Poor people are also much more likely to have 5 children each with a different person. Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline. People that never adequately prepared for their future are simply demonstrating the same faults in their eating habits as they have done in other things.
Being poor doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing better. People like that are just less likely to stay poor (been there, done that).
As every good conservative knows, that's the same reason black people are poor.
" In fact, the same weak impulse control that leads to such high crime rates among young black males inevitably means more disruptive behavior in school."
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
I thought humans were getting more spheroid? Cubes indeed...
It's part of our drive towards combatting AGW by increasing energy efficiency. It's well known that a sphere is the most efficient shape in terms of retaining energy, that's why Eskimos are more spherical than Watusis.
I grew up in Canada. You could tell the American tourists, not by their outfits or behavior, but by their sheer size. However, that is impossible nowadays.
It's not clear to me that the cube law is applicable. The cube law comes into play when all three linear dimensions (height, width, and depth) are changing by the same factor, so you are assuming that a width and depth (or girth) increase proportional to height increase is all healthy weight.
While this may be true it's something that needs to be examined in more detail to see how healthy weight is a function of both girth and height.
It All starts with Sodas, but I am not sure where it goes from there.
I have just returned from our community swim meet. Kids drink multiple sodas and get heavy and swim slow.
Kids drink water with the occasional small portion of soda stay lean and swim fast.
My wife and I have observed this for the past 12 years at our community pool with ~400 members. Slim kids drink water mostly, heavy kids always have a Coke in hand. 24, 32, 48 oz behemoths.
Years ago when I went to school there were the couple of Fat Kids. Now MOST Kids are Fat. And they are always drinking Sodas.
Yeah, sugary drinks are the main way we get excess calories in. You can cram a lot of sugar in in solution without getting filled up, compared to even just eating raw sugar with a spoon.
I know you didn't read the fucking post you were replying to but the OP pointed out that people have actually increased in height 2 inches, not one as claimed in the summary.
Well, obviously. In 1960, I wasn't even 5 feet tall. Now I'm more than a foot taller, obviously I'm going to be heavier.
Not necessarily. Time won't solve basic physical limits. Chemical batteries, as most will know, have very limited lifetimes. The RTG on Voyager 1 has been going for more than 37 years. If you rule out radioactivity or nuclear power, then your only options in space are chemical or something like solar. Solar has problems, as Philae has demonstrated. The issue with chemical is that there are hard limits on how much energy you can store in the bonds between atoms - even if we invent a wonderful new rocket fuel or battery type, the maximum limits can still be worked out and they will never exceed that (there's a reason why we use ion engines for space probes, and it has to do with "mass you have to carry" and "how much it can change your speed"). "More technology" will never overcome these problems, unless you come up with something really exotic (like zero-point energy). One that is easy to understand is solar on Earth: we can make it more and more efficient, but we can never exceed 1kW/m^2, as this is the total amount of solar radiation reaching the surface (and, I don't think we've got better than about 30% efficiency). It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology gets, it can never beat basic physics.
The only "high-yield, low launch risk" technology I could think of would be fusion (as deuterium isn't radioactive), but we are yet to get that viable. Apart from that, you're dreaming of magic, no matter how much time you wait.
Oooh I want to add my favorite: No flying jet packs, unless you can figure out how to create a longlasting stream of gas of sufficient momentum to lift a human which won't burn his legs off.
I've read somewhere that radiation detectors often alarm in ports because of bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, which is slightly more radioactive than average matter. Which is quite impressive - we have developed really precise sensors. But most of the people would understood this as a proof that we have developed really radioactive bananas.
Actually, eating one banana per day increases your risk of getting a cancer as much as smoking half of a cigarette per year. Of course, getting potassium is good thing and eating banana a day is recommended as it decreases your chances of getting sick. But even supposedly well-educated people will get confused when comparing the odds like this.
