IANAMD. My understanding is that contrary to intuitions, deceleration on a motor cycle is more dangerous than acceleration. Maintaining stability is your primary concern, less so velocity of impact. You also don't want to be overtaken by faster traffic, you'd rather see your threats. My friends who do ride motorcycles tell me they are taught to drive aggressively by default. I don't think braking is your first instinct in tight quarters.

Kitty does not have enough thrust to reach escape velocity.
Kitty is doomed to spend eternity in the black hole of hand bags.

@Payback -- The Youtube comments area is not to be considered a potential source of rational discussion.

Assume that one concedes to your point about "terminal velocity" being the wrong phrase to use here. What would be better? And I'll note that there are many potential metrics for "better" -- conveying the correct idea precisely, doing so in a concise manner, etc.

"Neodymium Magnets Reaching a Velocity at Which the Centrifugal Force Upon Them Exceeds the Magnetic Force Holding Them Together" makes for a more accurate title, but might lose brevity points. The "Terminal Velocity" title conveys maybe only 75% of the accuracy of the more precise title, but with a greater than 25% savings in length (5 words vs 19). Although I'm sure a more optimally brief AND accurate title exists.

Not trying to be snarky, and I 100% agree that there are situations where saying something with complete accuracy and careful precision is extremely important. But perhaps an online video about magnets spinning apart can be at least partially excused for opting for brevity over accuracy, especially in something as trivial as the title. Especially when the inaccuracy can be noted and explained in the comments section by well meaning viewers.

True, but "terminal velocity" conveys decently close to the right idea and there isn't any specific word that means the speed at which magnetic force is overcome by centrifugal force. As far as I know, anyway.

Escape velocity ("the lowest velocity that a body must have in order to escape the gravitational attraction of a particular planet or other object") might be arguably closer to the mark, but gravity is not the same as magnetism.

Terminal velocity does not mean what you think it means.

It's the speed that a falling mass achieves equilibrium between the force of gravity and the force of fluidic drag and stops accelerating. It's not the speed required to "terminate" a thing.

Your video, Neodymium Magnets Reaching Terminal Velocity, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

If they do that, I hope they amend a brain treatment for convicted paedophiles that includes high velocity injections of 123-147 grain Spitzer shaped lead.

Constant 1G acceleration followed by constant 1 G deceleration gets you to Mars in about 50-75 hours, and you never get anywhere near relativistic velocity. It's just a matter of scalability. If you develop an engine that can accelerate a given mass at. 001g, and it's made light enough that most of that mass is payload, you just scale up with an array of 1000 of them and you're at 1G.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

The survival rate for cats falling from 2 stories or higher is 90%. The peak death rate is actually at 2 stories, then goes down to about the 5th and flattens off because they're at terminal velocity and have achieved optimal landing position by that point.

Squirrels should do even better, as the smaller a creature is, the less momentum it has and the higher the drag-mass ratio (thus lowering the speed of terminal velocity). Pretty easy to believe it survived, whether it hit a tree or not on the way down.

Actually, it's all in the terminal velocity. He (or she) never exceeds the same speed he would from 10ft up. His weight-to-surface-area ratio is roughly the same as a human skydiver using a reserve chute. He'd easily survive, especially if he grabbed the end of a branch at the end.

As Woody once said, "it's falling... with style!".

Not that I think shooting into the air for minor reasons is a *good* idea, but the chances of it being dangerous to the point of killing (or even injuring) someone are really really low. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire

First of all, even in a densely populated city, the ratio of square meters of human-occupied space to unoccupied space is really low. So, you gotta be quite unlucky to have a bullet fired up land on a human instead of house / dirt / concrete / whatever.

Second, when the bullet comes down it won't be traveling at its muzzle velocity, but at its terminal falling velocity. Mythbusters did a test on that, as have various other sources, and most find that a bullet falling at terminal velocity isn't fast enough to kill unless you're outstandingly unlucky. Deaths have been recorded, but at a lower rate than, say, Hippos, pulling a Carradine, or having an icicle fall on your head.


I guess it is sorta like hailstones, which could potentially have relatively comparable mass, aerodynamic properties, and terminal velocities as bullets in some cases. I've been caught in a hailstorm before, and while it was enough to sting and be rather painful, it wasn't near strong enough to break the skin.


So, given all of that, IF it came down to a situation where a policeman has to show a dangerous assailant that they mean business and are willing to fire their weapon to resolve it, firing straight up into the air might potentially be a good way to accomplish that without immediately shooting to kill / injure the assailant. In some scenarios, possibly. NOT that a stopped car trying to dump drugs (via balloon or whatever else) is an example of such a scenario.

She probably did the right thing. By holding on for as long as possible and lasting until the peak strength of the water, she had as much water as possible between her and the rocks and the most velocity to push her away from the drop.

*carporn
I get hot and bothered for any car that would look at home on the track with the Mach5. This totally qualifies.

Odd to me that it's a V12, but has 10 velocity stacks.

Not only would i be fuming at nearly having been killed, but that kid nearly had his leg whipped off by a high velocity fully stretched bungee. And no one seems in a rush to get out of the damn seat.