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Elon Musk's 'Scientific Method' (rollingstone.com)
From a new wide-ranging interview of Elon Musk: An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific," Musk says. "There's this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that's really quite effective for figuring out the truth." The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here's how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
People need to get from point A to B.
Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.
They need to traverse the space between.
Ground level is at a premium.
Above ground is too visible for peopleâ(TM)s tastes.
Air requires a lot of coordination.
So go below ground?
What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probabilities of truths would lead someone to conclude that anyone was talking about "drilling" tunnels without government permission?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
True, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try... you just need to be mindful that you may be in an echo chamber and attempt to break out of it.
I have found that anyone I've worked for I have been blunt and not a yes man and it has mostly gone well for me. The two times it really didn't I was saved by being shoved out because not long after I found that said team / company had severe issues and was disbanded / closed up.
Now, there is a difference between being honest and being obstructionist and that's where a lot of people screw up. My old employer had a policy of "Disagree and commit" and it makes for an awesome workplace when management and team embrace it. Management/tech leadership gets feedback, yes's and no's and the reasoning behind them. They take this information and act based on it. If you were a "no" and the decision was to move forward anyway then you commit to seeing it through, even if you don't think it's the best idea... same the other way, if you were a "yes" and it's decided to change directions you drop it and change directions.
When done correctly and with trust it can make for a great team and stupendous levels of output, plus it builds trust even deeper between leadership and team.
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Who, among Slashdot's esteemed editorial board, decided, the publication's audience needs a refresher on what scientific method is?
And who, subsequently, chose the Rolling Stone — whoever it is they are interviewing — as the best fount of this illumination?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah but you can easily identify the sycophants.
The optimal political process is a bit more complex. I'm finding that a lot of things make economic sense, yet raise human issues: a strictly sub-optimal path to address the complexities of political issues is often required.
Take the economies of trade, for example. Because of things like wage differential or cost of resources (e.g. is the climate better for cotton in China?), importing pants is cheaper than making them here. Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American). When the differential is big enough, you actually lose jobs by moving manufacture to America. That "big enough" is only slightly above minimum-wage today.
Okay, so what about outsourcing then?
Well... when you outsource, somebody's job goes away. It's very bad for some .01% of the population, and very good for the other 99.99%.
Here's the thing: a rising tide lifts all boats, and yet it's obviously barbaric for the folks spread across a million boats to torpedo your boat so as to lift the tide a fraction of an inch. Maybe that's net-positive in a big way; maybe it all works out for you in the end (after you abandon ship and somehow manage to get yourself a new boat); but you just lost a boat, dammit, and that puts you at huge risk and places the burden of all our success on your shoulders.
In faster transitions, lots of people's boats get sunk. So maybe, even though it's not as great for everyone else, maybe we slow down that transition. Maybe we have a stronger safety net--we all pay into it, and we still keep a large part of the profit of this new trade deal--so you don't get torpedoed so bad. We crew you on our boats so you can sleep and eat, and you at least have a secure place in life until you can get back on your feet.
Trade, technology, things that create lay-offs. I look at the hard economic facts. When I talk to unions about these things, I push back on globalism rhetoric: I tell them we need to focus on protecting labor, and that global trade and new technologies are coming and we're not going to outright halt progress. Near as I can tell, they like that: it's uncomfortable, and yet it's facing a problem head-on and taking ownership of and responsibility for the impact on working Americans. We're looking for ways to not simply hurl people into the streets, but rather to carry them securely to their next place in life.
I'm frequently surprised by what people will accept when they think you're being honest, when you won't compromise your position, and when you start incorporating their needs into your position. Politicians who waffle based on with whom they're talking seem to take a hell of a lot of flack--as do politicians who have their mind set and don't care what you think.
This is more-complex than mere science. Well, it is if you actually care about doing your job right.
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inefficient and congested.
