But engineers dont try to build designs that almost certainly wont work. Scientists do experiments they expect to fail routinely - to confirm that they fail and if they dont start figuring out why. Engineering applies (usually very simplified) scientiffic theories while assuming those theories are correct. Science assumes tge opposite.
That does depend on how you define "overthrow". But I'm sure you feel all warm and fuzzy now because you think its less than I do and yet fail to realize that everything you were taught America stands for, everything you think makes you special was revealed as a complete farce the day it was more than 0.
You are discussing practical influence. I am discussing philosophy. Which is actually rather more apropos since the topic pf the threat is American exceptionalism versus non-interventionism.
No, there is no such thing as a minor country. Every country is equally important because they all consist of the same thing: people - who all have equal claim to basic rights and liberties.
Yes, you used the phrase "less important" - I stand by the assertion that there is no such thing. Every country is filled with people who have no lesser claim to rights than you do.
And nothing you won't let them do to you or your government should you allow your government to do them. No matter how much you may hate the specific people involved. I despise the Taliban - but the US had no right to go and kill them. Not unless you are accepting as a matter of course that they had a right to come and kill congressmen. I'm sure you would say they didn't. So then the American government had no right to kill them either. The excuse that they *would* kill Americans otherwise holds no water. There are plenty of ways to prevent that without killing them.
Not to mention that if you always pursued those - there would be far fewer people *wanting* to kill Americans. I'm philosophical about the fact that the government I get to vote for is little more than puppets on the strings of an American government I don't get to vote for (and to a lesser extent the Chinese government). Many people are a lot less philosphical about that than me. Many people think that's a violation worth killing for. I don't agree with them - but I don't pretend that they don't exist and I sure don't pretend that their true motivation is anything *other* than that.
The only real way to protect yourselves is to leave them alone.
Maybe there is something to be said for being where you are invited (like Japan) - though I wouldn't blame you if you said "We go nowhere at all - even where we are begged to go". But going anywhere uninvited is a recipe for retribution - and those who lack the resources to face you in open war (i.e. pretty much everybody) will use guerilla tactics instead. Only when anybody who isn't white and American uses those they are called terrorists. I'm still unclear why when white Americans do it they are "patriots" or "militias" instead. How those idiots in Oregon right now differs from any other terrorists is utterly beyond me. If anything their crime is significantly worse - they are not only terrorists - they are committing high treason as well.
>(parenthetically, it is unclear why any company would purposely destroy its own profit)
For exactly the reason Bell Labs existed - so a monopoly could hide how *much* of a monopoly it was and avoid antitrust laws.
> Bell saw that only the labs could develop the technology their system needed. Most of what Bell Labs developed were useless to AT&T and they did some of the most important research in a field Bell was specifically prohibited from entering - they could only do that because there was no intention to profit from that research.
>Bell Labs was not "publicly funded" I didn't say it was - I said that the lack of a profit motive on the research allowed the researchers to operate the same way publicly funded researchers do. Any researchers that have to consider a profit motive are no longer scientists by definition.
>The transistor is a good example No, It is not. It's the exact opposite of basic research. It was intended to build something with a practical purpose - that's decidedly NOT research, that's engineering by definition. Research seeks knowledge, it presumes any knowledge is useful - and there is no such thing as "failure". A failed experiment is just as valuable as a successful one because either way you gained knowledge. You proved or disproved an idea. Engineering only cares about successes. Nobody is interested in a design that cannot work - but an experiment that cannot work has value. It's not monetary or practical value however, the value is the knowledge itself - not something you can profit from, you already have all the value RESEARCH can ever have the moment it is done.
> Harvard was forced to put a Chinese Wall between its research and teaching Interesting suggestion - I would counter that I see no such problem but then I never saw teaching as a function of universities at all. To me a university is a research organisation, it exists purely for the production of knowledge for it's own sake. Teaching is a side activity it engages in purely for the purpose of letting the current generation of researchers pass their knowledge on to the next generation and ensuring there will be a next generation. Frankly any field that isn't purely research focussed should never have existed at university level at all. Arts and science should have been the only faculties a university ever had. The rest belong in trade schools.
