The American Observer has an animation showing how US unemployment rates have changed by country between January 2007 and May 2010. Due to the colors chosen to key the map, the animation resembles footage of lights being turned out all over America. If you watch the presentation enough times it begins to look like the spread of a pox over the body of a victim, with adjacent areas changing color as they are infected. There is no visual indication of a retreat in the disease. No intimation of a “recovery summer”. In fact it does not appear to have reached its high-water mark yet.
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A Washington Post blog says if you’re waiting for the “summer of recovery” don’t hold your breath. And there’s no telling how much longer you’ll have to hold it. The signs improvement is around the corner are few. Neil Irwin writes, “there’s a pattern here, and it’s not a good one. Virtually every major economic indicator to come out in the past two months has been disappointing in one way or another. Retail sales. International trade. Weekly jobless claims. The monthly employment report. Housing starts. In fact, of the major data releases, the only one I can think of that has been decent over the past couple of months was last week’s industrial production report.”
As if to underscore the problem, the Wall Street Journal reports that stocks have fallen for the fourth straight day, with 9 out of the last 11 days posting downturns. Investors it said “feared a protracted and uncertain recovery.”
Stocks fell in other markets. The Stoxx Europe 600 index closed down 1.7% at 249.44. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 index fell 1.5% at 5155.95, France’s CAC-40 index ended down 1.7% at 3491.11 and Germany’s DAX fell 1.3% to 5935.44.
The worst of it are suggestions that the “stimulus” has proved to be just a palliative. The moment it was withdrawn the underlying condition of the economy manifested itself again. The Los Angeles Times attributed the “unexpected” 27.2 decline in the housing market to the end of a government stimulus program.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton acknowledged that the drop-off was likely largely due to the expiration of the home-buyer tax credit and called the 27.2% decline a “tough number.”
“There’s a lot more work yet to do,” Burton said. …
Real estate experts said the tax credits led many buyers to speed up their plans to buy houses, boosting sales this spring, but sapping demand over the summer.
The Administration appears to have accepted that there will be no significant easing in the economic situation before November and their message is now that it is Bush’s fault; and that they haven’t had enough time to undo the damage of the past years. “For eight years before we arrived in the West Wing, Mr. Boehner and his party ran economy and the middle class literally into the ground,” Joe Biden said.
Seizing on the large budget deficit accumulated during the Bush administration, Biden today accused Boehner of returning to the policies that led to the crisis “from which we are still digging out.”
“They gave free rein to special interests to write their own rules at the expense of everyone else, not just the middle class,” Biden said.
But it’s a blame-shifting gambit, not an economic solution. The idea may be to pass ownership of the problem to the Republicans. The difficulty with this approach is that it doesn’t move the liability away from Washington. If there is a groundswell building against incumbents in both parties the administration may be taking cover behind the wrong tree. The point both parties need to fear is if the lights continue to go out after November 2010. That will turn 2011 from a possible year of recovery to a year of epiphany: one that goes, “we’re from the government and we can’t help you.”
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W: “The point both parties need to fear is if the lights continue to go out after November 2010.” As usual you hit it precisely right. IMHO the lights are highly likely to continue going out after the election: certainly if the Democrats hold Congress, less so if they lose it, in which case much may depend on how they comport themselves in the lame-duck session ending January 2011, and then how Obama comports himself for the remainder of his term. Ideally, the Dems suffer a rout and neither they nor Obama conducts a scorched-earth battle. Given their attitude and behavior so far, that’s a fond hope. Most likely they will try to jam things so that economic and fiscal policy fixes take longer and do less than we would want. But at least we’ll have a glimmer. That should not give the GOP much comfort, because if my views are typical I presume the worst of all incumbents and while categorically not voting for Democrats I will vote for GOP candidates only if they can demonstrate they did not collude in the felonies or compound them. Where possible I will vote for new blood, ideally with business and other real-world problem-solving pragmatism and humility. The “Tea Party” brand may help me find those people, it may not: it will depend on what they have to say for themselves. And however good they may seem, I will be watching them like a hawk. A very angry one. They have one term to get things fixed, or on the strategic road to being fixed. If not, they’re gone. As other commenters say, “rinse, repeat.”
It seems like all of the elements of a disinflationary, if not
deflationary spiral are in place. Overcapacity exists in most major
market segments, with real estate being a feature item. So Cash is
King and there are not many compelling arguments for prying discretionary
cash out of strong hands. The argument about who is at fault
is really irrelevant, although I strongly believe that Obama’s
policies are having a huge effect on paralyzing the cash holders
from parting with their dough. When one doesn’t know what future
tax rates will be, what health care costs will be and what the outlook
for interest rates will be, how does one do any reasonable Merger/
Acquisition analysis at the Corporate level, where the largest cash
stocks are.
What is relevant is how to break this cycle; don’t see how this
gets done with higher taxes or more regulation, which seem to be the
only tools left in the Democratic toolchest.
Since cutting interest rates is irrelevant given current levels, this leaves the door
open for the Conservative who can successfully argue that we need to get lean at all levels of government. This seems to be the only door out of this box canyon.
“We’re in the government, so we’re going to help our friends and family”
“We operate on the Pauli Principle: **** You, Pay Me!”
——–
With a change in the House leadership, Frank will be reduced to gavel-less status in “the committee to destroy the dollar and financial markets.”
We need to implement a dollar rescue before truly tragic damage is done.
That means recognizing Peak Government and Peak Economic meddling.
It is fair to say that the rest of the planet will not much longer be willing to pay our taxes for us. So the end of the Left is nigh.
Like an over successful highway man, the Left has shut down commercial traffic.
—-
BTW, the official government stats are way too biased. It’s much worse than the clip.
Forgive me for using this space to make a remark about another subject, namely, the Ground Zero mosque;
In a way, we have to be grateful to the Muslims who want to build it. Why? Well, think about the following: ever since 911, the MSM, the whole left, the elites and the establishment have been doing their best to erase what happened that day from anybody’s and everybody’s memory. The last thing they’d like to see was 911 or Ground Zero becoming a public subject again. They’d simply like all these to be forgotten, lost in the time hole. But now, thanks to the mosque builders, Ground Zero is back to the first pages and prime time. Thus, there’s a positive side to the whole thing.
Finally, Barney Frank Confesses
08.24.2010 – 10:40 AM
Barney Frank admits it wasn’t such a good idea to foist mortgages on people who couldn’t pay for them. Now he wants fold up fannie and freddie.
Not sure if the solution is to take out Fannie & Freddie. Fannie and Freddie did a good job for the middle class for many decades–before they were debased starting a decade or two ago.
If the GOP gains at lesat the House, they have to be prepared to be very agile if both Obama and the Democrats become aggressively obstructionist. Obama and the Democrats may try to sabotage GOP efforts to revive the economy in the hopes that the MSM can paint the GOP efforts as the cause of failure.
I remember 1995 and the ambush that awaited the newly-triumphant Republicans. This time around they need to be much better prepared, and they will face an even worse opposition.
The GOP needs to have an aggressive quick-response narrative that exposes Democrat sabotage and obstruction. The have to press the advantage leading up to 2012. They also have to watch each other and themselves, showing not only party discipline, but also personal discipline. No stupid, scandalous behavior, as the MSM and the left attack dogs in general will be looking for it like never before.
Given their attitude and behavior so far, that’s a fond hope.
Yep: food fight between Charlie Rangel and the Prez over the former’s “dignity”:
“Ouch. Rep. Charlie Rangel suggested Monday that he’s not going to take any lessons on dignity from whippersnappers like President Obama.
The New York Democrat, embroiled in an ongoing ethics investigation, lashed out at the president, reportedly saying Obama, 49, is too young to judge him on such matters.
‘Frankly, he has not been around long enough to determine what my dignity is,’ Rangel was quoted saying by The New York Times.
‘My dignity is 80 years old,’ Rangel continued. ‘How can somebody (Obama) so much younger tell me how to leave with dignity?’”
http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/08/24/embattled-congressman-rangel-obama%E2%80%99s-too-young-determine-my-dignity?test=latestnews
Just one more indication of the alternate universe these people live in.
Rangel and Waters are from safe districts.
So it looks to me like Obama & Co want to inject fresh blood.
The demographics of Compton and Watts are shifting Hispanic. So this may be the last chance to keep that seat ‘Black.’
If there is one thing that Black politicians fear the most it is to become the Second most important minority. However, based upon demographic trends, it seems inevitable that the crossover point can not be too far ahead.
The Administration’s best hope is to pass ownership of the problems to the Republicans after 2010. Then they can avoid blame for the crucial economic blunders of 2006-2010 on either the period before or after. If the Republicans don’t have the numbers and the vision, they will achieve neither enough to restore some confidence (which will have immediate positive feedback but not a lot) and may even be co-opted by the “bipartisans” to simply tinker at the margins with the basic decisions taken in the years of disaster.
In any case I think the GOP will have no help from the Dems, who for whatever reason, are determined to stay the course. Sit on their “gains” and dig in. The Dems are fighting a version of “bite and hold”. Take a piece of economic high ground and annihilate the hapless GOP when they make their eventual, half-hearted and belated counterattack.
I have a friend who hopes the GOP loses so the Dems will continue to rush forward, like sharks and jam their heads in hole from which there is no escape. Then everybody can laugh in economic hell, secure in the knowledge that the bad guys have finally been unmasked, while we all eat instant noodles and grits with salt.
But since the likeliest scenario is that the Left will lose some or all of the legislature in 2010 then we can already see the “bite and hold” strategy taking shape. If the GOP are weak sisters, then the time can be most profitably used to essentially advance the cause of returning powers to the State and Local under the relative benignity of a paralyzed Federal Government. In other words don’t bite what they hold if you can’t. Cut them off by flanking them. Get the governors (The Ents) to wake up in Fangorn Forest while the administration is squabbling with the GOP in the House. And then the conservatives can attack where the Dems did not expect them to.
The hardest part of the next two years will be 2011. This is the strategic piece that really needs thinking through.
Even the stoutest of heart, the bravest of the brave, fear the words; “We are from the government and are here to help you”.
“You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
US (Canadian-born) administrator & economist (1908 – 2006)
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
Will Rogers, quoted in Saturday Review, Aug. 25, 1962
US humorist & showman (1879 – 1935)
“For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.”
Bob Wells
“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
Voltaire
French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 – 1778)
To all commenters: great stuff as always. BC is the best place on the Web. Particular thanx to Skip_this_post @10 for the excellent quotes. Isn’t it wonderful how much wisdom can be conveyed, memorably and convincingly, by a well-turned quip?
W @ 9: Absolutely, 2011 is the strategic crux. Part of my newfound activism will involve much closer attention to state races and figuring how to move power back into responsible hands at the lowest practical level.
oM/1–my thoughts exactly; don’t trust any of ‘em, keep a sharp eye and vote for the one you distrust the least.
It’s like the punch line for the old joke, two old politicians talking:
“Well, frankly sir, they are both scoundrels.”
“Yes, of course–but which one is our scoundrel?”
the real battle if the gop takes the house will be spending bills. and the real fireworks will be the investigations by the committees.
#9, Richard, you seem to be assuming the problems with the US economy are systematic. They aren’t. All of Americas economic problems were created in October of ’08. The Market was manipulated toi crash and ensure the election of te One. The clever manipulators thought they could get it back under control. They are wrong.
Their Buzard egos overwhelmed their canary minds and here we are.
No, getting the economy back on track is as simple as a payroll tax holiday of about 2 years. Could have done it in 6 months if we had started right after the Obominations swearing in.
That isn’t going to happen without a Constitutional Convention. Look at you employment map again. Look at the area around D.C. It doesn’t go black, does it. That is because the politicians are not suffering. Neither are their strap hangers.
So until they feel the pain, there will be no gain.
Ditto for K-Street. K Street is easy. Just make lobbying a non-paying proposition. Once lobbyists have to work for free, their numbers will be reduced.
Lobbying is like sex. You cannot stop it but you can make it illegal to charge money for it. While nobody wants to stop sex, it would be a very good thing to stop lobbying for a fee.
Wretchard @ 9: “The hardest part of the next two years will be 2011.”
Only if the world outside the US decides to sit on its hands. Might happen, but I doubt it.
Whether Democrats go up, down, or sideways in this year’s US elections, the future looks tough because of the financial mess. And let’s be honest with ourselves, Congressional Republicans are the Keystone Kops of politics. Even a tidal wave in their favor at the polls is not going to get translated into the kind of tough policies needed to start things on the long road to recovery — rolling back regulations, defunding government programs, firing civil servants, simplifying tax codes.
But the rest of the world is not likely to give the US (and the West) time to gets its act together. The Chinese clearly have plans. As do the Russians. And the Iranians. Then there’s the lunatic fringe in Venezuela, Cuba, Pakistan. And all the well-known trouble spots. At what point does one of those actors decide that the time is right to make his move? When one of them does act, how can a Western world react when it is drowning in debt, strangling itself with red tape, and has a Grand Canyon opening up between rulers and ruled?
My guess is that many people around the world are going to look back on the first two years of the Obama Administration as the “Good Old Days”.
The right way to get through 2011 is to man up and face the truth about ourselves and our country. If the republican party has a message it should be that we must take pride in being Americans and just go about getting it done. No more excuses, no more blame. Find solutions and don’t spend money we don’t have.( Read Michael Yon’s report on the British troops near Basra and how they perform with a dearth of equipment.-Death or Glory Part I+II of IV)
That being said the news reports that -”President Barack Obama’s job approval rating among American men has fallen to a record low, hitting 39 percent in the week of Aug. 16-22, according to the Gallup Poll.”-CNSNews
James Joyce may have anticipated 2011 in Ulysses-
“–Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t
know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I
have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?
_Put but money in thy purse._
–Iago, Stephen murmured.
He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.
–He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but
an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you
know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s
mouth?
