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"Perpetual Motion DeLorean" Scammers Face $26M Judgment
An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2002, we discussed a story about the so-called 'Perpetual Motion DeLorean,' which could 'supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge.' More than seven years later, the final shoe has dropped on this saga, with a $26 million judgment against Carl Tilley and his wife, who propagated this scam that ran for several years. Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."
Did it go 88mph?
Without doubt that guy could be on the board or be CEO of a big company...
(I'm being serious!)
...require extraordinary evidence.
Vaseline? Where we're going, we don't need Vaseline.
So that reminds me, we all need to start wearing our multiple ties and chrome sunglasses so that they are in fashion by the time 2015 is here. And Nike, where are my power shoelaces?!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
It did and then the electric system blew out.
The article keeps referring to this Free Energy community and that the "reporter" is a sincere member in it. Then somehow, shockingly, turns out that the "businessman" claiming to have broken all the laws of physics was somehow being less than truthful about the perpetual motion machine.
In other news: gullible people with no understanding of basic science get conned. Shocking.
They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
How do you figure? The "revelation" that this was a scam won't make the fools any smarter. They'll just find someone else to trick them. These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief.
AccountKiller
They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
Evolution in action, baby. Anyone who is willing to not only believe in perpetual motion but invest money in it deserves whatever it is he or she gets from their particular brand of ignorance. A basic grade-school science curriculum should be sufficient armor against a scam of this type (well, at least in my day it was.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It was a tax on people who don't understand the basic laws of thermodynamics.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Well, he figured if he was going to scam folks, why not scam folks in style?
The GP seems to think that these scammers did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes. Any crime could be justified along those lines by blaming the victim of the crimes for being unable to defend themselves against it. Social darwinism at its finest.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
nt
Sounds like these investors were merely paying for an education .
If they could afford to invest outside common sense and buy stock in too good to be true, I'd say they got there moneys worth.
No harm no foul. I should say fowl, these were pigeons.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Seems fair enough to me :-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, "scammer" is a relative term. Certainly a number of U.S. CEO-types have scammed their employees out of their jobs, and have been scamming the government for years (H1B allocations, outsourcing, not enough capable American workers, TARP, etc. etc. etc.) so a comparison of the level of ethics involved is entirely reasonable.
H1B is a scam? I believe in open immigration. Unless we can prove you are a criminal, we should let you in. Where you were born is random chance, so it hardly seems fair for me to hoard the benefits of living in the USA.
They found me. I don't know how, but they found me.
...so potentially $2,000,000,000 - $26,000,000 = $1,974,000,000 = Not bad even when you lost in court IMHO. And certainly *not* counting what ~7 years worth of foreseeable built-up interest on $2B either.
The first sentence cracked me up:
"Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology"
OH NO!! He stole imaginary technology!!
I remember following this story back in 2002 and there was a report of Carl Tilley being hampered by a lawsuit -- some other guy was claiming that *HE* invented the imaginary perpetual motion battery charging technology.
Perhaps in your world-view but I have to say that, before being modded to +5 Interesting, being at the Flamebait level had it straight-up right.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
Hundreds of miles without recharging! How do I convert my DeLorean? I only get 19mpg.
They should have convinced people that they could move out of the dirty city and into the country. Then, they should have overbuilt the country to the point where it no longer had any rural character, thus negating the first part but requiring them to take long train rides into the cities they moved out of. Then they should have bought up the trains and closed them down, forcing them all to drive cars. Then after a while they could rebuild the trains; but this time at a much greater cost since the lines would now have to run through valuable "real estate".
A scam like that could run for years. $26 million? Pah! The real scam made $billions, $trillions even before it's all over.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
While I can see where you come from, this is still deception and should not be rewarded. Neither should the greed of the 'investors'.
My plain-old-ordinary car can go 100's of miles at 100 mph without stopping to refuel. What's exceptional about that? In fact, it'll probably go well over 100 miles at 175 MPH, although I've never tried that for obvious reasons.
Maybe they're spouting some BS perpetual motion nonsense, but a range of 300+ miles at 100 MPH is well within the range of modern automobiles, so that seems like an odd thing to say if you're trying to pretend you have invented perpetual motion. "I've invented infinite power, bwaaahahaha! I will now power this laptop for the next 3 hours without recharging it!!!"
