No, that's not what TFA says at all. You can't even blame a misleading Slashdot headline here: you just made that up. A detector was built to find a very specific kind of matter. It didn't find anything. No real surprise, as there was never any reason to think it would - it was just the sort of detector we already knew how to build.
Hence, my theory is just as valid, that EM has both mass and is a wave
Yes, that's called "Quantum Field Theory", and it's what nearly everyone believes. Doesn't explain anything that dark matter explains, though, so no.
No, it is more than that. Astrophysicists give the attribute of "gravity" to dark matter. In fact, that was the reason they promulgated the idea, i.e., galaxies would fly apart otherwise so there must be something we cannot see which supplies the extra gravity.
They do not entertain the idea that maybe their laws are wrong, or that some other phenomenon might be affecting gravity.
That was true quite a few years ago, when there were many theories for galactic rotation rates, including MOND (precisely "the idea that maybe their laws are wrong"), hot dark matter, and cold dark matter which might be WIMPs or MACHOs.
Then we got more data.
WIMPs won out because they also explain gravitational lensing and the early universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation observations were decisive. The predictions made WIMPs were right on the money - turns out the early universe had just the predicted amount of (a) matter, that (b) wasn't moving near the speed of light, and (c) before block holes, brown dwarfs, etc could have formed.
That's how science works. Scientists do not lack creativity - there was a whole forest of ideas to explain galactic rotation rates. But as more observations of unrelated phenomena come it, only "some sort of particle" was left standing. Falsifiable theories were falsified.
This experiment was a bit silly IMO - it was just a detector much like the detectors we built for neutrinos, which had never shown any signs of dark matter before. It was very much a case of "well, we know how to build this sort of detector already, so let just build a big one and hope for the best".
Yeah.... But half of my department are h1b or some sort of opt/ept graduates, so this would fuckin kill my startup. No way can I pay 100K to someone with next to no experience.
There's a whole country full of people with "next to no experience" - the country you're living in in fact, which should be quite convenient.
Do you have any evidence of this? When cars replaced horses, automobiles presented manufacture, repair, and refueling jobs almost immediately.
Car-related jobs did very little to replace horse-related jobs at first (number-wise). It was only after cars had been around for quite some time that Ford made them cheap enough that more people could own cars than previously owned horses that job replacement started to become meaningful.
Manufacturing brought product after product into the purchasing ability of common man that he either could never have afforded, or only afforded for the head of the household.
That's been the trend. The new jobs are in stuff that previously only the wealthy could afford, but now suddenly most people can afford due to automation. People who can predict those products going forward stand to make a great deal of money.
far as Helicopter Money, it's not so much about the money as it is circulatory pressure.
We know that's not true from decades of deflationary pressure in Japan. The truth is: you can't push on a rope. Economies can stagnate, even collapse, for lack of money supply, but it doesn't work the other way: you can't create demand for money by increasing the supply.
Pensions were long common until the private sector made them unfashionable. The gov't typically pays about 15% less than the private sector, making up for it via pensions and benefits
I used to live in Alameda County - their pension obligations were 100% of their budget, and they were far from the worst in California. It's a common story - most states have similar problems at the state level, and most major cities and counties face it to one degree or another. Pensions were under-funded for decades from a combination of assumptions of 90s stock market growth continuing forever, lifespan not increasing, and politicians not giving a shit about any problem they could kick down the road.
BTW, jobs at the federal level now typically pay more than the private sector. Aristocrats vs commoners.
Needs it for what exactly? You keep asserting that unimproved land has some mystical value, but I'm not seeing it. The majority of such land in the US is owned by the government - local, state, and national parks. There are a few huge private ranches, to be sure, but they're more trophies/status symbols than wealth. There's some unimproved land in the US that's actually rented out, but that's mostly "reverse sharecropping" that more-or-less pays for the property taxes, and again not a source of meaningful income.
Land becomes valuable when you build something useful on it (and not always then).
Past trends/patterns are not necessarily future trends/patterns.
No, but they're the best, sometimes only, evidence we have.
One thing that is different is that automation in the past mostly enabled people to do more, NOT replace them.
Nope. A great many professions have disappeared, or nearly so, over the centuries.
Can YOU see it? The "New Thing" wasn't so hidden in the past.
Everything's obvious in hindsight, but no one saw (or very few) what was coming, jobwise, until we were well into ramping up those new jobs.
