CaptainPanic

That's another question altogether, and it touches upon the fundamental right to protest and to go on strike. Going on strike always has consequences for other people... and that should NOT be a reason not to go on strike, unless lives are at stake. (At least, that is how us socialist Europeans think about it ).

Hmm... Although I agree that comparing new technology to fossil energy sources feels like cheating, I feel that this time I was left with no choice: 1. It was not my question - I just answered the OP's question after TonyMcC put me on the track of flywheels... to leave gasoline out of the answer would be silly. The OP asked about a car going 100 miles. 2. I just showed that there IS actually a future for flywheels in cars. It's not yet perfect, but it's not utterly impossible either.

I accept your insult that we have a certain mallow-barbarism. We copied nearly all your American culture - from MTV, through hollywood to burgers and coca cola... But you can never force your marshmallows upon us! For the necessary timber however, I have to point to our Northern friends up in Scandinavia. I know that you American imperialist bastards have plotted against my little country for so long, but you should have taken a look at Google Pictures to see how much timber we got. You made plans to invade the wrong country. Our country is mostly city, and what is not city looks pretty much like this or this. p.s. For those who fail to spot humor - this post is meant to be funny, and I don't wish to trigger any America-Europe debate... we have enough of those already.

As far as I know, the flywheel storage is meant to store energy, for example at a traffic light, and to turn it back into a forward motion of the vehicle when the light turns green. Back-of-the-envelope calculation to find the weight of a flywheel to do 100 miles in a fuel efficient car: Wikipedia states that energy density can be "360-500 kJ/kg". "The high energy densities often cited with flywheels can be a little misleading as commercial systems built have much lower energy density, for example 11 W·h/Kg, or 40 kJ/kg." Taking the upper (non-commercial) value of 360-500 kJ/kg, I conclude that we would need a flywheel of 100 kg to replace the energy value of 1 kg of gasoline (about 40 MJ/kg). An ordinary fuel-efficient car would need 8 liters of gasoline to do the 100 miles (160.9344 kilometers) as asked in the OP. Ordinary engines have an efficiency of 20%, while flywheels have up to 90%. So, while the fuel-efficient car would use the 8 liters, the flywheel-car would require 4.5 times less energy to do the same distance. It would require 1.8 liters of gasoline-equivalent. So, I conclude that to do 100 miles, you would need a flywheel of 180 kg... which is possible. We should note that this is with the future-tech flywheel. A common commercial flywheel stores about 10 times less, so it would weigh 1800 kg, which is too much.

I am not aware of relevant laws in the USA, so I will only give my opinion: I think these doctors should be punished for unprofessional behaviour. I think that these doctors make a mistake. In the Netherlands, it's a purely voluntary action to strike or to demonstrate (you receive no pay, but you also lose no holiday). Unions might compensate this financially although you almost never receive the equivalent of a full working day. In other words, (at least in the Netherlands) there is already adequate regulation for people who wish to demonstrate, timewise and financially. These doctors have no need to do this. In addition, I agree with Pangloss that is also undermines the trustworthiness of the entire profession. They should organize the protest in the weekend, so that everybody has enough time.

I will start the traditional complaining-about-the-poll. In the Netherlands, it's not the tradition to eat Marshmallows. I have probably had only 1-2 in my life. Therefore, I chose the option: But this might give a misleading result. I hope nobody is using this poll to do a market analysis for their new marshmallow factory. I've personally caused an overestimation of the marketsize and the mallowresistance of the market.

Humans use chemical energy (combustion)... They convert sandwiches, apples and milk to CO2, water, poo, urine So that doesn't count as a purely mechanical engine. I'm afraid that you can't store much energy like that. A giant spring might get you a few meter... or a giant flywheel spinning at a horribly high speed might work too (let's not include the safety issues yet). Does a compressed air engine count? There's no reaction, but the storage is by compressing air... not sure if that counts as "mechanical".