>That's what patents make possible. No. That's the opposite of what patents do. At least in the short term. However, it is irrelevant since anything you can patent is, by definition, not research but engineering. Research is about discovery, engineering is about building. Discoveries cannot be patented.
Make no mistake, I am not dissing engineering. Engineering is a noble profession and I'm proud to be second generation engineer. But it's not science, it's not research and it is incredibly intellectually lazy to conflate the two as if they have something in common. Computer science (where Bell Lab's greatest breakthroughs happened) is a bit blurry - some of it is research most of it is engineering, the best things to come out of Bell (like Unix) were the ones more on the research side.
>I think this just becomes some kind of statist class warfare Not at all - private research is tainted by the very concept that *anything* except the knowledge mattered at all - it forever leaves any private research less trustworthy than public research. But that doesn't imply either class or state based loyalties. There are many ways to fund things that involve neither profit motives NOR governments. They haven't been explored much when it comes to research but some examples do exist and I'm sure there could be others that will likely be far better than either of those alternatives (if only because governments also have ulterior motives and sometimes impose those on scientists which again taints the results). Science is about knowledge and the most trustworthy science is the science that considered nothing *bu
I got news for you - what you say no other country has done America has not done either. You have conquered the world and taken all the perks, you just pretend you havent to deny the responsibility. Nobody dares elect a leader unfriendly to American corporations lest you abandon all the principals you just claimed to hold and fund a coup to replace that leader with a puppet military dictator like youve done dozens of times since world war 2
I didnt suggest you should be able to point out KZN... just the country. In every other country you learn the location of every other country in primary school. Even now 25 odd years later i could find ethiopia or denmark. You name it. Because other countries actually think its critical to raise children to know how big the world is and not think their nation is the centre off it. Its an attitude difference creating a different type of education. More importantly I have no responsibility to know that. Who I vote for will only ever affect my fellow voting countrymen and affect them a tiny fraction as much as who you vote for. You have a responsibilty to know about our lives because you end up voting for our future as well. Your choice in a few months will have more influence on my families fortunes for the next 4 years than all the ballots of my entire life combined. You have a responsibility because of that. You can deny that responsibility but it wont go away. Oh and I could point out at least 30 US states and name their capitals. Way more than I challenged you on. Final note: there is no auch thing as a "minor" country.
America sneezes and the world catches pneumonia. That is the great injustice of national superpowers. 350 million people get to vote on the destiny of 7 billion. That makes being a US voter a terrible responsibility. Too bad those who carry it are afflicted by such a self centered culture that even as they decide our fate most can't find us on a map. And that is why America isnt safe. If you want to be safe stop fucking with tge rest of the world.
My first wife was Brazilian so I got to spend a lot of time in the country and can attest that this is just as accurate a description he left out (especially the midsize-cities, I spent a lot of time in Suzano and Fortaleza). It's a fantastic country by every measure. And I would add to what you said:
1) FAR Better healthcare than the US (I speak as somebody who has gotten ill on occasion in both countries) - nowhere else I've been in the world did a doctor tried a common flue with such care. Instead of the usual 2 weeks - Brazil's care had me back on my feet in 3 days. The focus on preventative care is amazing and the focus on getting people healthy and back to work as soon as possible is brilliant. And even as a foreign tourist (this was before the marriage) it didn't cost me anything.
2) Free public university (with strict entrance exams so they get the best of the best and ensure those people are educated even if they were poor), and private universities for everybody else (a good compromise I think - not as great as Denmark but better than USA). And cleverly the private universities are all night-schools so it's normal to have a job while you study and this means more people can afford to do so.
