I just markup how much I need an employer to pay me by the amount of the taxes such that it's equivalent to me paying no taxes.
And the employer marks up the costs of the products we sell so that it's equivalent to him not paying me at all.
And the customers of those products simply insist that their employers pay them more to cover the cost of the products, so it's like they're getting those products for free.
Wow, this is awesome. Somehow nobody ever pays for anything in this system. Money doesn't exist! It's all magic! Yippee!
Indeed. Taxes are not actually about the money, since money is just an abstraction. However, any goods or services the government consumes for its own needs are goods and services taken from that year's total pool, and not enjoyed by we the people. That's the only sane way to look at it. It's not about the money, it's about what the money is spent on.
Building roads? Providing a court system, and basic social order? No sane person objects to such spending, as we all benefit. Sadly, that's somewhere around 10% of government spending. Mostly the government taxes groups in political disfavor (never, ever the powerful, by definition), and mails their money to groups in political favor.
Sadly, everyday consumers are not a powerful group, so they're the ones who, in practice, end up bearing true burden of the taxes, not the large corporations or large employers.
If steam ever goes under and you don't have your full library downloaded, you're fucked anyway ya dingus.
Well, yeah, but that true with every online service ever. Or for that matter, all the game CDs I've lost or damaged over the years. Hardly a knock against Steam (or GoG for that matter, which doesn't have DRM in the first place).
License to Private Server... but just for dead games?
Well, games with dead activation servers - not sure if it extends to server-centric games. It's good to know that if Steam ever goes under, the inevitable patches to remove all the Steam DRM will actually be legal (not that it would have mattered - I'm sure such patches are already floating around somewhere).
I use one spray in each nostril, am free for 12 hours, then utterly plugged for 12 hours. People differ. I still use it in one nostril when it's the only way I can sleep but I wish for something better.
The wind on Mars would not really be a big deal. The atmosphere is too thin to push things (heavier than microscopic dust particles) around. That is something the movie also didn't get right. The highest recorded wind speeds on Mars would feel like a very gentle breeze to a person (i.e. you wouldn't feel it at all in a spacesuit).
Sure, but you wouldn't want to do e.g. huge "sails" of mylar sheet, which would otherwise be a simple way to get very large very lightweight reflectors. Wouldn't take much for them to get carried away.
I'd argue that the film still qualifies as the first mainstream Science Fiction movie. They made a real effort to get the details right, to the point where (at least for the film version), it's reasonable suspension of disbelief, rather then the usual "fantasy movie with spaceships and explosions".
I like your idea about the heliostats, and that could have added more challenges, as he's now taking a big hit to his available electric power. It will be interesting to see what NASA comes up with to do this on purpose. I've been in a house that uses "light pipes" to collectors on the roof for daytime lighting, and that works quite well. Concentrating light from a suitable large collection area into the room sure seems like it would work. Of course you have to be careful to keep it stable in a windstorm, so a bunch of lightweight panels sticking up from the roof of a lightweight structure is asking for trouble, but with fiber optics you'd have more options.
Farming is never a sure thing, but at least you'd be free of insects.
Well, it's not any kind of insider trading, as he did everything publicly. He didn't lie to the press or anything like that. I'd be surprised if there is a law to cover this specific kind of thing.
I can only hope you're right. I'm not sure this kind of price manipulation is illegal - there'd have to be a law to cover something this indirect, which seems unlikely, unless he bragged about his intent in email or somesuch. But then, he might have.
No. He (Shkreli) is hiking prices AND shorting biotech.
And he made a fortune.
People don't get this: this 5x drug price hike thing was all theatre. He wasn't trying to make some trivial amount off the pill, he was trolling. And important politicians bit, making comments to the press that dropped biotech stocks by about 25% over fears of "political action". Fucker made a mint.
You'd think at least here on/. we'd be better at spotting trolls!
Well, eventually. Energy demand is very low now, with almost every economy in the world having issues. If that should ever change, however: watch out. Energy prices will go nuts.
We will eventually have 11 billion people consuming power at US levels - likely before the end of this century. Smart meters won't fix that. Solar is the only thing that scales (unless fusion finally stops being "just 20 years away"). Efficient PV panels and Tesla batteries are very high-tech solutions, and it's unclear that they could be available cheaply at that scale. Solar thermal, though, is quite straightforward.
