I didn't think there was an issue of getting a nuclear as opposed to thermonuclar Orion off the surface of the earth - DARPA proposed a nuclear version in the 60s. But I think the overall point stands, any interstellar spaceship is a weapon of mass destruction in excess of our current world nuclear arsenal. The way I think of it is for a ship of mass m to hit x% of the speed of light you have to roughly convert a m*x amount of mass into energy - so for a 10000 ton spaceship to hit 10% of the speed of light you need on the order of 1000tons of mass converted to energy, this is an exageration for low speeds but you get the idea, for comparison a hydrogen bomb converts 1g of mass into energy, the speed limit of a ship is determined by the efficiency of the fuel - if the h-bomb weights 20kg and only packs 1g of energy, then that ratio of 20000 to 1 limits your top speed because you have to haul around all this mass just to get 1 g of pure energy....
You raise a good point, most companies do _not_ invest their profits in R&D or otherwise developing useful products - they invest their money on clobbering every other company, through marketing, lobbying, IP, lawsuits or buyouts. That is why in the US you often see one big company and only a few competetors, they bought out or out marketed their competition, the remaining competetors are too big to buy out. The US system would be greatly improved if there was regulation limiting the amount of money corps can spend on these socially useless or anti-competetive activities - let companies compete, but compete on the quality of their products, not their ability to kneecap their opponents.
Not mention the bottom 47% have to pay sales taxes, license fees, registration etc.. these taxes hit the poor much harder than anyone else as they spend a larger proportion of their income on neccesities
In the short term there will be no capital ships or space fighters, not with chemical rockets, in the distant future I would recommend reading Larry Niven, specifically Protector or some of his known space books which depict space battles at relativistic speeds, in Footfall he depicts how an Orion type nuclear putt-putt rocket is used in combat near earth. Charles Stross in Singularity Sky also discusses space battles and tactics while trying to stick with (mostly) known physics - none of these more realistic novels depict what you would call capital ships, fighters and cruisers - space is not a 3D version of naval warfare, with projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, you get hit you are dead, much of the battle is about not being seen until it is too late.
Why do you think this has happened? My hypothesis is that the distribution of wealth is the underlying issue, if you have 1B dollars, you don't need to compromise ever and you have the resources to fund whatever politicians you can to get your agenda through, you can apply enormous media pressure on anyone who disagrees with you, pundits will advocate for you and politicians will vote for whatever you want, often you don't even have to spend money to get what you want, just threaten to.
I have heard this line of BS many times before - "it is complex" "I have to weigh lots of variables together" - what they really mean is that there are politics involved and they don't want to upset anyone else - in this case people died because the manager didn't want to stand up to the next layer of management and say there was a problem - he would rather take a chance with peoples lives then expend an ounce of political capital, what a motherfucker - US management is so obsessed with the circle jerk of just trying to please everyone above them while treating their subordinates like servants that they can't possibly let reality get in the way, and if shit does happen they blame the guy who warned of the problem - this has to change someday or the US is fucked, maybe the Chinese can run this country better then our current set of narcissitic, sociopathic managers.
Why treat belief in god different than anything else? And anyway last time I checked Zeus, Thor and Odin are gods and I am certainly an atheist about their existence, I suspect you are too - it is just a question of whether you deny the existence of all gods or just a subset, and if it is a subset why that subset and not some other? But the broader point is why do we have to be agnostic about god and suspend judgement when for every other fairy tale, monster or nonsense statement we are comfortable saying that does not exist or that is not true based on the knowledge we have available?
Interesting discussion, are you saying you think there is _some_ evidence for a god but that it is just not very convincing, more so than for elves of faries? (this god does not have to be the judeo-chrisitian god) or are you saying that the existence of god is in a special category of knowledge and we have to suspend judgement even though there is no evidence? I ask this because I think most agnostics fall into two categories 1) They don't believe in god any more than the easter bunny, but they realize the sensitivity of the topic to believers so they say they are agnostic. This is the buckling in approach which I believe gives religion a special epistemic safety box, the existence of god is somehow special and cannot be addressed by normal truth seeking, it forces non-believers to cave in to an alternate criteria of belief for god. or 2) the agnostic thinks their really might be a god, intellectually they have no evidence, but they still somehow think they know it exists but cannot go all they way and believe without evidence. I suspect most agnostics are type 1.