3) Motel's... American's have no idea what they are missing when they've never gotten to take their SO's for a night in a motel where you can order vibrators and sexy-cosplay's from roomservice...;) Of course America also has things *called* motels, but they are nothing alike.
We don't even know that it is causing microcephaly now. There is absolutely no causal evidence linking the condition to the virus. What we have is a virus outbreak and a sudden, surprisingly high, incidence of a rare condition. That's correlation, not causation.
Now since we have no actual explanation for the high incidence, the Brazilian government felt it best to advise people to avoid getting pregnant until after mosquito season but that's a purely speculative preventative measure - they were very honest about there being no actual medical proof that the virus causes the condition. In fact, we don't even have evidence that it can cross the placenta (only a small number of diseases can).
The disease is fairly harmless to children and adults so it wasn't given much priority before. Now if, indeed, it is a risk for pregnancy then further testing will bear that out. There are many potential causes of birth defects - and clusters like this could *even* be entirely coincidental. We don't like to think that way but not all clusters of rare events share an unusual cause - random events sometimes form clusters of distribution - if they didn't they wouldn't be random. The odds of the lottery numbers next saturday being 1 1 1 1 1 1 is exactly the same as any other combination of numbers - but I bet if it happened there would be no jackpot winner because we all instinctively think that clusters like that should be unlikely.
>"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill
Some would say that a definition which does not cover "A person who happily starved over a million children" isn't a very good definition. But Churchill wouldn't agree as that would mean he would have to include himself.
>Bell Labs, a privately run lab to soak up profits from a government mandated monopoly. Not sure that makes a case for private for profit management. More like publicly funded research utopia.
Not to mention the core diference is that Bell Labs, being created as a profit sponge, was not a profit seeking enterprise. They may have been owned by one, but because they were specifically *expected* to not make profit they didn't operate like one - and instead was allowed to operate like academia and deliver knowledge instead (some of which, at least, would later be profitable to Bell of course).
The GP correctly pointed out that basic research is a very bad fit for a profit-motive, the only thing Bell Labs prove is that "academia" and charity are not the only ways one could conceivably fund a non-profit research lab. Nobody argued that, that was the case. That said - government-funded academia is definitely simpler to accomplish - which is why there are millions of government funded research labs around the world (including major multinational ones like CERN) while examples like Bell Labs are few and far between. Where private enterprise have tried to dabble in the "free reign for researchers lab" model in the past, hoping to cash in on ideas, there are far more dismal failures than successes. Xerox PARC was such an attempt - and while they produced world-class research and innocations - Xerox utterly failed to see it's value or capitalize on it (and basically gave the results to Steve Jobs for free). Ultimately that led to the end of PARC.
Bell Labs didn't survive much past the end of the AT&T monopoly either. It genuinely seems that research labs run by profit-seeking enterprises generally do not work well, and can only succeed when very specific conditions are in place (that are not organically arrived at by market forces).
I would add to the GP's reasons for this that science requires peer review, which works best when the results are shared as widely as possible. Secret-sauce science is not really science at all - and that too is fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive. Profit demands exclusivity but science demands reproducability - which are flat-out contradictory aims. This means that even when, practically, the process can be made to work - the results are tainted as science. Just look at the many resent scandals due to unreproducible drug tests. Evidence based medicine becomes a lot less trustworthy when we water down the scientific standards for what "evidence based" means (though still a lot better than pseudo-science like homeopathy and anti-vaxxers).
