't used the updated SDK using their jpm tool but my FF 41 is happily running addon packaged with out-of-date SDK. Good news for you is the new work-flow sounds even easier as you no longer need to call bin/activate to use cfx tools. I will eventually update SDK but I was perfectly happy with my old solution: alias ffsdk='cd /home/$USER/addon-sdk-1.17 && source bin/activate && PS1="ffsdk:\W$ "'
a) because there are more conformists in this world than non-conformists(Are we visionaries? Maybe. ;)). b) bunch of people up Google's a$$ thinking they can attract attention to themselves by making an HN Chrome extension. I can offer you lightblue HN http://i.imgur.com/H7Axkk7.png lol
Humans are a dime a billion. We have no problem slaughtering humans daily in contrived conflict but somehow losing a few furthering scientific understanding is unacceptable.
First, this is an extremely naive view as to what goes into training an astronaut to be sent into space. It's not like we just plucked four random people from the globe and are sending them to space. These are people who are very likely at the top of their fields, have gone through rigorous (and costly) training, and are going up to do very specific jobs. These people are not a "dime a billion", and claiming so is the same as saying that if Elon Musk were to disappear today, that any other person could simply take his place and keep moving his companies forward.
Second, just because there are negative aspects in the world that cause loss of life, doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing everything we can to ensure a safe flight. This is unrelated to the cost aspect mentioned in my first point, but the average person living in the U.S.A is only living as comfortable as they are because modern civilization, for the most part, values safety quite high. It's a poor argument to say "Well X people died yesterday, so we shouldn't care so much about the 4 that might die in a launch".
> These are people who are very likely at the top of their fields, have gone through rigorous (and costly) training, and are going up to do very specific jobs
That is irrelevant to the level safety precautions. Unless you were trying to argue that their costly training makes them worth more than other people. I hope that is not what you were arguing.
> doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing everything we can to ensure a safe flight
At some point you have to declare something 'safe enough' since 100% safety is an impossible perfection. Bicycles aren't 100% safe, but we don't go around insisting on multiple backup systems. Personally I do find it curious that the standard of safety for astronauts is so high. The cynic in me suggests its less out of concern for the astronauts and more to do with the publicity fallout that occurs after disasters and the damage to other assets. The optimist suggests its more a concern for all the ground crew and spectators who are also at risk. There is potential for a lot more than 4 casualties when you play with that much fire.
>> These are people who are very likely at the top of their fields, have gone through rigorous (and costly) training, and are going up to do very specific jobs
>That is irrelevant to the level safety precautions. Unless you were trying to argue that their costly training makes them worth more than other people. I hope that is not what you were arguing.
I believe GP was arguing about the "a dime a billion" part. They are not worth more than other people in the human sense, but that doesn't make them any more common. It's just the fact that there are very few people with such qualifications that negate the argument of "a dime a billion".
And I guess it's also true that not any of those billions could be trained to be an astronaut for a myriad of reasons.
But I think there is (or at least will/should be) a difference between a trained astronaut and a space tourist.
I mean, being an astronaut is more than just going to outer space, isn't it? A space tourist might do a lot of the stuff that astronauts do, but I think there will still be a fundamental difference. Astronauts are there to do research, push the limits on human capabilities, etc.
After all that is settled, then the tourists can come.
Well and think about planes. Planes are already safer than cars, but we demand very high reliability. If 30% more planes crashed and it cut ticket prices by 30%.. some people would make that trade. People do it when buying smaller less safe cars... but we don't like the thought of plane or shuttle crashes.
What astronauts are trained to do at the top of their field and what they end up doing are kind of divorced though. They spend an inordinate amount of time turning wrenches really, really slowly.
I think that's like saying that pilots spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in their chair making sure that the autopilot is working properly. The remainder is why they get all of the training that they do.
Divorced, but still related, I think. There are lots of possibilities to die in space, to kill fellow crew members or to seriously damage quite expensive equipment, so one should really know how to, e.g., turn wrenches.
Not only is it acceptable, it is necessary. How do you think our ancestors determined what was safe to eat? As the saying goes, sometimes you need to break some eggs. Now don't get me wrong, I'm neither condoning, nor encouraging, wanton negligence concerning human safety, obviously all possible efforts should be made to ensure it, but sometimes, such as in cases like this, the rewards far outweigh the risks.
Yes. And thousands have died in death camps to bootstrap our modern cariology. We should be grateful to all people who died in the past providing us data and knowledge, and to honor them we should use it in the best way we can, so that no one else has to die.
Yeah no doubt this all feels familiar. Because they're(media & globalized governments, which are effectively a single entity) reading from False Flag Operations 101
Quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever read on here. I hate to be cliche, but to quote Chomsky, "Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it". Regardless, the CIA and Mossad didn't use bitcoin to finance ISIS.
Lock picking is what lead me to learn to code. I had randomly ended up watching a YouTube video on bumping locks one day(YouTube can take you on some wild rides lol). Naturally, I tried it right away on my own door, low and behold it worked! After gorging myself on lock-picking tutorials for a while I came across this DEFCON 19 presentation - Safe to Armed in Seconds: A Study of Epic Fails of Popular Gun Safes https://youtu.be/vIJFQO4DIxw Of course after watching several hours worth of DEFCON presentations, and my first taste of what the fuck computer code even was, I was hooked.