Odin then? Zeus? do you withhold judgement on their existence? and what makes belief/non belief in some sort of god different in the belief or non-belief in some other mythical entity - is it just because nobody claims the easter bunny will send you to hell if you don't believe in him? does that make belief in the easter bunny not a religion? I suspect you are quick to dismiss the existence of all kinds of entities such as elves and faries or even crappy theories, because if you didn't every time you ran into some whackjob theory you would have to suspend judgement, every time you got a piece of data, you would have to run it against all the different crazy theories people came up with, like "stepping on sidewalk cracks will cause bladder cancer", do you step on cracks or not? because you know they _might_ cause bladder cancer, sure there is no evidence, but you never know - do you say only an arrogant fool would claim to know stepping on cracks does not cause cancer? - most reasonable people would say I was full of shit if I claimed such a thing or at the very least demand evidence and a plausible mechanism - now if I said "stepping on cracks would send you to hell" what would you think, I can't prove either claim, in fact the second claim is even more ridiculous than the first, because not only am I postulating a correlation with no plausible mechanism I am furthermore postulating the existence of an unproven entity (hell)
Are you an agnostic about the Easter bunny? (you think it is impossible to say whether he exisits or not) or are you an atheist? (the easter bunny, to the best of my knowledge and all known evidence does not exist) - kinda weak sauce to be an agnostic about every piece of crap informaiton or whacked out entity people come up with just to avoid some percieved philisophica dilemma - the flying spaghetti monster doe not exist, a physics undergrad made it up to make a point - there I said it - I can only hope I don't go to a saucy hell because of it!
Ding ding ding, we have a winner, lots of people are atheists about a lot of things, like the easter bunny, Thor, Zeus, Odin and Santa. If you have no evidence for the existence of something, most people will not believe in it and are quite comforable with saying it does not exist (elves, unicorns, witches) - However we are supposed to give religion a special place, even though we have no evidence for the Judeo Christian God, we are supposed to suspend judgement and be an "agnosistic" instead of an atheist - this is how the relgious even make it difficult to call a spade a spade, they call you closed minded when you treat their god just like any other mythical creature or other god for unpopular religions - nobody in the US would give you a hard time about being an atheist about the existiance of Vishnu but the Judeo Christian god - you have to be an agnostic, how do you know he doesn't exist! Note how the burden of proof changes from the believers to non-believers for popular religions
You can also think of the Fermi paradox as setting a limit on how far away the nearest spacefaring civilization is, since they have not got here yet and they expand at say 10% the speed (pick a fraction) of light they have to be at least 400M light-years away, given a 4 billion year old age of the earth - might be less if we don't think there were enough heavy elements produced until more recently - say 100M light years, which puts them outside of our local supercluster.
Ok - I'll fucking bite - the output of science perhaps succinctly stated, consists of models of how the world works, usually these models can be expressed mathematically but not always - in climate science you build a model of how the earth's climate works based on your understanding of physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics etc... when you build a model there are certain variables that are important that need to be put into the model, these could be temperature measurements, absorption properties of carbon dioxide, methane, water etc... some of the input data is time dependent, say you have 50 years of atmosphere and water temperature data - you feed your model the first 20 years of data and then try and predict the next 30 years, you then try this again for various time periods to make sure you really have all the data you need, and that your solution is stable, this is one way you test your model - if every fucking scientist who builds a fucking model based on physics and chemistry comes up with the same trend using differing data sets you have what we call a "consensus" - by the way astronomy, evolutionary biology and lots of other important fields work the same way, this is how science deals with complex systems, it is a better method than what came before, which was "gut feeling" or "pulling it out of your ass" - another thing to note is that when you build a model you do not know a priori what the model will predict - shitheads don't like this property of models, because it leaves the possibility of giving an answer they don't like.