The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems
history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.
–That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
–Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
–I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid
my way._
Good man, good man.
_–I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel
that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?”-Ulysses
In the end most men will want to say that they paid their own way. This works in Peoria, Kansas City and Pittsburgh. 2011 is going to come one way or another. Eyes opened and lashed before the mast as Ulysses would want. That is America. That is their men. That is why American women stand by them.
(Ahem- I would normally delete the post at this point but I find I like the Joyce passage too much not to post it -Kudos to Wretchard for another enjoyable thread.)
Don’t count on the GOP to save anyone or anything save their own sorry backsides. First they’d have sprout a pair and grow a spine on which to hang ‘em.
“If there is a groundswell building against incumbents in both parties the administration may be taking cover behind the wrong tree.”
This brings to mind an old joke. Two men are out golfing and it starts to rain. They get under a tree. The rain gets harder and does not look like it is going to stop anytime soon, and finally one guy says “What are we going to do when this tree gets soaked through and starts to drip on us?” The other guy replies “Don’t be ridiculous! There are hundreds of trees on this golf course! We’ll just get under another one!”
The Denizens of DC are pretending, at best, that the trees are getting soaked through sequentially, and they can use them up one at a time – but that job loss chart shows that in reality it is happening in parallel. The Design Margin is all used up and has gone negative in many areas.
Today on the Neal Boortz show he provided some more examples of “stimulus” spending, which again confirmed my suspicions that it consisted of everyone’s old cats and dogs they could not get funded under any “normal” circumstances:
1. A group in NC got about $750K to develop what is an Internet based dance group. People wear sensors hooked to computers and people can dance together via the Internet, in what they call a dance version of Youtube.
2. A group in California got $150K to help people in Siberia interface with the Russian government more effectively so to better express their cultural concerns.
If all goes as it seems the real test for the GOP is how well they organize and discipline themselves in the first few months. My guess is the best they’ll do is a C minus. Their fatal flaw is they want to be “liked” by their opposites across the aisle. “The Spirit of Bipartisanship” will be their undoing. If only they would mirror the Mossad instead of the Knesset, and learn to play smart. But the “Rodney King” wing of the Repubs will be too plentiful, I’m afraid, and the whole party will be dead in a dozen years.
The smart thing to do with organizations – all of them – that lobby is to make all payments to lobbyists go through the GAO. And require the GAO to divvy up each entities pot at least 50/50, with equal shares going to competing povs. Anything else is Leavenworth.
The animation is truth. Just the facts, Jack. The bubble has burst, and it is not going to reinflate anytime soon. We will be lucky if the floor does not give way and dump us all into a pit deeper than the BP gulf hole. The TRUTH is structural disaster for the US economy that has been levitated for a generation by a series of bubbles. I believe these are now OVER. Until we have politicians in BOTH parties competing with each other about neo-protectionist plans bringing back manufacturing and millions of jobs to the US, that animation is not going to lighten up again.
Facts? Few enough Republicans either are even vaguely aware of the facts, and of course Democrats are constitutionally barred from knowing a fact from a hole in the ground.
Facts is, this be the New Dark Ages, Jack. Lay back and enjoy it. Cuz nothing going to lighten it up for years and years.
“The Administration’s best hope is to pass ownership of the problems to the Republicans after 2010.”
I have been waiting, with increasing impatience, for someone to point out that the Current Mess is due to 75 years of Republicans being Mr. Nice Guy and either going along with Democratic New Deal Great Society National Malaise Fundamental Transformation programs put forth by the Democrats or sputtering incoherently when they do oppose them.
Today I heard a couple of remarkable observations. Dr. Thomas Sowell pointed out that during the Great Depression that unemployment really did not take off until FDR’s New Deal took effect – no wonder they called the worst part of the Depression the “Roosevelt Depression.” Dr. Sowell also explained that the reason that “WWII ended the Depression” was that when the war started they got rid of FDR’s ideologues that were hurting industry and replaced them with people who actually knew what they were doing.
How much change is necessary to stop the fall? An article which quotes Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, basically describes how far out of the acceptable parameters things have become. Otellini says the US tech sector is head for a drastic decline. The causes are largely due to dysfunctional government policy.
Otellini talked about a hostility to legal immigration. Engineers were kicked out of the US right after graduation. Qualified people could be not be hired.
A situation in which legal immigrants are punished, made to wait decades, asked to jump through hoops while illegals walk through the a non-fence and cannot be asked for ID is one in which politics, not rationality is the driver. The politicians just want millions of people who they can tell who to vote for. They don’t want any real immigration based on family reunion or points.
Moreover, they seemed determined to penalize business and anyone who wants to be economically productive from some sullen, entitled, and yes — ignorant point of view. And they do this in the name of Hope and Change. It’s a species of madness and like all insanities is evident to all but the insane.
Yet even if Otellini’s complaints were addressed the vast momentum of the Left would still be unaddressed. About all fixing immigration and reducing regulation would do is slow the fall. To push back the dead hand of Karl Marx will require a much longer period, maybe generations.
One of the scariest posts I’ve read in a long time: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-how-hyperinflation-will-happen by Tyler Durden himself.
It’s a post about how the US dollar will collapse.
Hyperinflation is not caused by rampant inflation; it’s caused by currency collapse otherwise thought of as the distrust of the worthiness of the currency. Or the debasing of the currency.
Currency collapse happens from things like rampant ‘Quantitative Easing” by the Fed , ridiculously huge bailouts and the unserviceable budget deficits like those cooked up by the current Administration and Congress. Also debasing America’s role as the world’s policeman doesn’t help either.
This problem does not directly stem from the crash of ’08. It’s stems directly from acts of the Fed and Obama since
November ’08. The only way out is to first cut the budget massively, then take a very big hatchet to the current regulatory regime muy pronto, and finally drill, baby, drill. Taking Iran’s oil fields for fun, profit and security (while denuking the place) would also be a nice quick fix, too.
Unsk, remember that the easiest thing to do for the Federales is to default on Social Security and other entitlements. Sorry suckers, you’re already in and we don’t need you any more. Makes the deficit look much better overnite, but admittedly with the accompanying political fallout. Much more attractive alternative than defaulting on Treasury owners who the Feds will need to continue to buy more paper.
A situation in which legal immigrants are punished, made to wait decades, asked to jump through hoops while illegals walk through the a non-fence and cannot be asked for ID is one in which politics, not rationality is the driver.
Well hold on, ah say, hold on a minute there, son. Isn’t Otellini also the one saying Intel needs to hire more Americans instead of H-1Bs, to avoid being a part of the problem? Or no, that was the other Intel exec, founder Andy Grove, I guess they disagree with each other. Sure, the legal/illegal immigration mess is nasty, but it isn’t a part of the business development issue – probably the opposite, business loves the cheap illegal labor, cutting Americans out of jobs and salary. Increasing the number of educated legal (or illegal) immigrants would still not help Americans.
I’m not sure if anything will.
But if there is anything, it’s not just an easing of regulations on business, that hardly touches the price difference between here and China, if there were NO restrictive laws, the costs of labor, even educated labor, is just much too much higher here. I’m afraid a lot of this is the fat cats crying crocodile tears, … if such mixed metaphors are even possible.
The facts is, China is too good and too cheap (and accepting of too much pollution). Meg Whitman can’t touch that. The trouble is STRUCTURAL not political not ephemeral not fiscal and not monetary.
” . . . a much longer period, maybe generations.”
It’s starting to dawn on all of us how deeply embedded and interwoven this situation is; how someone with no visible qualifications or experience could be propelled into the White House; how certain organizations and a lot of like-minded people have patiently and with a certain discipline learned what it took and gotten a lot done; all this while we were building houses, running grocery stores, selling insurance and raising families.
What bothers me is not that I won’t likely be around to see the outcome but that I’m not sure those younger than me will see to it. My grandchildren all seem to be good kids but I’m not sure they’ll have the temperament to get us out of this mess.
The problem we have, as a country, being competitive is all the alphabet agencies – see EPA, etc.
If we are permitted to mine our own fuels, including petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear, the energy costs will be reduced, the profits will remain here, the labor will be performed here – thus a recovery.
Palin in 2012!
Yet even if Otellini’s complaints were addressed the vast momentum of the Left would still be unaddressed. About all fixing immigration and reducing regulation would do is slow the fall. To push back the dead hand of Karl Marx will require a much longer period, maybe generations.
I wonder: did Mr. Otellini support the Democrats, like most of Silicon Valley? Careful what you wish for.
I called the last few quarters of growth “the recovery bubble” because the economic strategy was actually a political one that relied on an explosion of government debt to reward special interests that support the Democrats. They assumed the bubble would hold through November but the air is coming out six months early.
If the unemployment rate heads back towards 10 percent I doubt if the Dems will convince many people that it is George Bush’s fault.
I told an Obama voter friend a few months back that if the Democrats lose both houses than the economy will rebound in 2011 — nothing spectacular, mind you. But businesses have a lot of money and they will figure the worst from Washington will be put on hold for a bit and so start spending. Then in 2012 we’ll have inflation because of all the Fed cash sloshing around — which the Fed won’t want to withdraw in an election year for fear of a triple dip.
If the Democrats lose Congress they will have a real morale problem. If that happens I suspect the blood letting at the state and local levels will be something to behold.
“The trouble is STRUCTURAL”
Where is your evidence? Or do we have different definitions of structural?
Last years Nobel Prize in Physics was split between 2 Americans and a Chinese man in working in England.
Chemistry went to an Indian, an American and a Jew. (I know that starts like a bad joke, but it’s real)
While the next great whatever Might not come from an American, the odds are better then 50/50 it will. That isn’t bad for 5% of the worlds population.
That 5% produces about 25% of the wealth, as well as 50% of the science. Beating that dead horse some more, who is going to bell the cat? Which nation will replace the USA as #1? Which nation has less flaws and more resources?
Where is your evidence?
The problem here is that Perfection is always a goal but never an achievement. America doesn’t have to set a new track record, we just have to stay ahead of everybody else. To steal a thought from Chipper Jones; ‘As long as we are in first place and keep winning it doesn’t matter what anyone else does’.
America is running in front of the pack. Our lead is shrinking, but all that means is we are not in front by as much. That lead can grow instead of shrink. The people are willing, now all we need to do is replace a bunch of politicians.
If ALL those counties that are turning black on that map turn red on November 02, 2010 then we are on the way back. It’s up to the voters to keep the pressure on.
I’m thinking about creating a “Report Card” form letter that people can DL, fill out and send to their Congress critter. Do that on a quarterly basis and those we elected will know we are keeping and eye on them. As a father, I assure you that you have to keep your eye on the kids. Otherwise they WILL find trouble. That is what kids do. Politicians are like that with other people’s money. If they know they are being watched by thousands of people, they will walk a straighter line.
The new phrase is/will be “I’m from the government, and I’m here to crush you.”
The Statists will resort to force if necessary to keep their way. How that force is manifested can change over time–presently it is legal force, with a little brownshirting thrown in for flavor. How the people continue to wake up, and react to this, will be the interesting thing.
If you are a qualified foreign worker–smart, decently educated and capable of adding to a business–your fastest route to work in the US is to marry an American. That could get you your green card within only a few months through a fiance visa.
The fastest route to citizenship is… to marry an American citizen. It can be done (probably) in one (1) year.
But!
That American needs to be working overseas “furthering the commercial interests of the US abroad”. This is section 812 of the Act, which provides for immediate citizenship. The longest delay is in obtaining a SS number, which is needed in order to set up the naturalization test time.
But!
You will then have to go abroad with your new American spouse and live there for 1-2 years. Or, if you’re feeling gamey, your spouse could just have that job for an expected overseas stay of 1-2 years, leave the country for a short while, and then get laid off so you have to return to the States. That’d work too.
Companies–regardless of where they are located–want the best people they can hire at the lowest cost. Anything else would arguably be a violation of management’s fiduciary duty to shareholders. In this day and age, the best people may be from some other corner of the planet, but it is still desirable to locate factories near your main market, currently still the US. Even if you were to hire solely foreign, non-citizen workers in your semiconductor plant, a major portion of their income would in fact be spent inside the US, a major portion of the supplies would be sourced from the US, you would pay US property and corporate income taxes, your employees would pay US income taxes, and etc.
In short, you’d spend alot of money in the US. This would be a great thing if–say–that company were a tourist, right? The same logic applies for firms: a company supports secondary industry in and around it and where its employees live, and more widely within the tax areas that include it. Driving a company away to another administrative region just because they may not directly hire Billy-Bob your neighbor is like amputating your leg because you sprained your ankle playing tennis.
–JC
STP @ 29: Maybe the science Nobels have reflected in some way the economics of the home countries of the scientists in the past, since so many were American, but that relationship is broken NOW. Look around your house and, for anything you acquired in the last ten years, see if it was manufactured in the US, or how much of it was manufactured in the US. That is my evidence. Some stuff may be built by American companies, but in Chinese plants, or from Chinese-made components. This is not a small effect. Outside of automobiles, which Congress mandated *must* have x% American content, and houses that are still (and archaically) stick-built (by illegal Hispanics working at half or less of previous union wages, most likely), only some niche products in this or that industry are still built in the US, until there is call for sufficient quantity that manufacture is moved offshore.
I call that structural.
Name me a single major industry that manufactures half or more of any physical goods in the US.
The problem with the economy is not that the stimulus spending ended (it did not) but rather that the administration has made it far too costly to employee legal American citizens. Business will not create jobs in the current environment. Obamacare, cap and trade, card check, thr rxpiration of the Bush tax cuts and the spending of the stimulus money on the least productive sector of the economy – state and federal workers has dug a hole we may be a decade getting out of.