I see railroad tracks all over.rarely see trains, maybe a few per day (~1 every 6 hours). I've read a number of papers and studies addressing just this. Solutions are rather involved and expensive, but not more so than digging underground tunnels,
More like:
1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.
@orlanz: "People need to get from point A to B."
Goods and services need to get from A to B. Given the cost on the environment, moving people from A to B is something we're going to look on as a a luxury.
This makes no sense whatsoever, your trolling brings dishonor to Mother Russia. Report to the gulag for reeducation, comrade.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If you were forced to agree, then "disagree and commit" wasn't done correctly. You should only be forced to commit, not to agree. I mean... it's right there in the name.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
We use "scientific consensus" now.
1. Ask a question.
2. Find a group of people who give the answer you want.
3. Misconstrue their statements to remove nuance and ambiguity
4. Package them all together into a "meta study"
5. Tell everyone "the science is settled".
More like:
1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.
Wrong on both. Scientific consensus is not science. Any scientist will tell you that.
Science proposes hypotheses and then proceeds to test them with experiments, observations, and analyses. A consensus, if any, occurs after such studies produce consistent conclusions. But the consensus is not the science. It is the collective opinion on the current state of knowledge.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
government oversight
I bet you miss the good old days, huh?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that really isn't the scientific method.
"Attempt to disprove the conclusion."
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete.
"Attempt to disprove the conclusion" is most definitely part of the scientific method. It is the discipline of intellectual honesty that makes you ask yourself the question "Can I be wrong?"
Also, note that there is a well-established method of scientific inquiry known as "disproving the null hypothesis" that embraces this principle elegantly.
I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
Nobody is saying that an inability to disprove is an argument for proof. Except you.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probability of truths would lead someone to conclude that drilling lots of tunnels without governmental oversight under major metropolitan areas is something that will reduce traffic, be good for the environment, etc?.
He's not building a tunnel that will leave his property, I'm nearly 100% sure of this.
This is another "Glomar Explorer" cover story (we are planning to mine the sea floor) for some black project that some three lettered organization realizes cannot be hidden from view. The Glomar Explorer really was built and used to raise a Russian nuclear sub. The tunnel to the airport story is to explain why some big holes are being dug on Space-X property. It's a cover story...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete.
No, that is not the scientific method. You cannot prove a hypothesis. You can only disprove the null hypothesis.
What? Let me expand on that. Let's use an old example. Galileo at one time hypothesized, based on observations and thought, that gravity should cause two objects of different masses to accelerate at the same rate and go the same distance in the same time. But clearly, dropping a feather and a bowling ball shows that this cannot be true. Ahhh, if the hypothesis was true, then there must be a reason why feathers take so long to fall. Hypothesis: air resistance. Let's design an experiment to prove this. Well, you can't actually prove that air resistance is the cause. You can only disprove the null hypothesis, which in this case is "air resistance has nothing to do with the result." That one is easy to disprove. Simply remove air from a long tube and drop the objects without air. Since the feather and bowling ball now reach the bottom at close to the same time, the null hypothesis has been disproven. Air resistance does have an effect, and we now have support for the original hypothesis. But not proof. "Close to" or "as close as we can measure" is not "the same time." If our original hypothesis is true, then there must be some other cause for the difference. For more recent, more complicated things, scientific lifetimes are spent in both hypothesizing about the remaining causes or improving measurement techniques to make the measurement error so small that "close" starts to approach "same". (And there are lots of things we learn as we start to account for what we thought was "measurement error" and really wasn't.)
More complicated systems create more interactions, and experiments must be more carefully designed. For example, not too long ago some radio astronomers were seeing signals that looked too regular to be random. They removed all known hypothesized causes other than true alien signals. Did this prove the hypothesis that they were alien signals? Sorry, no. They finally found the cause: the microwave oven in the snack area in the building next door.
But Musk is not anywhere close to the scientific process, either. His step 3 is: "3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one."