$10M probably does not even come close to covering the R&D costs for something like this, if it is even possible (I can't access the sit through my corporate firewall) - I suspect it will provide no incentive for anyone serious - it would be a rip off for everyone who competes and does not win, what a great way to get 100M in reseach for only 10M, because you would not have to pay for all the blind alleys the losers went down, if they want it they should just pay for the god-damn research and do it themselves - I speak as a professional medical researcher
Thanks - I have thought of this and still consider this, unfortunately my field and the systems I have expertise in require a large amount of capital, so I feel I am forced to work for a larger organization. However, there are smaller companies in my field that do try to produce innovative products and systems - unfortunately the end game for most of these companies is simply to be bought out by a large conglomerate - that is how things work, big companies stay in business because they are big, they buy out smaller competitors and eventually run them into the ground, but in the process they make enough money to buy out the next wave - but you are right, it would be better to work for a small company and get bought out and get rich, it is risky, just as often as a buy out small companies with innovative products are simply run out of business through lack of distribution and negative marketing, a buy out is really the last thing the big conglomerate wants to do. Our system leaves something to be desired, I used to be sympathetic to capitalism, but after seeing it at work from the inside I have become more of a socialist, markets without regulation and rules prohibiting predatory behavior is just as bad as a dictatorship or a feudal system - the waste an inefficiencies in a poorly regulated market are seen in bloated management salaries, huge marketing and lobbying budgets and huge corporate profits from quasi-monopolies .
In my experience working in corporate R&D management has no respect for technical skills, our society just does not value expertise. For them, just wishing for a new feature or system is the real work - figuring out if it is even possible, and then figuring out how to make it work is for little people - many times managers have asked for system concepts that are just physically impossible - but god help you if you actually told them that "you are not a team player", when you suggest an alternative which has a chance of working, you are ignored - because little people can't possibly have good ideas and usually the alternative is not as sexy as something that is physically impossible
I simplified my example too much - in reality he bought out his competitors and now he owns all the restaurants on the block, which is a popular corner in my city - you would have to somehow find new commercial space on the block to compete. I work for R&D for a very large corporation, we spend far more on marketing and patent trolling than we do on developing new products, when we do try research it is most often not to innovate but to pull cost out of existing products, the cost out does not go to lower prices, just to higher profits and bonuses because there is very limited competetion. We forget that all this money focused on destroying competition is waste, it leads only to higher prices and only benefits the management and possibly shareholders, no new products are developed or improved - so next time someone complains about government waste think about marketing budgets, huge salaries and huge profits - that is just as wasteful as anything government can come up with.
Another thing most libertarians don't understand about the free market is that it is not all about competeting to produce be best servce or product. What most companies do is invest as much or more effort in destroying the competition as in making a better product. They do this through buy outs, marketing, patents, exculsive distribution agreements and lobbying the government. Unless you made this behavior illegal, it is quite often more profitable to kneecap the competion than actually improve your product. A simple example is in my neighborhood the owner of a restaurant simply bought out and shut down the other restaturants on a popular street - now he can charge twice as much as he did before
I agree - their engineers were idiots if they had to build a prototype to figure out if this would work, however, in my experience the managers are often idiots who don't understand the whole idea of being able to simulate performance - my bet is they probably insisted on a prototype being built because they didn't trust the models, probably being non-technical themselves they have no ability to tell a good model from a bad one - such is corporate life these days
We would get our panties all in a knot if the Egyptian police busted up their protesters with pepper spray and kicked them out of the square - here they do the same thing and say it is all in the name of public health
WTF is wrong with all the people on the thread that hate OWS? Do they really thing the big bad gubernment caused the financial crisis? Do they think corporate execs are paid to little and have too little influence? Do they really think the financial sector is over regulated? Maybe the EPA caused the crisis, Fannie and Freddie Mae? Really I want to know what these people think - they bitch about dirty hippies in drum circles and how they should all get a job but what do they think casued our depression? Dirty hippies? Obamacare? Or how should it be solved - maybe we should just give our job creators more tax breaks or maybe just cut to the chase and give them all our stuff? what kind of shit goes through their heads?
I hate to say it but the article makes a good point, at least from my own experience, I have worked with DARPA and the program managers got their ideas of what technology and systems to develop from movies, seriously, the programs they ran were very costly and anyone with a modicum of engineering or scientific expertise could tell they would fail. The managers all want the big win with some kind of star trek like technology but have no clue you have to play by the laws of physics and do years of research on basic priniciples in order to develop something radically different than what we have today.