Captured by the Long Arm of the Law... ... of Thermodynamics.
I'm still trying to think of the equivalent voice over that's at the beginning of each episode of COPS, "COPS is filmed on location with the men and women of law enforcement. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law."
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Does it need 1.21 gigawatts to get up to speed? Aaah, Christopher Lloyd.
1.21 Gigawatts?!?! 1.21 Gigawatts! What the hell is a gigawatt?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cYgRnfFDA
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
Actually, it's social Darwinism at it's _purest_. ... I'm just sayin'...
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
I'm in the United States here so the results may be skewed... but how many people do you think out of a poll of 100 random respondents would be able to describe accurately what "perpetual motion" means? :-\
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
...just like muggers and other thugs who help to weed out the weak and elderly?
what do you mean, random. it is impossible for any human, let alone computer, to actually generate random results. to be even close to random, you would have to buy ticket offer # for an unknown flight one hundred times (each a different number) on different airline sites and ask person # that you meet about it. that is practically impossible, and even that isn't random. The real question is, if you asked 100 random people what 'random' meant, how many could define it correctly.
I hear that amazing iPad has a near-perpetual 10 hour battery too!
The real question is, if you asked 100 random people what 'random' meant, how many could define it correctly.
Sounds like one of them would not be you. You've just described a quasi-random sampling of people who fly commercially, which by definition creates a very biased sample and one which would likely overestimate the percentage of people who know what random means. People who fly would tend to be more educated and wealthier than the general population. At any rate, it's certainly not a random sampling of the general population.
Actually, going 300+miles on a standard tank at 100+ mph is rather difficult, speeding tickets notwithstanding. Very few passenger vehicles have the combination of fuel efficiency and tank size which affords such a feat. Remember that at 100mph, you'll likely be burning fuel at a rate roughly double that at normal highway speeds (air resistance being dominant, and a with a squared relationship between speed and drag). If, say, you had a very fuel efficient car with 40mpg at 65, and 20mpg at 100mph, you'd need more than a 16 gallon tank (presuming you need 0.5 to 1.0 gallons in the system to avoid actually running out of gas - passenger cards don't use bladders). Most cars with that kind of mileage have tanks in the 10-14gallon range. Sure, bgger cars have 18-20 gallon tanks, but they also struggle to get 30-32mpg at 65mph, and would be lucky to see 15mpg at 100mph.
There are exceptions, but they're a very small percentage of the market.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Your thinking is the broken window fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Your thinking is the same thinking as 'tax the rich more'. Which is a fallacy too as the 'rich' do not keep their money in big stacks sitting around their house. They keep it in stocks, bonds, bank balances, etc. They basically loan the money out to others to use for a fee. So people can have newer things now. With a tax the rich that money can not be reloaned out (thus helping build more things). It is spent.
Ever tried to get funding for something? You'd be amazed how little investors know about your project. How little they actually want to know. Confront them with the technical side and their eyes will glaze over before you're halfway through. They don't care.
Make wild promises and call it revolutionary technology, then break directly to investment plan and projected revenue, and you're set. I'm not kidding here. They'd invest in a machine that turns shit into meat if you make it sound halfway scientific (use cyanobacteria you genetically engineered with a retrovirus, that's 3 hard to spell words that kinda sound like they could sorta do the trick), but don't spend more than 5 minutes with the technical side, then go immediately to the part where you promise them lots of riches.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology.
The man was clearly a visionary. After all, the US government has handed out billions of dollars to SOME companies (cough GM, AIG, Citi, Fannie and Freddie) "sight unseen"... so it DOES happen!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The story was that GM, and not GE, supposedly offered $2 billion.
Ha ha ha.
oh. You were serious.
You know, just because he got a patent on it doesn't mean it really worked as advertised.