Tax cuts, quantitative easing, and massive cuts to state and federal spending – especially bailouts of too big to fail businesses would get things moving again. Those things are not going to happen even if the Republicans win in November because Obama has a veto pen and he is a committed socialist. It is not so much that he and the people around him are economically clueless as that in some perverse way they see a crash and the subsequent chaos as an opportunity to crush capitalism and reshape society.
Nobels are a lagging indicator.
As for hyperinflation being an imminent threat, where have I seen that posted before?
BTW, Gonzalo Lira gets the byline on the thesis, not Zero. Sure looks like a great pen name, though.
The single biggest mistake in his thesis is the idea that the trigger will be domestic.
It NEVER is. It is ALWAYS the case that it’s the international crowd that rejects the fiat currency. And for the dollar, that is already underway.
If Pelosi-Obama-Bernanke are still running the show after the election, then one should expect hyperinflation at any time.
Looking at historical examples, no one ever sees it coming, least of all the issuing fiat power.
It ALWAYS hits as a cliff-function. Anyone foolish enough to project linearly gets crushed.
If you’re in no position to rack up gold and silver, at least stock up on:
Booze
Cigarettes
Rice
Beans
Canned food
Flour
Coffee
Tea
Vitamins
Paper products ( all of them )
Bandages
and the rest of day-to-day consumables.
When hyperinflation hits, these are always the items that scream out of sight.
By comparison, all other items collapse in relative value — and that includes real estate and stocks. Just because they are nominally rising doesn’t help. In a world of graduated income taxes the government comes and takes the value away. And I don’t mean on your tax forms. I mean that ALL of your middle class assets get destroyed.
It’s sort of a reverse Jubilee where by its the debt-assets that zero out and credit does not exist. Ordinary business billing utterly collapses. The ATM can’t be rescaled fast enough. All of the credit card issuers implode at the same time.
All of the above happens when a Fiat Power clearly has no intention of supporting the currency, rather it expects to be able to tax the rest of the planet by issuing phony currency exports at an exponential tempo.
We are ALREADY doing so. We are ALREADY at the issuance ratio that triggered all prior hyperinflations. ( Twice spending vs taxes collected. )
Because the US Dollar is international money the hardship will be global in scope. I find it hard to believe that heads will remain calm while every modern economy reels from the implosion.
Should Pelosi have her way, you can write off the European banking ‘system.’ They are geared way too high. Worse, they expect the Fed to lube their troubles away. How can that happen when the dollar, itself, collapses due to political folly of negative magnitudes?
W @9: Much more important than retaking control of Congress is retaking control of State Houses. The Republicans need to win as many Governorships as possible. Right now Real Clear Politics predicts that after election day there will be 31 GOP, 18 Dem, and 1 Independent. Thirteen seats are not up for election this cycle:
Deleware: Dem
Indiana: GOP
Kentucky: Dem
Louisiana: GOP
Mississippi: GOP
Missouri: Dem
Montana: Dem
New Jersey: GOP
N. Carolina: Dem
N. Dakota: GOP
Virginia: GOP
Washington: Dem
West VA: Dem
So the seats not contested this year are divided 7 Dem to 6 GOP.
The remainder are predicted to sort out as 11 for the Dem, 25 for the GOP, 1 Independent.
Two big states are still possible GOP pick-ups. California currently has Jerry Brown ahead of Meg Whitman by +2.5% — well within the margin of error. In a three way race, Florida has the Dem Sink ahead of the GOP Scott and the Independent Chiles, but when there is an independent in the race, anything can happen.
If Real Clear Politics is correct, GOP Governors will preside in states with 300 electoral votes. If they were to add California and Florida, GOP Governors would preside in states with 382 EV’s. This is MUCH more important than taking both houses of congress.
With GOP Governors in office in states with a majority (or perhaps even a huge majority) of electoral votes, redistricting will either end up fairly balanced or favoring the GOP. This is especially important, as the census will be redistributing House seats and the EV map for 2012 will change. With GOP Governors in states that are gaining votes, and even in those that are losing votes, this has the potential of tilting the House districts for the next 5 election cycles to as many as 7 likely GOP House seats might be created, causing a swing of up to 14 (+7 GOP together with -7 Dem).
The States are where it’s at this cycle.
#29 Skip_this_post. You are correct that America is number 1 in just about every category, from military to economic to cultural. And it will take decades for another country to overtake us in any of these domains. BUT….
First off, it does matter how big our lead is. If we are clearly the only super-power, we are in a different position of dominance than if we are one of a three to five nation pack, just a nose ahead of the others.
Second, just because we can’t think of anyone else who can take our place as the dominant number one doesn’t mean that things are good. After all, it was a world with no super-powers but just a bunch of almost equal powers that entered World War I. And it was a world in which there were no powers at all that ushered in the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome.
Both parties have failed, and will continue to fail. The Dems truly believed that the stimulus would save them, because they still believed in Keynes. Keynes has been proved (again) to have been a false prophet. But the Republicans are also in error in thinking that they are going to initiate some kind of short term recovery. They will almost certainly cut spending, but that is going to result in a huge new spike in unemployment from laid off government workers, hurting the economy even further. This has to be done, but I believe we will will see true unemployment go past the 20% mark, just as it did in the 1930′s, and it is going to result in years of misery before any true recovery commences, The sad fact is that we have let the rot get so ingrown that there is now no clean or painless way to get rid of it.
And what will make everything worse is that each party will control different centers of power, therefore each party will be working as hard as they can to sabotage the parts they don’t control – in short, 2 years of intergovernmental civil war. Economic chaos is the almost certain result, with each side counting on pinning the blame on the other side while the devastation spreads.
I honestly believe we are about to see the worst two years economically that any of us has ever seen in their lives. And *Both* parties are going to be responsible for it.
wws…
You need to take heart. Dumb old Harding was able to turn things around pronto. He cut government spending like a fool.
This caused unemployment to skyrocket for six months and then triggered the Roaring Twenties. Come the election of ’24 the opposition was destroyed.
Of course, the Silver Dollar made a come back. The US was on the gold standard. We were the lowest cost producer on the planet.
There was great inequity back then. America produced 95% of the world’s automobiles. Her industry was considered by all and every to be state of the art.
——-
Look folks, the problem is basic: too many parasites cripple the patient.
We’ve got a rogues gallery of sap-suckers: the regulatory class, the medical cartel, the mandarin class (attorneys and regulators), the premature retirees, the tenured class, etc.
We’re trying to fly but the bird’s nest is riven with parasites.
And then there’s the foreigner who is stealing our trade secrets. China, Russia and France would have to top the list.
——–
Lest trends become a total downer:
DNA discoveries are mostly in the future — the near future.
Tooth replacement by triggered re-growth is less than ten years away.
Carries will be thwarted even sooner.
Similarly, brain injuries can be redressed with DNA insight.
RIGHT NOW it is becoming apparent that suspended animation is right around the corner. It is in human trials as I post. Forget space flight. Think of surviving blood loss trauma. Think of open heart surgery without a heart-lung machine. Think of liver transplants as being ordinary. Think of pancreatic cures in less than ten years.
Fungal research is in its infancy. Once this trail is blazed remediation of toxic land fills will be reduced to launching spores and stimulus food towards the problem.
Asteroids hold the potential to make heavy metals cheap. Our Earth is molten and thusly such dense elements sink too far below. Not so on asteroids that never melted. Even a smallish asteroid could easily double known gold reserves. It would also double and triple the know reserves of all the rare earths, silver really anything heavy. ALL of the elements that are costing us a fortune to find and refine on Earth.
Come the day, they will be extracted by robots.
The Intercontinental Railroad was first dreamed of in the age of the ‘Rocket.’ Even the dreamer never thought that America would be crossed by rails before 1870! That’s only 58 years later. For one man, that’s a lot of time. For humanity, but a trice.
Now that English is the international language will it be the case that we all can understand each other?
There is much reason for hope. If only our ‘do-betters’ stop helping us so much.
Ah! It reminds me of Cool Hand Luke. “Boss, I wish you’d stop being so good to me.”
I have a few candidates to nominate immediately for the honor of early and extended suspended animation.
But seriously, the problem I see with trying to prepare for extreme hyperinflation is the likelihood that the same sacks of feces that are presently doing their damndest to CAUSE the currency collapse will be the same ones who then try to villify any who prepare by “stocking up” for their own family’s needs. The perpetrators of the calamity will call it “hoarding,” make it a crime, and ruthlessly punish, imprison, confiscate and sit on any supplies they can.
The harsher the punishment, the more effectively they discourage like behavior by “the others.”
It seems needless to defend this assertion; they have been stealing from the country for decades already. People rarely change their habits without supreme motivation.
39. Mad Fiddler
You’re absolutely right. Communists always do that. Criminalize the prudent; demonize them so that the foolish ‘grasshoppers’ demand that something be done, then confiscate their carefully gathered supplies and make everybody dependent on the government. Then, of course, the government gets to decide who will eat and who will not.
38. blert
There is much reason for hope. If only our ‘do-betters’ stop helping us so much.
Good comment. But “if” is a mighty big word.
blert @ 38 said:
“Asteroids hold the potential to make heavy metals cheap. Our Earth is molten and thusly such dense elements sink too far below. Not so on asteroids that never melted. Even a smallish asteroid could easily double known gold reserves. It would also double and triple the know reserves of all the rare earths, silver really anything heavy. ALL of the elements that are costing us a fortune to find and refine on Earth.”
I’ve read more than once that there are asteroids containing a significant content of platinum. A google quick search of the Internet indicates many sites were the platinum story is repeated. I’d like to believe this story is true (it seems reasonable). However I’ve never read this story in a peer reviewed scientific publication.
I own a couple meteorites made up of iron and nickel (they’re very common). I’ve also seen meteorites displayed in museums that have diamonds in them. However I’ve never seen an example of a meteorite with a significant content of platinum or gold in it. I fear that the story about gold/platinum in asteroids might be an urban legend without scientific basis.
41. Eggplant
I think iron and nickel meteorites are ones whose parent bodies have melted; hence the concentration.
Asteroids and comet nuclei which have not undergone melting should contain a variety of elements. They would be mixed in tiny quantities throughout the object, not in “veins of ore” as we commonly think of it. The asteroids or comets would have to be processed to refine and concentrate the desired minerals. As blert said, I think this will eventually be accomplished using robots and automated smelting facilities.
I did more searching on the platinum/meteorite story and found the following:
http://www.minsocam.org/ammin/AM48/AM48_379.pdf
The above URL links to the paper:
“The Determination of Platinum Metals in Siderite Meteorites”, Vol. 48, March-April 1963, The American Mineralogist.
The paper mentioned platinum concentrations of 1.86 to 11.4 ppm for siderite (iron) meteorites. Wikipedia claims average platinum concentrations in the Earth’s crust to be 0.003 – 0.005 ppm. The conclusion from this is a random iron meteorite has about 2300 times the platinum concentration compared to random rock from your back yard. This is obviously a significantly greater concentration but is it commercially interesting? Tin is considered to be a relatively rare metal and has an Earth crustal composition of 2.2 ppm. Lead has an Earth crustal composition of 14 ppm. I suspect that platinum or gold in asteroids comes to the Earth in concentrations comparable to lead in a ordinary terrestrial rock and then is concentrated through various hydraulic processes, e.g. dissolved in super-heated water under high pressure and then precipitates out in pure form after the water temperature or pressure suddenly drops. I suspect one will not find lumps of pure platinum or gold in asteroids because there is no hydraulic concentration mechanism available.
imho the technology that will enable space mining profitably is still +-3 decades off. The big story in this decade will be that the costs of water desalination and transport will collapse making economically feasible to pipe fresh water 1000 miles inland from any coast to water all the world’s deserts, turning them green and doubling the size of the habitable planet.
34 Batman
“The States are where it’s at this cycle.”
The States are where it’s at for the foreseeable future. The FEDs can’t be stopped by elections, only slowed. We need to remove much of the power that’s been assumed by the Feds, not replace the people who wield that power.
That’s going to take some doing, and several election cycles.
Charles, the technology that would make asteroid mining practical is at most a decade off – if the decision was made. Orion. Not the billions-of-dollars white elephant that currently bears that name, but the real one from the early 1960s.
Which leads me to another point. America (and to a slightly more limited extent other advanced Western countries such as the UK) and also Japan have an advantage over such places as China, that ought to be ruthlessly exploited while we still have it. That advantage is advanced technology and research know-how. So perhaps it’s time to go for broke. Put large amounts of money, still tiny compared to the trillions spent propping up failing banks and blowing holes in the Middle East, on research into advanced technology – particularly energy technology and advanced space systems.
Of course this would put a premium on scientists and engineers and destabilise the world economy. This is a feature, not a bug. We don’t need the millions of MBAs and peace studies graduates being produced every year, and a world economy that depends on trillions of dollars being sent to Dark Ages savages in exchange for something that will sooner or later run out needs destabilising.
For just one possible consequence – Just imagine the effect on Middle East oil revenues of workable fusion power from small, relatively cheap units. When the West has Mr. Fusion, what price an oil well?
9. wretchard
The hardest part of the next two years will be 2011. This is the strategic piece that really needs thinking through.
………
right now I think conventional wisdom looks something like this:
Its a given that O will try to do the same thing as Clinton did in 2005 & 6 — which was to totally demonized gingrich while taking the credit for his legislation. Obama is doing a lot of blame shifting now when he has all the levers of power. for that reason his stuff has little traction but when the pubbies come back in november he’ll have game.
it may well be that the way to deal with his game is to play zone defense & not man to man.
what’s the alinsky mantra. I can’t remember what comes after personalize.
imho the stock market is headed for a major correction going into sept oct. That will put some more major hurt on democrats across the board. it will serve as “proof” that the O economic team is out of their depth.
but when the pubbies come back in november the stock market will rise in anticipation of lower federal deficits and better regulatory policies–which will likely force the pubbies to do as much as they can as soon as they can.
which means they’ll need a plan.