I wasn't arguing what we should or should not do or how we should spend our money - I was just saying that not much changed in terms of overall spending before and after the crisis even though the debt went up. In any event I guess you are asking me what I would do? I wouldn't worry about the debt in the short term, in business you are supposed to buy low and sell high, debt is cheap now so we should buy it to build things of lasting value now (increase our assets), we should retire debt when interest rates go up and the cost of debt is high. So I would
1) borrow a few $T or whatever (you can calculate how much you need to borrow to sop up X amount of excess capacity) or so and invest in infrastructure to reduce energy dependence (high voltage power distribution comes to mind, massive thermal solar in the west), public transport and improve our decrepit roads, also invest in education and research (even though there is a limit how much we can absorb there), and send money to the states to keep them from cutting staff
2) Tax the rich at more realistic rates, the issue with a recession is people are hoarding money, companies and the rich (who have all the money) are just socking the money away money into Tbills/cash and not investing taking it out of circulation, taxing forces them to use it or loose it as a side benefit the taxes can easily pay for interest on the extra debt (and then some)
3) Our economy is driven by renters, we have huge industries devoted to just siphoning cash out of people, and are very unproductive - I consider finance and the health insurance industry to be the main culprits and healthcare overall is dysfunctional despite the reforms - these industries need to be re-regulated and/or reorganized so they encourage productive activity.
4) We have almost no industrial policy in this country, a lot of our corporations act more like pirates than entities that exist for the benefit of the society, tax laws that encourage off-shoring or tax havens should be rewritten - corporate governance needs to be strengthened, shareholder have almost no power in our current system, corporate exec pay needs to be reworked.
I think these are the main issues, sure we can cut defense spending and wind down our war, but I don't think that will solve our fundamental problems - I think these 4 things are bigger issues than a bloated defense budget, we have had a bloated defense budget since the 1950s...
thanks
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think there was an issue of getting a nuclear as opposed to thermonuclar Orion off the surface of the earth - DARPA proposed a nuclear version in the 60s. But I think the overall point stands, any interstellar spaceship is a weapon of mass destruction in excess of our current world nuclear arsenal. The way I think of it is for a ship of mass m to hit x% of the speed of light you have to roughly convert a m*x amount of mass into energy - so for a 10000 ton spaceship to hit 10% of the speed of light you need on the order of 1000tons of mass converted to energy, this is an exageration for low speeds but you get the idea, for comparison a hydrogen bomb converts 1g of mass into energy, the speed limit of a ship is determined by the efficiency of the fuel - if the h-bomb weights 20kg and only packs 1g of energy, then that ratio of 20000 to 1 limits your top speed because you have to haul around all this mass just to get 1 g of pure energy....
You raise a good point, most companies do _not_ invest their profits in R&D or otherwise developing useful products - they invest their money on clobbering every other company, through marketing, lobbying, IP, lawsuits or buyouts. That is why in the US you often see one big company and only a few competetors, they bought out or out marketed their competition, the remaining competetors are too big to buy out. The US system would be greatly improved if there was regulation limiting the amount of money corps can spend on these socially useless or anti-competetive activities - let companies compete, but compete on the quality of their products, not their ability to kneecap their opponents.
Not mention the bottom 47% have to pay sales taxes, license fees, registration etc.. these taxes hit the poor much harder than anyone else as they spend a larger proportion of their income on neccesities
In the short term there will be no capital ships or space fighters, not with chemical rockets, in the distant future I would recommend reading Larry Niven, specifically Protector or some of his known space books which depict space battles at relativistic speeds, in Footfall he depicts how an Orion type nuclear putt-putt rocket is used in combat near earth. Charles Stross in Singularity Sky also discusses space battles and tactics while trying to stick with (mostly) known physics - none of these more realistic novels depict what you would call capital ships, fighters and cruisers - space is not a 3D version of naval warfare, with projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, you get hit you are dead, much of the battle is about not being seen until it is too late.
