In reality there is only so much money the space program can absorb productively, there are only so many capable scientist and engineers at some point if you keep pouring money on them all you will do is increase their salaries but not their output - I have an issue with the bad mounthing of the great society, first improving the nutrition and education of poor people greatly improves the economy - I don't have any numbers but the impact of improving the health and education of millions of people could easily dwarf any of the benefits of the space program - another component of the great society was civil rights, and aside from the moral arguments again giving millions of people greater opprotunity and access has to have a massive impact on the economy - so comparing the space program to the great society is silly, you can't spend a trillion dollars on the space program productively but you can on anti-poverty and both have the potently for large benefits to society
If there is a dam nearby you can pump water up behind the dam and run the dam when the wind is not blowing - not super efficient but you can cheaply store some of the execess power
A plausable limit to computation per unit power could be derived from looking at biological systems, the human brain is estimated to be capable of 100 Million MIPS based on comparisons between the human retena and computer systems emulating that behavior the if the energy consumption of the brain is 100W then it is about 1 Million MIPS/watt would be a good measure of entitlement
I don't understand how anyone can argue with Malthus, because it is just math, he observed that population increases exponentially if unchecked (duh. which is obvious) and food production does not (he assumed linearity), you eventually hit the darwinian big crunch which are the conditions that all plants and animals live under. It just so happens that with intensive petrolium based farming we got ahead of the curve, a bump if you will, but I don't see any technolgy that can increase food production _exponentially_ nothing can increase exponentially in a finite world. In fact his insight says if you don't do something about exponental growth in populaiton you are fucked, what is there to argue about.
somebody mod the parent insightful, it is a brilliant insight, scarcity does not cause efficiency in resource distribution but often encourages hoarding, scarcity can drive market failure - all the free market/libertaian types should mediate upon this truth, scarcity of a commodity often leads to hoarding, which causes more scarcity, if is is a product that everyone needs this behavior can cause immense and permanent damage - BTW this is even true for money that is why the gov't had to flood the financial system with cash at the start of this depression, unfortunately that cash never trickled down to the rest of us, so we are still short of money.
Really talking about FTL is like a saying evoloution might not be true - just as there are multiple lines of evidence for evoloution there are interlocking ideas about the structure of space time and causality which require a speed limit - sure maybe during the creation of the universe of in other areas of space time there might have been different fundamental constants - but basically one you start talking about FTL you are talking about time travel and being your own grandfather - the structure of the reality starts to fall apart
Yes but how do you get one year of 1g acceleration to get to 99% the speed of light - I believe you need an amount of antimatter roughly equal to the rest mass of you payload - considering an h-bomb only produces the equivalent of 1g of energy that is a whole fucking lot of h-bombs for any reasonable payload it gets even worse when you have to take into the weight of the bomb which causes a limit of something like 10% the speed of light - even discussing 1g acceleration for a year is bullshit because you have to talk about thousands of tons of antimatter
You mean Feehdum! Local control is overrated, most people are incapable of determining which investment strategy is needed for them to retire, incapable of a determining the correct safety standard for drinking water, which scientific theories should be taught in school - we have experts who have studied these issues, we rely on them every time we eat some food we bought at the store or drink tap water, or get an inoculation - most people are dumb asses who just care about sucking up to the man in charge and keeping track of who is fucking who, for the dumb asses own safety we should not be giving them local control over what shit the local chemical plant can dump into the river, or telling the local farmers it is ok not to wash their fucking vegetables - local control or Feehdum! Is code word for fucking the dumb shits of amerika and really if the dumb shits getting raped by predators didn't effect me i wouldn't give a shit but it does - those unwashed veggies might end up in my supermarket, their unvaccinated kids might get my baby sick,that local chemical plant might fuck up the aquifer - we live in a civilization it's maintenance requires experts and professionals - appeals to freehdum are just appealing to the narcissism of dumbshits
Thanks for straightening me, you must be brilliant because you are quoting Feynman in your sig - enjoy your billions (Buffet is that you?) - hey check out the price history and dividends of GE and GM - now GE is worth 1/3 of what it did in 2001 and they cut dividends, GM went bankrupt - but I guess you knew that was going to happen you being brilliant and all - and Keynes is probably a better source than you for basic macroeconomics, you nitwit.