What about the suffering of the cat who can never play with a live mouse, and lives indoors all the time? Can I propose that the ethical thing to do is not to prevent the cat from playing with the mouse, but instead to have no cats at all? The bastards probably weren't invited. They're parasitic, and they probably acted as stowaways. After all, looking at fossils, Noah had little moral objections to let thousands of animals go extinct... but I fear that I have just opened up multiple ways to derail this thread... Sorry! Stay on topic!

Yes, let's talk about the tax level. I will shock most of you by claiming that it's irrelevant to this discussion, as I will explain below. First of all, Europe is in just as much sh*t as America... so apparently the tax level makes little difference. We've all learnt to think in dollars or euros... but the thing we're really dealing with is labor and resources. Goods. Tangible, physical things. People going to a real place to work. That's what is "The Economy"... and nothing else. All the money is just there so that we can exchange that labor and those goods. Remember? You all learnt that in school that this was how money was invented many years ago... Nowadays people happily yap away about bail-outs and other plans to push money around. Quite irrelevant if you don't see the bigger picture... and I am quite certain that most people no longer see that bigger picture where money is not the primary goal, but instead is just a means to exchange goods and labor. The real problem if an economy fails is that the tangible real things and the labor are allocated to the wrong places. In the Soviet Union it was easier to understand, because you had only the government (the boss of the plan-economy) to blame. We were taught that their economy failed because the government allocated everything. Wrong. It failed because the government allocated it to the wrong places. Nowadays it's more complicated because there are more players in a capitalist game... but it's the same problem. From here on, I discuss only the government, not the entire economy: In a simplified model, tax money can be spent in 3 ways: - Good investments: 1 dollar spent will return more than 1 dollar to the economy - Neutral investments: 1 dollar spent will return 1 dollar - Bad investments: 1 dollar spent will return less than 1 dollar (but often not zero, which is why some people can make it sound good) Good investments We can be brief about these: these are things that are just essential to the economy. Infrastructure is an obvious example. But good education might on the long term also have a very positive effect on an economy. Of course, people will be complaining if the payback time is too long... and the short-sightedness of people is a real problem here, and often these investments aren't made because of short-term-thinking. (Economy and society is not a short term thing). Neutral investments Also (this is probably gonna be debated in the next posts), I postulate that social expenses - or social experiments as Pangloss calls it - fit in the 2nd category. They will have zero net gain... You just take money from one consumer, and put it in the hands of another (poorer) consumer. That's all. Some governments do this to a huge extent (Scandinavia, West-Europe), and they are the socialists. Others, like America, don't. But ordinarily, this shouldn't make much of a difference to any economy. Neutral investments bordering on the bad Of course, if you attach a mighty bureaucracy to the redistribution of wealth, then its net gain will drop below 1... and it's a net loss. And I believe that for example medicare has managed to become such a massive bureaucracy that it's way below one. In that case, the discussion shouldn't be about the right or wrong of medical insurances, but about the bureaucracy that comes with it. The insurance itself is just a relocation of money from citizen A to citizen B. If you employ a million people just to do the management of the medical insurance, its overhead costs become too much, and it fails. In America, a lot of money meant to pay medical costs disappears to somewhere else (with a lower payback: overhead)... Bad investments Note again that in this part I talk about the government alone, and not the economy as a whole... So although for the whole economy, the bad investments still include all those things which I called overhead (earlier I mentioned the defense, Wall-street and the legal system), the government only directly controls defense... Obviously, the government cannot directly control Wall-Street or the legal system. It's a free capitalist country after all. The government might at best make some regulation to discourage further growth of these sectors (many people unfortunately fail to understand why these should not continue to grow - after all these sectors make money?). Anyway, the only bad investment would be a defense system that is not necessary. Note that I will not make the claim that it actually IS unnecessary - I'll leave that to the Americans themselves to judge this time - although some of you may know my opinion already . The Tricky Bit The really tricky part is to evaluate the tax expenses. Some will claim that all social 'experiments' fall under the bad investments - but I claim that some of them are certainly good ones - like education. The main message that I try to convey here is that government money isn't only spent. It's not just gone afterwards. It's a government's way of relocating labor and resources. If they do it the right way, it can give the economy a boost. If they do it the (correct) social way (without too much bureaucracy), it just relocates money from A to B without doing much harm. If they are stupid about it, they get their priorities wrong, and kill their own economy. And that's why I think it's irrelevant to discuss only a tax level and social issues alone. It's only part of a MUCH bigger picture. The government itself is only part of the entire economy... and the discussion should primarily be about the economy as a whole, with the government as the largest player in it. The Tricky Bit of the Big Picture As I said before, many people fail to see why legal and financial sectors should not continue to grow - after all, they make profit? Let me put it like this: their picture would look quite different if they too had to make a Cradle-to-cradle analysis of their business, like some chemical industry does. It will undoubtedly appear that these sectors are for a large part parasitic on the economy as a whole. But if I hear some economists talking (I never understand them), then I am probably just a stupid left wing socialist hippy who doesn't understand anything about the economy... Apologies for length