So far the only plan that I’ve heard of is wisconsin paul ryan’s plan. So unless some other major framework get big public play in the next two months–that’s the way it will go. (I have not heard yet as to whether ryan’s plan addresses bloated federal salaries & payrolls.)
This plan will provide a target rich environment for the dems.
Obama said up in canada in June that next year he would be cutting deficits in 2011 in a big way.
He let the congressional democrats take the lead in writing legislation for the last two years. I’m sure he’ll be comfortable letting the republicans do the same for the next two years. And he’ll enjoy his new role of critic in chief. (where he could not do the same for the democratic congress.)
Whether big federal deficit cuts come byo higher taxes or lower government spending–its going to happen in 2011 in a big way…that’s a given.
Republican control of congress will also make it likely that much of the health care bill will be defunded–even before the courts rule against its legality.
Its likely too that some form of t boone picken’s natural gas bill will be passed. that has support on both sides of the isle whereas off shore drilling bills would have to go through Obama’s veto
The setup that Obama would like to see would be that the sort of smart legislation that the pubbies would in enact in 2011 would turn the economy around in 2012 such that he could claim success going into 2012 presidential elections.
46. Fletcher Christian
The big cost to a space economy currently that even nuclear power doesn’t solve– is getting stuff off the planet surface.
I think the obama admin made a good first move to privatize the space lift biz –as happened to the space telecommunications biz 40 years ago.
Unless it strikes from the blue–which is certainly possible–I’m not buying that nuclear fusion is coming anytime soon and certainly not from ITAR.
In nuclear power — think the big story in the next ten years will be portable nuclear power plants. These things can be built in factory and shipped by truck or rail to anywhere and carry enough juice power a city of 50,000
My favorite pie in the sky idea for 21st century power is converting in situ sodium ions in water to pure sodium. Here’s what happens when you put pure sodium in water. (There’s a big explosion.)
If you can add an extra electron to sodium while its floating in water–then there will be an explosion.
If the extra electron could be added byo of electricity or radio wave then the explosion could be controlled in the same way that a spark lights a gas fuel mixture
Since the world’s oceans are full of sodium (because salt water is Na+… Cl-, there would be an unlimited supply of fuel.
Anyhow, that’s my favorite pie in the sky idea.
Charles, the whole point of the real Orion is heavy lift. And I mean HEAVY lift; thousands of tonnes at a minimum. For that matter, we aren’t all that far off from building an orbital elevator; Japan is putting serious development money into it.
Fusion power might well arrive from an unexpected direction. I agree with you about ITAR and it won’t even be any better than fission – more radioactive waste, for a start. But aneutronic Polywell or focus fusion might just do it.
The problem with your sodium idea is the same as that with hydrogen. Energy has to be put in to do the separating.
Let’s start with a 30% across the board pay cut for all politicians and their staff – including the Big Zero and his cronies. All of the White House economic “advisers” should be immediately fired. They are less than worthless – they are the problem.
Then cut all judge’s and their staff’s pay by 30%. Start revoking the tax exempt status of these “501-3c non-profit” organizations that always seem to peddling political influence. Most K-street “non-profits” should probably be paying some type of tax – at least payroll tax. Junk the EPA. Fire all of their employees.
Finally, start putting some high profile cronies in jail – where they should have been long ago.
Pence Joins Boehner in calling for Summers & Geitner’s resignation
49. Fletcher Christian
Portable nuclear power plants will be ubiquitous overseas before they get much shelf life in the USA because of people’s fears of nuclear power. I think the fears are unwarranted but that’s where its at right now. I’m not so sure a nuclear powered rocket would set well with people either.
I adore the space elevator story. I think some kind of carbon nanotube will eventually make that happen. There are steady improvements in the manufacture of carbon nanotubes that I’ve seen. Still I’d be surprised if the space elevator made it off the ground in the next decade or two. That sounds like something in the 2030′s or about the time of Kurzweil’s singularity.
The great thing about the sodium reaction is that its exothermic even with electricity or radio waves. Its not at all like electrolysis.
wretchard, the problem is…we don’t get to define the problem.
Unless and until we come full frontal confrontation into the battle for truth, we cannot, we will not…be able to address any real issues. We don’t own the narrative, no matter how often we pretend that we do.
Take EVERY issue that is…or should be…of monumental importance to us as a nation today. The narrative for that issue is owned by the professional left. (I am frustrated at our laziness in pinning an appropriate descriptive on them…I detest calling them “elites”, “progressives”, “liberals” or “mainstream”…these are COMPLIMENTS!!!! And they are anything but descriptive of the traitorous, dishonest and destructive behavior of the group of people hell bent on tearing this country to shreds)
Our economy has been pushed to the brink of catastrophic implosion. Our ability to secure and safeguard this land of ours from sworn enemies is being systematically dismantled. Our borders are being overrun with impunity. We have slapped the faces of eternal friendships and ground our heels on the extended hands of allies.
And when we raise a mere peep in protest, we are subjected to the eye bulging, spittle and frothing rage of the professional left, in full Alger Hiss-y fit.
Lift a finger to defend this land of ours from stealth attacks by sworn enemies and those who mean to harm us, steal from us, overthrow us…and we get the venomous bite of the “racism snakes”. Fang shui is the new way to arrange every debate room so that if you disagree with a leftist, you are automatically facing a sign hanging that calls you a racist and a xenophobe. You could be Karl Rove or Fred Barnes…o you could be Geraldine Ferraro or Bill Clinton. It doesn’t matter. ANY disagreement, triggers the strike.
The GOP is ill prepared to be the voice of the people. The Tea Party is currently being smeared on a daily basis. Both, seem constantly on the defensive. The leftist apparatus for dissemination of distortion and slander is so powerful and so permanently etched in our national conscience, that if every single man, woman and old enough child of honor stood up against it and voiced anger, resentment and utter rejection of this vile and despicable infection in our information stream, it would still take more than a decade to eradicate its deleterious impact on our society.
Instead, we keep fighting the symptoms, while the disease rages and ravages our body politic.
Wretchard, it doesn’t matter what happens in November…or in 2011…or in 3045…ir we continue to ignore the fact that the truth is being co-opted and bastardized each and every day of our lives. This country and its salt of the earth people are being slandered each and every day. We are under attack from within…and we are losing.
EVERY decision in modern America is now tainted with this same disease. We can’t hold an adult discussion, because ANY position that is not in kneejerk submission and compliance with leftist dogma, will be viciously attacked, bring heaps of scorn, ridicule, slander and threats upon the proponents.
One can’t take a principled stance against a victory mosque at Ground Zero without being labeled a racist, xenophobe, and having the Speaker of the House threaten an investigation. The “Fairness Doctrine” was aimed at one direction of political thought. The administration attacked Fox News and one radio talk show host.
We have lost civil discourse. We can’t debate. We can’t even discuss issues. Joe the Plumber couldn’t even ask a single question without being investigated!
Any gains…any…made in November…will be temporary and fleeting. The inexorable march of the leftist narrative will grind down any opposition. Unless and until we fix that, the disease will metastasize and we will be helpless to fend off its necrosis. We may have already crossed the point of no return.
The problem is…we don’t get to define the problem.
“just because we can’t think of anyone else who can take our place as the dominant number one doesn’t mean that things are good.”
Good is an opinion thangie. Yours might get better milage then mine. I think things are not so good now because I live off my investments, which are more or less non-existent these days.
My brother, the liberal Democrat, is a maxed out Government worker who is retiring next summer. Things are peachy for him.
Even in the worst depression, there are winners and losers. I remember being told by my Econ 101 Prof back in the dark ages that the true definition of a depression was when the losers outnumber the winners. Course we didn’t have computers to do kewl graphics on like that Unemployment by county map that Richard linked to a post back.
I have been sending that URL to everybody I can think of. It is soooo POWERFUL. It completely destroys the argument of the Obomination that it’s all Bush’s fault.
That is good, but remember you can destroy with negatives, but you cannot build with them. We (conservatives) have to produce our version of what “good” is on a national level. That is why RINO’s have to go. When RINO’s get elected, conservatives lose. It matters not what either party is up to.
I would vote for a conservative Democrat over a liberal Republican. Only there are no Conservative Democrats.
That is because the Democrats cleaned their ranks of any DINO’s. One of the reasons why they are in power today. Maybe the biggest reason.
@51 Charles
I agree with Mike Pence that tax and spend dolts such as Geithner and Summers should step down. Causing them to step down would cut the government payroll and halt the ludicrous plans of the Obummer Administration to Tax and Spend our was to prosperity.
The borrowing cycle has an important component to its success – and that is the repayment of said borrowing. Geithner and Summers have no plans of that. Loans are like a bicycle chain. To move forward they must be lent to responsible lenders and then repaid. The cycle repeats. If the chain is broken the bicycle stops.
Secondly, the government should never be in a spending mode unless it involves a war or the government is buying something on the cheap. It is certainly not buying anything on the cheap – just the opposite. The Government is acting an inefficient middleman out to skim as much “over-head” off of each “spending project” as possible.
The real problem is cronies like Geithner and Summers. They are using up economic oxygen. The quicker they are gone the better.
#36 WWS “Both parties have failed, and will continue to fail.”
Yes, both parties have failed because WE have failed!
Suppose Republicans retake both House and Senate. Suppose they do so with a strong majority in each. Suppose they rescind Obamacare. Suppose they undo everything Obama has done. Suppose they do everything right and necessary to turn this country around. In spite of all appearances, great pain will still come to this nation in 2011, a pain that is required to reverse this nation’s course for the better. Alas, people won’t like the pain and will look for a scapegoat to blame. Democrats will simply say, “Look who you put into office…look who controls Congress…it’s those Republicans who are giving tax breaks to the rich while your middle class jobs are falling off the vine…It’s George Bush all over again…They’re doing the same thing to our country as Gingerich’s ‘Contract With America’ did…America, it’s time for a change in Washington…It’s time to restore hope and put America back to work…It’s time we give back to our children a chance for a better future…Vote Democrat this fall and restore our country to its former greatness!” Blah, blah, blah!
And America will listen because we can’t abide the necessary pain to turn things around, and the pendulum will swing back to the left, and the country will continue its tailspin into the ground.
Take it to the bank!
Fletcher Christian @ 46: “When the West has Mr. Fusion, what price an oil well?”
The West today has nuclear fission. What price is an oil well?
Part of the change required is to recognize we have to play the cards we have been dealt. We have the means to get off imported oil, through competitively-priced liquid transportation fuels manufactured from coal & oil shale using heat from nuclear reactors. We have had that opportunity for about 4 decades. But our Political Class refuses to play that card. And we the people refuse to over-rule our titular leaders.
The problem is not in our stars, but in ourselves — as Shakespeare was wont to say.
On the animation, be sure to note the bubble of lower unemployment surrounding Washington D.C……
“White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton acknowledged that the drop-off was likely largely due to the expiration of the home-buyer tax”
So, at some gut level, at least some Democrats accept the basic equation of Higher Taxes = Lower Investment = Poor Economy.
I see Hope and Change!
Charles, that sodium idea … um, no. As FC says, requires the energy in to get the energy out, there’s no surplus, none, zip, zero, high school chemistry. I’m afraid I don’t anticipate any sudden breakthrus in fusion. Fission batteries from odd isotopes, maybe. I was all hot about supercapacitors as handy devices if not power sources … but it seems there’s no magic there, either. If God wants us flying around the universe at all, He hasn’t made it easy. Stargates, ZPMs, … right up there with the elves and unicorns. But we can get space-based solar energy, better desalination, and maybe better mileage out of our cars if they’ll just make them out of lighter materials.
But if all this stuff is made in China, I wonder if we’ll be able to afford any of it.
50. The Ledge
Start revoking the tax exempt status of these “501-3c non-profit” organizations that always seem to peddling political influence.
……..
501-3c’s include churches.they’re not susposed to talk about politics if they’re a 501-3c. conservative churches
follow the law. liberal churches do not. typically the reason for this is that liberal lawyers go after the conservative 501-3c’s when they get into politics whereas conservative lawyers and judges don’t go after the liberal churches when they get into politics.
Kinuachdrach – The problem with nuclear fission is that it is completely impossible to do it in really small units. The smallest being mooted is of a size to supply a town of 50,000, and like it or not nuclear waste – some of which is just about uncontainable (krypton) – is produced.
There is a fair amount of hope that focus or Polywell fusion will work, and if either or both of them do that the units might be quite small. Fusion-powered cars (hence the Mr. Fusion reference) might be stretching it, but a unit suitable for an indivudual house or large truck might not be. And either of these approaches lend themselves to nuclear reactions not involving neutrons; proton/B11 is favourite for that. (Yes, if you want to nitpick, this reaction is technically fission.) The result of this reaction is three alpha particles, which are charged and therefore can be induced to give up their energy with little loss.
I fully agree with your point about synthetic fuel. Unfortunately, up to now it isn’t competitive. Using cheap heat from intrinsically safe fission reactors (or SPS, or OTEC, or…) it might be. Best of luck getting the lawyers off your back to get them built. Quite a few of whom will be paid with oil company money.
With U.S. Approval, Moscow Heads Back to Afghanistan
Charles @ 44 said:
“The big story in this decade will be that the costs of water desalination and transport will collapse making economically feasible to pipe fresh water 1000 miles inland from any coast to water all the world’s deserts, turning them green and doubling the size of the habitable planet.”
From what I’ve read, fresh water is actually a bigger problem than cheap energy. This is significant because cheap energy is a huge problem (it’s slowly wrecking the world’s economy). Fresh water and cheap energy are the “yin-and-yang” of the same problem, i.e. you need cheap energy to produce fresh water.
Charles @ 47 said
“imho the stock market is headed for a major correction going into sept oct. That will put some more major hurt on democrats across the board. it will serve as “proof” that the O economic team is out of their depth.”