The only possibility I see right now is the "customization economy" where people get customized cars, landscaping, kitchens, etc.
Customization will take off in areas where the base good both becomes nearly free due to automation, and where it works as a social status signal. Moving from "owning X confers status" to "your customization of X confers status, since everyone can own one now" is the one obvious trend. Heck, that's already most of fashion.
I see "Helicopter Money" (HM) theory as one possible solution.
"And we all had plenty of money, but there was nothing that money could buy". More money without producing more goods and services doesn't really achieve anything.
We also have rotting infrastructure that needs repair, but no means to fund it.
We certainly have the means to improve it, we just lack the will. The vast majority of state and local taxes these days goes to pension plan funding. Those money helicopters seems to hover over people the government likes - funny how that works.
It may take a combination of HM, taxing the rich, socialism, and public works to crack this puzzle.
That puzzle was cracked by capitalism every previous time, but this time is different because... well, apparently, because you want free money.
timately somebody took those resources for free and used them to live off the labour of those who didn't.
How do you use unimproved land to live off the labor of others? No, really? It produces no income or other value unless you either work it or improve it.
There will always be jobs, at least until the Singularity. This is just the Nth automation transition since the Industrial Revolution begun. It's no more (or less!) scary than any of them.
The disaster you're predicting was predicted over and over throughout history, and it's just as wrong this time.
And yet Trump keeps telling his rubes that jobs are coming back. They are not coming back. Workers will be replaced by robots.
There are barely more manufacturing jobs in the US than there are farming jobs. Those aren't the jobs people care about - we're a service economy now. Automation threatens to displace service workers the way it already has manufacturing workers - but that's far enough out that neither Trump nor his supporters are complaining about it.
OTOH, service jobs (especially low-skilled) are being lost to lost to recent immigrants, and that's an immediate problem that a president can do something about. That's really the core of Trump's appeal, in fact. The very wealthy of course only want unlimited immigration, because lower wages helps that crowd. OTOH, unlimited immigration is not at all popular with people struggling to keep their low-skilled job as it is.
Earned is a funny word to use for those who withhold resources from those who have none in order to extract labor from them.
Where do you imagine those resources came from? Someone worked to create them.
It is a fundamental requirement of society that we each contribute as much to society as we consume, over our lifetimes. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. We measure that with money, but money itself is meaningless. Oh, we may be nice enough to carry a few people out of charity, but when that "few" goes beyond the legitimately disabled, the whole thing unravels.
and tax capital gains the same as any other income
Inflation-adjust the gains and few would argue your point there. There is some economic stability gained, I think, from having a "cliff"-style reduction in tax rate after 1 year, instead, as it encourages longer-term investment, but I doubt it's that big a win. Short-term capital gains are of course taxed at the same rate as income now.
It's totally worthwhile to give tax breaks to the rich, but only as an inducement to spending. Any other kind harms everyone, even them in the long term.
Many investments are just spending, one level removed.
if my math is right, 100 GB/month is just 38 kB/s sustained, or ~300 kb/s.
The fact that you felt the need to express the figure in kB instead of kb
You wot mate?
"and the even sillier fact that you contemplate literal 24/7 throughput for a *mobile* device whose usage by an ordinary device-addicted person would arguably max out at *8* hours a day of non-stop usage
Did you know some people have mobile data as their only realistic home internet connection? Cause it doesn't sound like you know that.
To repeat, 100 GB a month is a massive shitpile of data
See above. HD video is 3 GB/hour. AAA games are often over 20 GB these days. Netflix uses a massive shitpile of bandwidth. Their customers, individually, consume an ordinary amount.
That still seems OK to me if it's small in absolute terms. If you're stuck somewhere that mobile is your only worthwhile high speed internet, that's a small amount of HD TV watching, or a moderate amount of normal streaming and a AAA game download, or the like.
If the 24/7 usage rate seems low compared to the lowest-end wired ISP download rate anyone advertises in the country, that seems to me like it should be OK.
That's certainly true. "Unlimited" should always be understood to include "but don't be a dick".
However, if my math is right, 100 GB/month is just 38 kB/s sustained, or ~300 kb/s. That's a bit more than modem speeds, which is nice, but it somehow doesn't seem to be a dickish level of overuse in the modern world.
And that's what Regulatory Capture looks like when it grows up. Effective legal monopolies are the dream of every CEO, and we seem intent on making more of that happen under the guise of "protecting the little guy from corporations through additional regulations" (which may even be true for the first few years).