Interestingly the Unix philosophy largely abandoned that idea much earlier - back in 1969 already. The unix philosophy says:
First make it work Then make it work right Then make it work fast
Of course it's a trade-off but even back in 1969 it was obvious that memory-squeezing has significant downsides in terms of design and when it's not required it shouldn't be done. Now of course when it is required, it's a useful skill - but that has been a niche area for a long time. Interestingly - the original Unix tools still did a lot of memory squeezing, but that was because of the low memory of the machines it was written on which meant that tools were forced to use paging-buffers and such as it was simply not possible to write reliable code if you loaded data straight to memory by default so it had to be a case of read-process-free-read. When GNU started in 1983 ram had already massively increased - so the GNU tools loaded "all into memory" by default. That remains how GNU tools do things, because even if you run out of memory - swap is cheap in that environment and not paging makes your code simpler - which makes it more reliable and easier to maintain (and faster too). Swap is an interesting version of that trade-off, it achieves exactly what the old unix paging code did - but it does it on the kernel level which means the mechanisms for dealing with "too much data to read at once" is now handled centrally by one piece of software and bugs can be fixed in one place - rather than complexity being added to every tool individually.
Even then - there will always be cases where paging data remains the best approach. Video players for example readily read files which may well be much larger than the memory in the box, swapping them out would be a massive performance loss in an application where that would destroy usability - so video players often use their own paging-buffer code.
Oh you're right - they are very adamant about that, which is exactly why I refuse to go along with it. The sceptic movement cannot afford to be associated with these people who stand for exactly the opposite of what the sceptic movement does.
Getting them to admit it's really a political motivation for their opposition is, perhaps, a positive step (I've had that a few times) but unfortunately that it still an appeal-to-consequences fallacy, the truth of a theory is not dependent on whether you like what we have to do about it.
Then *why* is America's infrastructure falling apart ?
Oh - that's right - because construction companies would much rather donate to the guy who promises to clear zoning rights for a new strip-mall because building a new private development is *much* more lucrative than maintaining or building infrastructure.
They are not skeptics. Skeptic has a specific definition - and they are literally the opposite of skeptics. Skeptics are people who believe only that which has evidence, they embrace science and reject pseudo-science, religion and other ideologies not based on evidence.
Skeptics accept climate science as one of the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in the world today (we have more evidence for this theory than we have for the link between tobacco and lung cancer and very nearly more than we have for evolution - and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence against it).
People who refuse to believe something *despite* all the evidence are not skeptics, by definition they are not. The proper term is "deniers" whether what they are denying is evolution, climate change or the holocaust - they are all the same movement intellectually.
It's a classic denier pattern of course, which is either a deliberately attempt at deception or a massive failure at understanding even the most basic premise of science. Science makes a very specific kind of prediction: if X then Y.
Then, when we take steps to prevent X the result becomes: !X therefore !Y - and deniers declare that this somehow DISPROVES the original prediction (when, in fact, it confirms it).
> and pointless infra projects That simply isn't true, if anything the exact opposite is true. America's buildings, bridges and other critical infrastructure is crumbling and falling apart. You're risking millions of lives every day with unmaintained infrastructure. If anything - you can't manage even the most basic infra projects required to prevent disasters !
Infrastructure projects are not sexy, they aren't politically appealing - and they don't attract donor money. What corporation is going to give you campaign finance because you "promised to patch the crumbling concrete of a bridge in your town" ?
Whatever the reason may be, despite the fact that infrastructure projects would not only have short-term employment benefits but the much more important benefit of actually keeping the stuff your entire economy depends on to function working past the end of the decade - they aren't being done.
I haven't read the book - so I can't say how accurate the rest of your description of it is, nor how much modern America really reflects that - but this claim was simply outright provably and factually incorrect.
We had a case like that in the 1980s. My dad was tge investigating officer. That bullet killed a 2 year old in her crib. The shooter got 20 years for aggravated manslaughter.
Granted we have a different legal system. Under the law here all homocide requires an intent to kill. Manslaughter is defined as causing a death where a reasonable person would not. Basically its the criminal version of wrongfull death. The judge ruled (correctly) that a reasonable person would forsee that firing a gun into the air in an urban environment is reckless and could potentially kill somebodu and thus refrain from doing so.
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But engineers dont try to build designs that almost certainly wont work. Scientists do experiments they expect to fail routinely - to confirm that they fail and if they dont start figuring out why.
Engineering applies (usually very simplified) scientiffic theories while assuming those theories are correct. Science assumes tge opposite.
