Comment Re:Darmok is Science Fiction about an idea (Score 1) 512
So you are looking for the fabled wholly new and original story that is not like anything anyone has ever thought of before?
Good luck with that.
So you are looking for the fabled wholly new and original story that is not like anything anyone has ever thought of before?
Good luck with that.
A weak season for sure, but really you are dismissing "Heart of Glory"? It is a crucial introduction to the Klingon culture of honor (and the character conflicts of Worf) that we have all grown to know and love!
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- Every time Wesley saves the day....
Not every time! Remember the episode where he accidentally almost collapses a universe on Mom?
That is "Remember Me", and one I rather like though it is entirely Beverly Crusher's episode.
Right, this is a bad episode, because unlike all the other episodes of ST:TNG it consists of a scientific premise that isn't based on sound science.
For example pick any other episode of ST:TNG... um, not that one... no not that on either... er, none of these... or those... wait... can someone name one episode that is real science?
This is what ST:TOS is so superior to ST:TNG, in that series you didn't have any made-up pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, right? Right?
In the United states you can get away with not working at all. You can take advantage of homeless shelters and welfare.
Oh the advantages of living on the street in America! I can't believe I am reading this.
Oh, and about the "welfare" thing. Do you have any notion of what the facts are?
TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families)... requires that all recipients of welfare aid must find work within two years of receiving aid. So no, welfare requires you to find work or you get cut off.
The wealth of our society makes it possible for more and more people to be non-producers. I am not saying this in a fox news "moochers are the downfall of society" kind of way. I am saying it in a "look we *can* actually sustain a fairly large moocher population, and how many we can support is continuing to grow.
Easy there. Don't dislocate your shoulder patting yourself on the back.
So it *has* already come true to some extent, and it is continuing to become more true as time goes on. Right now only about 50% of adults work.
If by "50%" you mean "63%" then yes, otherwise no. This "only 50% of adults work" meme, in addition to being actually incorrect, is a deliberately misleading misuse of economic statistics. The real meaningful metric is the labor force participation rate (all those working or actively looking for work), which is rarely above 70% in any economy, ever. The all time high in the U.S. was in 1997, with a rate of 67% which was temporarily inflated by the fact that none of the Baby Boom had yet retired. The current participation rate is only modestly lower.
It's doesn't take a leap of faith to imagine a world where only 10% or 5% of people are working, and the rest of the jobs are done by robots and computers.
And are the other 95% going to be living on $1200 a month welfare, or will that be cut off after two years?
That's known as the Luddite fallacy and has been wrong every time it has been stated for the last 200 years. You will need to explain why this time is different.
Ah the fallacy of the "Luddite Fallacy"! The problem is that the industrial revolution ushered in a period of drastically reduced living conditions for a period of at least 60 years - that is to say an entire lifetime, or two generations for the majority of British citizens. Ever heard of all those poor houses is Dicken's London? The unemployment rate among those teeming urban masses looking for work in factories was 50% or so.
It is striking that recent revisionist economic historians, pushing the argument that the Industrial Revolution really wasn't so bad, argue that the period of dramatic wage collapse only lasted 40 years, and was 'speedily' made up over the course of merely another 30 years. These are the guys looking on the "bright side"!
The fact of the matter is that the livelihoods lost by one generation were made up by their great grand children!
If we are as successful as the first Industrial revolution we can look forward to poverty and misery of the next 60 years.
The fact is that most of the luddites were right-- they mostly died horrible homeless deaths of starvation. The fact is, they asked for training on the new machines and were refused (much as employers are today refusing to train employees)...
Quite so. The spinning jenny did the work of 200 spinners (and other textile machines did likewise) - thus wiping out virtually the entire employment of the largest manufacturing sector in Britain. Factory textile mills created some jobs, but not for the vast majority of those left without livelihoods (and naturally, an oversupply of prospective workers allowed the factory owners to pay a pittance for deadly dangerous jobs.). Those horrific Dickensian slums didn't create themselves.
