I found Mr Badnarik's position on nuclear proliferation very troubling. His position seems to presume that the leaders of nations who get nukes will behave in a rational manner. That there will never be a nuclear exchange as a result of erroneous brinkmanship. Neither assumption holds validity.
In the case of assuming rational behavior, there are too many counter-examples to mention, but I'll list one that is dirtectly pertinent. The Atlantic Monthly featured a story about Pakistan -- I believe it was 9/2000 by Robert D. Kaplan, but I'm not certain (Atlantic archives are no longer viewable without a subscription). In the article, a high-ranking former member of the Pakistani military said that he felt it would be a good idea to nuke India. The writer incredulously asked whether he was aware of the consequences of a nuclear exchange between the two nations. He assured that even considering the fallout (literal and figurative), he thought it was a good idea. Mind you, this is not some illiterate on the street. This is a guy who knows exactly what would happen.
As to infallibility, although there was never an inadvertent launch as in "Fail Safe" nor a misconception leading to an exchange, we came perilously close. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have resulted in an exchange merely as a result of miscommunication. McNamara said there were other incidents where an unlucky series of events could have resulted in a nuclear exchange -- in other words, we got lucky.
Leaders of countries like Iran and North Korea know exactly what they are doing and why. But I don't credit those leaders with enough rationality to believe that they would not use nukes against enemies in a first strike, under some irrational calculation, such as the hatred Iran's leaders have for Israel.
Unfortunately, I don't think the US has the international standing to make any serious case against them as a result of (a) the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and (b) our own programs to build new nukes. And no one else seems likely to take up the issue.
My sense is that nuclear weapons counter-proliferation is the most important national security issue we face. Even bio-weapons are probably less important, given that they are difficult to actually deploy. If an American city is nuked, our response to 9-11 will look like patty-cakes.
The constitution reserves the execution of foreign policy to the executive branch. It is not in the interest of Americans to have other Americans go implement their own foreign policies based on their own conceptions. The result would be a target on the back of all Americans, as a result of the actions of those interventionists.
Further, it does not require a vivid imagination to figure that violent partisan interventionists could really screw up negotiations. Imagine some delicate negotiation is going on, is nearing agreement, and then some butthead commits an assassination or sabotage in the country we are negotiating with.
An example of this is in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority does not have a monopoly on force (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc attacks), and Israel has not reined in illegal settlements. Troublemakers on both sides are holding the entire process hostage.
That there is hatred for Americans already does not mean that things cannot get worse.
Some of these issues have been well developed on slate's coverage and elsewhere. And I'm not advocating the abolition of the EC for some of the practical and political reasons you mentioned -- but I am interested in what the candidate thinks, hence the question. For 3rd party candidates, some sort of electoral reform has got to be a consideration given that Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote and no EC votes. If that is not a stunning example of something that should offend 3rd party candidates, I don't know what is.
As to the irrelevance of votes, ask yourself: how relevant is the vote of a Rep in CA or a Dem in TX? The Founding Fathers may not have anticipated the 2-party system becoming so entrenched in elections.
The "firewall" effect of state-by-state elections is an admirable quality of the current system. As to the interest in proportional electors, here are some issues to consider. First, why don't Maine and Nebraska go to winner-take-all, if the will of the majority is all that counts? Second, there are ways to implement such a change without directly confronting self-interest. For example, a state where party demographics are changing might approve such a measure. Or, they could impose such a change 10 years after the election, which means that the predictability of the effect is diminished.
Good point! I hope the experiment is useful. The beauty of the US system is that sometimes, experiments like this can happen. And if California eventually adopts it for state elections, we could see a national trend (often CA leads the nation in these sorts of things).
The implementation of the SF system might however slow down its adoption, if some of the wackier pathologies occur.
Some of the anticipated effects of ranked voting might rankle the Founding Fathers: they were very leery of "cabals" and collaboration between candidates. I'm currently reading a general audience book "A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution" by Carol Berkin, and she details their extreme suspicion.
