From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri Apr 28 2000 - 00:06:10 MDT
Michael S. Lorrey <mike@datamann.com> Wrote:
> union workers as in a) high salary for low skill work, b) lots of convoluted, expensive,
>and time wasting work rules,
If your opinion of unions is that low then why are you worried that technology will
render them obsolete; or are you just a fan of incompetence and red tape?
> the turmoil of crashing markets
Oil markets will crash, fusion markets will not.
>will cause large amounts of capital to evaporate.
So if an airline, for example, found its fuel bill was now zero that would cause
financial difficulty for the company and it would no longer be able to finance expansion.
Does that sound right to you?
>Actually, stealth technology *is* being used commercially, even down to the point
>where you can buy a bra for your car made of stealth material to help protect
>yourself against radar speed traps.
And if a stealth bra is not worth a few hundred billion dollars what is? Your tax dollars
at work. What's next, Tang and non stick frying pans?
>I don't know the cost of a B-1 bomber (which is not a stealth bomber)
True, I meant to say a B2 bomber
>but the B-2 bomber (which is a stealth bomber) costs around $800 million
The cost per airplane is about 2 billion, but the military can get very creative with
their accounting when they want good PR, you could probably get a $800 million
figure if you ignored the huge R&D bill (mostly D), but as there are no plans to build
any more of these white elephants that doesn't seem like good accounting practice to me.
>A B-2 bomber weighs over 400,000 lb. which equals 6.4 million ounces. An ounce of
>gold goes for around $250-300, which makes the weight of the B-2 in gold equal to
>about $1.6-1.95 billion,
Sound just about right.
> What it did have to do with technology and productivity is that the change in market demand
>for grain in the negative to that extent was not foreseen by the farmers, or by the bankers
>who allowed them to mortgage their farms to buy all the latest and greatest farm equipment
If I've parsed that formidable sentence correctly then foreign governments stopped importing
food and local government jacked up interest rates so high that farmers could no longer pay
their bills and that's technology's fault. Huh?
>which is what allowed them to overproduce.
So, there were plenty of people willing to pay good money for the products American farmers
made but were prevented from doing so by third parties and the root cause of this mess is
overproduction and technology. Huh?
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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