That does depend on how you define "overthrow". But I'm sure you feel all warm and fuzzy now because you think its less than I do and yet fail to realize that everything you were taught America stands for, everything you think makes you special was revealed as a complete farce the day it was more than 0.
You are discussing practical influence. I am discussing philosophy. Which is actually rather more apropos since the topic pf the threat is American exceptionalism versus non-interventionism.
No, there is no such thing as a minor country. Every country is equally important because they all consist of the same thing: people - who all have equal claim to basic rights and liberties.
Just of the top of my head:
Nicaraqua, Panama, Brazil.
There really are dozens, but you can google the rest.
Yes, you used the phrase "less important" - I stand by the assertion that there is no such thing.
Every country is filled with people who have no lesser claim to rights than you do.
And nothing you won't let them do to you or your government should you allow your government to do them. No matter how much you may hate the specific people involved. I despise the Taliban - but the US had no right to go and kill them. Not unless you are accepting as a matter of course that they had a right to come and kill congressmen. I'm sure you would say they didn't. So then the American government had no right to kill them either. The excuse that they *would* kill Americans otherwise holds no water.
There are plenty of ways to prevent that without killing them.
Not to mention that if you always pursued those - there would be far fewer people *wanting* to kill Americans. I'm philosophical about the fact that the government I get to vote for is little more than puppets on the strings of an American government I don't get to vote for (and to a lesser extent the Chinese government). Many people are a lot less philosphical about that than me. Many people think that's a violation worth killing for.
I don't agree with them - but I don't pretend that they don't exist and I sure don't pretend that their true motivation is anything *other* than that.
The only real way to protect yourselves is to leave them alone.
Maybe there is something to be said for being where you are invited (like Japan) - though I wouldn't blame you if you said "We go nowhere at all - even where we are begged to go". But going anywhere uninvited is a recipe for retribution - and those who lack the resources to face you in open war (i.e. pretty much everybody) will use guerilla tactics instead. Only when anybody who isn't white and American uses those they are called terrorists. I'm still unclear why when white Americans do it they are "patriots" or "militias" instead. How those idiots in Oregon right now differs from any other terrorists is utterly beyond me. If anything their crime is significantly worse - they are not only terrorists - they are committing high treason as well.
>(parenthetically, it is unclear why any company would purposely destroy its own profit)
For exactly the reason Bell Labs existed - so a monopoly could hide how *much* of a monopoly it was and avoid antitrust laws.
> Bell saw that only the labs could develop the technology their system needed.
Most of what Bell Labs developed were useless to AT&T and they did some of the most important research in a field Bell was specifically prohibited from entering - they could only do that because there was no intention to profit from that research.
>Bell Labs was not "publicly funded"
I didn't say it was - I said that the lack of a profit motive on the research allowed the researchers to operate the same way publicly funded researchers do. Any researchers that have to consider a profit motive are no longer scientists by definition.
>The transistor is a good example
No, It is not. It's the exact opposite of basic research. It was intended to build something with a practical purpose - that's decidedly NOT research, that's engineering by definition. Research seeks knowledge, it presumes any knowledge is useful - and there is no such thing as "failure". A failed experiment is just as valuable as a successful one because either way you gained knowledge. You proved or disproved an idea. Engineering only cares about successes. Nobody is interested in a design that cannot work - but an experiment that cannot work has value.
It's not monetary or practical value however, the value is the knowledge itself - not something you can profit from, you already have all the value RESEARCH can ever have the moment it is done.
> Harvard was forced to put a Chinese Wall between its research and teaching
Interesting suggestion - I would counter that I see no such problem but then I never saw teaching as a function of universities at all. To me a university is a research organisation, it exists purely for the production of knowledge for it's own sake. Teaching is a side activity it engages in purely for the purpose of letting the current generation of researchers pass their knowledge on to the next generation and ensuring there will be a next generation. Frankly any field that isn't purely research focussed should never have existed at university level at all. Arts and science should have been the only faculties a university ever had. The rest belong in trade schools.