And say hello to Aunt Minnie and Aunt Sally for me...;-) (not that there's anything wrong with it)
Maybe the question we should ask the candidate is: Do you think alternative voting systems have a snowball's chance in hell of passing the Aunt Minnie test?
(The Aunt Minnie test. as I see it, is whether Aunt Minnie would be too suspicious of these "schemes" to support them, even if a successfully implemented system would yield a result more representative of the will of the electorate. Substitute Uncle Ernie if you see fit.)
There have been proposals to eliminate the electoral college. Notably, Slate has run a series of pieces calling it "America's worst college." Slate's coverage has examined some of the political difficulties in trying to change the system and has proposed some possible solutions.
It's clear from the results of 1992 that the electoral college, as currently implemented at the national and state level, tends to turn small spreads into large ones, and eliminates 3rd parties altogether. As a 3rd party candidate, this must be an important issue to you (after ballot access, perhaps the most important one).
How do you propose to address this? Would you support an amendment to the US Constitution to abolish the Electors in favor of direct popular vote? Or, would it make more sense to address it state by state, using legislation to split the electors proportionately within each state (as Maine and Nebraska do)?
"Not only do they not get what they could because of investments, but neither does anyone else. "
True, and Peterson agrees that there should be mandatory savings accounts, invested in global index funds (see interview). He does not whole-heartedly endorse Bush's personal savings accounts under Social Security. Bush has not said how to make up the loss in payments, and far more is needed to prevent a crisis.
I oppose term limits because I believe the result would be that the power of staffers, consultants, and lobbyists would be increased. A neophyte congressman would be (IMO) more susceptible to manipulation and pressure from these anonymous power brokers.
That is not to say that I like the status quo. One big problem is congressional district gerrymandering, by which a huge percentage of Congressional Reps are in politically "safe" districts (strongly Dem or Rep). They would basically have to commit murder to be unseated. I forget who said it, but "voters don't choose the candidates, candidates choose their voters."
The other issue that I think bears mention is the "rules" by which the House and Senate are run. This is another case where the rules are made by those who must then live by those rules.
I'm not sure how to deal with these issues, but I'm not convinced that term limits would do the trick either.
"From what I've heard, in the best of time Social Security ended up rendering about 2% interest in terms of average payouts."
There is a very important difference between Social Security and investment accounts. SS is continually being raided (every dollar coming in is sent out to granny immediately -- actually there's a little more coming in than going out, but very minor). The analogy that would fit would be if you took out a loan on your 401k for your kid's Ivy League education (removing the entire principal). No principal means no earnings.
This is not the same problem as year-to-year account deficits. Peterson estimates that the year-to-year deficits would be $783B in 2020, increasing to trillions later. Even Robert Rubin and the other economic experts on Clinton's team cannot pull off those kinds of savings and revenue increases without radical reforms of the entitlements.
Peterson does propose some relatively minor tweaks which will add up to big effects -- indexing COLAs to inflation instead of wages, legally mandatory savings accounts, and a variety of reforms of Medicare.
I do not believe that the radical options presented in the Gokhale/Smetters study are serious proposals for reform so much as illustrations of just how serious the problem is. I'm not saying that they are disingenuous at all, merely that they expressed the seriousness of the inter-generational debt in a way that the politicians can understand.
"Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think" -- Ken Wharton
At the risk of jumping on him for what might be a comment that has been taken out of context:
That's an interesting way to envision how the unpredictable actions of huge collectives could be predicted: just assume that they will be manipulated by demagogues, and that the demagogues' aims will be obvious from their (necessarily public) rhetoric.
Still, I don't buy it, except over such short timespans that no particular skill is required to make predictions. For example, "bin Ladin Determined to Strike within the United States." What was their first clue? His declaration of war on the US in 1998?