This plant isn't good enough to be more than an experiment, and useful to hedge against a steep rise in fuel prices, but it's an incremental step. There seem to be many more incremental steps available for various approaches to solar thermal (I'm not the biggest fan of this exact design, but the power storage aspect is nice). Solar thermal just isn't a hyper-optimized mature field grasping for 1% improvements - there's lots of headroom here.
We're going to need a power generation solution that scales over 10x current world generation, and we're likely to need it in the lifetime of some/.ers. A solution with no exotic toolchain requirements, and no raw material requirements that won't scale, and that works for base load doesn't leave many options. (Obviously, solar isn't good for high latitudes, and gas generation isn't going away, but we're going to need something new for base load until fusion finally shows up).
Building PV panels that are efficient enough to be worthwhile requires a very long toolchain. A bunch of mirrors and a steam turbine don't. Thermal energy storage is a much lower tech idea than the Tesla battery pack. As the soar thermal field evolves, there will be a variety of high- and low-tech improvements and experiments, and the prototypes of new ideas are always going to be complicated and expensive, but that doesn't preclude an eventual evolved design that's quite straightforward.
California operated some plants that worked that way for a while: solar thermal with gas generator backup. Seemed to work OK. The problem is: these solar plants are more expensive to operate than gas generators. Gas is nearly free these days, but these solar thermal plants can still make sense to build as a hedge against changing fuel prices; however if you're relying on gas for base load that's less appealing.
If this plant live up to the hype, it's cheaper and stores power longer than previous efforts, which is a great step.
Crescent Dunesâ(TM) generation earns about $190 per megawatt-hour, including the value of federal subsidies
Which translates to $0.19/kWh. That's 46% higher than the U.S. national average of just under $0.13/kWh.
Very true. Solar thermal has the advantage of being low-tech and scalable, and will be key to bringing 11 billion people up to US levels of consumption, but right now it has 2 big problems: cost, and overnight power generation. This plant is an incremental improvement in both (if it lives up to the hype).
Natural gas is astonishingly cheap right now, and generation plants operate for a very long time compared to the volatility of fuel prices, so building some generation capacity around fuels that aren't the cheapest today isn't stupid. Solar is a great hedge for variable fuel prices, as the cost and availability is stable.
This is industrial power generation for the grid, not a toy for your roof. They are taking a step towards solving the problem of base load. Solar is great, but it's not steady. If you can store enough energy to make it through the night, solar becomes something really special.
The other important element of this is cost. I don't have a problem with natural gas power plants myself, but bring solar down below that price for base load, and why bother with anything else? For us non-greens, this is the interesting potential for solar. (Plus solar thermal scales to 11 billion people at US consumption levels, if only just.)
I hope this plant works out, and lives up to the hype.
m never going to buy beer or porkchops or bread online from Amazon
.
I bought bread online from Amazon today, but I'm in an area where Amazon Fresh is available. It's not a full selection of groceries (though they do have beer, and lots of produce), but there's a lot there, with same/next-day delivery, in a refrigerated truck, or by bicycle+trailer courier in downtown Seattle. It was really a "too good to be true" deal, and now they're charging $300 a year in some sort of double-secret-Prime in order to get that service. Guess they weren't making it work at the price.
Anyhow, never say never: the world is changing fast. A pork-chop-carrying drone (trailed by all the neighborhood dogs, no doubt) may be in your future.
any why would i want to pay $99 a year for shipping when i can simply drive to the store that day?
How much stuff do you buy in your life. Driving to the store and back is the least efficient way (transportation-wise) to get anything, compared to any sort of route where multiple packages get delivered.
$99 a year is like 0.6-0.7 gallons of gas a week. Doesn't take much to come out ahead. I'll still shop at B&M stores within a couple blocks of my place, but that's a different order of convenience than the Target 20 minutes away.
Non-capitalist countries have turned out some pretty good technology, also. If inventors are going to be rewarded for their inventions, by whatever means, they'll try to invent something. It's different, in that in non-capitalist countries the awards come from the government rather than the market, but I can see advantages to both approaches.
The technology needed for the industrial revolution wasn't new at the time. Some of the key ideas were centuries old, with existing products. The problem was: governments (church and secular) were the only customers. So you got very fancy and high tech clock towers and fountains and the like: products that made the powerful people happy (and had some minimal knock-on benefit to the people, sure). The idea of doing existing things cheaper, an idea strongly resisted by the guilds of the time, actual technological progress not just toys, needed capitalism.
Capitalism is a great way to generate wealth. It isn't all that great in many other aspects.