This post on flickr seems to give you relevant hard data for Toronto. Insolation on a cloudy day in W/m2. It also provides a link for a sunny day.

It's a tricky question. The amount of dew you get is mass-transfer limited, so the larger your surface area, the more you can get. Also, the temperature of the surface on which the dew is being deposited is critical... some surfaces cool much faster than others, and therefore will collect more dew overnight. For example, the roof of a car cools quickly, and will be dew or frost covered the next morning. But, a rain gauge should get very limited dew inside of it... so, although it is not perfect, it's probably the easiest and best way to measure rain. Then you should take a surface area on which dew deposits easily... and measure the increase on weight of that too. Then you know rain for a certain area (square meter or something), and the rain+dew for another surface area. Convert to the same surface area. Subtract the first from the second, and you have only the dew. It might be interesting to take two very different surface types for the dew measurements. Good luck!

Thanks. That's exactly what I should have said. Yeah, I was away for the weekend, only to come back afterwards to a thread that's twice as long Anyway... My point (imho) still stands that the USA, compared to its younger self when it was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, has relatively much more overhead costs. It has a larger percentage of people who are not working in production than before. Note that I do not make any comparison to any other country, and neither do I take the productivity per capita into account. I just compare the percentages of the actual productive class of the USA now, and the USA some time ago... and I think that everybody agrees with me on this. Another point I tried to make is that if the USA would reduce that overhead, and employ a certain percentage of its population in real production, then its economy would grow. Again, no comparison to any other countries needed. More production with the same people and also less overhead costs directly leads to economic growth. And, to bring this back to the main topic, economic growth leads to increased tax income, which leads to a reduction of the deficit. My final point was that the government can have a hand in this, by reducing the government-related overhead costs, and therefore forcing some people to employ themselves into more productive ways. Then the government both reduces expenses, and increases income (on the long term) from tax. You can bicker among yourselves whether Wall-street, defense, lawyers are really overhead costs. From my perspective they all just cost money... but feel free to make your own list. Douglas Adams proposed another set of people in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and in one part of the story, the main character Arthur finds himself on a space ship, the B-ark with all the "hairdressers, tired TV producers*, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like". Same thing. My point stands. Too much of that, and your economy fails. And the USA has too much. (Europe is not doing very well either, btw, but the topic of this thread is the USA). None of these things are a black and white picture. Of course you need a few investment bankers - I am not saying you should close the entire sector... but perhaps the financial sector got way too big. Please note that I am not saying we should abandon armies and defense altogether... but the percentage of your economy devoted to defense is higher than ever, so a reduction might not be a bad idea. And the whole legal sector also went through a long and steady growth for decades, but they probably sued everybody who published the numbers about it - I cannot find any graphs about their growth... Anyway, again, I do not advise you to kill your justice system. I am just wondering if you could do with a little less. The point is that a lot of people consume goods, but return little or no value on the long term to society. If your financial, defense, legal, sectors would grow another 4 decades at the same pace, then ALL Americans would either have to be working in those sectors... I hope you can all agree that this is not a healthy situation for a large economy. So, this reduces the discussion to: "What is a healthy percentage of overhead costs for an economy". Too little and the system fails, too much and it also fails.