And, no, that wasn't AC power. It was pulsed DC at a specific frequency (or pattern actually). AC would just give you warm water. :) Been there, done that, have the lab notes to go with it. The "mystery" frequency doesn't exist anywhere but in fantasies and stories.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
[mode = evangelical german christian with 98 kids] Who are we to say that perpetual motion is impossible? Thermodynamic laws are just theories, like evolution and gravity.[/]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here in London, 7MPH is a great achievement - traffic was faster when horse drawn. There is no real need for > 100MPH vehicles. Parking spaces would be more use!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It makes you wonder how many times over the past 150 years people have been suckered into investing in machines that (allegedly) violate the law: energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
His long running scam is no less criminal.
It's nothing to do with the frequency. You just need the right catalyst. It's 68% unicorn horn, 29% santa claus whiskers and 3% JWSmythe brain.
Ironically, the minor component is proving the most difficult to find.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most cars are made to travel approx 300 to 400 miles per tank of gas at their expected operating speeds.
As far as operating at 100mph, that's dependent on not just aerodynamics, but the available power and effective gear ratio. Most gas automobile engines are most efficient between 1700 to 2200 RPM.
For example, a lot of cars are already running at 3,000 RPM at 70mph. That would put them at at about 4,500 RPM at 100mph.
My car (and ones like it) are an exception. 90mph is about 2200 RPM in 6th gear. I track my mileage especially on long trips where I can burn through a tank of gas without too many changes in speed. The mileage goes something like this.
65 mph = 25mpg
75 mph = 26mpg
85 mph = 27mpg
In areas where I could cruise at 85mph, I would plan my next fuel stop for approx 380 miles. That allowed for about 50 miles of extra fuel.
As you said, tickets not withstanding. Even in the middle of nowhere, you're bound to find at least one patrol car in a 400 mile stretch, who would love to grab someone at 100mph.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Err, if you get right down to the bottom of it, this is in fact the core principle of Capitalism, i.e. impoverishment of "fools" (i.e. people unable or unwilling to adjust to become sufficiently effective savages towards all around them) and rewarding of "smart" people (i.e. those who are all too willing to take advantage of everyone else around them) by whatever means they can get away with. The difference between a "criminal" and a "successful businessman" is largely a very subjective one.
For example, while most "legitimate" businesses produce a product, say a car, they also engage in advantage taking of all around them in order to survive, they pay as little as they can get away with to their employees, they studiously ignore social and environmental impact of their products, they go to extreme measures to "manage cost versus risk" by deliberately exposing their dupes ... I mean "customers" to possibility of flaming death in order to increase loot etc and so on.
lucky he hadnt downloaded music, otherwise he would to face double that judgment :)
Certainly a crime was committed, but in this case the victims should also be declared mentally incompetent and put under financial guardianship. Just like any action can be justified, any punishment can be justified to protect the weak and foolish, and it is a crime to be a danger to oneself.
It's nothing to do with the frequency. You just need the right catalyst. It's 68% unicorn horn, 29% santa claus whiskers and 3% JWSmythe brain.
Ironically, the minor component is proving the most difficult to find.
Well, there are some technical challenges with getting the frequency of (-3 + 2i)pi kHz...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The Tilley Foundation was supposed to go into production with an electric bike on July 4, 2004, but it did not materialize. I'm shocked. The Aptera 2e is going to be available in 2009. No, wait... The Corbin Sparrow went into production (sold 285 and went out of business). The Solus International KD08E COCO is available (it can only go 25mph). My liege, the list is long and the batteries still sucketh.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Heh, my Diesel Excursion, the so-called eco-atrocity oughta make that easily. It has a 44 gallon tank and gets 20mpg at 65-70mph. 7+ mpg @ 100 mph should be no problem.
Eating too much? crime. Smoking? crime. We've tried that. A crime is harming other people (fraud, theft etc.) not harming one's self.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Do you know what this means? It means, that this damn thing doesn't work at all! --- I know it's overdone, but I had to.
i wouldn't call it imposable but other things have to improve alot before its even possible. battery's have to me alot lighter and alot more efficient electric engines need to put out more hp and use less power. once we have those 2 things then it might be possable for something moving to generate its own power at that point you would get big distances without a charge.