Capitalism is certainly the worst system imaginable other than everything else that's ever been tried. Economic growth that benefits the common man - technology - is measurably faster in capitalist countries. Year-by-year it's not much, maybe 2%, but that adds up enormously over a lifetime. Individual buyers are simply better decision makers about what's better for individual buyers than any central planning committee (even a fantasy one that's neither ideological nor corrupt).
Real men use a.650 nitro express Tyrannosaur rifle guaranteed to knock you over when you fire it and drop your $20k+ rifle every time. It has a shit range, but real men don't shoot the grizzly until it's close enough to be a fair fight, so that's OK. Any gun so small you don't seek medical care after firing it once is for girly men.
Classical EM theory predicted no such thing. It was measured as such, and incorporated in theory, without any real explanation from first principles as to why. And it wasn't obvious that electron spin polarization would work the same way.
If you start reasoning about elections as spinning bar magnets that precess along the axis of measurement, then think about measuring them at one angle and the change you'd get the same result when measured at another, you're lead to the wrong answer. Electron "spin" is a metaphor.
If you think of photons as particles, you also get a similar wrong answer (heck, it's hard to explain why polarization even happens to a particle). No intuitive mental model is going to explain the 3-polarizer case, or similar experiments where the polarization of light changes without any energy input.
Apples and oranges. Not all videos are created equal. Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu have full TV shows (entire series) and movies. Youtube has a bunch of user content I mostly don't give a crap about.
I spend enough time watching stupid user content on YouTube that I wouldn't mind paying a subscription, but not at $10/month! There's just less content there, and less quality. At $5/month, it would be appleaing.
Don't we have an intractable Chicken-and-Egg problem here?
The difficulty in understanding is mostly in how the experiment is described. This is the latest in a series of increasingly technical experiments exploring pretty odd corner cases in quantum theory. They're important because they close the last loopholes, the last excuses that anyone who really understands the field had in believing in any sort of classical underlying reality.
There's no time travel here. There's no FTL communication here. Either of those would actually invalidate the experiment. The point of this all is: you simply can't explain these results classically. And that's nothing new - there's a long list of such results.
Here's any easier experiment to understand. Take 2 polarized filters, and measure the amount of light that gets through as a function of the angle between them. With a classical model of polarization, you'd expect it to fall directly with the angle, but instead it falls of as cos^2 of the angle. Most of these Bell Inequality experiments are very similar in principle, they just use 2 entangled photons or electrons instead of one beam of light passing through two filters in series.
The part about "hidden variables" vs "spooky action at a distance" is only relevant if you're trying to explain the result classically. If you give up notions of a classical underpinning to physics, if you accept that e.g. the spin polarization of an electron simply isn't about the axis of a spinning ball (a ball with a bar magnet inside), then there's nothing surprising here. Sure, it's weird, but it's weird in the exact same mathematical way as the beam of light passing through 2 polarizing filters.
This all just shows that the idea of an electron or photon as any sort of particle, like a dust mote only smaller, is simply a flawed metaphor that you can't reason from. But since there was no reason to expect them to be that way, it's not even that weird.
(What's really weird, though, is that of you take 2 polarizing filters at right angles, such that no light gets through, then stick a third between them at a 45 degree angle, then it's as bright as one filter alone.)
he idea is that the "scientific method" is hardly new, and can't account for the rapid development of modern technology over the past few centuries.
Rapid technological improvement was a direct result of the rise of capitalism. Once people could make vast sums of money by making things more efficiently, the started spending vast sums of money on doing just that. "Technology" isn't iPhones, it's any improvement in the efficiency of producing and delivering goods and services.
But you were talking about scientific progress, which is something different.
Technological progress, while necessary for scientific progress, is nowhere near sufficient (and vice versa!). Open publication certainly helps as well, but that started long before Newton. It's not like Aristotle was only published in secret. I think it's more likely that open publication is simply correlated strongly with "surviving published works documenting scientific progress".
I think the existence and size of a subculture devoted to openly questioning received wisdom (together with the fundamental idea of empiricism) is the biggest force that drives scientific progress. The fact that you're not afraid to publish openly, asserting that the current belief is wrong, is the key!
I like the actual SF elements - they spent real effort on imagining minor changes and appropriate set dressing. I always liked that his job sucked so much he had to wear two neckties - predictive miss, perhaps, but a nice touch. I also liked their comment on the rise of biometrics, with the headline "thumb bandits strike again". Lots of cool details that they could have just ignored, and it really made the point by contrast that people will still be the same jerks as always.
Slashdot Mirror
I just markup how much I need an employer to pay me by the amount of the taxes such that it's equivalent to me paying no taxes.