Sure, just tell me when the market has crashed because of fundamentals and when it hasn't - in other words should I buy real estate or gold? - but if you could you would be rich - because you would know when it was going to bounce back quickly - or are you saying it is a tautology, when it bounces back quick it wasn't fundamentals when it takes years it was fundamentals? I think Keynes also said (Paraphrasing) that that bubbles always last longer than your patience or your checkbook
Bingo - understanding feedback is the key to this problem, mod parent up - feedback loops also dominate a lot of social systems as well and answers questions like "why is Snooki so popular?"
The belief that markets always reflect underlying fundamentals is flawed, and the belief that they rapidly correct is also demonstrably untrue, Keynes (a boogyman of the right) pointed this out quite eloquently when he compared the market to a beauty contest in which the judges were required not to guess which contestant was the most beautiful but which contestant they thought most _others_ thought were most beautiful - in that contest people will start voting for contestants simply because others are voting for those contestants. In engineering, the most analogous situation is feedback where the output of an amplifier is fed back into the input - our markets along with a lot of social networks seem to be dominated by these runaway feedback-like mechanisms and when they eventually break real and lasting damage has been done - resources have been misallocated, players were forced to sell low, poor leaders were chosen. Engineers design systems to limit feedback or dampen its effects - the natural dampening mechanism for these social feedback like effect are regulation and taxes - examples would include taxing trades held for too short a time or limiting the amount of money spent in political campaigns - of course those that benefit from these feedback like mechanisms fight like hell anyone who tries to dampen them out and often have a disproportionate amount of resources to do just that.
My GF drives a big F-ing SUV because she thinks it is safer (Ford expedition if you can believe it, you need a tugboat to parallel park it), she has no need for such a large vehicle, also I remember my dad when he had an incident on the expressway with a semi he wanted to buy and SUV and that was in the early 80s when the things were almost unheard of, he though the high seating and larger size would make him safer - I think the american auto companies exploited people's fear of accident or collision to sell SUVs to women in the mistaken believe that they are safer - in reality there is a huge roll risk with SUVs and the best way to avoid an accident is not to get in one in the first place, however most people will gladly pay more for gas in order to buy the supposed "safety" of an SUV, it doesn't really occur to anyone that if everyone drove a smaller car we would all be safer but most people would rather fuck their neighbor than cooperate over anything.
Shit man you are right - who knows in two weeks it could be 100 below zero in NY city, the air might turn to liquid, carbon dioxide snow or maybe 500, the oceans will boil - we can't possibly predict what temperature it will be in two weeks! OMFG we are gonna die!
It takes more than just having the right elements to create life - water has some interesting chemical properties that methane lacks - such as it is one of the only chemicals which expands when it freezes, water is a polar molecule being slightly positive on one side and negative on the other, can form a large number of hydrogen bonds for its size, and especially relevant is that it is a fantastic solvent - all these properties are favorable for life, for example being a good solvent allows other molecules and ions to dissolve into water, allowing for lots of different types of chance chemical reactions to occur between different dissolved molecules - Methane is not as good a solvent as water, as it lacks polarity, however some people have proposed life working using poly-lipids as a substitute for proteins in non-polar liquids but because it is a poor solvent the chances of life working in a methane ocean seem less likely than water...
Would he have been persecuted for being gay if he was not a so well recognized figure? I doubt it - somebody wanted to "put him in his place" - analogously you can say Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, and while technically true, he would not have been put in that situation if there were not some very powerful people out to fuck him.
If humans were just as smart as woodchucks or acted like deer populations I could see your point, the problem is some of us are smart enough to see the consequences of our actions and can change our behavior to avoid of limit those consequences, unfortunately that mode of thinking is out of style these days - now of course if you point out the negative consequences of group behavior and propose laws or some other collective action (often through governments) you are called a socialist, fascist, communist, or unamerican - so by that logic I guess only socialists are smarter than grazing animals.