What? An axiom is defined as " a self-evident truth that requires no proof." Some dictionaries include "cannot be proven" as part of the definition, with the example "For every two points P and Q there is a unique line that contains both P and Q".
So, creating axioms from evidence is not science. Creating HYPOTHESES is science. Hypotheses are statements that require, even beg for, attempts to be disproven. Axioms are what are used to build universes, like the five axioms of Euclidean geometry. You cannot prove any of the five, they are the assumed truths. In fact, there are two other geometric systems (elliptic and hyperbolic) that are based on changing the axiom regarding parallel lines that Euclidean geometry assumes.
If Musk assumes the truth he seeks to prove, then he's failing at science.
I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
No, it is neither lazy nor dishonest. You're trying to apply scientific method to religion, which is like comparing apples and oranges. You cannot prove God exists, and you cannot prove He does not. This puts the question well outside the scope of the scientific method. The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.
Non sequitur. The fact that current modes of travel are congested does not prove that people need to get from A to B:
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Yeah! I mean, it's not like we give billions of dollars to other industries like oil. Or have paid trillions of dollars in protecting those same interest abroad.
But it's not just oil. How about the $5.3 billion in improper subsidies for Boeing for the Dreamliner? Or that Boeing and Lockheed get billion dollar subsidies for launching absolutely nothing into space. Pork-barrel spending is never truer than in aerospace. How about the $20 billion we give to farmers to NOT GROW CROPS.
Do you know what Big Oil, Big Aerospace, and Big Agriculture all have in common? They are predominantly located in red states. Not that all subsidies are republican-related of course. $1T goes to medicare, medicaid, and ACA. $366B goes to safety net programs. Hell, $1.5B goes to the entertainment industry every year.
Personally, I'm very interested in the coming electrification of the auto industry and have invested my own money into it. It was a smart move. Anyone with half a head could see it coming a decade ago.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://nation.time.com/2011/04...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
https://www.economist.com/news...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/...
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.
Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I will question the validity of the statement "Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested". Consider these modes that exist today:
/congesting/ and the other modes are affected by said congestion. Get more people out of their cars and Musk's Boring Company disappears in a puff logic.
- Walking, Bicycling (Transportation on demand, short distance, lowest cost)
- Bus, Bus Rapid Transit (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, short to medium distance, low cost per person)
- Commuter Rail, Passenger Rail (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, medium to long distance, medium cost per person)
- Carpool, Vanpool (Transportation by negotiated and variable routes and schedules, short to long distance, variable cost based on people per vehicle)
- Driving alone (Transportation on demand, short to long distance, high cost per person)
The only thing that's truly congested are roads/freeways (from personal automobiles) and rail lines (from freight and passenger/commuter rail having to share the same rails). Getting more people on buses for shorter trips would ease congestion on the roads which would make bus trips more convenient. Rail could be expanded to get passenger/commuter services off of freight lines, but as evidenced in California, the second you say you're going to build rail, speculators come buy up land and wait for their paydays.
Thus, current modes are not inefficient and congested. One particular mode (driving alone) is
No, because trains are open-air, i.e., not in a vacuum, which is required to produce the pneumatic tube effect. That leads us back to orlanz's response, where we decide that above-ground pneumatic tubes are undesirable. I would offer that they're undesirable not only because they're unsightly but also because they take up space and will cause other kinds of pollution (light, sound, air, etc). Not to mention logistics of terrorism prevention... it's far better that a bomb on the Hyperloop go off underground than above (not that we want it to go off at all).
I agree with your other points though. Remember that we got here because Edison's electric company replaced Rockefeller's kerosene lamps, and Ford's automobile started to replace Rockefeller's trains. At the time there was a plan to connect all of America via passenger trolleys; you could ride from LA to NY, even though it would take you a couple weeks or so. So Rockefeller got Ford to replace his clean burning ethanol fuel with Rockefeller's own kerosene waste product: gasoline, and the nationwide trolley system was scrapped in favor of a highway system for cars. Now we're coming full circle with an electric powered train that can take passengers from LA to NY, in minutes not days.