I've always wondered about that; if bananas are setting off detectors designed to detect smuggled dangerous radioactive isotopes, shouldn't the detectors be set to a somewhat higher threshold? Alternately, shouldn't we be working on keeping bananas out of the hands of terrorists before they develop a dirty banana split of mass destruction?
Typical self-centered human POV. How would you like it when the dwellers of the asteroid belt send their probe here and land it in the middle of Orlando with a big honking plutonium powered steam generator aboard?
Firstly, what caused the problem was not "Nuclear fear", but failure of the harpoon to hold Philea down. The solar panels would have worked fine otherwise.
Secoundly, Plutonium-238 is simply no longer available - nobody makes it anymore. The reason why is because it is created using a dangerous and expensive process by irradiation of neptunium-237.
Another ecological nut related failure. Not the nuclear thing, but the fact that the econazis no longer allow whale hunting has resulted in us losing our vital harpooning technology and skills, thus resulting directly in the failure to anchor the vehicle correctly.
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present. This is because natural selection ensures that we can survive the amount of that toxin that we normally find in the environment. This includes the constant drizzle of background radiation that we live in.
In fact, the scientific term for belief in LNT in chemistry is "homeopathy."
Well, given that the overall death rate is one per capita, there comes a point where the medical impact is undetectable because the victim dies first. I.e. if you are shot at by a person so inaccurate that it would take him 300 years to hit a vital organ, then the effective death risk from such shooting is zero. That does not imply that below a certain frequency, being shot at has an actual risk of zero, however. I sense that I am being pedantic so I'll stop now.
The fact that even less people understand the difference between the non-weapon grade Pu238, and the weapon grade Pu239/Pu241. For them, it's Pu, so it's bad.
I'm not opposed to nuclear. I think it needs to be a viable option if we are to stop producing CO2, but I won't pretend that it's harmless, either. Even if we get to a 100% safety record, there's still the matter of storage, and transporting that waste to the storage areas. How many TEPCOs do we need to realize many of these companies entrusted with the task can be very incompetent and borderline criminal in ignoring safety lapses pointed out by inspectors.
You're not opposed to nuclear, but you still fall prey to the severe lack of knowledge most people have regarding nuclear power generation. It's really simple: if the waste is so dangerous as to need storage that can last centuries, as is currently the case, it's because it's overwhelmingly still fuel. It's been "poisoned" in the reaction process, but can be reprocessed into usable fuel. However, the US has stopped all reprocessing activities, which means that the fuel is immediately disposed as soon as its efficiency dips too much. While studies say that reprocessing is more expensive than just getting new fuel, this wouldn't hold if we refocused on nuclear power, making recycling an obvious choice. Further, certain designs of reactors can straight up use the poisoned fuel anyway, lasting dramatically longer and producing far less dangerous waste, since more of its energy has been extracted. That's discounting thorium reactors, which don't even use uranium and produce up to 100 times less waste than uranium-based reactors.
In essence, the waste issue has by and large already been solved (or at the very least dramatically diminished) by scientists. It's just politicians getting in the way.
"already been solved by scientists. It's just politicians getting in the way" is one of those classic sentences, like "lemme have a try, I know what I'm doing" and "how hard can it be?" "trust me, I'm a doctor" and "look what I can do"
I've read somewhere that radiation detectors often alarm in ports because of bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, which is slightly more radioactive than average matter. Which is quite impressive - we have developed really precise sensors. But most of the people would understood this as a proof that we have developed really radioactive bananas.
Actually, eating one banana per day increases your risk of getting a cancer as much as smoking half of a cigarette per year. Of course, getting potassium is good thing and eating banana a day is recommended as it decreases your chances of getting sick. But even supposedly well-educated people will get confused when comparing the odds like this.
Not quite as impressively sensitive, but post 9/11, people coming home from radioactive isotope medical imaging visits have found themselves pulled over by the police when their bodies triggered Homeland Security radiation detectors which apparently are out there driving around incognito.