This is a good point, often our ideal of how knowledge works, i.e. everyone should figure everything out for themselves, explain all sides of the argument and in general be "fair" or give the benefit of the doubt to naysayers conflicts with reality - the reality is people don't know anything when they are born, and most people just follow what people in authority tell them to think, it is easier that way, you will be a member of the group in good standing and nobody will beat you up for believing what everyone else does. Also, many people aren't smart enough to think for themselves, many people when thinking for themselves come to terrible conclusions - "vaccines cause autism" comes to mind - as most people overestimate their own competence and tend to disregard experts - in short, most people are egotistical followers, and are easily led by the idea or demagog who simultaneously complements them and tells them the path with the least effort
I would say our educational system is bimodal, public schools in affluent suburbs are just fine - that is why real estate is so high there, you are paying for the school district everyone wants to be in - but for a huge segment of the population the schools suck, I grew up in Chicago in the 70s, there was no public school my parents were willing to send me to, they shelled our for private schools all the way. In Europe most schools are centrally funded - not dependent on local property taxes - which encourages everyone to chip in for good schools because everyone is in the same boat. Until you address our screwed up system of property tax based schools, you will continue to get this bimodal system, schools in cities and poorer areas will suck and rich suburban schools will be good. To be more fair, is is better to think of the US as a mixture of a second/third world country with a first world country - some places/counties/states in the US are dirt poor, while others are fabulously wealthy.
Yes these guys complain about free loaders but what is their solution? - I could respect them more if they proposed one - even if it is "I think people without medical insurance should be refused service at the ER, I am OK with the consequences of that, such as people dying on the street after traffic accidents" then I would ask them what they propose to do with the bodies on the street.... But it always "those freeloaders are taking away my hard earned tax dollars" but never think through what the consequences will be if someone doesn't pay.
At one point in time before the 70s a lot of professional workers had their own office, then came the cubicle which was really a huge cost out exercise, it saves rent but kills productivity, ironically the designer of the cubicle meant to make it a private work area to optimize productivity and then corporate america perverted it into it current form, it is not about worker productivity it is about reducing overhead cost - I hate cubicles, fortunately the building I work in now was built in the 70s so almost everyone had their own office but I have worked in cubicle or even worse, completely open offices, it is very difficult to work in such a crowded chaotic environment and it is not conducive to thinking through a problem, just mindless button pushing
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In reality there is only so much money the space program can absorb productively, there are only so many capable scientist and engineers at some point if you keep pouring money on them all you will do is increase their salaries but not their output - I have an issue with the bad mounthing of the great society, first improving the nutrition and education of poor people greatly improves the economy - I don't have any numbers but the impact of improving the health and education of millions of people could easily dwarf any of the benefits of the space program - another component of the great society was civil rights, and aside from the moral arguments again giving millions of people greater opprotunity and access has to have a massive impact on the economy - so comparing the space program to the great society is silly, you can't spend a trillion dollars on the space program productively but you can on anti-poverty and both have the potently for large benefits to society
If there is a dam nearby you can pump water up behind the dam and run the dam when the wind is not blowing - not super efficient but you can cheaply store some of the execess power
A plausable limit to computation per unit power could be derived from looking at biological systems, the human brain is estimated to be capable of 100 Million MIPS based on comparisons between the human retena and computer systems emulating that behavior the if the energy consumption of the brain is 100W then it is about 1 Million MIPS/watt would be a good measure of entitlement
I don't understand how anyone can argue with Malthus, because it is just math, he observed that population increases exponentially if unchecked (duh. which is obvious) and food production does not (he assumed linearity), you eventually hit the darwinian big crunch which are the conditions that all plants and animals live under. It just so happens that with intensive petrolium based farming we got ahead of the curve, a bump if you will, but I don't see any technolgy that can increase food production _exponentially_ nothing can increase exponentially in a finite world. In fact his insight says if you don't do something about exponental growth in populaiton you are fucked, what is there to argue about.
somebody mod the parent insightful, it is a brilliant insight, scarcity does not cause efficiency in resource distribution but often encourages hoarding, scarcity can drive market failure - all the free market/libertaian types should mediate upon this truth, scarcity of a commodity often leads to hoarding, which causes more scarcity, if is is a product that everyone needs this behavior can cause immense and permanent damage - BTW this is even true for money that is why the gov't had to flood the financial system with cash at the start of this depression, unfortunately that cash never trickled down to the rest of us, so we are still short of money.