I share this opinion. Also I believe that O and his economic team were never in their depth (proof by inspection, QED). It is my opinion that the economic collapse in September 2008 was a consequence of long term economic neglect coupled with bubbles blown by the Federal Reserve as symptomatic cures. However I suspect the triggering event in September 2008 was some sort of financial system manipulation by Soros and/or others in his league. I believe Soros committed this economic sabotage because he wanted his savior Obama elected as messiah in November 2008. The strategy worked (Soros knows his stuff) and we’re afflicted with the Messiah as President during a crucial branch point in our nation’s history. However I suspect there are others with significant financial power who would like to see Obama and the socialists expelled from political power. These other people will not hesitate to use their own form of economic sabotage in the next month. It’s an open question concerning how long our economic system will continue to survive with different factions using economic sabotage as a political tool.
Charles @ 48 said:
“The big cost to a space economy currently that even nuclear power doesn’t solve– is getting stuff off the planet surface.”
Cheap Access to Space (CAtS) is ***The Problem*** with establishing a space economy. The cost to launch stuff into Low Eart Orbit (LEO) is $10,000/kg. Despite the efforts of some of mankind’s brightest engineers, that number of $10,000/kg has not budged in 50 years. The Space Shuttle was justified as an attempt at lowering the cost to LEO and the lie was originally propagated that the Shuttle would lower launch costs to $1000/kg. Unfortunately this was only a lie and most of the people propagating the lie knew they were lying (they were hoping to later build a second generation shuttle that could enable CAtS). Before the end of next year (probably February 2011), the Shuttle will go away and there is ***NO*** CAtS technology waiting on sidelines to take its place. The failure to solve the CAtS problem represents almost as big of a technology disaster as the failure to solve the riddle of controlled nuclear fusion (arguably our worst technological failure). In the 1960s it was generally accepted that nuclear fusion and CAtS were going to solve the problem of living on a world of finite resources with an exponentially growing population. Unfortunately no solution was found and now we’re in serious trouble.
Charles @ 52 said:
“I adore the space elevator story. I think some kind of carbon nanotube will eventually make that happen.”
I wish it were true. I work with guys who did nanotubes for a living (note the past tense). The carbon nanotube thing has hit a dead end in terms of space elevators. The problem is the longest that a single nanotube can be made is about a meter. A space elevator needs to be many kilometers in length. This requires that the nanotubes be glued together. The point of contact between the nanotubes where they are in shear is the weak link. A glue with the same strength in shear as a single nanotube in tension is probably impossible to create.
Near the turn of the 20th century Chesterton pointed out that what
had been known for centuries as “Christendom” was no longer
Christian. The people who inhabited “Christendom” had been
abandoning the beliefs that were the underpinnings of western
philosophy and turning to heresies and fads and it was these
that were now dominant in western thought. And within 2 generations
the formerly Great Powers that had once formed “Christendom” had
become second and third rate powers. And by the turn of the 21st
century those powers who had dominated lands all across the planet
are scarcely capable of defending their own borders.
No nation whose people abandon the morality that underpinned the
very creation of their culture and state will last for long. It
takes virtue to maintain a strong, free people. It takes courage
to face up to adversity and persevere. It takes wisdom to
exercise prudence, honesty and thrift in governance and business
and so prosper. It takes humility to recognize reality and to set
our actions accordingly in order to invite as little chaos as
possible while imposing as much order as we are truly able. A
people who have fallen so far as to butcher the unborn because
it is more convenient than facing the responsibilities of
parenthood will not face for long the stresses of actual living. They
will instead insist upon a fantasy world of entitlement and
license. No people who tolerate a mentally disturbed minority
to overturn and then dictate the meaning and form of ancient,
proven and working custom and tradition will hold fast to
anything important. They will instead insist upon holding fast
to their comfort, to their “dignity”, to their “self esteem” and
they will hate and bitterly oppose any who dare point out that
these things must be earned and guarded continually against the
assault of the wicked and the temptations that forever taint
their own souls.
This next election may well result in a large turnover of
politicians. And we may even see some significant changes in
policy and procedure in government. But this will be only a
temporary diversion. Immoral people are cowardly, profligate,
boastful and arrogant. Immoral people lack the steadfastness
to stay any course that entails discomfort or sacrifice for any
meaningful length of time. Immoral people expect others to do
for them and will only do for themselves if the effort will
induce others to serve their purposes.
If America turns itself around it will be the first time of which
I am aware of any such occurrence. The truly terrible part of this
is that the fools will take down the good and decent with them.
Fletcher Christian @ 62 said:
“There is a fair amount of hope that focus or Polywell fusion will work, and if either or both of them do that the units might be quite small. Fusion-powered cars (hence the Mr. Fusion reference) might be stretching it, but a unit suitable for an indivudual house or large truck might not be. And either of these approaches lend themselves to nuclear reactions not involving neutrons; proton/B11 is favourite for that.”
The ignition temperatures for proton/B11 fusion are much higher than deuterium/tritium. We have so far failed to achieve controlled fusion for deuterium/tritium.
I strongly support research efforts towards viable controlled fusion technologies. I no longer believe that tokomak technology such as proposed in ITER is a viable line of inquiry. I’d rather seen the money spent on other approaches.
Polywell might(?) pan out. Unfortunately very bright people have been looking at inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion since Philo Farnsworth invented the fusor in the early 1960s. Both Farnsworth and Robert W. Bussard failed to make IEC a practical energy source. I’m skeptical that there are brighter guys out there who can succeed where Farnsworth and Bussard failed.
IMHO the deuterium-deuterium fuel cycle is probably the best option for commercial nuclear fusion. Inertial confinement using ion beams (not lasers) as the trigger is the technology with the best chances for success.
53. cfbleachers
You are utterly correct. A few examples come to mind but there are many, many, more.
Take illegal immigration. Because there are 20 million of them we just “can’t” round them up and deport them. We just can’t. Therefore the question becomes one of how we must assimilate them into our society. And of course, that is utter bullshit. Yes we can round them all up and deport them or take measures that would make them leave of their own volition. To use an extreme example to make the point, if we made it official policy to shoot each and every illegal alien on the spot and started doing so I suspect the entire group would be out of the United States within a week. But there are a lot of less Draconian measures that could be taken that would accomplish the same thing, but no, we are supposed to accept as a given that it is “impossible” to do this, and move along from there and merely discuss how and when amnesty for them is to come.
The same can be said for the issue of health care. The real issue is whether the Federal Government should be involved with the provisioning of health care at all. If one agrees with the notion that it should not all debates about the issues of Medicaid, Medicare, and ObamaCare become irrelevant. But instead we are supposed to accept the Iron Premise which cannot be questioned.
The greatest success of the Progressives is their imposition of Iron Premises into the culture. Once they are taken as givens the desired conclusion becomes inevitable. Political discourse devolves into the means and velocity by which we reach that destination, and not, as it should, as to whether we should even go there at all.
60. Josh
Charles, that sodium idea … um, no. As FC says, requires the energy in to get the energy out, there’s no surplus, none, zip, zero, high school chemistry.
………
That’s not proven. We’re not talking electroylsis here. Mix sodium with water and there is a big explosion. That’s the high school chemistry hijinks.
This is an exothermic reaction. What’s not known is whether an extra electron could be added to Na+ in solution such that the addition of the extra electron would involve less energy than the resulting explosion.
Hey, EggPlant! In your post 41 you said you own a couple of meteorites… meaning you actually have’em in a cardboard box in your den or so?
I bought 50 percent interest in a minor planet from a guy who was putting together funding to exploit the minerals. He even showed me the dot in the sky, through one of those big paper-tube scopes. Just waiting till the kinks are worked out of the extraction/delivery system.
I’ll sell you half of my interest at a bargain price. I’ll even send you a five-color certificate of authenticity, with a signature from a Doctor on staff in a certain Honolulu medical records facility.
hmmm. Hold on a minute… dang printer can’t read my word processor document…
(Tee Hee!)
#49 Fletcher Christian
Charles, the whole point of the real Orion is heavy lift. And I mean HEAVY lift; thousands of tonnes at a minimum. For that matter, we aren’t all that far off from building an orbital elevator; Japan is putting serious development money into it.
The Ares V design you allude to is 1) now in limbo, and 2) too big; a core module HLV design would make more sense, because it would be expandable. We are very far off from a space elevator — I don’t care how much money the Japanese have put into it.
If I’m following these giddy hypothetical discussions at all, it sounds like the group is talking around the idea of using some available proven technology, like f’rinstance mirrors focusing sunlight to run a big generator to evaporate then separate sodium from chlorine (salt) that had been dissolved in the seawater.
Isaac Asimov used to give a lecture all over the place about putting reflectors in geostationary orbit (I’d love to write some letters on that stationery…) That leads inevitably to questions about how much extra sunlight energy does that add to the overall sunlight we get jes’ naturally.
It’s not so efficient as some methods, but the sunlight is free, for the moment. Is it efficient enough that our great grandchildren might maybe see the fruits of our planting now?
Success hinges on the actual cost and effort involved in extracting useful amounts of Sodium & Chlorine, handling, storage, etc. That same amount of sunlight might be more tangibly productive by applying it to growing fish to feed to children as brain food so they can figure out a better safer fusion process.
Who can work out the numbers?
Average daily sunlight energy impinging on a square meter at the equator is known… But those lying bastards who’ve been making up data to sell their AGW projects have likely got everything skewed and bolloxed up.
Miscreants.
Mad Fiddler @ 69 said:
“In your post 41 you said you own a couple of meteorites… meaning you actually have’em in a cardboard box in your den or so?”
Actually I always carry my “lucky” iron-nickel meteorite in my pocket. Meteorites are beyond cool. Not only do they come from deep space but typically they crystallized a few billion years ago and are older than anything on Earth. Also my meteorite has the additional advantage that I can close my fist around it thus making it an extraterrestrial blackjack that’s legal in the state of California.
Mad Fiddler also said:
“I bought 50 percent interest in a minor planet from a guy who was putting together funding to exploit the minerals. He even showed me the dot in the sky, through one of those big paper-tube scopes. Just waiting till the kinks are worked out of the extraction/delivery system. I’ll sell you half of my interest at a bargain price. I’ll even send you a five-color certificate of authenticity, with a signature from a Doctor on staff in a certain Honolulu medical records facility.”
Oh boy, I’ve got to have one!! Will you take a personal check from Lehman Brothers Bank?
Getting back to meteorites: It’s straight forward to prove that an iron-nickel meteorite is real. Saw it in half and then etch the surface with nitric acid. What you’ll see on the surface is a Widmanstatten pattern that only occurs on meteorites, refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Widmanstatten-patterns-3.jpg
Eggplant @ 66: “I strongly support research efforts towards viable controlled fusion technologies.”
So do I. Though we need to be very careful about how the funding is organized — otherwise we end up with the US paying the French to build an expensive white elephant, a la ITER.
What I rail against is the attitude that, until the perfect fusion device is discovered and (many decades later) commercialized and (even more decades later) built on a large enough scale to make a difference, we should just sit on our hands.
WE HAVE A WORKABLE TECHNOLOGY TODAY! Plain old nuclear fission could support a future global population of 9 Billion human beings at first world standards for about two millenia — lots of time to develop the eventual fusion replacement.
The canard of nuclear waste is just that — a quacking duck. Yes, there are technical issues to be resolved with expanded nuclear fission. But a world full of subsidized wind turbines would have problems too — problems which would be insoluble. Much better to have a world full of big nuclear reactors than a world full of hungry people sitting sucking their thumbs until some genius invents the perfect answer.
There is a Biblical story about hiding one’s light under a bushel. We have the light of nuclear power. We have the need for global cheap energy. Let’s dump the bushel of uninformed left-wing extreme environmentalism.
The Space Elevator Idea seems to violate the laws of physics starting with conservation of angular momentum.
——
Robotic mining of asteroids is much more practical than any scheme involving Mars.
Every time one has to descend a gravity well — and then come back up and out — the delta momentum is a killer. BTW, that’s why von Braun’s dream died and we went with Lunar Orbit Rendezvous.
( He wanted LEO assembly/rendezvous, then an up and back from the Moon. For him the Saturn rockets were just stepping stones to Nova, a design three times as large as the Saturn V!)
By comparison, going out further than Mars to the Asteroid Belt takes virtually no delta momentum. The solar gravity well is pretty flat there. Then a mining semi-robotic craft faces essentially no target gravity well. It becomes a rendezvous very much like the Space Shuttle drifting up to our over engineered Space Station.
By using patience — and planetary transits — modest rocket designs can shift our target down from the Belt and towards the Sun. Solar energy will be used to transform the body. By taking its path closer to the Sun, the flux available takes off.
Then it should be possible to use gasification separation. With the hard vacuum of space and no adverse consequence to scale one could imagine solar concentration so great that the lode would be made plasma. This would probably be a step wise cycle vaguely like a reciprocating engine.
Because total control of the reaction permits either reduction, oxidation, inert gas, low pressure, high pressure, ultra-centrifuges, etc… one may reasonably assume that separation could be effected.
To my way of thinking, the task would be split between robotic ‘trucks’ carefully shifting asteroids into position — a years long (multi-decade long ) task. Then, somewhere in a loopy orbit around the Sun, would take over and process the lode. This, too, would take many years. The bulk of the material would be left on orbit for the construction of all an every: energy capture from orbit, energy assist by microwave to orbital ‘trucks’, agriculture pods for the ultimate commuters, etc..
The elements rare here: the Platinum Group elements would be retro’d down for walking around money.
——
BTW, it is the incredible ‘excess’ of Ir and other Pt group metals that firmed up Dr. Alvarez’s thesis WRT the end of the dinosaurs. That enrichment zone covers the world.