The tunnel is hardly nonsense. Apart from passenger trains, it will become an effective way to move shipping containers and other large items quickly. Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way. We could also reduce the number of trucks on the road by shipping their contents via pneumatic tube.
There aren't a lot of trains in action because of several reasons. Not all goods that need to be shipped, or people waiting to receive them, can wait the duration of a cross-country train trip. Trains also need a lot more buffering to manage traffic, as they need more time/space to speed up and slow down. The system simply can't accommodate the level of traffic that an invention like the Hyperloop would fill.
At (most likely) the same employer, I was nearly fired for disagreeing with my boss in the first place. "Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected. But then, that guy would yell at me for disagreeing with him, then yell at me for not raising concerns early enough.
Yeah, "disagree and commit" looks great on paper, but assholes gonna asshole.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested."
You obviously do not live in the LA Metro area or Inland Empire. The Metrolink trains are very under-utilized. Every time I see one pass, I can usually count on one hand the amount of heads I see in 5 train cars total.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Management fads are almost never done correctly.
You should have seen the way they rolled out agile at my old place.
Fixed features, fixed delivery dates.
Agile became "work 80 hours or more per week to meet targets set by management".
I also loved their implementation of CMP.
"People who write their own goals tend to meet them" became "management will write and assign your "own" goals to you". You will meet them if you want a raise. But wait... let's lay "stack ranking" over the top of that just for shits and giggles.
Every software methodology degraded to waterfall except RUP. And that wasn't because RUP was fantastic but because RUP had support from its direct upper management and the team using it got formal training and the team using it believed in RUP.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
When you remove a person's job from the local economy, you actually remove about 7x their salary from the local economy.
Moving that job to china or destroying a job in china affects the global economy but a fraction of the amount that local economies are devastated by job loss.
And it's even more than that because when you know someone laid off, you also cut back on your spending.
As long as wages are so different, offshoring is inevitable.
If prices were allowed to drop in the 1st world, then we'd be okay. But we pay up to 50x for the same products because prices are set locally not globally. We pay $20 for a Tshirt that cost $1 to make which sells for $1.50 in china.
So the lower wages in china have greater buying power than you realize. It's only for things like automobiles and air conditioners that the world price is close to the lowest price.
Inflation is higher in 3rd world countries but their educational systems are pretty terrible so that limits their possible productivity. As their education improves and inflation slowly increases wages, things will even out.
But it's going to be a long time. And it could get really ugly. And it absolutely doesn't have to be as ugly as republicans are making it. Reasonable taxes, retraining, and protection for those who become unemployable are antithetical to republican values.
So.. probably going to be pretty ugly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Even tunnels without the vacuum are expensive. Although real estate in our most congested urban areas is equally expensive. Once you get out into open country subways don't make sense anymore. Doesn't matter what the underlying tech is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
thejeffwhite claimed:
Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way.
You're talking through your hat.
In 1965, I traveled from L.A. to Honolulu on the Matson liner Lurline. It took 5 days.
If you're talking about the amount of time it takes for a given container to be offloaded from a freighter, cleared through customs, loaded onto a semi (or a train), and driven through the gates of the port facility, in addition to travel time from Hawaii to the West Coast, you're still probably wrong. (It depends on a bunch of things, including customs clearance.) If you're talking about strictly domestic goods - pineapples, say, or Kona coffee - you're definitely wrong, because those shipments aren't subject to customs inspection.