This thread made me buy a new fountain pen. It was a good investment... now let's hope that this one stays with me a little longer than average. I told myself that I won't bring it anywhere on a trip. It just stays on my desk.

You're not convinced that the acid rain was real? The tone of your reply ('reportedly', and "acid rain" between " ") suggests that you think it was another media-hype to make the poor customers/tax payers pay more money for nothing, like some people say climate change is just a way to make the poor customers pay more money? The acid rain was VERY real. It had a pH of 4. It killed eco-systems. All large oil-refineries are now equipped with desulphurization equipment to remove the sulphur from the fuel. All large coal-burning powerplants have stack-gas cleaning systems which also prevent the sulphurdioxide emissions. And that helped.

I can see some form of consensus developing in this thread, where most (if not all) of us agree that there is no case where ethics simply do not apply. Therefore, even in the case of an evasive species, the animals must be terminated in the most humane way possible. There is a mention of a (slippery) slope where all animals are equal regarding ethics, (but some animals are more equal than others?). Cat-ethics ≠ human-ethics If you say that the cat itself is responsible then we must use cat-ethics... and in cat-ethics, playing with a mouse is most likely completely ok (I'm no cat, so I'm no expert). Some people say that they (as the cat-owner) are responsible for the actions of the cat. And they take responsibility by putting a cat-bell around the neck of the cat, which completely ruins the cat's chances to catch anything at all... until they learn to hunt without ringing the bell around their neck. I agree... however... mosquitos bring up the sadist in me. How unethical is it to slowly dismember a mosquito? I really hate the bastards… and as a species I’d like to see them go extinct (although I am not fully aware of the ecological implications that would have). I will always try to kill them if I can, and it's easy enough to stun them, or injure them so they cannot fly anymore... I really don't see the need to finish them off. Let them suffer. I'll take one wing off to make sure they never sting me again. (Ok, in reality I kill them most of the time - but just regard me as a sadistic mosquito killer for the sake of this discussion). Is this then the other end of the (slippery) slope? Is it ok to have that slope, and to distinguish between the higher mammals and tiny annoying insects, or are they all equal? Please note that we really hurt some microorganisms in a terrible way... take for example yeast. We allow that organism to either slowly bake to death in bread. Or we boil it to death in a distillation. And we have no problems to alter its genetics while it's still alive. Obviously, microorganisms are not really part of the animal-cruelty discussion. How large/intelligent must an animal be to become part of the discussion?

In a simple approximation, we might agree that: Money = labor Money = resources With labor you can develop and construct the space station... so you need labor and resources for both the research and the actual construction. Since we need labor and resources to build a larger space station, we can conclude that the bottleneck is money. You can invent several schemes how more money (labor, resources) could be allocated to a new space station. Here's a few: - increase taxes and send all extra tax money to the space station, either through direct government involvement or some stimulation - make a plan-economy like the Soviets had, and simply send the laborers/resources and scientists to work on the space-station Whatever you come up with, you will need to massively increase the labor effort on space-related research and also on the space-industry. All that will mean that a lot more resources are needed. A lot of that is high-tech resources, which again need more people and more money. Right now, there is no large pool of unemployed highly educated people anywhere on this planet, so labor is a real bottleneck. Worldwide, resources of all types are becoming more expensive. Production of many resources cannot keep up with demand, which increases prices. So, resources are also a bottleneck. Solve those two bottlenecks, and we'll have a spacestation in no-time.

Sounds like Sealand. It already exists.

What are "molecular coordinates"? Do you mean the bond angles and bond lengths? The only program that I know that comes close to what you want to do is chemdraw, but that's a Windows program... and probably not exactly what you're looking for. Why do you use an apple machine for such scientific tasks? I know only people who use Windows or Linux for scientific work. And even for those systems, the program you want might not exist.

Then we are left with no choice but to build the multidimensional multispectral model of sexual arousal, integrating all the different sexual spectra once and for all !!!