By all means - let us recreate the slums of Charles Dickens in the 21st Century! Hurray for the job cremators!
For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. 'It's not easy to retrain people,' Corley said.
No doubt this is true - hiring cheap indentured laborers without rights is more profitable. Which is why they must be denied that option.
Corporations would employ sweat shops with child labor here*, if we let them. But we don't because while it would be profitable for the sweatshop operator, it would be bad for everybody else.
If the choice is retraining workers, and not having the workers they need, they will most definitely stop throwing away their workforce.
*Yes, I know they do that overseas.
Vegas doesn't predict. They set the lines/odds so that there is equal money on both sides of a bet.
Those two sentences seem to be in contradiction.
They aren't. Bookmakers aren't predicting at all. What they are doing is assessing what the community of bettors believes to be the even odds point so that (as the OP said) there is even money on both sides, and the bookie picks up the vigorish without any risk. By seeing where the money is going the bookie get immediate, positive feedback on what that point is, and can easily adjust the line accordingly - no guessing involved. It does not matter what he/she thinks the real odds are, if they even care (and they don't).
Many of the costs you mention are fixed costs and are by definition ignored in asymptotic analysis....
Repeating the word "asymptotic" many times - without presenting any actual analysis - does not cut any ice -- here on Earth or on the Moon.
When you look at total cost as a function of the amount of water put into orbit, as the amount of water approaches infinity, the cost of lunar water is asymptotically less than the cost of terrestrial water
This is utter nonsense. The cost of lunar water is at a minimum the cost of operating an industrial mining operation in a vacuum, amid abrasive dust, 250000 miles from the nearest supply source. The cost of this - even "asymptotically" - is incredibly expensive.
It takes roughly an order of magnitude more energy to get water into space from the Earth than it does from the moon.
Only if you ignore essentially all of the energy inputs into making the launch happen. The cost of the energy to send a payload into orbit is trivial - for a $100 million dollar Falcon launch the cost of the fuel is about $100,000, or 0.1% of the launch cost. Essentially all of the cost (and energy consumption) of putting something into orbit is the cost of manufacturing all that high-tech gear, and running the organization required to assemble and launch it.
Trying to do this from the Moon, without any facilities in place, is going to be far more expensive. How many contractors currently live on the Moon, and are ready for hire?
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Space-X's Falcon Heavy is none of that & as an expendable is already in the $150 Million dollar range....
And this just the cost for a non-man-rated launcher, with no provision for a human transport vehicle which can land and return. Thanks for demonstrating that that $150 million to send someone to the moon is laughable.
Thy only way to get a human to the moon for $150 million is to seal him/her in a can and crash it on the surface.
but there's no *practical* reason to go there
Helium-3. Well, once we figure out fusion, which is always just ten years off.
Naah. In the 1950s, with Project Sherwood, it was ten years off. By the 1970s it was 25 years off. Currently the earliest conceivable date for a prototype power plant (that actually produces electricity) is about 2047, twenty years after the Iter project is projected to start burning tritium (2027), so it is currently 33 years off. That the "time to the first fusion power plant" appears to be a monotonically increasing function of time is not encouraging.
... Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
Despite what some progressive rock bands would have you believe there is no dark side of the Moon. There is however, a far side which gets no more darkness than the near side.
Arguably, social security @ 15% and Medicare, most states add in sales taxes @ 6%, local property taxes, fuel taxes; no 60% isn't that far fetched.
This is fantasy math. The 15% (roughly) payroll tax drops to zero on income above $113,000. If you are making so much that your effective Federal tax rate is close to 43% (only levied on income above $250,000) then your payroll tax percentage is very small. And sales tax is only levied on taxable purchases - a rich person uses little of their income in this way (mostly this money is 'invested'), unlike poor people where it is a large share. So, yes, 60% is extremely far fetched.
The actual overall tax burden of the rich is only about 33.0%, not much more than the average tax burden for Americans of 30.1%. The effective U.S. tax system overall is already nearly flat, with the income tax the only prgressive component to offset extremely regressive taxes (e.g. payroll and sales).
Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.