Gearing and volumetric efficiency of the engine play a huge part in highway speed mileage. Some cars really do get better mileage at higher speeds because of those effects. I usually rent this model of car when in SoCal/Nevada because of the comfort over long stretches, the ability to take 3-5 people with me, tons of luggage space (or, in my case, demo products for CES and NAMM) and the great mileage on LONG highway runs. Add in the 19 gallon tank and you can get 400+ miles on the highway before having to refuel.
And when you rent a white or dark blue one, people tend to get out of your way when you come up behind them, since the only people who actually buy such cars are either retirees who putter along at 50 MPH or police who typically patrol that stretch of road at 80-90 MPH speeds (for those not familiar with the LA-LV road, the speed of traffic is typically 75-80 MPH, with a good 30-35% of the traffic moving at 90 MPH).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
> Actually, going 300+miles on a standard tank at 100+ mph is rather difficult, speeding tickets notwithstanding. Very few passenger vehicles have the combination of fuel efficiency and tank size which affords such a feat.
True, I meant in theory, not in practice counting speeding ticket chances and so on. But what can the car itself do.
My car gets 30 MPG in 6th gear at 75-80 MPH. I haven't tried an extended range at 100, but let's call it 20 MPG. I have an 18.5 gallon tank. I'd bet that I could do it on a banked oval (again not trying to say anything about cops and the real world, just about the ability of the car).
I know that I've got around 460 miles range at 75 with a few gallons reserve, so 300 at 10 doesn't seem infeasible.
It might not be as trivial as it seems at the first glance, but going for 300 miles on a tank is pretty easy, even my Euro-barge of a car can do it. The tank is around 60l, and fuel consumption at this speed should be somewhere below 12 l/100 km, giving me a range of 500km = 310 miles.
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
If you buy something, the object was worth more to you than the money which was charged.
If you sell something, then that something was worth less to you than the price you got for it.
This isn't a flaw, it's the way that value is maximized.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
There is some truth to your statement. In fact capitalism is regulated to mitigate it's harmful effects somewhat. Runaway capitalism can be as bad as runaway socialism. Both systems have their good and bad sides.
hybrids can do it. i get 400+ miles with my honda insight on a 10 gal tank. a prius would also work.
The Ford Pinto entered production in 1970, whereas the date on that memo is allegedly 1968. That means the timeframe for the memo is
to early to account for pre-production issues being seen in test mules, and certainly far too early to see issues from the general motoring public.
A "best seller" in the automotive market in 1968 would have been 1 million units/year*. Am I to believe that Ford mgmt
thought that the Pinto was going to move 1 million units/year for 11 years?
Perhaps you should acquaint yourself with this pretty thorough debunking of the Pinto "fiasco":
http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf
*By the time the Pinto actually went on sale, a best seller was around 800k. Fairly soon thereafter, the market share of Japanese imports increased such that
a best seller could be crowned with as few as 500k units.
"These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief."
People who do so deserve to be visibly and mercilessly crushed by events as examples to others.
Unless there is a punishment for being like that, it will spread to no good.
They worked hard to be in desperate craving gullible denial. Fuck 'em.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Most of what you say is true. Fortunately, we are able to harness entropy sources to achieve truly random results. It's quite useful.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
AC would just give you warm water.
No, AC will give you an oxy-hydrogen mix. Electrolysis will still occur, but you'll just get both gases at both electrodes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
Excuse me? That's Reaganite nonsense. It's perfectly true that the marketplace does a lot of good work, but the way you word it implies that mutual benefit is the prime motivator.
The prime motivator is profit. Somebody who sells me something will try to get the most money out of me they can. That's true even if they're selling me something that essential to life, such as medicine or food. (In this context, it's meaningless to say that I value the commodity more than the money; I just plain don't want to die.) And if they can find a way to restrict the supply so they'll get a better price, they'll often do it, regardless of consequences. Even if people die. And people do die because of not being able to afford stuff they need.
Of course, people of good will won't pull crap like that, but the motivation to do so comes from outside the marketplace. The marketplace itself is purely about selfishness.
Before you use the S word or the M word, understand that I'm not against a free market. But freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum: Tony Soprano's unrestrained economic freedom is somebody else's severed finger.
This is not true, everyone knows that if you run a specific frequency of AC current through water, you get be more hydrogen out of the water than what you are putting in current wise.