Why do you think this has happened? My hypothesis is that the distribution of wealth is the underlying issue, if you have 1B dollars, you don't need to compromise ever and you have the resources to fund whatever politicians you can to get your agenda through, you can apply enormous media pressure on anyone who disagrees with you, pundits will advocate for you and politicians will vote for whatever you want, often you don't even have to spend money to get what you want, just threaten to.
I have heard this line of BS many times before - "it is complex" "I have to weigh lots of variables together" - what they really mean is that there are politics involved and they don't want to upset anyone else - in this case people died because the manager didn't want to stand up to the next layer of management and say there was a problem - he would rather take a chance with peoples lives then expend an ounce of political capital, what a motherfucker - US management is so obsessed with the circle jerk of just trying to please everyone above them while treating their subordinates like servants that they can't possibly let reality get in the way, and if shit does happen they blame the guy who warned of the problem - this has to change someday or the US is fucked, maybe the Chinese can run this country better then our current set of narcissitic, sociopathic managers.
I could stop reading after "feedback effects obviously never cause anything" - insightful? you have got to be kidding me
Why treat belief in god different than anything else? And anyway last time I checked Zeus, Thor and Odin are gods and I am certainly an atheist about their existence, I suspect you are too - it is just a question of whether you deny the existence of all gods or just a subset, and if it is a subset why that subset and not some other? But the broader point is why do we have to be agnostic about god and suspend judgement when for every other fairy tale, monster or nonsense statement we are comfortable saying that does not exist or that is not true based on the knowledge we have available?
Interesting discussion, are you saying you think there is _some_ evidence for a god but that it is just not very convincing, more so than for elves of faries? (this god does not have to be the judeo-chrisitian god) or are you saying that the existence of god is in a special category of knowledge and we have to suspend judgement even though there is no evidence? I ask this because I think most agnostics fall into two categories 1) They don't believe in god any more than the easter bunny, but they realize the sensitivity of the topic to believers so they say they are agnostic. This is the buckling in approach which I believe gives religion a special epistemic safety box, the existence of god is somehow special and cannot be addressed by normal truth seeking, it forces non-believers to cave in to an alternate criteria of belief for god. or 2) the agnostic thinks their really might be a god, intellectually they have no evidence, but they still somehow think they know it exists but cannot go all they way and believe without evidence. I suspect most agnostics are type 1.
Odin then? Zeus? do you withhold judgement on their existence? and what makes belief/non belief in some sort of god different in the belief or non-belief in some other mythical entity - is it just because nobody claims the easter bunny will send you to hell if you don't believe in him? does that make belief in the easter bunny not a religion? I suspect you are quick to dismiss the existence of all kinds of entities such as elves and faries or even crappy theories, because if you didn't every time you ran into some whackjob theory you would have to suspend judgement, every time you got a piece of data, you would have to run it against all the different crazy theories people came up with, like "stepping on sidewalk cracks will cause bladder cancer", do you step on cracks or not? because you know they _might_ cause bladder cancer, sure there is no evidence, but you never know - do you say only an arrogant fool would claim to know stepping on cracks does not cause cancer? - most reasonable people would say I was full of shit if I claimed such a thing or at the very least demand evidence and a plausible mechanism - now if I said "stepping on cracks would send you to hell" what would you think, I can't prove either claim, in fact the second claim is even more ridiculous than the first, because not only am I postulating a correlation with no plausible mechanism I am furthermore postulating the existence of an unproven entity (hell)
Are you an agnostic about the Easter bunny? (you think it is impossible to say whether he exisits or not) or are you an atheist? (the easter bunny, to the best of my knowledge and all known evidence does not exist) - kinda weak sauce to be an agnostic about every piece of crap informaiton or whacked out entity people come up with just to avoid some percieved philisophica dilemma - the flying spaghetti monster doe not exist, a physics undergrad made it up to make a point - there I said it - I can only hope I don't go to a saucy hell because of it!