>That's what patents make possible.
No. That's the opposite of what patents do. At least in the short term. However, it is irrelevant since anything you can patent is, by definition, not research but engineering. Research is about discovery, engineering is about building. Discoveries cannot be patented.
Make no mistake, I am not dissing engineering. Engineering is a noble profession and I'm proud to be second generation engineer. But it's not science, it's not research and it is incredibly intellectually lazy to conflate the two as if they have something in common. Computer science (where Bell Lab's greatest breakthroughs happened) is a bit blurry - some of it is research most of it is engineering, the best things to come out of Bell (like Unix) were the ones more on the research side.
>I think this just becomes some kind of statist class warfare
Not at all - private research is tainted by the very concept that *anything* except the knowledge mattered at all - it forever leaves any private research less trustworthy than public research. But that doesn't imply either class or state based loyalties. There are many ways to fund things that involve neither profit motives NOR governments. They haven't been explored much when it comes to research but some examples do exist and I'm sure there could be others that will likely be far better than either of those alternatives (if only because governments also have ulterior motives and sometimes impose those on scientists which again taints the results).
Science is about knowledge and the most trustworthy science is the science that considered nothing *bu
Compared to what is needed it is.
I got news for you - what you say no other country has done America has not done either. You have conquered the world and taken all the perks, you just pretend you havent to deny the responsibility. Nobody dares elect a leader unfriendly to American corporations lest you abandon all the principals you just claimed to hold and fund a coup to replace that leader with a puppet military dictator like youve done dozens of times since world war 2
I didnt suggest you should be able to point out KZN... just the country. In every other country you learn the location of every other country in primary school. Even now 25 odd years later i could find ethiopia or denmark. You name it. Because other countries actually think its critical to raise children to know how big the world is and not think their nation is the centre off it. Its an attitude difference creating a different type of education.
More importantly I have no responsibility to know that. Who I vote for will only ever affect my fellow voting countrymen and affect them a tiny fraction as much as who you vote for.
You have a responsibilty to know about our lives because you end up voting for our future as well. Your choice in a few months will have more influence on my families fortunes for the next 4 years than all the ballots of my entire life combined. You have a responsibility because of that. You can deny that responsibility but it wont go away. Oh and I could point out at least 30 US states and name their capitals. Way more than I challenged you on.
Final note: there is no auch thing as a "minor" country.
America sneezes and the world catches pneumonia. That is the great injustice of national superpowers. 350 million people get to vote on the destiny of 7 billion. That makes being a US voter a terrible responsibility. Too bad those who carry it are afflicted by such a self centered culture that even as they decide our fate most can't find us on a map. And that is why America isnt safe. If you want to be safe stop fucking with tge rest of the world.
My first wife was Brazilian so I got to spend a lot of time in the country and can attest that this is just as accurate a description he left out (especially the midsize-cities, I spent a lot of time in Suzano and Fortaleza). It's a fantastic country by every measure. And I would add to what you said:
1) FAR Better healthcare than the US (I speak as somebody who has gotten ill on occasion in both countries) - nowhere else I've been in the world did a doctor tried a common flue with such care. Instead of the usual 2 weeks - Brazil's care had me back on my feet in 3 days. The focus on preventative care is amazing and the focus on getting people healthy and back to work as soon as possible is brilliant. And even as a foreign tourist (this was before the marriage) it didn't cost me anything.
2) Free public university (with strict entrance exams so they get the best of the best and ensure those people are educated even if they were poor), and private universities for everybody else (a good compromise I think - not as great as Denmark but better than USA). And cleverly the private universities are all night-schools so it's normal to have a job while you study and this means more people can afford to do so.
3) Motel's... American's have no idea what they are missing when they've never gotten to take their SO's for a night in a motel where you can order vibrators and sexy-cosplay's from roomservice... ;) Of course America also has things *called* motels, but they are nothing alike.