The lessons of the post-Cold-War period are that history is driven as much by chaotic regions like Afghanistan as by tightly controlled ones like North Korea. By definition, events in chaotic regions cannot be predicted.
Another source of chaos is diseases like SARS and AIDS. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the USSR, poor government responses to such diseases could result in the collapse (or reform) of those governments. We could quibble about whether a disaster like Chernobyl was or was not predictable in the decaying USSR. We can also debate about whether it's all that important in the grand march of history -- maybe it sped up the collapseof the USSR but not by much. OK, but (for those who credit Reagan for ending the Cold War by playing chicken with the USSR) consider how different history might be, had John Hinckley's aim been a little different.
Control, and predictability, are illusions. At least, to the degree proposed in Foundation. I seem to recall however that Foundation acknowledged the difficulties posed by unruly leaders coming from out of nowhere.
I think Marx said that a capitalist is a person who will sell you the rope with which to hang him.
Outsourcing also inevitably results in skill erosion here in the US and skill development overseas. For example, if you outsource a software job by lobbing a requirements spec over the wall, just reading that requirements spec gives the vendor a better idea of the sorts of skills and ideas needed to do it themselves next time.
So, the split incentives of capitalism may result in general losses in economic value. That's why the economy is regulated. (Samuelson did not prescribe protectionism, and I don't think that's the right answer in low-skill areas, but perhaps educational subsidies and R&D credits, etc.)
According to the article, economist Jagdish Bhagwati (a former student of Samuelson) agrees with the theory but says it is not all that significant in practice. Speaking of the labor force that can compete with Americans for high-value IT jobs, he says: "You have a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they are qualified. That sort of thinking is really generalizing based on the kind of Indian and Chinese people who manage to make it to Silicon Valley."
This may be true now, but Samuelson's argument is about whether the past benefits of global trade will inevitably continue. This has nothing to do with the current state of affairs. When you look at the structural issues, it does seem likely that outsourcing of high-value jobs is here to stay. There will probably be some slowing of the trend eventually -- it's easy for the Chinese economy to grow quickly, because it's "underutilized." But as their economy matures, it will slow down. Of course, by then, they will have taken many more American jobs.
The other issue is that even where there is no direct competition, the low cost of Chinese and Indian skilled labor can depress American wage growth indirectly. Even if your job cannot be outsourced, a general wage pressure is present, and employers will use the *threat* of outsourcing to press employees for more work.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think I managed to explain my point.
The contract is between the customer (government) and the contractor performing the work. If the contract is written such that payment is contingent on mission success, then the contractor must monetize the risk (more financial risk means more financial reward must be present). That's how any free market operates: more risk means more reward. I suppose the most obvious examples would be Lloyd's of London, any hedge fund, or commodities futures such as fuel contracts bought by airlines to hedge against price shocks. You can trade money for risk, or you can just assume the risk.
To give a concrete example: Genesis was a $264M contract according to the news coverage. If 100% of that is contingent on a successful conclusion, then the contractor would bid a price based on the anticipated costs plus a profit, and then divide the bid by the estimated probability of success. So if 1/3 of these probes are successful (let's say), a $264M contract would turn into a $792M contract. There is no way that any contractor would take on the risk without being compensated for that risk. The same goes in Vegas.
Assuming that the penalties are low, it amounts to the customer (govt) having assumed the risks, which is how most NASA and military projects work. They are doing complex, risky things, and the govt seems to think it's better to assume the risk of failure instead of paying more for success.
That does not mean there is no accountability in the awarding of contracts. I suspect that some award fees were at stake for a lot of mission milestones, possibly including successful landing. Also, this failure will reflect on those involved, to their discredit. Since this is a government contract, you could probably get a copy of the contract under FOIA and satisfy your curiosity.
As to hiring the engineers directly -- I don't think that having a LockMart badge automatically makes you a better engineer than a NASA civil servant, or vice versa. JPL is not really part of NASA (it's a Federally Funded Research & Development Center, similar to the Dept of Energy labs). But JPL has built and operated probes, and not always successfully.