Really talking about FTL is like a saying evoloution might not be true - just as there are multiple lines of evidence for evoloution there are interlocking ideas about the structure of space time and causality which require a speed limit - sure maybe during the creation of the universe of in other areas of space time there might have been different fundamental constants - but basically one you start talking about FTL you are talking about time travel and being your own grandfather - the structure of the reality starts to fall apart
Yes but how do you get one year of 1g acceleration to get to 99% the speed of light - I believe you need an amount of antimatter roughly equal to the rest mass of you payload - considering an h-bomb only produces the equivalent of 1g of energy that is a whole fucking lot of h-bombs for any reasonable payload it gets even worse when you have to take into the weight of the bomb which causes a limit of something like 10% the speed of light - even discussing 1g acceleration for a year is bullshit because you have to talk about thousands of tons of antimatter
You mean Feehdum! Local control is overrated, most people are incapable of determining which investment strategy is needed for them to retire, incapable of a determining the correct safety standard for drinking water, which scientific theories should be taught in school - we have experts who have studied these issues, we rely on them every time we eat some food we bought at the store or drink tap water, or get an inoculation - most people are dumb asses who just care about sucking up to the man in charge and keeping track of who is fucking who, for the dumb asses own safety we should not be giving them local control over what shit the local chemical plant can dump into the river, or telling the local farmers it is ok not to wash their fucking vegetables - local control or Feehdum! Is code word for fucking the dumb shits of amerika and really if the dumb shits getting raped by predators didn't effect me i wouldn't give a shit but it does - those unwashed veggies might end up in my supermarket, their unvaccinated kids might get my baby sick,that local chemical plant might fuck up the aquifer - we live in a civilization it's maintenance requires experts and professionals - appeals to freehdum are just appealing to the narcissism of dumbshits
Thanks for straightening me, you must be brilliant because you are quoting Feynman in your sig - enjoy your billions (Buffet is that you?) - hey check out the price history and dividends of GE and GM - now GE is worth 1/3 of what it did in 2001 and they cut dividends, GM went bankrupt - but I guess you knew that was going to happen you being brilliant and all - and Keynes is probably a better source than you for basic macroeconomics, you nitwit.
Sure, just tell me when the market has crashed because of fundamentals and when it hasn't - in other words should I buy real estate or gold? - but if you could you would be rich - because you would know when it was going to bounce back quickly - or are you saying it is a tautology, when it bounces back quick it wasn't fundamentals when it takes years it was fundamentals? I think Keynes also said (Paraphrasing) that that bubbles always last longer than your patience or your checkbook
Bingo - understanding feedback is the key to this problem, mod parent up - feedback loops also dominate a lot of social systems as well and answers questions like "why is Snooki so popular?"
The belief that markets always reflect underlying fundamentals is flawed, and the belief that they rapidly correct is also demonstrably untrue, Keynes (a boogyman of the right) pointed this out quite eloquently when he compared the market to a beauty contest in which the judges were required not to guess which contestant was the most beautiful but which contestant they thought most _others_ thought were most beautiful - in that contest people will start voting for contestants simply because others are voting for those contestants. In engineering, the most analogous situation is feedback where the output of an amplifier is fed back into the input - our markets along with a lot of social networks seem to be dominated by these runaway feedback-like mechanisms and when they eventually break real and lasting damage has been done - resources have been misallocated, players were forced to sell low, poor leaders were chosen. Engineers design systems to limit feedback or dampen its effects - the natural dampening mechanism for these social feedback like effect are regulation and taxes - examples would include taxing trades held for too short a time or limiting the amount of money spent in political campaigns - of course those that benefit from these feedback like mechanisms fight like hell anyone who tries to dampen them out and often have a disproportionate amount of resources to do just that.
My GF drives a big F-ing SUV because she thinks it is safer (Ford expedition if you can believe it, you need a tugboat to parallel park it), she has no need for such a large vehicle, also I remember my dad when he had an incident on the expressway with a semi he wanted to buy and SUV and that was in the early 80s when the things were almost unheard of, he though the high seating and larger size would make him safer - I think the american auto companies exploited people's fear of accident or collision to sell SUVs to women in the mistaken believe that they are safer - in reality there is a huge roll risk with SUVs and the best way to avoid an accident is not to get in one in the first place, however most people will gladly pay more for gas in order to buy the supposed "safety" of an SUV, it doesn't really occur to anyone that if everyone drove a smaller car we would all be safer but most people would rather fuck their neighbor than cooperate over anything.
mod parent up - this is so true, incentives in a free market system are completely out of whack with the long term health of the population
Shit man you are right - who knows in two weeks it could be 100 below zero in NY city, the air might turn to liquid, carbon dioxide snow or maybe 500, the oceans will boil - we can't possibly predict what temperature it will be in two weeks! OMFG we are gonna die!
