Mail 681 Friday Jule 1, 2011 – 1
This is an attempt to publish Mail. I made up a package last night but Word informed me that I could not publish it. It gives no explanations, and Help was as useful as Microsoft Help usually is. I have no idea whether there is something in one of the mail items, or if I inadvertently put in a bad character. I am going to publish this several times (assuming I can do so at all) adding mail to it each time in a series of tests. Apologies to those getting multiple feeds.
All right. That worked. Now to start adding some mail.
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All right. I pasted one of the unpublishable letters from last night. I was promptly told that I cannot publish. I tried eliminating my reply and it still will not publish. First see if this will publish –
And it does. Now to see if I can paste in any letter at all and get it to publish. This will not be an organized mail session.
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Subject: America saving California
Dr. Pournelle
Now to the point you mentioned that America might save California from itself where they are voting themselves largess. The question really should be: “Who is going to save America?”
Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation in testimony in front of the Senate Budget Committee on March 9, 2011 showed that right now that 36% of filers do not pay income tax and that shortly that number will be almost 40% due to tax credits that the Democrat controlled Congress passed and the President signed into law:
[quote]In 2008, these tax rebates boosted the number of nonpayers to nearly 52 million, or roughly 36 percent of all tax filers. Moreover, the rebates boosted the maximum income for nonpayers to more than $56,700. In the absence of the rebates, the threshold would have been roughly $44,500.
When the final IRS data is tallied for tax years 2009 and 2010, it is likely that the number of nonpayers could approach 40 percent due to President Obama’s making-work-pay credit, first-time homebuyer credit, and American Opportunity tax credit. As a rule of thumb, we can now expect that the typical family of four earning up to $50,000 will owe no income taxes.[5] [End Quote] http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/27099.html
So as you can see asking America to save California is like asking the blind to lead the blind.
Robert Allaband
Oh, I am aware of the irony here. The only thing that can save the United States, or California, is what my father used to call an economic dose of salts; and at the moment that is politically impossible. We are not so bad off as Greece where they riot because the retirement age for civil servants may be set to 55 instead of 50, and there is insistence on raises and more spending even long after they have gone broke, but it’s close. The political leadership in both California and Washington has built a tax and spend machine that is ruthless, and any attempt to cut back anything is met with fiery opposition, and the claim that this is a preference for the rich over – the kids, the poor, the sick, nurses, teachers, anyone other than the political organizations which forcibly collect dues and make big donations to political campaign funds, which are of course the main beneficiaries of this system. Boss Tweed used to fix the potholes and actually provide some services for the constituents: Los Angeles has managed to have all the high salaries, exchanges of favors, bureaucracies within bureaucracies, and the rest of it and still be the pothole capital of California. Probably there is a lobby of autorepair shops that donates to keep the potholes unfilled, and God how the money flows in…
We all know that in the past decades the cost per pupil in the schools has doubled while the effectiveness of our K-12 schools has been going down and down. We expect it. But any attempt to cut back on all the money spent, or to introduce some form of productivity testing to the schools, is always an attack on the teachers. The only remedy to bad schools is to throw in more money. We don’t have any more money, so we must raise more money, with taxes, or borrowing, or balancing the budget by putting in an item on how we expect money from the Easter Bunny. Charlie Sheffield and I described a school system in Higher Education that was seen as a horrible slur on the school system. It seems to have been prophetic, and if it was in error, it was an understatement of just how awful things can get.
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fusion space “drive”
Message Body:
Jerry,
I saw this interesting tidbit about a potential fusion space drive in and article on the IEEE Spectrum magazine on line site. It is pretty brief, but informative description of a non-continuous fusion reaction used for a space drive based on boron as fuel (since it is low on neutrons). It produces significantly more power than is input by a pulsed laser.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/
a-fusion-thruster-for-space-travel/0
The NASA scientist who is working on this said he thought it would take 10 years to make it usable as a space drive.
Joe Kubler
NOTE: this published, but when I attempted a reply I got the cannot be published message. I am trying again, first with this note. Then I will try to do a reply.
I used a boron fusion drive in a story some decades ago, after I visited Los Alamos and talked to the project director. There were high hopes for fusion as an interplanetary drive system. Other projects got higher priorities and I have not followed this, but it is good to see that work still continues. This isn’t Heinlein’s torch ship, but there’s enough ISP to generate interplanetary commerce.
Comment: that worked and published. Now to see if I can color it.
Apparently an attempt to color the QUOTE style before publishing renders the entire document unpublishable; but if I use quote style, publish, THEN color the quote style and publish again, it works. Of course that raises the question, should I bother with the color. The quote style certainly makes it clear which remarks are mine and which are the readers.
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Not so! Not so!
Reads like an Oslo editorial, about 1100.
http://www.economist.com/node/18897425 http://www.economist.com/node/18897425
Steven J. Dunn
Or the Mandarins dealing with the Chinese Treasure Fleet that discovered Africa in the time of Vasco de Gama. But it is not so, we will have interplanetary commerce.
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The Sixth War
We’re back in Somalia and we now have six wars.
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Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Bush took terrible advice regarding Aidid, who had previously had every indication that he was “our man” in Somalia, and who undertook to restore some order. Operation Gothic Serpent was a terrible idea: there was no need to arrest Aidid, who was the most popular leader in the region and who had at least some notions of western values (his son was educated in the US). The result was a terrible war of all against all, with the US exacerbating the situation as we often do when we send in leaders who know little of the local area – and worse, who have not studied the classical documents of political philosophy and reality, starting with Aristotle. We paid a price in Somalia but the people there paid worse. And the beat goes on.
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Instaneous Cheap Memory
Another game changer from IBM. I don’t want to wait 5 years, I want it NOW.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30/embargo-ibm-develops-instantaneous-memory-100x-faster-than-fl/
–Jerry
Fascinating. I want it now, too. Things flow here so…
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