And the employer marks up the costs of the products we sell so that it's equivalent to him not paying me at all.
And the customers of those products simply insist that their employers pay them more to cover the cost of the products, so it's like they're getting those products for free.
Wow, this is awesome. Somehow nobody ever pays for anything in this system. Money doesn't exist! It's all magic! Yippee!
Indeed. Taxes are not actually about the money, since money is just an abstraction. However, any goods or services the government consumes for its own needs are goods and services taken from that year's total pool, and not enjoyed by we the people. That's the only sane way to look at it. It's not about the money, it's about what the money is spent on.
Building roads? Providing a court system, and basic social order? No sane person objects to such spending, as we all benefit. Sadly, that's somewhere around 10% of government spending. Mostly the government taxes groups in political disfavor (never, ever the powerful, by definition), and mails their money to groups in political favor.
Sadly, everyday consumers are not a powerful group, so they're the ones who, in practice, end up bearing true burden of the taxes, not the large corporations or large employers.
If steam ever goes under and you don't have your full library downloaded, you're fucked anyway ya dingus.
Well, yeah, but that true with every online service ever. Or for that matter, all the game CDs I've lost or damaged over the years. Hardly a knock against Steam (or GoG for that matter, which doesn't have DRM in the first place).
License to Private Server... but just for dead games?
Well, games with dead activation servers - not sure if it extends to server-centric games. It's good to know that if Steam ever goes under, the inevitable patches to remove all the Steam DRM will actually be legal (not that it would have mattered - I'm sure such patches are already floating around somewhere).
I use one spray in each nostril, am free for 12 hours, then utterly plugged for 12 hours. People differ. I still use it in one nostril when it's the only way I can sleep but I wish for something better.
The wind on Mars would not really be a big deal. The atmosphere is too thin to push things (heavier than microscopic dust particles) around. That is something the movie also didn't get right. The highest recorded wind speeds on Mars would feel like a very gentle breeze to a person (i.e. you wouldn't feel it at all in a spacesuit).
Sure, but you wouldn't want to do e.g. huge "sails" of mylar sheet, which would otherwise be a simple way to get very large very lightweight reflectors. Wouldn't take much for them to get carried away.
I'd argue that the film still qualifies as the first mainstream Science Fiction movie. They made a real effort to get the details right, to the point where (at least for the film version), it's reasonable suspension of disbelief, rather then the usual "fantasy movie with spaceships and explosions".
I like your idea about the heliostats, and that could have added more challenges, as he's now taking a big hit to his available electric power. It will be interesting to see what NASA comes up with to do this on purpose. I've been in a house that uses "light pipes" to collectors on the roof for daytime lighting, and that works quite well. Concentrating light from a suitable large collection area into the room sure seems like it would work. Of course you have to be careful to keep it stable in a windstorm, so a bunch of lightweight panels sticking up from the roof of a lightweight structure is asking for trouble, but with fiber optics you'd have more options.
Farming is never a sure thing, but at least you'd be free of insects.
Well, it's not any kind of insider trading, as he did everything publicly. He didn't lie to the press or anything like that. I'd be surprised if there is a law to cover this specific kind of thing.
I can only hope you're right. I'm not sure this kind of price manipulation is illegal - there'd have to be a law to cover something this indirect, which seems unlikely, unless he bragged about his intent in email or somesuch. But then, he might have.
No. He (Shkreli) is hiking prices AND shorting biotech.
And he made a fortune.
People don't get this: this 5x drug price hike thing was all theatre. He wasn't trying to make some trivial amount off the pill, he was trolling. And important politicians bit, making comments to the press that dropped biotech stocks by about 25% over fears of "political action". Fucker made a mint.
You'd think at least here on /. we'd be better at spotting trolls!
Well, eventually. Energy demand is very low now, with almost every economy in the world having issues. If that should ever change, however: watch out. Energy prices will go nuts.
We will eventually have 11 billion people consuming power at US levels - likely before the end of this century. Smart meters won't fix that. Solar is the only thing that scales (unless fusion finally stops being "just 20 years away"). Efficient PV panels and Tesla batteries are very high-tech solutions, and it's unclear that they could be available cheaply at that scale. Solar thermal, though, is quite straightforward.
This plant isn't good enough to be more than an experiment, and useful to hedge against a steep rise in fuel prices, but it's an incremental step. There seem to be many more incremental steps available for various approaches to solar thermal (I'm not the biggest fan of this exact design, but the power storage aspect is nice). Solar thermal just isn't a hyper-optimized mature field grasping for 1% improvements - there's lots of headroom here.