Your larger point - the use of "hyperloop" technology as a replacement for trans-oceanic surface shipment being somehow feasible, in addition to its use for transcontinental cargo transportation is also contra-factual. There are these things called "spreading zones" in both the mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific oceans where crustal plates are separating. The magma from the mantle is quite close to the seafloor in these zones (which stretch north and south for thousands of miles) - far too close to make a hyperloop-style, airtight tunnel either practical or safe. In addition, particularly in the Pacific, there are both strike-slip and thrust faults that will cause the crust to shear catastrophically (which would neatly and disastrously sever an airtight tunnel in the process) and unpredictably, within no more than a few decades. That makes the risk to a hyperloop transportation system uninsurably high.
Such faults exist within continental borders, as well, but they largely can be avoided, with proper planning. It's still going to be problematic, for a variety of reasons, however, including acquistion of rights of passage across vast stretches of privately-owned, and city-, county-, and state-owned property to name only the first of them. (Slant-drilling precedents aside, you've got to know that lawyers are going to line up in brigades to sue over the issue, because profit. To them.)
I'm actually a fan of Elon. Tesla has thus far both proven the car-guy doomsayers wrong and sparked the general conversion of automobile manufacturing to electric vehicles that appears to be inevitable now. That's a Good Thing for everyone except fossil fuel shills. And SpaceX has completely upset the defense-contractor monopoly on launch vehicles, sparked a whole wave of private industry competition in the space launch sector, and breathed incredible new life into the prospect of large-scale space colonization and industrialization in the relatively-near future. For those things alone, future-oriented thinkers already owe him an enormous debt of gratitude - and he's clearly not even close to done, yet.
But what he's dubbed "hyperloop" technology faces geotectical, legal, financing, and insurance barriers (not to mention regulatory ones) of daunting dimensions. In fact, I'm certain that those considerations are why Elon has wisely decided to let someone else tackle actually implementing the conceptual technology he proposed.
Boring tunnels, by contrast, is a task area that's already pretty firmly taped down in all of those respects - and has been for donkey's years. Revisiting the technology involved, however, is still squarely within the wheelhouse of an innovator like Elon, and I applaud his efforts there ...
(Posting as AC so as not to undo existing upmods.)
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Check out my novel ...
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' -- Isaac Asimov
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
I don't think it's fair to say that "no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results". First of all, many studies overlap with others, so some repetition of investigations does occur, and rightly. Second, it would not be wise for a scientist to submit a proposal to a granting agency that calls for an exact repetition of someone else's study. Rather, it would be better to spend money and effort trying to find whether the same conclusions hold if a different approach is taken, or better experimental techniques or instruments are developed and employed. And finally, publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
That's because LA's mass transit doesn't connect at all well. I have a job that until recently took TWO HOURS to drive to.
Mass transit, via Metrolink, would have gotten me 80% of the way there in only 1 hour.
The other 20%? a 1.5 hour bus ride followed by a ten minute train ride again.
And, as none of these were coordinated, each step needed at least 20 minutes between.
So my entire transit was something like three plus hours
In Sydney Australia (population about 4 million) and in most of the major cities we do have bus lanes which predominately follow the major roads however normal drivers are banned from these lanes except in an emergency or turning left (we drive on the left-hand side) otherwise you risk a fine. In addition, some bus lanes have corridors which can bypass more potentially congested roads. So yes a bus can get to a particular destination faster than cars can even though it may have to stop every two to three kilometers to pick up and set down passengers.
We also have what is called transit lanes such as T2 (one or more passengers) and T3 (two or more passengers) which allows cars that meet the appropriate criteria to use at certain times of the day. In addition, we have clearways where no one is allowed to park at certain times of the day. It's not perfect but it does improve the traffic flow.
We also have a train system (underground through the city center) that is not as elaborate as cities like New York, London, Paris, etc but I have found that it is far cheaper, faster and less stress full than taking a car if I wish to travel to any major city centers.
Of course, we also have expressways and toll roads although it is very galling when you have had a toll free expressway for years and then the government decides to upgrade (debatable) it and then slap on a toll. Then they wonder why commuters bypass it by doing what is commonly called "rat running" which is a means of avoiding the toll road by driving through suburban streets.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.