——
WRT lodes: The vast bulk of rare metals and rare earth lodes are of BIOGENIC origin. They are produced at geothermal vents whereby the earliest life-forms of Earth ran on a Hydrogen Sulfide cycle. As a byproduct of their metabolism, the excrete reduced metals upon the sea floor. The various families can live on more than one Me-S. ( Metal-Sulfide) This is why you see Pb,Ag,Zs deposits such as Broken Hill. It represents a staggering concentration of life at a geothermal vent at a time of no oxygen lasting eons of time.
After the metals are deposited as a flour upon the ocean bottom there is a tendency for geochemistry to bury them, squeeze them, and squirt them into cap rock like quartz. ( The quartz started out as ocean sand. But after enough heat and pressure it recrystalized into nearly pure Silicon Dioxide. Hard, but brittle, this cap rock cracked and let the heavy metals intrude.)
Finally, after a billion years, the quartz and other parent rocks become exposed to surface conditions and begin to degrade due to low pressure. ( Most rock types formed at depth because they need and love pressure. At the surface they practically ‘sublime’ into the air, that is they flake to pieces.)
Once the glacier gets through, you end up with placer deposits running down the hillside.
Other ores also show convincing signs that they are biogenic. The very limited number of phosphate deposits makes one suspect that they were laid down like that of Nauru.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nauru
BTW, Nevada’s largest gold mine operates directly upon gold ‘flour’ which was never otherwise manipulated by geochemical processes. It is so fine it is invisible to the naked eye. The deposit is massive, none the less. You can drive right through in on I-80 and see it from your car window.
Cheers.
Kinuachdrach: #15
Your comment is without a doubt one of the keenest observations yet on Pajamas Media. And isn’t it about time that the “hopeful” commenters face reality?
The “ruling class” has the folks in the United States of America, and all around the world in a vise grip that cannot be broken by wishes and hope. From here forward, the game is going to be Raw Power, and the “Country Class” as defined by Professor Angelo Codevilla will be paying the price after losing the game.
John McCain’s defeat of Hayworth in Arizona last night demonstrates clearly that the “Tea Party Conservatives” are not about to change the dynamic in Washington D.C. Waiting for them to fix the mess is a non-starter, hope and faith held by desperate folks with no place to hide. When an idiot, lying two faced, amnesty supporting, Obama electing deal maker such as McCain can buy another six years in the senate for 20 million dollars, where’s the hope of change for the better to come from?
Minority Leader McConnel in the senate, says his party is going to wait for the Deficit Reduction Commission’s report before Republicans offer any resistance to the communist dictator’s final and absolute takeover of the nation. Then he and John McCain will probably join forces with Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders in support of a Value Added Tax to put on top of the existing, soon to be increased, Federal Income Tax.
Looking forward to the next move by the Fed to create another trillion dollars out of thin air to be distributed to the masses?
People need to heed your comment, wake up, grow up and get real. Wishes and hope aren’t solutions to the serious problems we all now find ourselves in.
Somewhere, at some point, a Leader, with belief in the possibility of fixing problems and ideas as to how to get the job done needs to step up to the plate. Tragically, he or she is nowhere in sight and will never appear if the American voters continue to look within the political class for such a person. All professional politicians feed from the same trough and their commonality is to perpetuate a corrupt system that provides them with wealth and power.
And even he or she was in sight, “conservatives” would be too blind to see the figure, and probably too stupid to support such a person if one did stand up.
Thank you for darkening my day even more than it would have otherwise been. I take comfort in your recognition of the truth even thought in these days, the truth of matters counts for so very little.
I can not advocate any fusion cycle that spits out energetic neutrons like D-D and D-T and He(3)-D.
It’s a crippling engineering problem that must forever kill its practicality.
It makes much more sense to harvest what the Sun gives us on the Eastern Slope of the Andes.
We can do that right now, it’s just a commercial enterprise challenge.
That the powers that be are stuck on gigantic reservoirs in their imagination shows where their heads are at.
The true solution is mass-produced run-of-the-river asynchronous generators working to a high head. Containment is not to be a design concern to speak of. The rain forest has no dry season such as you’d know it.
It has two seasons: Wet and Monsoon!
Charles, yes it’s “known”, it’s known as you’re going to repeat high school chemistry if you persist in trying to not know it.
blert, I’ve never understood that space elevator sky hook business either, but I thought respectable people believed in the basic physics. maybe not.
but for the biogenic origin of metal ores, is that now accepted science? even for the single case of say that Nevada site?
#73. Kinuachdrach
Eggplant @ 66: “I strongly support research efforts towards viable controlled fusion technologies.”
So do I. Though we need to be very careful about how the funding is organized — otherwise we end up with the US paying the French to build an expensive white elephant, a la ITER.
Yes. The essential lesson which we need to learn is that anything that depends upon government funding thrives upon failure, not success. That is the key. If your pay check and/or career is predicated upon solving a particular problem what will happen to your career and pay check once that problem is solved?
The answer is to make sure that it never will be solved, but rather to complain that you have been given inadequate resources to solve the problem.
We should indeed use the technology we have in plain old nuclear fission plants. But if we really want a workable fusion technology we should not be passing out dollars to academic hacks who live for the grant dollars for research, we should rather offer a guarantee that anyone who manages to build a workable fusion technology, and their investors, will be free from having to pay taxes on the income from the invention and its power generation for a period of twenty years.
I suspect the technology would appear in a remarkably short period of time.
Re nuclear waste: I’ve always wondered, Why not drop the stuff into a subduction zone and cycle it through the tectonic process another time?
Kinuachdrach @ 73 said:
“WE HAVE A WORKABLE TECHNOLOGY TODAY! Plain old nuclear fission could support a future global population of 9 Billion human beings at first world standards for about two millenia — lots of time to develop the eventual fusion replacement.”
I agree that we need to get shifted over to nuclear fission as soon as possible. It was nuts (suicide) that we allowed the radical environmentalists to control the “narrative” concerning nuclear fission (we should have converted over to nuclear fission as our primary energy source about twenty years ago). However, I’m sceptical that nuclear fission could provide the world’s energy needs for two thousand years. The most optimistic number that I believe is about 500 years.
blert @ 74 said:
“The Space Elevator Idea seems to violate the laws of physics starting with conservation of angular momentum.”
If you do the math there is no violation with conservation of angular momentum (space tether concepts are very nonintuitive). However the Space Elevator concept does flop over dead when you get into practical details like the material requirements of the tether (gluing the nanotubes together), impact with orbital debris, and the energy requirement to put the tether on orbit.
blert @ 74 also said
“Robotic mining of asteroids is much more practical than any scheme involving Mars.”
I have to disagree. Asteroid exploration serves as stepping stones towards a permanent colony on Mars, i.e. do manned missions to asteroids that are further away until a base camp can be established on Phobos. The goal that the Space Program should be focused on is the establishment of a Mars colony that is completely self sufficient and no longer dependent upon resupply from Earth. The possibility of survival based entirely upon in situ resources is the main justification for Martian colonization. After the seed of Martian colonization has been planted then eventually asteroids will come into play again when the established Martian civilization spreads outwards to the Saturn system. Saturn is the “treasure chest of Solar System” where it becomes economically and technologically feasible to fabricate interstellar vehicles. Unfortunately the big problem today is simply getting people out of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Our failure to leave LEO may end up being the main reason why our species becomes extinct on its planet of origin.
Gordon @ 79 asked:
“Re nuclear waste: I’ve always wondered, Why not drop the stuff into a subduction zone and cycle it through the tectonic process another time?”
We need to treat the ocean’s ecology with greater respect. For too long we’ve treated the ocean like it’s a big sewer. Also nuclear waste is a valuable resource, e.g. the long half-life actinides can extracted and used as fuel.
67.Tcobb & 53 cfbleachers,
The myth of “rounding up the illegals is too hard and can’t be done” is easily broken. (credit to Andrew Wilkow of Patriot radio Sirius 144) If 20 million taxpayers decided to ignore tax laws would the government say it was too hard to enforce or it can’t be done? Bogus argument, period. It’s all about creating more “zero liability voters.”
I am convinced the solution to the economy lies not with any political party per se but with the states individually and together as economic partners (mainly because of the land-locked nature of some). Asking politicians to solve this is like asking the crack addict to toss his rock into the toilet. I remember an article I read in Iraq about Idaho getting Case Knife Company to move their entire corporation, families included, out of California where they had been doing business for 100 years. (I’m fuzzy on actually years) All it really took was tax incentives to allow them to profit. Imagine that.
States who want to survive should renegotiate their terms of inclusion in the union. Move the power back to the states, ammend the constitution to ensure it stays put, and prosper (living long if possible). Would you send your bank account number and access pin to any of these pirates? You may as well.
#72- don’t know what that means, but that photo looks kind of ‘star of David’ like.
Don Rodrigo, in referring to Orion I was definitely NOT referring to the recently-mooted abortion that will serve no purpose except soaking up taxpayer dollars that can be better spent – except that IMHO another purpose is to prevent space development, because a viable large-scale society in space will be beyond the grasp of Federal bureaucrats.
No, I mean the original Orion. Bang-bang. Pulsed nuclear rockets. The earliest stage of Orion development would be a craft weighing maybe 10 kilotons, of which about 4kT would be payload. Possibly, to avoid some fairly serious pollution, one could get the thing into the lower ionosphere using a hell of a lot of strap-on solid boosters.
Later developments would lead to 8-10 megatonne ships, with about the same payload ratio, nevertheless able to generate enough delta-V to get to Saturn in a reasonable timeframe. For reference, this is about 4-5 times the mass of the Great Pyramid. Shades of early space opera; half-mile-long ships with shock absorbers hundreds of metres high as part of the design, made out of ordinary steel.
The USA could have beaten Kennedy’s promise by a ridiculous factor – making it to a different moon altogether (Callisto?) in roughly the same timeframe. Von Braun, however, won the argument and hence the project was canned.
I have a very strong suspicion indeed that one of the reasons for the project name choice was to bury even the memory of a relatively easy and cheap way to get off this mudball.
And lastly, the recent booster designs are not at all too big. They are too small. As are the ideas of the people who designed them.
Mr. Christian, forget the nuclear bomb drive. There is a better one, all worked up and ready for prime time;
http://rocket.itsc.uah.edu/u/cassibj/IonPropulsion.htm
Here is the URL to the one flying a deep space mission RIGHT NOW!
http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/sep.html
For interplanetary travel, Ions are the way to go. Getting to LEO is still the problem, as it always will be.
Nano-tech still has mass issues. While a 200 kilo ballerina is better then a 300 kilo ballerina, it still isn’t there yet. I suspect the final solution to a ‘space elevator’ will be mass less. Some sort of magnetic or gravity connection to the space station. Wild eyed but still not as wild as a materiel that can reach from Earth to Geo-synch without collapsing under it’s own mass.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htm
Truax was on to something: bigger is better with any motion machine that moves through fluids; okay, that moves through the vacuum of space, too.
——–
Direct inspection of any scheme for the orbital elevator shows that angular momentum is not conserved.
——–
The energy wealth residing in quasi-spent fuel rods is staggering. It’s far beyond the value of all the gold mined. Only a trivial fraction of mined U is ever burnt.
After ‘seasoning’ the spent rods will be surely reprocessed by our betters: our great-grandchildren. Virtually all of the isotopes that scare us today will have decayed to the point that the rods are only modestly more touchy to handle than raw ore.
With robotics, what radio-isotopes remain, will be easily handled.
——-
Shifting LEO launches to the equator and using a variation on the VLCC should produce the lowest cost to orbit. Even Britain and Germany can jump into the game.
In such a scheme, the control room is submerged underneath the launch vessel. SCADA controls make everything push-button. Should bad weather threaten, this launch vessel simply sails away.
It also imposes the least constriction upon other activities. There would be no quarantine zone for blast effects. Refreshed launchers would be brought up by sea and transferred upon the calm waters of an atoll.
Essentially all of the big components would be always transported upon the ocean. The factories supporting it would have their own piers.
Liquid-fueled boosters, without pumps but with thick pressure walls, would get the LEO rocket off to a fast start without the expense of rubber fuel. After expenditure, the launcher would hoist them back aboard and cycle them again.
Fuel pressure for the liquid-fueled boosters would come from a squib at their top that would perform a controlled pressure burn. You get the cheapness liquids and the simplicity of solids. With less than one minute of burn time, the specific impulse need not be a primary concern.
Don Rodrigo @ 6,
In other words, “We are SO screwed!”
Skip_this_post @ 85 said:
“For interplanetary travel, Ions are the way to go.”
This is certainly true and I’ve been following the ion propelled Dawn mission with close attention, refer to:
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/index.asp
The big problem with ion propulsion is the power supply. Dawn uses big and heavy solar arrays for its power supply that restrict the vehicle to operating within the inner solar system. Years ago I was involved in the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) project. JIMO was a nuclear powered, ion propelled spacecraft that was intended to travel to the Jupiter system. In our enthusiasm for the project, there was a brief period of time where we actually thought JIMO might happen. Unfortunately JIMO died after we got into the nasty details. A big problem was the thermal cycle for the reactor. Ideally we would have used a Brayton cycle but there were just too many moving parts (the power supper must be reliable for decades). The alternative was a thermoelectric system based upon direct conversion of heat to electricity using solid state components. The reliability was extreme for thermoelectric but thermal efficiency was dreadful. Bad thermal efficiency means significant heat rejection which means hauling around a huge radiator. JIMO ended up becoming a huge radiator where the nuclear reactor, ion propulsion system and payload where almost insignificant after thoughts. There’s the old story that arm chair generals worry about tactics while real generals worry about logistics. Arm chair rocket scientists worry about propulsion while real rocket scientists worry about heat rejection.
dtmack @ 45:
QFT!
88. Eggplant:
Was that Prometheus, or another project?
Also, what do you think of VASIMR?
87. mariner:
It’s the high likelyhood of “stupid human tricks” by Republican individuals that has me concerned. Republicans don’t seem to understand that the dominant narrative is they are required to have a set of moral standards worthy of June and Ward Cleaver, whereas Democrats can behave as they like for the most part.