We're going to need a power generation solution that scales over 10x current world generation, and we're likely to need it in the lifetime of some /.ers. A solution with no exotic toolchain requirements, and no raw material requirements that won't scale, and that works for base load doesn't leave many options. (Obviously, solar isn't good for high latitudes, and gas generation isn't going away, but we're going to need something new for base load until fusion finally shows up).
Building PV panels that are efficient enough to be worthwhile requires a very long toolchain. A bunch of mirrors and a steam turbine don't. Thermal energy storage is a much lower tech idea than the Tesla battery pack. As the soar thermal field evolves, there will be a variety of high- and low-tech improvements and experiments, and the prototypes of new ideas are always going to be complicated and expensive, but that doesn't preclude an eventual evolved design that's quite straightforward.
California operated some plants that worked that way for a while: solar thermal with gas generator backup. Seemed to work OK. The problem is: these solar plants are more expensive to operate than gas generators. Gas is nearly free these days, but these solar thermal plants can still make sense to build as a hedge against changing fuel prices; however if you're relying on gas for base load that's less appealing.
If this plant live up to the hype, it's cheaper and stores power longer than previous efforts, which is a great step.
Crescent Dunesâ(TM) generation earns about $190 per megawatt-hour, including the value of federal subsidies
Which translates to $0.19/kWh. That's 46% higher than the U.S. national average of just under $0.13/kWh.
Very true. Solar thermal has the advantage of being low-tech and scalable, and will be key to bringing 11 billion people up to US levels of consumption, but right now it has 2 big problems: cost, and overnight power generation. This plant is an incremental improvement in both (if it lives up to the hype).
Natural gas is astonishingly cheap right now, and generation plants operate for a very long time compared to the volatility of fuel prices, so building some generation capacity around fuels that aren't the cheapest today isn't stupid. Solar is a great hedge for variable fuel prices, as the cost and availability is stable.
This is industrial power generation for the grid, not a toy for your roof. They are taking a step towards solving the problem of base load. Solar is great, but it's not steady. If you can store enough energy to make it through the night, solar becomes something really special.
The other important element of this is cost. I don't have a problem with natural gas power plants myself, but bring solar down below that price for base load, and why bother with anything else? For us non-greens, this is the interesting potential for solar. (Plus solar thermal scales to 11 billion people at US consumption levels, if only just.)
I hope this plant works out, and lives up to the hype.
m never going to buy beer or porkchops or bread online from Amazon
.
I bought bread online from Amazon today, but I'm in an area where Amazon Fresh is available. It's not a full selection of groceries (though they do have beer, and lots of produce), but there's a lot there, with same/next-day delivery, in a refrigerated truck, or by bicycle+trailer courier in downtown Seattle. It was really a "too good to be true" deal, and now they're charging $300 a year in some sort of double-secret-Prime in order to get that service. Guess they weren't making it work at the price.
Anyhow, never say never: the world is changing fast. A pork-chop-carrying drone (trailed by all the neighborhood dogs, no doubt) may be in your future.
any why would i want to pay $99 a year for shipping when i can simply drive to the store that day?
How much stuff do you buy in your life. Driving to the store and back is the least efficient way (transportation-wise) to get anything, compared to any sort of route where multiple packages get delivered.
$99 a year is like 0.6-0.7 gallons of gas a week. Doesn't take much to come out ahead. I'll still shop at B&M stores within a couple blocks of my place, but that's a different order of convenience than the Target 20 minutes away.
Non-capitalist countries have turned out some pretty good technology, also. If inventors are going to be rewarded for their inventions, by whatever means, they'll try to invent something. It's different, in that in non-capitalist countries the awards come from the government rather than the market, but I can see advantages to both approaches.
The technology needed for the industrial revolution wasn't new at the time. Some of the key ideas were centuries old, with existing products. The problem was: governments (church and secular) were the only customers. So you got very fancy and high tech clock towers and fountains and the like: products that made the powerful people happy (and had some minimal knock-on benefit to the people, sure). The idea of doing existing things cheaper, an idea strongly resisted by the guilds of the time, actual technological progress not just toys, needed capitalism.
Capitalism is a great way to generate wealth. It isn't all that great in many other aspects.