. The difference is that all of those jobs are fractions of a percent of what they were.
I wonder how many jobs that's true of (other than farmer, where it's clearly true). Oh, sure, as a percentage of the population it's smaller, but as an absolute number? Some of these were never more than "a few niche specialists". More people can read and write cuneiform today than when it was current, and that's a very small niche.
In any case, as long as the need for workers in specific jobs falls slowly over a generation or two, it's not a problem. There's always something new people want, but abrupt transitions are hard.
Can what be defeated by "a screwdriver and some electronics skills"?
The stuff we know from Snowden is pretty old now, but included firmware-level exploits for all common PCs, phones, routers, and firewalls of the time (e.g., IRATEMONK which lived in hard drive firmware to run arbitrary code at OS boot time). It included concealable (on a PC) taps for both video and audio, that emitted no signal by themselves, but were readable by hitting them with a low-power radar device from some distance away (e.g., RAGEMASTER and LOUDAUTO). We know the NSA would intercept shipments of PCs and routers at large scale and conceal these devices, and it never made the news before Snowden.
Now it's the era of phones. You really think there aren't modern projects, that don't require something the size of PC components for concealment? They had penny-sized modules in '08.
Spend some time reading through project summaries here. Really. You sound like the guys 3 years ago, arguing that the government couldn't be recording all phone calls in the US, when we knew they were.
I spent some time reading through the detailed program information disclosed by Snowden. All the nifty little devices that the NSA has "productized" and can hide in a PC to snoop on it, and their programs to saturate areas where a person of interest might buy a PC (by intercepting shipments from manufacturers), so that he'd buy one pre-tapped. Not enough tinfoil in the world.
I'd take that bet. The big studios love BluRay, as it's a revenue model they understand and fully control. They aren't exactly fast learners. I heard an MPAA executive shouted "ouch" in a meeting today because he had stubbed his toe over the weekend.
Slashdot Mirror
But we just proved it doesn't exist.
No, that's not what TFA says at all. You can't even blame a misleading Slashdot headline here: you just made that up. A detector was built to find a very specific kind of matter. It didn't find anything. No real surprise, as there was never any reason to think it would - it was just the sort of detector we already knew how to build.
Hence, my theory is just as valid, that EM has both mass and is a wave
Yes, that's called "Quantum Field Theory", and it's what nearly everyone believes. Doesn't explain anything that dark matter explains, though, so no.
No, it is more than that. Astrophysicists give the attribute of "gravity" to dark matter. In fact, that was the reason they promulgated the idea, i.e., galaxies would fly apart otherwise so there must be something we cannot see which supplies the extra gravity.
They do not entertain the idea that maybe their laws are wrong, or that some other phenomenon might be affecting gravity.
That was true quite a few years ago, when there were many theories for galactic rotation rates, including MOND (precisely "the idea that maybe their laws are wrong"), hot dark matter, and cold dark matter which might be WIMPs or MACHOs.
Then we got more data.
WIMPs won out because they also explain gravitational lensing and the early universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation observations were decisive. The predictions made WIMPs were right on the money - turns out the early universe had just the predicted amount of (a) matter, that (b) wasn't moving near the speed of light, and (c) before block holes, brown dwarfs, etc could have formed.
That's how science works. Scientists do not lack creativity - there was a whole forest of ideas to explain galactic rotation rates. But as more observations of unrelated phenomena come it, only "some sort of particle" was left standing. Falsifiable theories were falsified.
This experiment was a bit silly IMO - it was just a detector much like the detectors we built for neutrinos, which had never shown any signs of dark matter before. It was very much a case of "well, we know how to build this sort of detector already, so let just build a big one and hope for the best".
Trump needs Virginia badly. This has nothing to do with the senator, and everything to do with delivering his state.
Yeah.... But half of my department are h1b or some sort of opt/ept graduates, so this would fuckin kill my startup. No way can I pay 100K to someone with next to no experience.
There's a whole country full of people with "next to no experience" - the country you're living in in fact, which should be quite convenient.
Do you have any evidence of this? When cars replaced horses, automobiles presented manufacture, repair, and refueling jobs almost immediately.
Car-related jobs did very little to replace horse-related jobs at first (number-wise). It was only after cars had been around for quite some time that Ford made them cheap enough that more people could own cars than previously owned horses that job replacement started to become meaningful.
Manufacturing brought product after product into the purchasing ability of common man that he either could never have afforded, or only afforded for the head of the household.
