Re: Does the Fear of Jail Actually Prevent Crime? Yes.
- From: "Patriot Games" <Patriot@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2007 11:41:52 -0500
"Jerry Kraus" <jkraus_1999@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:17d3cdd0-9ec9-46db-966e-fcc20ffa9b77@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Dec 3, 9:42 am, "Patriot Games" <Patr...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:"Jerry Kraus" <jkraus_1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in messageWe agree that Capitalism is high maintenance. Actually, I think that
>> Big Huge Assumption (BHA): We have a normal amount of basic >> capitalist
>> greed in the society. (Not enough greed and capitalism fails, too >> much
>> and
>> capitalism fails. Capitalism is a high maintenance socio-economic
>> system,
>> unlike Socialism and Communism.)
>> If people are making money they spend money, when they get bored >> spending
>> money they invest money. Whether they invest in the economy directly
>> (starting businesses that create jobs) or they invest indirectly >> (their
>> money is indirectly loaned to people to start businesses that create
>> jobs)
>> doesn't much matter. Eventually money finds the opportunity and that
>> creates jobs. So, in addition to BHA above we need an environment
>> characterized by plentiful opportunity. When we have that we get
>> "naturally
>> occuring" job creation.
>> The gov't is like the bus driver. Foot on the accelerator (lower
>> interest
>> rates, speed up the ecomony), foot on the brake pedal (lower interest
>> rates,
>> slow it down if it gets going to fast). Sometimes opportunity is >> timid
>> and
>> has to be prodded, and we see the gov't fund (or squash) an emerging
>> industry. The gov't has to always monitor the environment of
>> opportunity.
>> > All governments collect people's
>> > money, and use it in ways they see fit. What makes you think that
>> > bombing Iran is a useful use of people's money, while solving the
>> > nursing shortage is not? What makes you think that more people >> > agree
>> > with you than with me?
>> We have Polls for that, we have politicians and we have debates and
>> elections for that. In the bigger picture that has worked pretty well >> to
>> set
>> national priorities.
>> I'm not necessarily so confident about the future. When we run low on
>> oil
>> the oil companies will run low on what? Power. Then cash.
>> This is humorous in a perverted way. Which is driving up the cost of >> oil
>> today: The US saber-rattling over Iran's nuclear weapons development, >> or
>> Iran persuing nuclear weapons? The former is the key factor today. >> But
>> in
>> five years when Iran successfully tests a nuclear warhead the price of
>> oil
>> will automatically double before the US says or does anything.
>> You think we should have a referendum-based govt. I think you should
>> think
>> bigger.
>> We should planetize our oil reserves.
> Oh, I think big enough. We should develop controlled nuclear fusion.
They're working on it.
> Ten thousand micro-lasers, pointed at a focal point. A technique
> quite consistent with inertial containment technologies classified by
> the U.S. Department of Defence. Gee, I wonder why they classifed that
> particular technology, and not the more commonly employed
> electrostatic and magnetic containment technologies? Because inertial
> containment -- basically just making the area fused small enough that
> energy released is easily manageable using conventional methods --
> works. And a lot of people DON'T WANT CONTROLLED NUCLEAR FUSION!!!!
> Free energy would change things a bit, wouldn't it?
It wouldn't be free, but it would be BOTH price-stable and market-driven.
Pick a number. I'll say $32 a barrel for oil. That the official on-Earth
price for a barrel of oil. Everybody was making a nice profit when it was
$23 a barrel so this shouldn't hurt anybody. That covers the total cost for
a nation to find, drill, pump and transport oil to be sold.
How each nation finds, drills, pumps and transports oil is their business.
All I'm saying is that the official price cannot exced or be less than $32
per barrel. If a particular nation doesn't want to sell any of its oil or
some of its oil fine. Its their oil anyway.
Who do they sell it to? Don't care. The market would then determine the
prices of the refined products of crude, including gasoline.
The high maintenance aspects of Capitalism make certain items, like
gasoline, critically important. Our economy could be operating just fine
and fluctuating gas prices can swing it in and out of minor inflation and
recession. This then requires TOO much maintenance.
modern capitalism is entirely an artifact of the biological,
historical accident that virtually the entire native population of the
Americas was wiped out by disease, leaving huge, untapped natural
resources for the taking by the Europeans. Not a normal situation!
Europeans were gonna take these resources with or without diseases. Epidemics are quicker and cheaper but conquest has the same end result.
Are you quite sure that controlled, nuclear fusion is being seriously
worked on?
Heck yes. The world's largest such facility is in the UK: http://www.jet.efda.org/
In the US these folks are working it: Boeing, Columbia University, General Atomics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Savannah River National Laboratory, Schafer Corporation, UCLA, UCSD, University of Rochester, UT Austin, University of Wisconsin
Here's more: http://fusionpower.org/OtherSites.html
Also: Office of Fusion Energy Sciences http://www.science.doe.gov/ofes/
If so, why classify the information regarding the most
promising technological approach -- inertial containment?
"ICF is one of two major branches of fusion energy research, the other being magnetic confinement fusion. To date most of the work in ICF has been carried out in the United States, and generally has seen less development effort than magnetic approaches. When it was first proposed, ICF appeared to be a practical approach to fusion power production, but experiments during the 1970s and 80's demonstrated that the efficiency of these devices was much lower than expected. For much of the 1980s and 90s ICF experiments focused primarily on nuclear weapons research. More recent advances suggest that major gains in performance are possible, once again making ICF attractive for commercial power generation. A number of new experiments are underway or being planned to test this new "fast ignition" approach."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_fusion_energy
Why limit research to government laboratories? We both agree that government
bureaucracies are astonishingly inefficient.
They always seem to end up that way...
In Europe, they're
putting in another twenty billions into a project that "might" develop
controlled nuclear fusion, sometime in the next fifty years, or so
they say. Does it really sound like they're trying? Or, is the
professional scientific research community simply using this as a cash
cow, ad infinitum? They do like to do that kind of thing, you know.
We're spending about $4B/yr.
Are they really trying + "government bureaucracies are astonishingly inefficient."
When they figure it out what will they do then? They don't know. But they do know they each have bills and a mortgage to pay and this at a minimum creates the impression that they have a vested interested in actual progress that always falls short of a solution.
Will they continue to get billions a year to figure out something that they (then) already figured out? Of course not....
And this is why "government bureaucracies are astonishingly inefficient." Two excellent examples of non-bureaucracies that gave excellent results fast are the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. And both are also decent examples of what happens when the Project turns into a bureaucracy!
Let me repeat myself. We're spending about $4B/yr. on Fusion and $3B/yr. fighting AIDS in OTHER COUNTRIES. Something's wrong somewhere....
.
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