"if I engineer a building and it falls down, I'm liable for the whole thing" -- do you know for a fact that buildings are contracted this way? Also, buildings are designed and constructed more conservatively than spacecraft. You can't afford that kind of conservatism on spacecraft -- it would weigh too much.
If 100% of the contract value were on the line against mission success, no contractor would bid with the modest ROI built into NASA contracts. Although parachute entry systems are far from cutting-edge technology, the systems integration needed to build a one-off space probe is far from simple. I'm disappointed that Genesis failed the final test, after having passed every one so far. But this is not easy stuff, and NASA's space sciencce program is trying to do it on a fraction of what the manned program costs.
There is some motion towards "completion form" contracts, on smaller increments of work. This means that the contractor is paid for some discrete delivery under some set of conditions (schedule, passes QA tests, etc).
Under the proposals of the Moon-Mars Commission, NASA may begin offering contracts under some sort of "bounty" arrangement. But any contractor undertaking it would need to build the odds of failure into the bid -- just like a Vulture Capitalist.
From the Moon-Mars Commission Report: "Recommendation 5-2 The Commission recommends that Congress increase the potential for commercial opportunities related to the national space exploration vision by providing incentives for entrepreneurial investment in space, by creating significant monetary prizes for the accomplishment of space missions and/or technology developments and by assuring appropriate property rights for those who seek to develop space resources and infrastructure."
There is no economically, scientifically or technologically defensible reason to return Shuttle to flight and to complete ISS. There is no reason to keep going on these twin technological dead ends. Completion of ISS will cost about $40-50B. Wouldn't that amount of money be put to better use on basic and applied research in furtherance of the Moon-Mars program? Why waste the money on a dead end? The only obvious answers: political and diplomatic expediency.
OK, I'll admit that ISS assembly has contributed to the knowledge base of "how to live and work in space." But how much more will be learned by repeating the same sorts of assembly operations that have already been performed? Is that knowledge worth $50B?
How about the remaining research goals of ISS, namely the effects of microgravity and space radiation on humans? Given that we have one known method of mitigating microgravity (namely, centrifugal acceleration, presumably using tethers), it's hard to take NASA's research program seriously. They are searching for an excuse for ISS, not a practical solution to a real problem. The radiation problem is hardly isolated to humans: much more effective (and ethical) research can be performed on Petri dishes full of bio-goo than on human subjects.
If I offered $50B to go investigate these problems and propose solutions, no reasonable person would go about it this way.
I would have preferred for NASA to have turned away from Shuttle and ISS based on rational analysis, but if a hurricane does it for them, that's fine too. Maybe we'll see the Shuttles flying sooner than we expected.
Now that is an explanation I can believe. Especially if you also say that the replicants are *designed* to be as strong as possible without being detectible, so that they can perform clandestine infiltration operations against some enemy.
If Void-Comp had been just a throwaway device, it would have bothered me less, but the movie spent sooo much time on it that it could not be ignored.
Thanks for the explanation, but I'm not satisfied. I could probably give PKD a break on this given when the story wwas written, but by the time the film came out, I think the inconsistency was basically papered over.
One of the tests of any novel (not just sci-fi) is that it creates a convincing scenario. As much as I enjoyed the story and atmosphere of Blade Runner, it fails that test. That the replicants are genetically engineered to be physiologically superior to humans is believable. That the engineering is imperfect (resulting in short lifespan) is believable. But the notion that there is no genetic assay to ID them is just beyond belief.
If someone is given superior muscular strength by geneticc engineering, the physiologically and chemically observable traces would not be limited to the bone marrow.
This criticism is not applicable to scenarios that require other sorts of suspension of disbelief -- faster than light travel cannot be explained in scientific terms, but it does not generally create the same glaring inconsistency.