That's been the trend. The new jobs are in stuff that previously only the wealthy could afford, but now suddenly most people can afford due to automation. People who can predict those products going forward stand to make a great deal of money.
far as Helicopter Money, it's not so much about the money as it is circulatory pressure.
We know that's not true from decades of deflationary pressure in Japan. The truth is: you can't push on a rope. Economies can stagnate, even collapse, for lack of money supply, but it doesn't work the other way: you can't create demand for money by increasing the supply.
Pensions were long common until the private sector made them unfashionable. The gov't typically pays about 15% less than the private sector, making up for it via pensions and benefits
I used to live in Alameda County - their pension obligations were 100% of their budget, and they were far from the worst in California. It's a common story - most states have similar problems at the state level, and most major cities and counties face it to one degree or another. Pensions were under-funded for decades from a combination of assumptions of 90s stock market growth continuing forever, lifespan not increasing, and politicians not giving a shit about any problem they could kick down the road.
BTW, jobs at the federal level now typically pay more than the private sector. Aristocrats vs commoners.
Needs it for what exactly? You keep asserting that unimproved land has some mystical value, but I'm not seeing it. The majority of such land in the US is owned by the government - local, state, and national parks. There are a few huge private ranches, to be sure, but they're more trophies/status symbols than wealth. There's some unimproved land in the US that's actually rented out, but that's mostly "reverse sharecropping" that more-or-less pays for the property taxes, and again not a source of meaningful income.
Land becomes valuable when you build something useful on it (and not always then).
Past trends/patterns are not necessarily future trends/patterns.
No, but they're the best, sometimes only, evidence we have.
One thing that is different is that automation in the past mostly enabled people to do more, NOT replace them.
Nope. A great many professions have disappeared, or nearly so, over the centuries.
Can YOU see it? The "New Thing" wasn't so hidden in the past.
Everything's obvious in hindsight, but no one saw (or very few) what was coming, jobwise, until we were well into ramping up those new jobs.
The only possibility I see right now is the "customization economy" where people get customized cars, landscaping, kitchens, etc.
Customization will take off in areas where the base good both becomes nearly free due to automation, and where it works as a social status signal. Moving from "owning X confers status" to "your customization of X confers status, since everyone can own one now" is the one obvious trend. Heck, that's already most of fashion.
I see "Helicopter Money" (HM) theory as one possible solution.
"And we all had plenty of money, but there was nothing that money could buy". More money without producing more goods and services doesn't really achieve anything.
We also have rotting infrastructure that needs repair, but no means to fund it.
We certainly have the means to improve it, we just lack the will. The vast majority of state and local taxes these days goes to pension plan funding. Those money helicopters seems to hover over people the government likes - funny how that works.
It may take a combination of HM, taxing the rich, socialism, and public works to crack this puzzle.
That puzzle was cracked by capitalism every previous time, but this time is different because ... well, apparently, because you want free money.
timately somebody took those resources for free and used them to live off the labour of those who didn't.
How do you use unimproved land to live off the labor of others? No, really? It produces no income or other value unless you either work it or improve it.
There will always be jobs, at least until the Singularity. This is just the Nth automation transition since the Industrial Revolution begun. It's no more (or less!) scary than any of them.
The disaster you're predicting was predicted over and over throughout history, and it's just as wrong this time.
And yet Trump keeps telling his rubes that jobs are coming back. They are not coming back. Workers will be replaced by robots.
There are barely more manufacturing jobs in the US than there are farming jobs. Those aren't the jobs people care about - we're a service economy now. Automation threatens to displace service workers the way it already has manufacturing workers - but that's far enough out that neither Trump nor his supporters are complaining about it.
OTOH, service jobs (especially low-skilled) are being lost to lost to recent immigrants, and that's an immediate problem that a president can do something about. That's really the core of Trump's appeal, in fact. The very wealthy of course only want unlimited immigration, because lower wages helps that crowd. OTOH, unlimited immigration is not at all popular with people struggling to keep their low-skilled job as it is.
Unless you're a farmer (and that's about the hardest job around), what are you going to do with unimproved land?
Assuming you want not just land, but housing or a shop, with utilities and so on, then we're back to "where did those resources come from".
Earned is a funny word to use for those who withhold resources from those who have none in order to extract labor from them.
Where do you imagine those resources came from? Someone worked to create them.