I would tweak what you said to: "Google is mind bogglingly popular because its search results USED TO BE not dictated by short-sighted bean counters, and then market inertia now that they are".
I switched away from Google about a year ago because I was finally fed up with lousy result quality. My specific complaint is that Google ended its long-ago policy that every result contains every search term exactly as given. Wow, that was useful, but now Google just tries to guess what you want. That's nice and all, but if you think I'm a dumb user, then show me results for what I actually searched for and then make a suggestion about a search you think would be better. But just straight up giving me results that I didn't search for? No thanks, I switched.
I don't mind the adjusted search terms, they work for me; but the slew of useless garbage sites that comes up pisses me off, either as the result of an overload of garbage sites in general, or else the brilliant optimization the click farmers are using. Search for anything, and you get a bunch of sites offering to sell it to you, best available at cheapest prices. Search for diarrhea, you get a dozen sites offering to sell you the best diarrhea.
I'm hoping they will automatically uninstall Chrome as well, since it somehow manages to reinstall itself surreptitiously so often. So many third party programs will install it during an update if you're not paying attention to which boxes to uncheck; and I know every time I go visit my mother she'll be asking about what this Chrome thing is and how to get rid of it. Most often it's the anti-malware software that puts that shit there, which is ironic since I consider anything being installed without my explicit permission to be malware. It should get rid of googlebar or whatever that's called, and all other opt-out software.
No kidding? I haven't seen that. Probably because I have Chrome installed.
This is really going too far.
will java be also removed since it's bundeled with ask toolbar?
I was stupid enough to try installing Safari without realizing Apple had dropped it and it was now just a vector for search hijacker safesearch. After a long struggle i got it removed from everywhere except the actual Chrome settings for search engine, which it has written itself in as an administrative setting. Since I don't have any administrator accounts for Chrome, I can't get in to change the damn thing.
The plant was deluged by a tsunami, it was never designed to handle that, and that was the central flaw. Cooling systems were not available, a necessity for this plant design. However, the melted fuel is still generally contained, but there are releases of contaminated coolant which is unacceptable, an outcome of placing a plant in the path of a tsunami when it is not designed to handle it, thus disabling the features that mitigate the things you discussed.
Any mechanism which requires active mechanism to ensure stability and/or safety is obviously going to have at least one failure mode which will defeat that system. This goes for nuclear reactors which require cooling pumps, but also for automobiles with automatic transmissions that creep forward unless the brakes are applied, and of course...... airplanes.
But, left completely with no mitigation, you are right in that the containment of older designs alone may not be enough to guarantee complete retainment under all circumstances, and newer passive designs or ones with core catching features are addressing this aspect.
With those jobs, most of our callers have no clue what their talking about - so we won't believe you anyway.. Or the one the killed me was "My son/brother/neighbor's kid is in IT and he says..." Even if that person really knows what they're doing, by the time it gets to your ears it's usually wrong.
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
My advice is to let them go through their motions and if it takes a long time - like you're without service for days - ask for some sort of compensation. Otherwise, you'll be bashing your head in and getting angry at the "idiocy". Drop their service if they refuse - customer retention may give you something.
And one last thing, I have been on the other end and thinking I knew better, the tech came out and solved the problem and showed how wrong I was. It was something I would never have thought of and it was so stupid, too. Arrrrrg!
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
different silos. the customer support silo and the engineering silo do not connect financially. to hire an engineer would come out of the engineering budget, to cut a couple of tech service reps would save on the customer support budget. As far as the average company is concerned, they are apples and oranges. the fact that the whole company would come out ahead is beyond the pay grade of almost every manager there.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's about having better impulse control.
Poor people are also much more likely to have 5 children each with a different person. Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline. People that never adequately prepared for their future are simply demonstrating the same faults in their eating habits as they have done in other things.
Being poor doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing better. People like that are just less likely to stay poor (been there, done that).
