Gasoline/diesel prices hit record highs

I don't really like to think about how high the price of everything we use in our everyday lives will go up if the cost of diesel suddenly shot to $7 a gallon. I mean, I know I can handle $7 a gallon with my car that gets over 30MPG and I drive, maybe, 300 miles a month, but there's really not a whole lot I can do to curtail my consumption of food or other necessities which have to be shipped.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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Not to mention, I don't want my car to explode.

Last I checked the Pinto already had that covered.

How ya doing, buddy?

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Actually, China is (Relatively speaking) a far, far greener nation than most other developed countries. Their CO2 production per capita is a fraction of the US, they recycle pretty much everything, build carbon neutral buildings and have very efficient production methods. The reason they buy up so much in the way of natural resources is because they want to control it all before the west squanders it.

They're a far greener nation on average because so many people there don't have TVs, cars, radios, or anything of the sort that would actually use energy. Their "recycling" methods are very shoddy, and cause massive problems to the communities that spring up around those areas. It's mostly people that take apart dangerous equipment without any protection for themselves, so they can recycle it because it's worth barely enough for them to make a living off of. A number of those recycling centers in China and other poor areas actually get a lot of technological waste from westernized countries, because our laws don't have any stipulations on how things will be recycling, just that they need to be "recycled."

As for NASA, it's not just what they've done in space for us (satellites, communications advancements, computer advancements, new materials used in everyday products, etc), but things they've been funding on the ground in research facilities as well. And saying any of those inventions/discoveries would happen eventually anyway just calls into question the entirety of basic government-funded scientific research.

And multi-national space exploration is bullshit. Just look what happened to the International Space Station.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Well, the thing is, the government allocates that money to NASA, then NASA allocates that money to various companies, universities, and its own divisions in a quest to come up with various solutions. Along the way, there's usually a bunch of baby steps which have to be taken to solve the Bigger Problem, and those are typically the things we see trickle down into our every day life.

I agree that going through NASA to fund a lot of the research it does isn't necessarily the best way to distribute the funds, but you're not going to get congress to create yet another party to distribute money out for research than they already have (current biggest ones I'm familiar with are the National Institute of Health, Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards & Technology, and all the various military affiliated organizations (DARPA, NRL, etc)).

A lot of funding for solar technologies, recyclables, high-tech polymers/plastics, and such come out of funding from NASA much in the same way we get radar, noise-filtering/signal processing, ultra-strong materials, and high temperature alloys from military research.

I know I'm kinda wandering around topics, but one last note. Science usually isn't done to one really specific end. It's one of those things where you need to sprinkle a lot of seeds and hope one of them will be able to take hold, since each technology which is going to be the next big thing actually has ten hurdles to overcome before it can be. You just need to hope that you've either invested in enough projects that all ten of those things happen to be discovered at around the same time (and someone recognizes they can be put together), or you completely lucked out and put tons of money into what happened to be the best one.

Let's just take solar power, for example. There's hundreds of ways to try and harness solar energy. Some people are trying to mimic photosynthesis that plants use, some are making multilayers of differently doped silicon, some are doing multilayers of different semiconductors, some are working on ways to create very cheap photovoltaics so you can have moderately inefficient solar cells that are extremely cheap to manufacture, others are working on extremely efficient materials that are very expensive, so instead of covering your whole roof with the material, you use a postage-stamp sized piece, but you then need to cover your roof with (hopefully) inexpensive light collectors that'll push all of the light onto that little area. Even within that subset of collectors, there's a plethora of ways to try and go about collecting the light, and all of that is being looked into by hundreds/thousands of people worldwide.

Then let's look at fuel cells. You need methods of storing the hydrogen, you need methods of dispensing the hydrogen quickly and safely, you need to determine what kind of fuel cells you're going to work on, you need to figure out what operating temperatures you want to be running at. Each of these options gives completely different opportunities for research into completely different materials. An electrolyte which is good for methane fuel cells might be useless for hydrogen fuel cells.

One of the biggest problems facing these new technologies is that nobody knows what's going to offer the most promise in the next 5, 10, 20, 50 years. Think about how hard it was to decide if you were going to buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. Now imagine if instead of just those two, you had 200 technologies to choose from, with none of them having any media released yet. That's the situation funding agencies are faced with today.

Sorry for the massive post, I just think this whole problem is a bit misunderstood by most people. It's not just like Civilization where you put 30% of your income into and you're guaranteed a breakthrough. Sure, lots more money will help expedite the process, but experiments still take time, and we'd still need to train the people to conduct these experiments.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

What do you actually define as a "consumer good," though?

I was speaking idiomatically.

I actually sat through a boring ass presentation on thermoelectric materials today. Apparently they were originally developed for spacecraft since they don't involve any moving parts and have super-high reliability. That technology is now trickling down into these cars that have coolers built into them. Sure, it's a stupid luxury now, but once these materials get even more efficient we'll be able to draw more than just a hundred watts off of the heat that's wasted from our combustion engines (or power plants, or anything else that releases heat when it runs).

I think the reason why NASA seems so inefficient is because they're doing so much pure research, which generally has very little immediate and obvious benefit to it. I mean, my research group has been getting money from NASA for years, and we're the only people in the world that can actually make a profit off of what we're researching. So far its most popular use has been in golf clubs and metal baseball bats. Also, they're inefficient because I don't think the smartest people want to work at NASA anymore. It doesn't pay as well as other jobs, you've got government bureaucrats breathing down your neck, and it's just not as "sexy" as it was back during the Apollo program. I'm hoping this is something that the recent proclamation of us wanting to build a moon base/go to mars will help fuel, though I really doubt it.

If we want to solve all these technological problems we really need to start making a career in science a lot more attractive than one in investment banking or any of these other really high paying careers that don't create wealth, but only shuffle it around.

How ya doing, buddy?

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Investment banking does create wealth, just not new types of wealth. Oh wait, it indirectly does that too, shit, fuck jews.

Could you sustain a country off of investment banking?

I appreciate the necessity of needing people to shuffle around large sums of money nowadays with how expensive things are and how it requires large collectives of people to get some of these things accomplished, but I often feel their value is a bit exaggerated.

I mean, how does trading stock beyond the initial investment in the original company actually generate money for anyone? It seems about as useful to society as buying ten pounds of gold, sitting on it for five years, and then reselling it, to me.

FELIPE NO

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You don't want investment bankers responsible for scientific or productive parts of society. They can't handle facts or reality so they'd have nothing to contribute. I bet 60-80% of Wall Street is jacked up on booze, pills, or drugs. The rest occupy their time by crying to or doing the most depraved acts humans can think up with $2000+/hr whores.

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Yeah, if nobody wants to be a scientist that is a problem. I'm sorry your earnings don't match your self-importance.

It's not so much the earnings don't match self-importance, as I feel many scientists are compensated quite fairly for what they do, it's more of other professions being overpaid for what their role is. I also feel it creates too much of a disincentive for people to become scientists/engineers and, in the long run, that will hurt our economy.

Brady, how does it actually create wealth and not just provide a service for which new wealth can be generated from? A slightly different question; does me paying the mortgage on my house cause the bank to generate wealth?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Whoops, I didn't meant for it to be taken as a relationship.

I suppose my point is that I feel the importance of these people that do the money-shuffling is exaggerated as they're providing a simple service so that actual wealth can be generated. So why does this service seem to be valued more by the marketplace than the actual people generating the wealth? (Perhaps it's the same reason when Congress asks itself if it deserves a pay raise, the answer is seldom "No.")

Jam it back in, in the dark.