Ding ding ding, we have a winner, lots of people are atheists about a lot of things, like the easter bunny, Thor, Zeus, Odin and Santa. If you have no evidence for the existence of something, most people will not believe in it and are quite comforable with saying it does not exist (elves, unicorns, witches) - However we are supposed to give religion a special place, even though we have no evidence for the Judeo Christian God, we are supposed to suspend judgement and be an "agnosistic" instead of an atheist - this is how the relgious even make it difficult to call a spade a spade, they call you closed minded when you treat their god just like any other mythical creature or other god for unpopular religions - nobody in the US would give you a hard time about being an atheist about the existiance of Vishnu but the Judeo Christian god - you have to be an agnostic, how do you know he doesn't exist! Note how the burden of proof changes from the believers to non-believers for popular religions
You can also think of the Fermi paradox as setting a limit on how far away the nearest spacefaring civilization is, since they have not got here yet and they expand at say 10% the speed (pick a fraction) of light they have to be at least 400M light-years away, given a 4 billion year old age of the earth - might be less if we don't think there were enough heavy elements produced until more recently - say 100M light years, which puts them outside of our local supercluster.
good point - mod parent up
Ok - I'll fucking bite - the output of science perhaps succinctly stated, consists of models of how the world works, usually these models can be expressed mathematically but not always - in climate science you build a model of how the earth's climate works based on your understanding of physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics etc... when you build a model there are certain variables that are important that need to be put into the model, these could be temperature measurements, absorption properties of carbon dioxide, methane, water etc... some of the input data is time dependent, say you have 50 years of atmosphere and water temperature data - you feed your model the first 20 years of data and then try and predict the next 30 years, you then try this again for various time periods to make sure you really have all the data you need, and that your solution is stable, this is one way you test your model - if every fucking scientist who builds a fucking model based on physics and chemistry comes up with the same trend using differing data sets you have what we call a "consensus" - by the way astronomy, evolutionary biology and lots of other important fields work the same way, this is how science deals with complex systems, it is a better method than what came before, which was "gut feeling" or "pulling it out of your ass" - another thing to note is that when you build a model you do not know a priori what the model will predict - shitheads don't like this property of models, because it leaves the possibility of giving an answer they don't like.
$10M probably does not even come close to covering the R&D costs for something like this, if it is even possible (I can't access the sit through my corporate firewall) - I suspect it will provide no incentive for anyone serious - it would be a rip off for everyone who competes and does not win, what a great way to get 100M in reseach for only 10M, because you would not have to pay for all the blind alleys the losers went down, if they want it they should just pay for the god-damn research and do it themselves - I speak as a professional medical researcher
Thanks - I have thought of this and still consider this, unfortunately my field and the systems I have expertise in require a large amount of capital, so I feel I am forced to work for a larger organization. However, there are smaller companies in my field that do try to produce innovative products and systems - unfortunately the end game for most of these companies is simply to be bought out by a large conglomerate - that is how things work, big companies stay in business because they are big, they buy out smaller competitors and eventually run them into the ground, but in the process they make enough money to buy out the next wave - but you are right, it would be better to work for a small company and get bought out and get rich, it is risky, just as often as a buy out small companies with innovative products are simply run out of business through lack of distribution and negative marketing, a buy out is really the last thing the big conglomerate wants to do. Our system leaves something to be desired, I used to be sympathetic to capitalism, but after seeing it at work from the inside I have become more of a socialist, markets without regulation and rules prohibiting predatory behavior is just as bad as a dictatorship or a feudal system - the waste an inefficiencies in a poorly regulated market are seen in bloated management salaries, huge marketing and lobbying budgets and huge corporate profits from quasi-monopolies .
In my experience working in corporate R&D management has no respect for technical skills, our society just does not value expertise. For them, just wishing for a new feature or system is the real work - figuring out if it is even possible, and then figuring out how to make it work is for little people - many times managers have asked for system concepts that are just physically impossible - but god help you if you actually told them that "you are not a team player", when you suggest an alternative which has a chance of working, you are ignored - because little people can't possibly have good ideas and usually the alternative is not as sexy as something that is physically impossible
I simplified my example too much - in reality he bought out his competitors and now he owns all the restaurants on the block, which is a popular corner in my city - you would have to somehow find new commercial space on the block to compete. I work for R&D for a very large corporation, we spend far more on marketing and patent trolling than we do on developing new products, when we do try research it is most often not to innovate but to pull cost out of existing products, the cost out does not go to lower prices, just to higher profits and bonuses because there is very limited competetion. We forget that all this money focused on destroying competition is waste, it leads only to higher prices and only benefits the management and possibly shareholders, no new products are developed or improved - so next time someone complains about government waste think about marketing budgets, huge salaries and huge profits - that is just as wasteful as anything government can come up with.