As every good conservative knows, that's the same reason black people are poor.
" In fact, the same weak impulse control that leads to such high crime rates among young black males inevitably means more disruptive behavior in school."
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
So are professional athletes.
And Strom Thurmond.
bigger tits. average bra size has increased too.
For men too, as a trip to the beach will demonstrate.
I thought humans were getting more spheroid? Cubes indeed...
It's part of our drive towards combatting AGW by increasing energy efficiency. It's well known that a sphere is the most efficient shape in terms of retaining energy, that's why Eskimos are more spherical than Watusis.
I grew up in Canada. You could tell the American tourists, not by their outfits or behavior, but by their sheer size. However, that is impossible nowadays.
It's not clear to me that the cube law is applicable. The cube law comes into play when all three linear dimensions (height, width, and depth) are changing by the same factor, so you are assuming that a width and depth (or girth) increase proportional to height increase is all healthy weight.
While this may be true it's something that needs to be examined in more detail to see how healthy weight is a function of both girth and height.
assume a spherical human...
It All starts with Sodas, but I am not sure where it goes from there.
I have just returned from our community swim meet. Kids drink multiple sodas and get heavy and swim slow.
Kids drink water with the occasional small portion of soda stay lean and swim fast.
My wife and I have observed this for the past 12 years at our community pool with ~400 members. Slim kids drink water mostly, heavy kids always have a Coke in hand. 24, 32, 48 oz behemoths.
Years ago when I went to school there were the couple of Fat Kids. Now MOST Kids are Fat. And they are always drinking Sodas.
Yeah, sugary drinks are the main way we get excess calories in. You can cram a lot of sugar in in solution without getting filled up, compared to even just eating raw sugar with a spoon.
I know you didn't read the fucking post you were replying to but the OP pointed out that people have actually increased in height 2 inches, not one as claimed in the summary.
Well, obviously. In 1960, I wasn't even 5 feet tall. Now I'm more than a foot taller, obviously I'm going to be heavier.
Not necessarily. Time won't solve basic physical limits. Chemical batteries, as most will know, have very limited lifetimes. The RTG on Voyager 1 has been going for more than 37 years. If you rule out radioactivity or nuclear power, then your only options in space are chemical or something like solar. Solar has problems, as Philae has demonstrated. The issue with chemical is that there are hard limits on how much energy you can store in the bonds between atoms - even if we invent a wonderful new rocket fuel or battery type, the maximum limits can still be worked out and they will never exceed that (there's a reason why we use ion engines for space probes, and it has to do with "mass you have to carry" and "how much it can change your speed"). "More technology" will never overcome these problems, unless you come up with something really exotic (like zero-point energy). One that is easy to understand is solar on Earth: we can make it more and more efficient, but we can never exceed 1kW/m^2, as this is the total amount of solar radiation reaching the surface (and, I don't think we've got better than about 30% efficiency). It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology gets, it can never beat basic physics.
The only "high-yield, low launch risk" technology I could think of would be fusion (as deuterium isn't radioactive), but we are yet to get that viable. Apart from that, you're dreaming of magic, no matter how much time you wait.
Oooh I want to add my favorite: No flying jet packs, unless you can figure out how to create a longlasting stream of gas of sufficient momentum to lift a human which won't burn his legs off.
I've read somewhere that radiation detectors often alarm in ports because of bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, which is slightly more radioactive than average matter. Which is quite impressive - we have developed really precise sensors. But most of the people would understood this as a proof that we have developed really radioactive bananas.
Actually, eating one banana per day increases your risk of getting a cancer as much as smoking half of a cigarette per year. Of course, getting potassium is good thing and eating banana a day is recommended as it decreases your chances of getting sick. But even supposedly well-educated people will get confused when comparing the odds like this.