“If ‘everybody knows’ such –and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least ten thousand to one.”
-- Robert A. Heinlein
In the meantime, while you're digesting Heinlein's wisdom, you might wish to review some basics.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Virginia Supreme Court found attempted suicide to be a common law crime in Wackwitz v. Roy in 1992.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
No, really -- I want a list of everyone who actually invested in this scheme! I've got some great technology I'd like to sell them! I wonder if any of them would be interested in owning their own bridge...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've never gotten how the pundits who hate on big government mock anyone who suggests legalizing certain self-harmful drugs / suicide.
That's why you inject the Elmo extract into the coolant before you start, helped get the imagination flowing.
That is because they aren't against big government, They're against government benefiting anyone other than themselves. Remember that the republican pundits had nothing bad to say about Bush despite the fact that under his administration, the big bad government expanded by over a third inflation adjusted compared to the liberal Clinton administration.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Really, at 100+MPH? If we assume your drivetrain is efficient at low speed, your mileage will decrease in proportion to the work (forcexdistance, where distance is 300 miles, and force = internal friction + wind resistance) Between 60mph and 100mph, your car will experience in increase in wind resistance to 270% of the value at 60mph. Most ultra-distance drivers end up averaging about 30-40mph to get the super results - and there's a reason for that.
I have no doubt you can get 400+ miles on a tank. I got over 500 on a tank in my wife's Dodge Gr. Caravan (19ish gallon tank) on a trip from VA to NC. But, again, even if you could use just 33% more fuel with an increase in aerodynamic work of over 100%, your vehicle is unusual in that it's designed for high efficiency. I haven't heard any Taurus, Camry, or Accord members chiming in here. Cars with 6 manual gears, or diesels with enormous fuel tanks (44 gallons; I thought my F150's tank was expensive to fill).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I believed the same thing, which is why it was included in my experiments. For my purpose, a mixed gas output was my intended result.
That isn't what I observed. At 120VAC 60Hz, I observed temperature changes in the water. I could see the layers of warm water rising.
From there, I put a full-wave bridge rectifier in, so it became a fairly lumpy but DC voltage. Turning the unit back on, the electrolysis occurred exactly as expected.
If you were to slow the frequency down, it could possibly work. Even with DC, you'll see there is a ramp up period. It's not instantaneous. It's pretty quick, but not 1/60 second. That's also partially why the fictitious pulsing doesn't really work. You can't shake the molecules apart, like it or not.
My observations were that the higher the voltage, and the more constant the power supply, the larger yield. Tests ran from under 1VDC to 30,000VDC. Frequencies ran from 1hz to about 20Khz, and many stepped frequencies per "researcher" suggestions online and patent information. any break in the DC current resulted in a lower yield.
But hey, if you don't believe me, Google around for it a little bit. Anyone who's tried will describe either heat or sparks and blown circuit breakers (hopefully). ... and I strongly (STRONGLY) suggest that people don't try this, unless you really know what you're doing, and you've taken a lot of precautions. You're working with a deadly voltage. You are also creating a fire and explosion hazard without the appropriate precautions. I had DPST cutoff switch, inline breaker, and isolation of the test environment so no one could contact the equipment while it was operating, and sufficient protection in case of explosion. Yup, if you do produce a nice hydrogen/oxygen mixture, and there's a short, it'll make a very unpleasant explosion if you aren't expecting it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That's true even if they're selling me something that essential to life, such as medicine or food. (In this context, it's meaningless to say that I value the commodity more than the money; I just plain don't want to die.
Uh...you therefore value your life, and any commodity that keeps you alive more than the money.
Why should it matter? The rational course of action should be to not invest in perpetual motion, either because you know what it means ("it ain't happening") or because you don't ("could be a hoax").
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."
And the height of stupidity came from those shareholders who took his word for it.