VASIMR looks like it a winner.
If it there ever comes a time when we can beam IR or Optical to a spacecraft, then cis-Earth acceleration could be ramped up.
All of the high performance rockets are slugs off the line. VASIMR looks like it’s solved that bug, mostly.
Don Rodrigo @ 90 asked:
“Was that Prometheus, or another project?”
Prometheus morphed into JIMO and then JIMO simply died.
“What do you think of VASIMR?”
I think the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is a very interesting concept. Franklin Chang-Diaz is the main man behind VASIMR (he’s another one of these amazing uebermensch like Buzz Aldrin). Chang-Diaz main motivation with VASIMR was to come up with an enabling technology to get humans to Mars. The main problem with transporting people to Mars using chemical or nuclear thermal propulsion is the cosmic radiation dose. It has been claimed that with a VASIMR propulsion system, people could get to Mars in about 39 days. With a 39 day transit time, most concerns about cosmic radiation and zero gravity effects go away (travel to Mars becomes very practical). Of course the gottcha with VASIMR like ion propulsion is the power supply. There would need to be either huge solar arrays or a nuclear reactor with an enormous radiator. That couples in with mission architecture issues, for example:
Do you have the vehicle travel to Phobos and another vehicle transports the flight crew from Phobos to the Martian surface? This enable the VASIMR to be used for Earth return. Alternatively, if this were a colonization mission and VASIMR was nuclear powered then you might want to take the nuclear reactor down to the Martian surface and use it for powering the colony. Another option is to detach the payload from the VASIMR propulsion system while the vehicle was sill in heliocentric orbit and use aerocapture to put the payload into Mars orbit while the VASIMR propulsion system free returned to Earth. Doing so would enable multiple reuse of a heavy propulsion system without the worry of atmospheric interaction with the solar array.
Chang-Diaz has been hustling to have a VASIMR mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) for technology demonstration. I think that’s an excellent idea. Also there is the slender possibility that if enough VASIMRs were mounted on the ISS then it might be possible to retrofit the ISS into an interplanetary spacecraft. As it currently stands the ISS is little more than a white elephant. However with a VASIMR propulsion system, the ISS might be transformed into something like Sir Francis Drakes’ Golden Hind, i.e. amazing exploration capability on almost no budget.
93. Eggplant
Also there is the slender possibility that if enough VASIMRs were mounted on the ISS then it might be possible to retrofit the ISS into an interplanetary spacecraft.
Now that’s interesting as hell. I’ve often thought that a true interplanetary spacecraft would resemble the ISS more than a beefed-up Apollo.
Eggplant @ 80: “I’m sceptical that nuclear fission could provide the world’s energy needs for two thousand years. The most optimistic number that I believe is about 500 years.”
For all practical purposes, if the time that nuclear fission could meet all the energy needs of an expanded human population at First World standards is somewhere between 500 years and 2,000 years — Houston, We Do Not Have A Problem!
500 years back in time would take us to the first European voyages to the New World. The Industrial Revolution started only about 250 years ago. Think how much technology could advance in 500 years if we have 9 Billion Human beings living at First World standards with education & opportunity for all.
For the record, the two millenia guestimate is based on a 100 TeraWatt global energy supply. (Nearly 7 times the current global energy supply of about 15 TeraWatts). It assumes reasonable projections for future uranium discoveries, extraction of a reasonable portion of the massive uranium resource in the oceans (technology already demonstrated by the Japanese), and adoption of breeder reactors (again, demonstrated technology). It does not include the potential expansion of nuclear fuels to include thorium, so the two millenia is probably conservative.
But whether the time frame for sustainable nuclear fission is centuries or millenia, the point is that it is a long enough time for human beings to develop the next source of power, which will be even better and cheaper. Creativity = sustainability.
To misquote OPEC’s Sheikh Yamani, the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones; the nuclear age will not end because we run out of fissionable fuel.
“Arm chair rocket scientists worry about propulsion while real rocket scientists worry about heat rejection.”
Don’t you mean heat retention? Not being a rocket scientist nor an astronaut I don’t understand why residual heat from an internal combustion engine (heat rejection) should matter in outer space. Powering your spaceship with a chevy small block? With the universe as a heat dump and a vector to prevent retention, What’s the Problem?
Technically, a radiator requires liquid and air flow. Considering that there is no air and the ambient temperature is as low as it gets (no liquids in space) I think maybe radiator is the wrong word. Or maybe a radiator isn’t the same thing to a Rocket scientist.
If this was a course, I would be standing up a hollorin’ BULLSHIT! in the back of the class.
Professors loved me. Unless they were bullshitting.
Maybe you mean a ‘heat sink’? Typically, a heat sink transfers heat to a radiator.
n.
1. A heating device consisting of a series of connected pipes, typically inside an upright metal structure, through which steam or hot water is circulated so as to radiate heat into the surrounding space.
2. A cooling device, as in automotive engines, through which water or other fluids circulate as a coolant.
3. Physics. A body that emits radiation.
4. A transmitting antenna.
1 and 2 have nothing to do with Space vehicles. 3 is a stretch while any space vehicle will have LOTS of antenna.
On a practical note, why not reel out a wire and allow the heat to travel down that wire? Not enough heat loss? Reel out 2 wires. Or 3 or 4 or however many it takes.
Is the same team that dropped a decimal on the way to Mars working this one? Or did they do part of the calculations in metric the rest in British Standard?
Heat problems with an object moving thru vacuum at absolute zero? Sounds like a NASA scam to me. But I’m not a rocket scientist, nor an AGW believer.
rickl @ 94 said:
“I’ve often thought that a true interplanetary spacecraft would resemble the ISS more than a beefed-up Apollo.”
This is true. NASA originally planned on de-orbiting the ISS in 2016 (the date has since been pushed back to 2020). Given that the ISS cost almost $100 billion to construct, deliberately burning it up in the atmosphere seems incredibly stupid. Of course, retrofitting the ISS into an interplanetary spacecraft would be difficult to do. For example, the current design of the ISS assumes that if something catastrophically goes wrong then the astronauts could immediately bail-out using a Soyus spacecraft as an escape capsule. Obviously if something went wrong while the ISS was half-way between Earth and Mars then the crew would have no escape options. Finding astronauts who would be prepared to take that risk would probably not be difficult. For what it’s worth, Sir Frances Drake had no escape options when the Golden Hind was off the coast of California. Also the international partners would have to agree to such a conversion (some might prefer to having it burned up).
The “con” game is about to get even more geared up as Repubs “win” big after an October surprise, the China/Soviet/Arabian engineered stock meltdown that tanks 40% more of people’s wealth/retirement.
Then we will see the Bush Tax Cuts expire (“expiration date”,!!!, we were set up, clearly) despite the Repubs “in power”, as they will never get Obama to sign anything that might have a flicker of hope at righting the sinking ship (once again, clearly planned and timed to the political season). This will have a drastic impact on employment, and investment (foreign & domestic) vanishes along with Barry’s remaining poll numbers, like he cared what the middle class thought of him. “Useful idiots and fools, the whole lot of ‘em” he must be thinking.
The economy will crash and smoulder, there is almost nothing left to burn so complete the robbery, unemployment skyrockets along with your electric/gas bill with the dollar’s multiple devaluations, and the rhetoric will fly, blame Bush, blame Obama, blame the taxpayer! TAX the taxpayer. Watch carefully what gets passed in the coming months, probably under the cover of darkness aided by a MSM blackout!
What’s left of the retirement accounts will be seized for “redistribution”, and natural resources will be “Nationally Auctioned” off to China.
Get ready California, BP of China will be drilling just off the coast in less than 2 years.
They will also be pumping oil to their supertankers as well as their Mexican built/located refineries, from the US oil network, out of pre-drilled but capped wells all over the country, wells drilled into proven reserves by the thousands during the 80′s and 90′s.
Eight or nine years ago I asked a state representative about all those wells drilled into reserves but capped, the largest diameter hole allowed in the cap was 1/8″. A drill rig technician (over 1300 wells in the eastern US) that frequented the store was standing right next to me, and I wanted to know who are they saving these wells for, “the commies?” I asked.
He shook his head, looked me dead in the eye and said “You might be right son, I just don’t know.”
I, for one, haven’t had any doubts about it, since that day. All those people, smart young people, educated, whatever that means in this country, the same people that used to roll their eyes at the mention of “commies”, well they now get it.
It surprized me today when one of them comes up and says, “All this Mosque stuff, smoke and mirrors, right?”
“Well,” I said, “they really do want to finish the destruction started on 9-11.” Then reminding him that a part of the landing gear from the flight piloted by Mohammed Atta hit this building, and it has been closed ever since. “So they HAVE to finish tearing it down, destroying it” was his reply, as a question.
I said “I guess, but a Burlington isn’t really that strategic of a target.”
Of course when did their strategy/beliefs make sense, it’s a cult, period, and the cult has become the KGB’s wild dog off the chain (who said that, Nyquist?).
Skip…
The limitation is ‘Black Body Radiation.’ Google around on it.
The only way you can eject heat in the vacuum of space is to radiate it.
The lower the temperature you are working with the more time or area you need.
Since continuous operation is desired, your only trade off is between temperature and radiator size.
The sole remaining angle is to defeat the laws of thermodynamics by using a non-heat engine, or to use a heat engine of extra-ordinary high working temperatures.
If you can solve that you’ll get a nobel!
E/81–not the ocean. Vitrified waste dropped into a subduction zone, drawn slowly down into the mantle, there subjected to intense heat and pressure, transformed, not to surface again for eons.
Skip_this_post @ 96 asked:
“Don’t you mean heat retention? Not being a rocket scientist nor an astronaut I don’t understand why residual heat from an internal combustion engine (heat rejection) should matter in outer space.”
No, heat rejection can be hard to do in space (think “thermos bottle”). We normally don’t worry about heat rejection on the Earth’s surface because our atmosphere is quite dense and allows for efficient convection. Heat rejection in space is possible only through radiation (there is no atmospheric gas for convection). Consequently heat rejection is constrained by the the Stefen-Boltzmann Law (Heat flux is directly proportional to absolute temperature to the fourth power). To radiate away waste heat, you need a radiator with a large surface area and the radiator’s surface needs to be hot. The interior surface of the Space Shuttle’s bay doors are actually big radiators. When they get the Shuttle on orbit, one of the first things the astronauts need to do is get the Shuttle bay doors open so the vehicle’s stored waste heat can be radiated away. If the doors fail to open then the Shuttle needs to be de-orbited pronto before the electronics over heats.
Here’s a gee-wiz bit of trivia. The surface temperature of Venus is 735.3 deg.K. (lead melts at 600.65 deg.K). A spacecraft landing on Venus typically dies from overheating after about an hour on the surface. The fun bit is the overheating is not due to the heat from Venus soaking in but rather the heat from the spacecraft’s own electronics. In order to survive at all on Venus, a spacecraft needs to have extremely effective thermal insulation. That insulation is so effective at keeping the Venusian heat out that the option of rejecting the spacecraft’s own heat is prohibited so the spacecraft ends up dying from its own heat (the payload is refrigerated before the spacecraft enters the atmosphere). A similar problem can happen with an astronaut’s pressure suit on Mars. With the Apollo astronauts on the Moon, the astronaut’s heat was simply stored in the pressure suit’s backpack (the heat was later dumped into the Lunar Module’s thermal managment system). An astronaut on Mars might be working for hours in a pressure suit so heat storage isn’t an option. Some Martian pressure suit designs have called for having a big fin out the astronaut’s back like a marlin’s fin. That fin would reject heat by radiation and convection into the thin Martian atmosphere.
Eggplant @101 The surface temperature of Venus is 735.3 deg.K. … A spacecraft landing on Venus typically dies from overheating after about an hour on the surface. The fun bit is the overheating is not due to the heat from Venus soaking in but rather the heat from the spacecraft’s own electronics. In order to survive at all on Venus, a spacecraft needs to have extremely effective thermal insulation. That insulation is so effective at keeping the Venusian heat out that the option of rejecting the spacecraft’s own heat is prohibited so the spacecraft ends up dying from its own heat (the payload is refrigerated before the spacecraft enters the atmosphere).
You’re making it sound as if were physically impossible to cool a spacecraft on Venus. I don’t know if you mean that it’s physically impossible, but in case you do mean it, I don’t see that you’re right. If it’s physically impossible, then why isn’t an ordinary refrigerator physically impossible on earth? Venus just makes for a far more difficult refrigeration problem, requiring far more energy and different materials. For all I know, it’s not a problem for which engineers know a practical solution at the present time, but that’s not at all the same as saying that it’s physically impossible.
Contrary to what you say, the heat from the electronics is not the main problem; the heat of Venus is the main problem. If the electronics are cooler than Venus, Venus, in the absence of refrigeration, will heat them.
Kinuachdrach @95 But whether the time frame for sustainable nuclear fission is centuries or millenia, the point is that it is a long enough time for human beings to develop the next source of power, which will be even better and cheaper. Creativity = sustainability.
To misquote OPEC’s Sheikh Yamani, the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones; the nuclear age will not end because we run out of fissionable fuel.
Oh, it might. Creativity is not magic. I don’t think we can exclude the possibility that there are no tricks that are good enough.
Smoking…
For a heat engine to function while rejecting waste heat at a backround temperature of 750K would require an atomic power source.
Further, it would have to tolerate a brayton cycle ( or its equivalent ) ranging up towards 2,250K to keep its size practical.
To keep its radiator modest its rejection temperature would have to be 800K.
Even at this point, your engineering challenges have just begun.
You now need a refrigeration cycle that can pull internal working temperatures down to 300K while ejecting it at 800K. Another brayton cycle would seem to be your only bet. ( Could be Stirling )
Very quickly, the mass and complications drive the projected cost of any such design way past any utility.