We don't even know that it is causing microcephaly now. There is absolutely no causal evidence linking the condition to the virus. What we have is a virus outbreak and a sudden, surprisingly high, incidence of a rare condition. That's correlation, not causation.
Now since we have no actual explanation for the high incidence, the Brazilian government felt it best to advise people to avoid getting pregnant until after mosquito season but that's a purely speculative preventative measure - they were very honest about there being no actual medical proof that the virus causes the condition. In fact, we don't even have evidence that it can cross the placenta (only a small number of diseases can).
The disease is fairly harmless to children and adults so it wasn't given much priority before. Now if, indeed, it is a risk for pregnancy then further testing will bear that out. There are many potential causes of birth defects - and clusters like this could *even* be entirely coincidental. We don't like to think that way but not all clusters of rare events share an unusual cause - random events sometimes form clusters of distribution - if they didn't they wouldn't be random.
The odds of the lottery numbers next saturday being 1 1 1 1 1 1 is exactly the same as any other combination of numbers - but I bet if it happened there would be no jackpot winner because we all instinctively think that clusters like that should be unlikely.
>"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill
Some would say that a definition which does not cover "A person who happily starved over a million children" isn't a very good definition. But Churchill wouldn't agree as that would mean he would have to include himself.
>Bell Labs, a privately run lab to soak up profits from a government mandated monopoly. Not sure that makes a case for private for profit management. More like publicly funded research utopia.
Not to mention the core diference is that Bell Labs, being created as a profit sponge, was not a profit seeking enterprise. They may have been owned by one, but because they were specifically *expected* to not make profit they didn't operate like one - and instead was allowed to operate like academia and deliver knowledge instead (some of which, at least, would later be profitable to Bell of course).
The GP correctly pointed out that basic research is a very bad fit for a profit-motive, the only thing Bell Labs prove is that "academia" and charity are not the only ways one could conceivably fund a non-profit research lab. Nobody argued that, that was the case.
That said - government-funded academia is definitely simpler to accomplish - which is why there are millions of government funded research labs around the world (including major multinational ones like CERN) while examples like Bell Labs are few and far between.
Where private enterprise have tried to dabble in the "free reign for researchers lab" model in the past, hoping to cash in on ideas, there are far more dismal failures than successes. Xerox PARC was such an attempt - and while they produced world-class research and innocations - Xerox utterly failed to see it's value or capitalize on it (and basically gave the results to Steve Jobs for free). Ultimately that led to the end of PARC.
Bell Labs didn't survive much past the end of the AT&T monopoly either. It genuinely seems that research labs run by profit-seeking enterprises generally do not work well, and can only succeed when very specific conditions are in place (that are not organically arrived at by market forces).
I would add to the GP's reasons for this that science requires peer review, which works best when the results are shared as widely as possible. Secret-sauce science is not really science at all - and that too is fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive. Profit demands exclusivity but science demands reproducability - which are flat-out contradictory aims. This means that even when, practically, the process can be made to work - the results are tainted as science. Just look at the many resent scandals due to unreproducible drug tests. Evidence based medicine becomes a lot less trustworthy when we water down the scientific standards for what "evidence based" means (though still a lot better than pseudo-science like homeopathy and anti-vaxxers).
Interestingly the Unix philosophy largely abandoned that idea much earlier - back in 1969 already. The unix philosophy says:
First make it work
Then make it work right
Then make it work fast
Of course it's a trade-off but even back in 1969 it was obvious that memory-squeezing has significant downsides in terms of design and when it's not required it shouldn't be done. Now of course when it is required, it's a useful skill - but that has been a niche area for a long time.