I've always wondered about that; if bananas are setting off detectors designed to detect smuggled dangerous radioactive isotopes, shouldn't the detectors be set to a somewhat higher threshold? Alternately, shouldn't we be working on keeping bananas out of the hands of terrorists before they develop a dirty banana split of mass destruction?
Typical self-centered human POV. How would you like it when the dwellers of the asteroid belt send their probe here and land it in the middle of Orlando with a big honking plutonium powered steam generator aboard?
Firstly, what caused the problem was not "Nuclear fear", but failure of the harpoon to hold Philea down. The solar panels would have worked fine otherwise. Secoundly, Plutonium-238 is simply no longer available - nobody makes it anymore. The reason why is because it is created using a dangerous and expensive process by irradiation of neptunium-237.
Another ecological nut related failure. Not the nuclear thing, but the fact that the econazis no longer allow whale hunting has resulted in us losing our vital harpooning technology and skills, thus resulting directly in the failure to anchor the vehicle correctly.
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present. This is because natural selection ensures that we can survive the amount of that toxin that we normally find in the environment. This includes the constant drizzle of background radiation that we live in.
In fact, the scientific term for belief in LNT in chemistry is "homeopathy."
Well, given that the overall death rate is one per capita, there comes a point where the medical impact is undetectable because the victim dies first. I.e. if you are shot at by a person so inaccurate that it would take him 300 years to hit a vital organ, then the effective death risk from such shooting is zero. That does not imply that below a certain frequency, being shot at has an actual risk of zero, however. I sense that I am being pedantic so I'll stop now.
The fact that even less people understand the difference between the non-weapon grade Pu238, and the weapon grade Pu239/Pu241. For them, it's Pu, so it's bad.
If it isn't bad, why do they call it Pu?
I'm not opposed to nuclear. I think it needs to be a viable option if we are to stop producing CO2, but I won't pretend that it's harmless, either. Even if we get to a 100% safety record, there's still the matter of storage, and transporting that waste to the storage areas. How many TEPCOs do we need to realize many of these companies entrusted with the task can be very incompetent and borderline criminal in ignoring safety lapses pointed out by inspectors.
You're not opposed to nuclear, but you still fall prey to the severe lack of knowledge most people have regarding nuclear power generation. It's really simple: if the waste is so dangerous as to need storage that can last centuries, as is currently the case, it's because it's overwhelmingly still fuel. It's been "poisoned" in the reaction process, but can be reprocessed into usable fuel. However, the US has stopped all reprocessing activities, which means that the fuel is immediately disposed as soon as its efficiency dips too much. While studies say that reprocessing is more expensive than just getting new fuel, this wouldn't hold if we refocused on nuclear power, making recycling an obvious choice. Further, certain designs of reactors can straight up use the poisoned fuel anyway, lasting dramatically longer and producing far less dangerous waste, since more of its energy has been extracted. That's discounting thorium reactors, which don't even use uranium and produce up to 100 times less waste than uranium-based reactors. In essence, the waste issue has by and large already been solved (or at the very least dramatically diminished) by scientists. It's just politicians getting in the way.
"already been solved by scientists. It's just politicians getting in the way" is one of those classic sentences, like "lemme have a try, I know what I'm doing" and "how hard can it be?" "trust me, I'm a doctor" and "look what I can do"
I've read somewhere that radiation detectors often alarm in ports because of bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, which is slightly more radioactive than average matter. Which is quite impressive - we have developed really precise sensors. But most of the people would understood this as a proof that we have developed really radioactive bananas.
Actually, eating one banana per day increases your risk of getting a cancer as much as smoking half of a cigarette per year. Of course, getting potassium is good thing and eating banana a day is recommended as it decreases your chances of getting sick. But even supposedly well-educated people will get confused when comparing the odds like this.
Not quite as impressively sensitive, but post 9/11, people coming home from radioactive isotope medical imaging visits have found themselves pulled over by the police when their bodies triggered Homeland Security radiation detectors which apparently are out there driving around incognito.