I won the one working prototype in a bet and was playing with it one day via remote control. Unfortunately prior to the test the designer never told me I should not exceed 87 mph. As soon as the prototype hit 88mph, it vanished - I questioned the designer and he said the prototype had a time circuit which causes the vehicle to act as a time machine (in fact time travel was the primary purpose for the machine; overunity from what he termed the "flux capacitor" is just an accidental discovery) and it jumped through time; presumably into the future. So, please believe me, this technology works. We had a user error which caused the proof to vanish. I'd love to help these poor crackpots^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvisionaries out but because they didn't warn me about the flux capacitor's primary function. Just wait a while; the prototype will turn up. Honest!
It's powered by human gullibility. A substance with an inexhaustible supply.
Well, that again is so USA-inhibited of you here. And there is no such thing a s "volumetric efficency".
My car has a 55 liter tank (= 15.5 gallon) and on long journeys I'd drive constantly 130-140 km/h (= 86 mph). This usually gets me around 800 km (= 497 miles) far. So I'd use around 6.7 liters per 100 km which is a MPG of 67.5 if my math isn't failing me.
And my car actually is 10 years old.
Suck that.
No. The core principle of Capitalism is Greed, transactions are simply a mechanism to satisfy that greed. There is no requirement that the transaction are "mutually beneficial" and one can easily see that by the way they are conducted in real life: most consumers are ripped off on a regular basis and many transactions are benefiting only one side, the other being coerced or bamboozled into the action.
The standard cop-out of the True Believers is that "buyers should be informed and they should beware", which is of course in practice impossible in majority of cases with most transactions.
Thus fleecing is far more the practical norm than any "mutual benefit".
No, usually it is because you have no clue as to actual (or even relative) value of anything and all you can do is to engage in flawed, mis-informed gambling. To further ensure that you remain clueless, most sellers engage in elaborate obfuscation and mis-information campaigns and because they usually are far better financed and experienced at it then you, they usually win with you ending up buying something at 100x price of an identical (literally or with just a different label made in the same plant on the same assembly line on the same day) product in a warehouse two blocks down the street. Since the products are identical, it is impossible to pretend that their value (even subjectively) is somehow vastly different. Yet this is par for the course for majority of transactions.
See above. If you manage to con someone out of 10x the value (even the value you estimate yourself) most sellers would gladly do it. This conning and mis-information are again Standard Operating Procedure in majority of transactions.
Yea, right. What is being "maximized" is the ability to manipulate buyers, value having remained wholly elusive and unquantifiable. No "maximizing" of it is going on. Case in point: most utterly destructive and counter-productive consumer practices, such as borrowing at 30% interest are also the most popular, leading to "maximizing" of utterly non-productive sections of economy, such as fictitious "derivatives" and other "financial instruments", which then collapse (repetitively, every few decades) requiring panicked influx of vast amounts of cash to stop the whole rickety pyramid of nonsense from collapsing outright.
Capitalism as espoused by fundamentalist believers is an Utopian ideal that might be operative in a world of idealistic, "honest" small-town bakers and shoe-makers but like all similar simplistic ideologies (like Communism) it falls apart as the scale grows, eventually (and inevitably) imploding into oligarchic-kleptocratic-pseudo-feudalism (which is what we are experiencing now). And before some fundamentalists start whining about "government interference", it is worth pointing out that most multinational corporations are larger and better financed (sometimes by few orders of magnitude) than many nations.
It depends on how you define profit. The definition of profit (... as used in economics) is revenue - cost, in economic utility terms. I.e. money, and everything else. The utility I gain from purchasing a bag of potato chips is the (as yet unrealized) satisfaction from eating it. I pay $2, but "I get" (read: I feel I will have) more than $2 in happiness.
The market is where firms and consumers meet.
Mutual benefit is a corollary of the definition of profit. Since everyone is in to make a profit, any rational transaction is mutually beneficial since both sides need to realize nonnegative benefit.
Before you say Microsoft and ATT, the negative benefit is to third parties, not the two involved in the transactions.
In principle, free markets allow everyone to make economic profits (whether they be in dollars, happiness etc). However, that is "in principle" and not in reality.
It is my view that all of these 18th century, simplistic ideologies were never capable of scaling up from a "rustic town" level to gigantic industrial nations and global economies. Capitalism "works" (kind of) when shoe-makers, bakers, smiths and flour mills are the largest industrial entities around. As the size and power (and numbers of employees and the depths of managerial pyramids) increases, the thing is increasingly shaky finally imploding completely at the present levels, resulting in de-facto oligarchic-kleptocratic-neo-feudalism, which is what we get now.