It is a fundamental requirement of society that we each contribute as much to society as we consume, over our lifetimes. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. We measure that with money, but money itself is meaningless. Oh, we may be nice enough to carry a few people out of charity, but when that "few" goes beyond the legitimately disabled, the whole thing unravels.
and tax capital gains the same as any other income
Inflation-adjust the gains and few would argue your point there. There is some economic stability gained, I think, from having a "cliff"-style reduction in tax rate after 1 year, instead, as it encourages longer-term investment, but I doubt it's that big a win. Short-term capital gains are of course taxed at the same rate as income now.
It's totally worthwhile to give tax breaks to the rich, but only as an inducement to spending. Any other kind harms everyone, even them in the long term.
Many investments are just spending, one level removed.
if my math is right, 100 GB/month is just 38 kB/s sustained, or ~300 kb/s.
The fact that you felt the need to express the figure in kB instead of kb
You wot mate?
"and the even sillier fact that you contemplate literal 24/7 throughput for a *mobile* device whose usage by an ordinary device-addicted person would arguably max out at *8* hours a day of non-stop usage
Did you know some people have mobile data as their only realistic home internet connection? Cause it doesn't sound like you know that.
To repeat, 100 GB a month is a massive shitpile of data
See above. HD video is 3 GB/hour. AAA games are often over 20 GB these days. Netflix uses a massive shitpile of bandwidth. Their customers, individually, consume an ordinary amount.
I know this is Slashdot, but you could at least read the thread you're replying to.
You're the guy who empties the "give a penny, take a penny" tray into his pocket, aren't you?
That still seems OK to me if it's small in absolute terms. If you're stuck somewhere that mobile is your only worthwhile high speed internet, that's a small amount of HD TV watching, or a moderate amount of normal streaming and a AAA game download, or the like.
If the 24/7 usage rate seems low compared to the lowest-end wired ISP download rate anyone advertises in the country, that seems to me like it should be OK.
"Unlimited" comes with a caveat: common sense.
That's certainly true. "Unlimited" should always be understood to include "but don't be a dick".
However, if my math is right, 100 GB/month is just 38 kB/s sustained, or ~300 kb/s. That's a bit more than modem speeds, which is nice, but it somehow doesn't seem to be a dickish level of overuse in the modern world.
And that's what Regulatory Capture looks like when it grows up. Effective legal monopolies are the dream of every CEO, and we seem intent on making more of that happen under the guise of "protecting the little guy from corporations through additional regulations" (which may even be true for the first few years).
Well done, sir.
. The difference is that all of those jobs are fractions of a percent of what they were.
I wonder how many jobs that's true of (other than farmer, where it's clearly true). Oh, sure, as a percentage of the population it's smaller, but as an absolute number? Some of these were never more than "a few niche specialists". More people can read and write cuneiform today than when it was current, and that's a very small niche.
In any case, as long as the need for workers in specific jobs falls slowly over a generation or two, it's not a problem. There's always something new people want, but abrupt transitions are hard.
Can what be defeated by "a screwdriver and some electronics skills"?
The stuff we know from Snowden is pretty old now, but included firmware-level exploits for all common PCs, phones, routers, and firewalls of the time (e.g., IRATEMONK which lived in hard drive firmware to run arbitrary code at OS boot time). It included concealable (on a PC) taps for both video and audio, that emitted no signal by themselves, but were readable by hitting them with a low-power radar device from some distance away (e.g., RAGEMASTER and LOUDAUTO). We know the NSA would intercept shipments of PCs and routers at large scale and conceal these devices, and it never made the news before Snowden.
Now it's the era of phones. You really think there aren't modern projects, that don't require something the size of PC components for concealment? They had penny-sized modules in '08.
Spend some time reading through project summaries here. Really. You sound like the guys 3 years ago, arguing that the government couldn't be recording all phone calls in the US, when we knew they were.
I spent some time reading through the detailed program information disclosed by Snowden. All the nifty little devices that the NSA has "productized" and can hide in a PC to snoop on it, and their programs to saturate areas where a person of interest might buy a PC (by intercepting shipments from manufacturers), so that he'd buy one pre-tapped. Not enough tinfoil in the world.
And the speaker, which can be used as a microphone. And the other microphone, the one that looks like a capacitor.
I'd take that bet. The big studios love BluRay, as it's a revenue model they understand and fully control. They aren't exactly fast learners. I heard an MPAA executive shouted "ouch" in a meeting today because he had stubbed his toe over the weekend.