LOL I visit this forum to keep myself sharp... to think problems over and then see what other people think of my solution. If I may summarize your post, you come here for entertainment. It's nice to see that other people have different goals - because that's what keeps this forum alive!

Engineering companies are actually building floating houses in the Netherlands, and in a few other places on earth as well probably. It seems that those people think that the way forward is to have individual floating houses, connected to other relatively small structures. In a way, that would mean you get a modular city. It's a whole lot easier to build probably, and the initial (financial and technical) hurdle to overcome for a single house is a lot smaller than the massive problems associated with the "lilypad". Here's some links of modern multi-story floating houses: - A .pdf about plans for delta regions - with a picture of a floating house on page 22. - Of course, the idea to live on a boat is quite old... in Amsterdam there are thousands of house-boats. Almost all of them are just 1 floor as you can see here and here. I think that the lilypad looks cool, and it is quite ambitious, but in reality the project developers will choose a more simple and practical approach.

... but 100% of it does not add to the real economy of the country. It's at best overhead costs. You always need a little, but too much can kill you. That successful economy was built in the past, when the USA did not spend the same percentage of its income on the military, on lawyers and lawsuits, on financial institutions or other useless things. That economy was built in the days that the USA actually manufactured things: Detroit made cars, Silicon Valley made computers, Boeing was (and is) the largest airplane manufacturer, etc... And the USA did so for a competitive price with superior technology. That's indeed how you build a strong economy. The only way that you can build an economy is that you have an industry that makes something that starts a feedback loop: with every product you make, you can more effectively make more products for less energy and resources. An economy, in the end, is only worth what is physically constructed... So, also a Wall Street adds nothing at all. Wall Street is nothing but a massive group of people who all try to predict which industry will grow the fastest. But the combined accumulation of wealth by such investors must be compensated by a real economy somewhere on earth... Or how about the huge legal system the US has? Again, it makes absolutely nothing. Again, it's good to have a few lawyers and a functioning legal system... but too much will be crippling. But what's really doing the USA in is that you have all those combined. The American economy is crippled by too many people who do useless jobs. ... and when you realize the scale of the problem, it's sad ironic to see that huge groups of lobbyists (also a non-productive workforce) bicker over the best way to reduce spending, while they themselves are actually part of the problem: too many unproductive people.

All European countries have the possibility to impose Martial Law, in case of trouble. Until that is needed, the current benevolent system is preferred. I don't see a problem.

The problem is much larger than just your government. The imbalance between expenses and income is just one of the symptoms of a much larger problem. You Americans have way too many people working in jobs that do not add value to your economy. Security, army, weapons, government, but also the millions of people employed in all kinds of financial institutions pushing money around... None of those produce any physical wealth. I think that can all be considered "overhead costs of society (link to my blog post about it)"... and when you got too much overhead, you'll go bust. I think that the USA stands a chance to reduce DoD budgets, just by stopping the war on terror. Troops and armies cost a lot less if they are at home, than when they are actively fighting... but that will have a 2nd effect: there will be job losses in the weapons industry. Those people can start new businesses (weapons manufacturers employ some of the smartest minds - they can always do something else). What I am trying to say is that a steady economic growth (of the real physical economy, not the Wall-street paper economy) can also increase tax income, and thereby solve the problem. But I guess that the idea that you first lose jobs before you can create new ones will be a hard one to sell in the USA.

Of course not, those are simple examples... I just don't understand how they are relevant to this thread. The topic you started yourself is about the law. And the law is written with a big picture in mind, and then applied to examples. Personal opinions are quite irrelevant... because we should not take the law into our own hands. At my first post in this thread (#9) I asked what you want to discuss - whether according to you personally a certain example deserved the death penalty, or the big picture of the justice system. Now I realize that you never answered that question, but the answer is that you would like to discuss the examples. Or perhaps you just want to vent your rage at the lack of justice in the world, and discuss nothing at all. However, a lot of other posts, including some by your own hand, deal with the justice system and the death penalty... I kindly request that you somehow stay on topic.