Which is why the Russians always went with heat sinks and undelayed telemetry.
Cheers.
Smoking Frog @ 102 said:
“You’re making it sound as if were physically impossible to cool a spacecraft on Venus.”
What I earlier described was the technology used by the Soviet Venera landers that landed on Venus in the late 1970s. Their approach was to refrigerate the payload while it was still on orbit and then place the payload on the Venusian surface inside a well insulated sphere. As I earlier said, the insulation was so effective at keeping the heat of Venus out that the payload eventually cooked from its own heat which could not escape through the insulation. The Venera design was a reliable low cost approach to a difficult technical problem. Unfortunately the trade-off was the payload could survive on Venus for only about an hour. The United States sent four atmospheric probes to Venus on 9 December 1978, i.e. Pioneer Venus. These probes were not designed to actually land on Venus. However one probe survived surface impact by accident and continued to function for about one hour before its electronics cooked. The Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) has been considering Venus lander designs where the vehicle could actually be long lived on the Venusian surface (it’s easier to acquire funding for longer lived payloads). One design concept is to use a radioactive thermal generator (RTG) to drive a Sterling engine refrigerator. The RTG would provide the energy necessary to pump heat out of the payload into the Venusian environment through the Sterling engine refrigerator. The basic limitation with the design is the Sterling engine has many moving parts and is sensitive to deceleration (supposedly a Sterling engine can not tolerate more than 30 G deceleration). The Venusian atmosphere has an extreme density gradient as a function of altitude. This results in ridiculous deceleration during atmospheric entry. For example, the Pioneer Venus Large Probe experienced 288 G deceleration during its successful entry in 1978. At present, designing a Sterling engine that could survive Venusian entry deceleration is considered “too hard” and the concept has been shelved.
blert @ 104:
I’m impressed. You have an excellent understanding of this problem. I appreciate that we’re trying to remain anonymous (for excellent reasons) but do you work at JPL?
Eggplant…
I wish I did.
——
If a Mars Mission means Phobos or Deimos then I consider it much more practical.
What I would like is to tackle the Asteroid Belt first and then Phobos and then the Moon-Stage II.
Like Augustine ( Of Augustine,s Laws fame ), I think that the scientific and economic impact of Asteroid research holds the highest promise.
My conjecture is that these hunks are ejecta from collisions with the inner planets during the earliest times of the system. Any remnants, with more energy slipped in to the giant planets.
The Belt, then, is the Sun’s version of Saturn’s rings. The Belt’s shepherd ‘moons are Jupiter and Mars. However, the Belt seems to have settled into a ‘Lagrangian Orbit.’
In what has to be quite the multi-body system the Belt dances like a hula-hoop. Just studying its orbital dynamics with research craft of known mass is worthwhile.
Insights into primal geochemistry must abound.
My thinking is that the galaxy got started as a collision between mega-gas clouds of H(2). Their axis of collision generated angular momentum and collisions bled energy into radiation. At the focus, the first star raced ahead of the pack and became a black hole. After a time, it became magnum. Next, even neutron stars and binarys hit the event horizon.
When a neutron star hit the horizon both astrophysics and quantum physics meld. The far-side of the neutron star erupts ejecting hyper-elements with relativistic velocity. (These hyper-elements erupt as neutron jolts and then decay into elements.)
This is the continuous process that creates the heavy elements.
You can discount Supernovas.
Their relativistic speed is bled down as they exit the intense gravity well of the mega-black hole.
These hyper-elements continue to decay down from billions of atomic mass units creating a radiant hyper-heavy metal plasma cloud. Further decay creates a plasma of what we consider to be normal elements. U(235) happens to be particularly favored on the high side.
Examination of the Asteroid Belt will give us ground truth WRT the original distribution.
Eventually, the metal cloud runs back up and out into the tail of the primal collision stream. A solar system has thus been seeded. Like a starting crystal in a super-natant solution, accretion takes off as other neutron ejecta dances into the scene.
The first point of collision should normally be the system center, the star. The bias of the black hole is preserved with the rotation of the daughter suns and grand-daughter planets.
Only the occasional trick collision will flip a planet or pop a moon.
So the elemental distribution that makes up the hard rocks of our planetary system escaped from near extinction at the event horizon, popped from neutrons to mega-elements, then decayed into plasma and ultimately hooked-up with a fresh hydrogen cloud to form our solar system.
The light elements are virginal. The heavy elements come out from within.
The heavy metal distribution throughout the galaxy and the universe is pretty much the same since they were all produced from the same neutron decay events.
When one examines the mass of the mega-black hole it becomes clear that the above mechanism completely dominates the production of heavy elements.
Supernovas just don’t produce the galaxy we see. Like a spermatozoa that lost the race to the ovum, they are just too late and in the wrong place to start their own galaxy.
Going to the Asteroid Belt should give us an insight as to the decay processes of ultra-elements and into the nature of all other planets in the galaxy.
Neutron Star eruptions during its decent into the event horizon should radiate with the intensity of a slow motion Supernova — but with a very specific orientation. It’s that orientation that creates the spirals.
I would expect a single surge out of the neutron star to weigh up towards a small planet, and more. Now that’s some element!
The neutron quakes ripping apart the black hole victim must fuse astrophysics and quantum events. This is a point of study that can only be performed on a galaxy of superchips.
Cheers.
Blert,
You alluded to this, but it’s my understanding that elements with atomic number higher than iron are debris from supernovae. What I was taught in undergraduate astronomy was that Population I stars like our sun condensed from the debris of Population II stars that had earlier exploded as supernovas. Your idea that matter decayed down from super-heavy elements is interesting. However if this were true, shouldn’t we be finding a greater abundance of extremely high atomic number elements from the so called “Island of Stability”? Also stable high atomic number elements like bismuth should be much more common if everything was decaying from the top down.
Nobody really knows how the early Solar System formed. There is a theory that the planet Jupiter was once much closer to the Sun than it currently is (I don’t believe this). A question they liked to ask in graduate school orbital mechanics lectures is whether or not the Solar System is actually stable. It’s an N-body problem after all and N-body systems are supposed to be chaotic. I’ve been watching the progress of the Kepler spacecraft with considerable interest. Like everyone else, I’m mainly interested in finding out how common Earth-like worlds are (I suspect they are very common). However another exciting consequence of Kepler will be in providing a database of planetary system configurations. Eventually we’ll have a big enough database that we can actually construct statistical models that could be used for validating planetary formation theories. At that point it should become obvious concerning how the asteroids were formed.
For the time frame we are dealing with there are absolutely no ultra-heavy elements left to decay. Once you move past U there are no islands of stability long enough to produce survivors.
The decay of ultra-elements is a likely source of insanely powerful gamma rays.
I suspect that this process occurs up to the present time. Observing our galaxy’s radiation will always be tough.
We should look to Andromeda. Perhaps it will give the secrets away.
——
For us, radioactive decay means alpha, beta, gamma. For ultra-elements radioactive decay must mean the ejection of iron nuclei as if they were alpha particles. Fission must occur at a staggering clip. Ultra gamma rays seem likely. Because the process starts at relativistic speeds promptly after the ‘neutronium’ rips free from the neutron star, by our clock, these decays are not instantaneous. Because their departure should be equitorial, directly opposite to the event horizon, this is the process that creates the amazingly flat spiral galaxy out of a vague gas cloud. Supernovas cannot explain that, at all. A galaxy not so seeded would be expected to be globular, much in the fashion of the virginal gas cloud.
One should investigate to see if a super black hole is spinning inside globular galaxies. That would say a lot.
QED?
Eggplant @105 What I earlier described was the technology used by the Soviet Venera landers that landed on Venus in the late 1970s. Their approach was to refrigerate the payload while it was still on orbit and then place the payload on the Venusian surface inside a well insulated sphere. As I earlier said, the insulation was so effective at keeping the heat of Venus out that the payload eventually cooked from its own heat which could not escape through the insulation.
Your entire message (not just the part quoted above) satisfies me that you are not claiming that it is physically impossible to cool a spacecraft on the surface of Venus. As I said, it sounded as though you were claiming it, so I wasn’t sure. I posted because I didn’t want others to be misled.
What makes it sound that way are your remarks about the insulation trapping the heat of the electronics, and cooking them. The trouble is that the electronics would also cook without the insulation, and they’d cook even faster. It’s not as if there were tiny little labeled “electronics calories” and “Venus calories,” such that the 1st could not be driven out without letting in the 2nd, but a person with little or no scientific education, reading your remarks, might think there was; he might think there was a fundamental conflict between insulation and refrigeration. That’s not true, of course. For example, a kitchen refrigerator is insulated.
blert @104
I agree with you that it’s an extraordinarily difficult problem, and, let me say, you seem to know more about it than I do. I only meant that a very poorly informed person might read Eggplant’s remarks to mean that it was physically impossible.
By coincidence, a couple weeks ago, I was stuck at a shopping mall for several hours, while my son, now broke due to the “recession,” visited his clients. (I’ve been driving him around.) At some point, I went into Borders. I couldn’t decide among the approx. eight books I wanted to buy. Considering budget, I felt I should only buy one. (By the way, all but one were non-scientific.) I put all eight back on the shelves and selected another one, Schaum’s Outline of Thermodynamics for Engineers, with the idea of better understanding the miscommunications or disagreements between scientists and engineers about global warming. I then sat outdoors, alternately reading and girl-watching, until my son called. Such is the fate of the aged.
just a tiny datum or two to add to the Uranium fuel discussion (I bet Wretchard is getting pretty tired of seeing me drag this out every few months…)
“The world uranium resources in phosphate rock are estimated a 9 x 10 [to the Sixth] metric tonnes (mt) of Uranium (U).”
— M. Ragheb
3/15/2008
From the introduction to the report “Uranium Resources in Phosphate Rocks”
I downloaded this report just a couple of weeks after Israel confirmed its air force had bombed the Syrian Al Kibar nuclear facility the previous year. You may recall this was a complex which the Syrian government built mostly underground, with structures above ground intended to look like ancient ruins.
Doctor Magdi Ragheb is an Associate Professor, faculty of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Enginerring, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There’s a later version of essentially the same report with some minor alterations to the text, dated 09 September 2009, and Doctor Ragheb’s website has a link to his paper included in the Proceedings of the 1st International Nuclear and Renewable Energy Conference (INRECIO), Amman, Jordan, Mrch 21-24, 2010.
That paper is titled “URANIUM FUEL AS BYPRODUCT OF PHOSPHATE FERTILIZER PRODUCTION”, listing as co-author Mohammed Khasawneh.
To a casual skimming this paper appears to follow the earlier versions in form and many details.
What is endlessly fascinating to me is that the IAEA seems to have been fully aware of Syria’s ongoing efforts to extract fissile Uranium from their extensive phosphate deposits since 2001. A quote from the third section of 17. SYRIAN PHOSPHATE states, “According to statistics, in 2001, Syria mined over 2.04 million tons of Phosphate. A food-grade phosphoric acid micro-pilot plant is already operating at the city of Homs under IAEA safeguards provisions.”
The IAEA seems to have coyly pretended that the process of extracting Uranium (known to include fissile isotopes) was merely to ensure that any phosphate products to be used for fertilizer would be certifiably free of radioactivity.
“Gotta keep those dates and figgies all pure and natural, eh?”
Smoking Frog @ 111 said:
“I put all eight back on the shelves and selected another one, Schaum’s Outline of Thermodynamics for Engineers, with the idea of better understanding the miscommunications or disagreements between scientists and engineers about global warming…”
A computer program that I use at work is CEA, refer to:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/CEAWeb/ceaHome.htm
You can download the source code for free from the above web site and then compile an executable if you have a Linux system (Linux can also be downloaded for free). Prior to learning about CEA, I had a deep dread of thermodynamics. Third year thermodynamics was one of those courses that my teachers used for weeding out the weaker students (they would beat us over the head with it like it was a blunt instrument). Consequently I developed a Pavlovian dread of the subject, (Beat a dog with a stick while ringing a bell and eventually the dog will hate the sound of bells). Then I discovered CEA and realized that thermodynamics was really neat stuff. It still irritates me that my teachers did such a crappy job of teaching thermodynamics.
Eggplant @113
Thanks very much! Unfortunately, I have no near-term prospect of running Linux. I’d have to free up a lot of disk space and then keep my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t screw anything up by trying to install it and make it dual boot with Windows XP Home Edition. I suppose some freebie from VMWare might do the trick for me, but I’d still have the disk space problem to take care of first.
Smoking Frog @ 114 said:
“Unfortunately, I have no near-term prospect of running Linux. I’d have to free up a lot of disk space and then keep my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t screw anything up by trying to install it and make it dual boot with Windows XP Home Edition.”
Hard disks are cheap (particularly used ones bought from eBay). Chances are that inside your computer chassis is a vacant slot for a hard disk and an unused IDE cable flapping in the breeze. The machine I have here in the office has four hard disks on it (three SCSI and one IDE). The gaming computer that I built for my son has two hard disks on it and setup for dual boot (Windows XP Pro and Unbuntu Linux). Dual booting is easy through use of the Linux provided programs Grub or Lilo. A big advantage with dual booting is in having some immunity from single hard disk failure, for example: I like to setup my machines so there is an operating system on a SCSI disk and a separate operating system on an IDE disk. Typically I have a scratch disk that can be accessed by both operating systems. After a good days work, I always transcribe my results from one operating system disk to another and also write a backup on the scratch disk. I periodically write a backup copy of everything onto a DVD-R and transcribe the information to another machine. Simply backing up information to another hard disk on a single computer isn’t safe because power supplies when they go into their death throes will sometimes fry all hard disks attached to them (this happened to a friend of mine and it’s wise to never buy a cheap or used power supply).
It’s worth the trouble to learn about Linux and get away from Microsoft products.