Capitalism is certainly the worst system imaginable other than everything else that's ever been tried. Economic growth that benefits the common man - technology - is measurably faster in capitalist countries. Year-by-year it's not much, maybe 2%, but that adds up enormously over a lifetime. Individual buyers are simply better decision makers about what's better for individual buyers than any central planning committee (even a fantasy one that's neither ideological nor corrupt).
Real men use a .650 nitro express Tyrannosaur rifle guaranteed to knock you over when you fire it and drop your $20k+ rifle every time. It has a shit range, but real men don't shoot the grizzly until it's close enough to be a fair fight, so that's OK. Any gun so small you don't seek medical care after firing it once is for girly men.
Diesel doesn't explode, and the tanks are pretty strong. Pay attention to real risks in life, not far-fetched fantasies.
Classical EM theory predicted no such thing. It was measured as such, and incorporated in theory, without any real explanation from first principles as to why. And it wasn't obvious that electron spin polarization would work the same way.
If you start reasoning about elections as spinning bar magnets that precess along the axis of measurement, then think about measuring them at one angle and the change you'd get the same result when measured at another, you're lead to the wrong answer. Electron "spin" is a metaphor.
If you think of photons as particles, you also get a similar wrong answer (heck, it's hard to explain why polarization even happens to a particle). No intuitive mental model is going to explain the 3-polarizer case, or similar experiments where the polarization of light changes without any energy input.
Apples and oranges. Not all videos are created equal. Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu have full TV shows (entire series) and movies. Youtube has a bunch of user content I mostly don't give a crap about.
I spend enough time watching stupid user content on YouTube that I wouldn't mind paying a subscription, but not at $10/month! There's just less content there, and less quality. At $5/month, it would be appleaing.
Don't we have an intractable Chicken-and-Egg problem here?
The difficulty in understanding is mostly in how the experiment is described. This is the latest in a series of increasingly technical experiments exploring pretty odd corner cases in quantum theory. They're important because they close the last loopholes, the last excuses that anyone who really understands the field had in believing in any sort of classical underlying reality.
There's no time travel here. There's no FTL communication here. Either of those would actually invalidate the experiment. The point of this all is: you simply can't explain these results classically. And that's nothing new - there's a long list of such results.
Here's any easier experiment to understand. Take 2 polarized filters, and measure the amount of light that gets through as a function of the angle between them. With a classical model of polarization, you'd expect it to fall directly with the angle, but instead it falls of as cos^2 of the angle. Most of these Bell Inequality experiments are very similar in principle, they just use 2 entangled photons or electrons instead of one beam of light passing through two filters in series.
The part about "hidden variables" vs "spooky action at a distance" is only relevant if you're trying to explain the result classically. If you give up notions of a classical underpinning to physics, if you accept that e.g. the spin polarization of an electron simply isn't about the axis of a spinning ball (a ball with a bar magnet inside), then there's nothing surprising here. Sure, it's weird, but it's weird in the exact same mathematical way as the beam of light passing through 2 polarizing filters.
This all just shows that the idea of an electron or photon as any sort of particle, like a dust mote only smaller, is simply a flawed metaphor that you can't reason from. But since there was no reason to expect them to be that way, it's not even that weird.
(What's really weird, though, is that of you take 2 polarizing filters at right angles, such that no light gets through, then stick a third between them at a 45 degree angle, then it's as bright as one filter alone.)
he idea is that the "scientific method" is hardly new, and can't account for the rapid development of modern technology over the past few centuries.
Rapid technological improvement was a direct result of the rise of capitalism. Once people could make vast sums of money by making things more efficiently, the started spending vast sums of money on doing just that. "Technology" isn't iPhones, it's any improvement in the efficiency of producing and delivering goods and services.
But you were talking about scientific progress, which is something different.
Technological progress, while necessary for scientific progress, is nowhere near sufficient (and vice versa!). Open publication certainly helps as well, but that started long before Newton. It's not like Aristotle was only published in secret. I think it's more likely that open publication is simply correlated strongly with "surviving published works documenting scientific progress".
I think the existence and size of a subculture devoted to openly questioning received wisdom (together with the fundamental idea of empiricism) is the biggest force that drives scientific progress. The fact that you're not afraid to publish openly, asserting that the current belief is wrong, is the key!
I like the actual SF elements - they spent real effort on imagining minor changes and appropriate set dressing. I always liked that his job sucked so much he had to wear two neckties - predictive miss, perhaps, but a nice touch. I also liked their comment on the rise of biometrics, with the headline "thumb bandits strike again". Lots of cool details that they could have just ignored, and it really made the point by contrast that people will still be the same jerks as always.