The only feasible cure is to limit the size of possible entities in operation (to a fraction of their current size), and thus to return the thing to a more stable (and also vastly more equitable) scenario. Unfortunately the way things are going it is not unlikely that in a 100 years or so a few mega-corporations will end up owning 99%+ of global assets and become practical rulers of the planet, absolute kings and emperors in all but name. This trend is already well advanced, last statistical data indicating that the "top" 5% of global population already has 90%+ of global assets (and the trend is accelerating towards further consolidation).
Well I am sure that with millions spent on "debunking" this fiasco Ford would have come up with something. Many somethings actually. But one can also remember that Pinto was recalled and the tanks re-engineered. Lawsuits were also settled. But then you are entitled to believe the "debunkers" and The Unsassailable Virtue of Capitalism that prevents Illustrious and Pure CEOs from Straying Afar. I on the other hand chose not to be so gullible. Pinto of course being one of many, many examples of similar corporate behaviour (and speaking of Japanese cars ...). And we only know of the ones who got caught with their paws in the cookie-jar, many others having gotten away with it.
Serious? Really? How are most technology CEO's scammers on a level that this guy is on? Can you name a legit technology CEO that you think is at that same 'scam level'?
Darl McBride?
But it can also run on very strong spirits if needed...
how long until
Not really. In the broken window fallacy a real physical asset is destroyed.
In this scam buying power is transferred.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I mean, just look at steorn.com ! Those guy preetnd to have 3 time OU. They are also pretending to demonstrate since 1/2 december. You think they would have a comprehensive evidence by now ? Think again. And look at the freaking FOLLOWING like a cult they got. Remmember Dennis lee ? Remmember the other scammer like Lutec ? Scam there are a dozen out there. Start by the billion dollard homeopathy industry (motto: selling sugar pills to the gullible since 1886).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Well, that again is so USA-inhibited of you here.
I'm sorry, I figured with MPH and gallons it was quite obvious what the discussion was about. But that said, what does the country of my residence matter?
And there is no such thing a s "volumetric efficency".
Perhaps not in Europe, but over here in the USA we understand a thing or two about internal combustion engines. Perhaps the lawnmower engines you all use negates the need to worry about such things?
My car has a 55 liter tank (= 15.5 gallon) and on long journeys I'd drive constantly 130-140 km/h (= 86 mph). This usually gets me around 800 km (= 497 miles) far. So I'd use around 6.7 liters per 100 km which is a MPG of 67.5 if my math isn't failing me. And my car actually is 10 years old.
So you kind of proved the grandparent's point - that cars moving at high speeds can cover 300+ miles on one tank of gas. Glad you came about to confirming the original contention!
Suck that.
Would that be an example of volumetric efficiency?
I always hear this kind of argument "we had skills and experience that were almost nonexistent in the US".
Since you were part of the program you should be able to spell-out in detail what relevant skills and/or experience you had that was supposed to be unavailable in the US. By "relevant", I mean skills directly used in your work.
Then we can see if US Slasdotters have or know someone who has those skills. That way we can get some indication if these claims are true or just BS.
Are you a Pepsicrat or a Cokecan?
Not to mention having a unique fashion sense and an affinity to phone booths.
Who says it matters? I simply posed a question.
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
Thanks for reminding us of the theory.
May I remind you how we see it working in practice - raking in as much as possible while handing out as little as possible optimizes profits. Taken to the extreme this is known as fraud or scam and illegal.
Your theory assumes that both sides in a deal have the same knowledge, the same bargaining power, and are acting ethically.
I would agree if everyone had access to a reasonable degree of education, literacy levels were much higher than they are now.
I asked the guy sitting next to me at work who is one of the smartest people I know, who is very well educated and well read (although not in science) and he didn't know. I think that there's plenty like him. Also, with the ammount of ludicrous claims made by science journalists talking up very minimal results into major technological breakthroughs, I'm not surprised at peoples gullibility.
i'll just set up my windmill over here, may not be "perpetual", but it's good enough.