I would tweak what you said to: "Google is mind bogglingly popular because its search results USED TO BE not dictated by short-sighted bean counters, and then market inertia now that they are".
I switched away from Google about a year ago because I was finally fed up with lousy result quality. My specific complaint is that Google ended its long-ago policy that every result contains every search term exactly as given. Wow, that was useful, but now Google just tries to guess what you want. That's nice and all, but if you think I'm a dumb user, then show me results for what I actually searched for and then make a suggestion about a search you think would be better. But just straight up giving me results that I didn't search for? No thanks, I switched.
I don't mind the adjusted search terms, they work for me; but the slew of useless garbage sites that comes up pisses me off, either as the result of an overload of garbage sites in general, or else the brilliant optimization the click farmers are using. Search for anything, and you get a bunch of sites offering to sell it to you, best available at cheapest prices. Search for diarrhea, you get a dozen sites offering to sell you the best diarrhea.
I'm hoping they will automatically uninstall Chrome as well, since it somehow manages to reinstall itself surreptitiously so often. So many third party programs will install it during an update if you're not paying attention to which boxes to uncheck; and I know every time I go visit my mother she'll be asking about what this Chrome thing is and how to get rid of it. Most often it's the anti-malware software that puts that shit there, which is ironic since I consider anything being installed without my explicit permission to be malware. It should get rid of googlebar or whatever that's called, and all other opt-out software.
No kidding? I haven't seen that. Probably because I have Chrome installed. This is really going too far.
will java be also removed since it's bundeled with ask toolbar?
I was stupid enough to try installing Safari without realizing Apple had dropped it and it was now just a vector for search hijacker safesearch. After a long struggle i got it removed from everywhere except the actual Chrome settings for search engine, which it has written itself in as an administrative setting. Since I don't have any administrator accounts for Chrome, I can't get in to change the damn thing.
Then what happened in Fukushima?
The plant was deluged by a tsunami, it was never designed to handle that, and that was the central flaw. Cooling systems were not available, a necessity for this plant design. However, the melted fuel is still generally contained, but there are releases of contaminated coolant which is unacceptable, an outcome of placing a plant in the path of a tsunami when it is not designed to handle it, thus disabling the features that mitigate the things you discussed. Any mechanism which requires active mechanism to ensure stability and/or safety is obviously going to have at least one failure mode which will defeat that system. This goes for nuclear reactors which require cooling pumps, but also for automobiles with automatic transmissions that creep forward unless the brakes are applied, and of course...... airplanes. But, left completely with no mitigation, you are right in that the containment of older designs alone may not be enough to guarantee complete retainment under all circumstances, and newer passive designs or ones with core catching features are addressing this aspect.
Sorry, but Man in the Iron Mask was a great Musketeers movie.
Annette was good.
Insert Chinese dialect joke here regarding "I am Ang-Lee!"
Has he really? You fools!!!
With those jobs, most of our callers have no clue what their talking about - so we won't believe you anyway.. Or the one the killed me was "My son/brother/neighbor's kid is in IT and he says ..." Even if that person really knows what they're doing, by the time it gets to your ears it's usually wrong.
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
My advice is to let them go through their motions and if it takes a long time - like you're without service for days - ask for some sort of compensation. Otherwise, you'll be bashing your head in and getting angry at the "idiocy". Drop their service if they refuse - customer retention may give you something.
And one last thing, I have been on the other end and thinking I knew better, the tech came out and solved the problem and showed how wrong I was. It was something I would never have thought of and it was so stupid, too. Arrrrrg!
yeah, that happens.....
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
different silos. the customer support silo and the engineering silo do not connect financially. to hire an engineer would come out of the engineering budget, to cut a couple of tech service reps would save on the customer support budget. As far as the average company is concerned, they are apples and oranges. the fact that the whole company would come out ahead is beyond the pay grade of almost every manager there.