Another thing most libertarians don't understand about the free market is that it is not all about competeting to produce be best servce or product. What most companies do is invest as much or more effort in destroying the competition as in making a better product. They do this through buy outs, marketing, patents, exculsive distribution agreements and lobbying the government. Unless you made this behavior illegal, it is quite often more profitable to kneecap the competion than actually improve your product. A simple example is in my neighborhood the owner of a restaurant simply bought out and shut down the other restaturants on a popular street - now he can charge twice as much as he did before
I agree - their engineers were idiots if they had to build a prototype to figure out if this would work, however, in my experience the managers are often idiots who don't understand the whole idea of being able to simulate performance - my bet is they probably insisted on a prototype being built because they didn't trust the models, probably being non-technical themselves they have no ability to tell a good model from a bad one - such is corporate life these days
We would get our panties all in a knot if the Egyptian police busted up their protesters with pepper spray and kicked them out of the square - here they do the same thing and say it is all in the name of public health
WTF is wrong with all the people on the thread that hate OWS? Do they really thing the big bad gubernment caused the financial crisis? Do they think corporate execs are paid to little and have too little influence? Do they really think the financial sector is over regulated? Maybe the EPA caused the crisis, Fannie and Freddie Mae? Really I want to know what these people think - they bitch about dirty hippies in drum circles and how they should all get a job but what do they think casued our depression? Dirty hippies? Obamacare? Or how should it be solved - maybe we should just give our job creators more tax breaks or maybe just cut to the chase and give them all our stuff? what kind of shit goes through their heads?
I hate to say it but the article makes a good point, at least from my own experience, I have worked with DARPA and the program managers got their ideas of what technology and systems to develop from movies, seriously, the programs they ran were very costly and anyone with a modicum of engineering or scientific expertise could tell they would fail. The managers all want the big win with some kind of star trek like technology but have no clue you have to play by the laws of physics and do years of research on basic priniciples in order to develop something radically different than what we have today.
I wasn't arguing what we should or should not do or how we should spend our money - I was just saying that not much changed in terms of overall spending before and after the crisis even though the debt went up. In any event I guess you are asking me what I would do? I wouldn't worry about the debt in the short term, in business you are supposed to buy low and sell high, debt is cheap now so we should buy it to build things of lasting value now (increase our assets), we should retire debt when interest rates go up and the cost of debt is high. So I would 1) borrow a few $T or whatever (you can calculate how much you need to borrow to sop up X amount of excess capacity) or so and invest in infrastructure to reduce energy dependence (high voltage power distribution comes to mind, massive thermal solar in the west), public transport and improve our decrepit roads, also invest in education and research (even though there is a limit how much we can absorb there), and send money to the states to keep them from cutting staff 2) Tax the rich at more realistic rates, the issue with a recession is people are hoarding money, companies and the rich (who have all the money) are just socking the money away money into Tbills/cash and not investing taking it out of circulation, taxing forces them to use it or loose it as a side benefit the taxes can easily pay for interest on the extra debt (and then some) 3) Our economy is driven by renters, we have huge industries devoted to just siphoning cash out of people, and are very unproductive - I consider finance and the health insurance industry to be the main culprits and healthcare overall is dysfunctional despite the reforms - these industries need to be re-regulated and/or reorganized so they encourage productive activity. 4) We have almost no industrial policy in this country, a lot of our corporations act more like pirates than entities that exist for the benefit of the society, tax laws that encourage off-shoring or tax havens should be rewritten - corporate governance needs to be strengthened, shareholder have almost no power in our current system, corporate exec pay needs to be reworked. I think these are the main issues, sure we can cut defense spending and wind down our war, but I don't think that will solve our fundamental problems - I think these 4 things are bigger issues than a bloated defense budget, we have had a bloated defense budget since the 1950s... thanks