It takes more than just having the right elements to create life - water has some interesting chemical properties that methane lacks - such as it is one of the only chemicals which expands when it freezes, water is a polar molecule being slightly positive on one side and negative on the other, can form a large number of hydrogen bonds for its size, and especially relevant is that it is a fantastic solvent - all these properties are favorable for life, for example being a good solvent allows other molecules and ions to dissolve into water, allowing for lots of different types of chance chemical reactions to occur between different dissolved molecules - Methane is not as good a solvent as water, as it lacks polarity, however some people have proposed life working using poly-lipids as a substitute for proteins in non-polar liquids but because it is a poor solvent the chances of life working in a methane ocean seem less likely than water...
Would he have been persecuted for being gay if he was not a so well recognized figure? I doubt it - somebody wanted to "put him in his place" - analogously you can say Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, and while technically true, he would not have been put in that situation if there were not some very powerful people out to fuck him.
If humans were just as smart as woodchucks or acted like deer populations I could see your point, the problem is some of us are smart enough to see the consequences of our actions and can change our behavior to avoid of limit those consequences, unfortunately that mode of thinking is out of style these days - now of course if you point out the negative consequences of group behavior and propose laws or some other collective action (often through governments) you are called a socialist, fascist, communist, or unamerican - so by that logic I guess only socialists are smarter than grazing animals.
Oh Oh I know the answer! We will do nothing and just see what happens! we are right on track for the club of rome predictions already....
Teller?
This is a good point, often our ideal of how knowledge works, i.e. everyone should figure everything out for themselves, explain all sides of the argument and in general be "fair" or give the benefit of the doubt to naysayers conflicts with reality - the reality is people don't know anything when they are born, and most people just follow what people in authority tell them to think, it is easier that way, you will be a member of the group in good standing and nobody will beat you up for believing what everyone else does. Also, many people aren't smart enough to think for themselves, many people when thinking for themselves come to terrible conclusions - "vaccines cause autism" comes to mind - as most people overestimate their own competence and tend to disregard experts - in short, most people are egotistical followers, and are easily led by the idea or demagog who simultaneously complements them and tells them the path with the least effort
Wow I guess the unions did a good job in pulling up those science scores!
I would say our educational system is bimodal, public schools in affluent suburbs are just fine - that is why real estate is so high there, you are paying for the school district everyone wants to be in - but for a huge segment of the population the schools suck, I grew up in Chicago in the 70s, there was no public school my parents were willing to send me to, they shelled our for private schools all the way. In Europe most schools are centrally funded - not dependent on local property taxes - which encourages everyone to chip in for good schools because everyone is in the same boat. Until you address our screwed up system of property tax based schools, you will continue to get this bimodal system, schools in cities and poorer areas will suck and rich suburban schools will be good. To be more fair, is is better to think of the US as a mixture of a second/third world country with a first world country - some places/counties/states in the US are dirt poor, while others are fabulously wealthy.
Yes these guys complain about free loaders but what is their solution? - I could respect them more if they proposed one - even if it is "I think people without medical insurance should be refused service at the ER, I am OK with the consequences of that, such as people dying on the street after traffic accidents" then I would ask them what they propose to do with the bodies on the street.... But it always "those freeloaders are taking away my hard earned tax dollars" but never think through what the consequences will be if someone doesn't pay.
At one point in time before the 70s a lot of professional workers had their own office, then came the cubicle which was really a huge cost out exercise, it saves rent but kills productivity, ironically the designer of the cubicle meant to make it a private work area to optimize productivity and then corporate america perverted it into it current form, it is not about worker productivity it is about reducing overhead cost - I hate cubicles, fortunately the building I work in now was built in the 70s so almost everyone had their own office but I have worked in cubicle or even worse, completely open offices, it is very difficult to work in such a crowded chaotic environment and it is not conducive to thinking through a problem, just mindless button pushing