They should be building those things on the far side of the Moon instead. Radio telescopes suffer from interference from terrestrial radio sources, which is why they locate them in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia, but even that doesn't fully isolate them. Putting them on the far side of the Moon would (at least for a while) completely eliminate problems with terrestrial interference, plus give humanity a good reason to back to the Moon and build some serious infrastructure there, and perhaps also distract us from fighting with each other so much. It would also give many engineers something much more important and useful to work on than ad-ware.
When I developed a clenching habit, I resolved it by training myself to put my tongue in the correct position in my mouth. It is pretty simple: with your lips closed but your teeth not touching, place the tip of your tongue right where your gums and your two top front teeth meet. That's it. At first it takes effort but once the habit and muscle memory develops it'll happen naturally. This eliminated my bruxism because now my jaw has a healthy resting state.
The thought of humanity destroying the environment to get the oil and then, in a fit of panic and at great expense, pumping it back into the ground, caused me to erupt in laughter.
Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something.
Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good.
It's not a straw man, and your examples are no more apt than Rayiner's.
America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2].
It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.
The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.
In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate.
But you submitted it. You ought to know that submitting an article can cause it to appear on the front page. You also ought to know better than to submit advertisements, yet you did it anyway.
>It's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products.
Their pitch is "we respect your privacy more than the other guy" instead of just "we respect your privacy". User privacy is the antithesis of what they do.
Smaller and lighter, yes, but with drastically less carrying capacity. Your delivery van can pack over a hundred packages on a trip. Your delivery drone will probably carry one or two. So it's going to make a hundred more trips to replicate the same workload. Van might stop twenty times on the same block, drone has to return to the warehouse between each dropoff.
And engine idling is not a huge deal compared to the amount of thrust that must be expended constantly to keep a drone in the air (along with it's payload).
You'll gain a little on pathing straighter and then lose everything on upward thrust and repeat trips.
Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains. Trains are bigger and heavier, but they are the most efficient at moving things from one place to another.
The benefit you get from a drone potentially is package delivery in the time it takes to order a pizza, because it's automated direct shipping of one item at a time. But drones do not, in any way, offer the promise of fuel efficiency.
> Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains.
I think you just described the potential usefulness of drones in terms of energy used for a delivery. A drone only has to carry itself and it's package - compared to a car that has to carry it's weight, the driver's weight, the packages in the vehicle, etc.
I think it boils down to this: How many/weight of items being delivered to energy efficiency is on a curve. Sure trains are the most efficient method of transporting goods, but there's a reason a train doesn't deliver our packages to our doors. Building such an infrastructure would be insane.
That's why current delivery is tiered to the quantity/weight of the goods you're shipping.
I have a feeling drones will be more efficient for small packages, but larger ones will still be best by car.
A drone only has to carry itself and it's package, but it has to carry it in a vertical direction, and maintain that (because things in the air without thrust tend to fall back down to the ground, and that's bad). Meanwhile, a car only has to push itself in a horizontal direction around the ground.
As you say, the problem with trains isn't efficiency, it's infrastructure for last mile to our doors. However, we already have that for vans: Roads and driveways to our door are already built.
If I need a cell phone delivered to my front door, which is going to be more efficient: The van that already is delivering a larger box two doors down dropping it off, or a separate trip from the warehouse to my house from effectively, a small aircraft?
Maybe, but if you loudly espouse progressive values as Googlers seem to do more than most tech workers, maybe you should put some of those values into practice, and actually make a real effort to integrate those contractors into the group?