Interestingly - the original Unix tools still did a lot of memory squeezing, but that was because of the low memory of the machines it was written on which meant that tools were forced to use paging-buffers and such as it was simply not possible to write reliable code if you loaded data straight to memory by default so it had to be a case of read-process-free-read. When GNU started in 1983 ram had already massively increased - so the GNU tools loaded "all into memory" by default. That remains how GNU tools do things, because even if you run out of memory - swap is cheap in that environment and not paging makes your code simpler - which makes it more reliable and easier to maintain (and faster too). Swap is an interesting version of that trade-off, it achieves exactly what the old unix paging code did - but it does it on the kernel level which means the mechanisms for dealing with "too much data to read at once" is now handled centrally by one piece of software and bugs can be fixed in one place - rather than complexity being added to every tool individually.
Even then - there will always be cases where paging data remains the best approach. Video players for example readily read files which may well be much larger than the memory in the box, swapping them out would be a massive performance loss in an application where that would destroy usability - so video players often use their own paging-buffer code.
Oh you're right - they are very adamant about that, which is exactly why I refuse to go along with it. The sceptic movement cannot afford to be associated with these people who stand for exactly the opposite of what the sceptic movement does.
Getting them to admit it's really a political motivation for their opposition is, perhaps, a positive step (I've had that a few times) but unfortunately that it still an appeal-to-consequences fallacy, the truth of a theory is not dependent on whether you like what we have to do about it.
Not when that company would rather pay the politician who would massage their zoning application for a new highrise.
Then *why* is America's infrastructure falling apart ?
Oh - that's right - because construction companies would much rather donate to the guy who promises to clear zoning rights for a new strip-mall because building a new private development is *much* more lucrative than maintaining or building infrastructure.
They are not skeptics. Skeptic has a specific definition - and they are literally the opposite of skeptics.
Skeptics are people who believe only that which has evidence, they embrace science and reject pseudo-science, religion and other ideologies not based on evidence.
Skeptics accept climate science as one of the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in the world today (we have more evidence for this theory than we have for the link between tobacco and lung cancer and very nearly more than we have for evolution - and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence against it).
People who refuse to believe something *despite* all the evidence are not skeptics, by definition they are not. The proper term is "deniers" whether what they are denying is evolution, climate change or the holocaust - they are all the same movement intellectually.
It's a classic denier pattern of course, which is either a deliberately attempt at deception or a massive failure at understanding even the most basic premise of science.
Science makes a very specific kind of prediction: if X then Y.
Then, when we take steps to prevent X the result becomes: !X therefore !Y - and deniers declare that this somehow DISPROVES the original prediction (when, in fact, it confirms it).
> and pointless infra projects
That simply isn't true, if anything the exact opposite is true. America's buildings, bridges and other critical infrastructure is crumbling and falling apart. You're risking millions of lives every day with unmaintained infrastructure.
If anything - you can't manage even the most basic infra projects required to prevent disasters !
Infrastructure projects are not sexy, they aren't politically appealing - and they don't attract donor money. What corporation is going to give you campaign finance because you "promised to patch the crumbling concrete of a bridge in your town" ?
Whatever the reason may be, despite the fact that infrastructure projects would not only have short-term employment benefits but the much more important benefit of actually keeping the stuff your entire economy depends on to function working past the end of the decade - they aren't being done.
I haven't read the book - so I can't say how accurate the rest of your description of it is, nor how much modern America really reflects that - but this claim was simply outright provably and factually incorrect.
That house had a sync plate roof and asbestos ceiling, but yes it was fired upwards at an angle.
We had a case like that in the 1980s. My dad was tge investigating officer. That bullet killed a 2 year old in her crib. The shooter got 20 years for aggravated manslaughter.
Granted we have a different legal system. Under the law here all homocide requires an intent to kill. Manslaughter is defined as causing a death where a reasonable person would not. Basically its the criminal version of wrongfull death.
The judge ruled (correctly) that a reasonable person would forsee that firing a gun into the air in an urban environment is reckless and could potentially kill somebodu and thus refrain from doing so.
Simply put - studies have repeatedly found that there is far more genetic diversity *within* races than *between* races.