Can anyone explain how the replicants are physiologically superior to regular humans, yet the only way to identify them is to ask them stupid questions while videotaping their irises?
Wouldn't some sort of DNA test, or blood protein assay, work a lot easier?
(But then there wouldn't be much of a movie, would there.)
"Do Androids Dream..." was written in 1968, but the idea of genetic assays might not have been known to Philip K Dick. But the film was not until 1982...
Bonus points if you answer the following questions: 1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2. What do Electric Sheep dream of?
Thanks for posting it -- this is the first time I've seen the story in this much detail, and it corrected some misconceptions I had about the case. In fact the root of the problem seems to have been a race condition between the user interface, the control software, and the hardware. This raises a very important point about critical, real-time systems: if you impose a software wait state that is designed to permit the hardware to reach some necessary state, be very careful and make certain that the wait state is enforced properly and understood by other contributors as a critical component.
What was lacking: FMECA (failure modes, effects and criticality analysis).
When I think about some of the bugs I have found (and coded), the Whyline approach seems very far-fetched. The degree of self-awareness (introspection) required by something like this makes it seem like the program would be able to avoid the trap in the first place. It would require the "analyst" or "observer" module to observe not only a stack trace and PC trail, but also would require the module to understand what is supposed to occur.
I don't expect this early research tool to catch all of these, but I'd like to hear the researchers' response on how their system might (after years of development) answer questions about some of these bugs: - Why did the Mars Pathfinder software deadlock (priority inversion) - Why did the Mars Polar Lander crash (improper state management) - Why did the Ariane 5 blow up (arithmetic overflow in a register) - Why did the Patriot missiles miss in the 1991 Gulf War (accumulated time error) - Why did a radiation therapy machine zap patients with the wrong doses (inconsistent state between GUI display and internal software state)
I'm sure there are some others on comp.risks and elsewhere.
Another point: this approach is still "just" a testing tool. In other words, it can only find errors on paths that have actually been taken in tests, which means the testing program must cover enough cases to generate the runtime errors in the first place. In all of the above cases, it was the testing program that permitted the bugs to be fielded.
One of the frustrating things about NASA's plans to return the Shuttle to flight and complete the Space Station is the opportunity cost. Is there no better way to spend $50B and 6 years of the collective efforts of thousands of talented engineers? Come on. It's not only ridiculous, but it also makes NASA look ridiculous for saying so.
Your point is right on. People say that space flight is a way to avoid putting humanity's eggs in one basket (Earth). By the same reasoning, NASA should be trying to solve the problems of human spaceflight using a multiplicity of approaches and possible solutions. NASA people might say: (a) that the taxpayers will not foot the bill for competitive programs (waste?) and (b) that Congress does not give NASA enough money for multiple research programs. But given NASA's history of serial monogamy in trying to develop new launch systems to replace Shuttle, you would think that they would try something new.
They might say that their approach to CEV is indeed competitive, but at the end of the day, NASA will still only have one system. As to the argument of NASA lacking the money for parallel research programs, the reason they lack the money is that they spend so freakin' much money on operations (approx $6-7B per year).
From the article: Casting an eye on the space shuttle's contribution to science, van Allen suggests they have been modest, "and its contribution to utilitarian applications of space technology has been insignificant."
The still only partly put together International Space Station, van Allen points out, has already garnered a price tag of some $30 billion. "If it is actually completed by 2010, after a total lapse of 26 years, the cumulative cost will be at least $80 billion, and the exuberant hopes for its important commercial and scientific achievements will have been all but abandoned," he argues.
Given that NASA has not and will not renounce, abjure, and utterly forsake the folly of the last 25 years of their human spaceflight program (Shuttle and Space Station), I think he has a valid point. Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, says that NASA "gets it" in relation to the need to change, but I don't see much evidence of that. They seem to understand the need to improve their effectiveness, but they don't seem to understand that the bigger problem is a lack of relevance.
To give an example, consider the contributions of Charles Lindbergh to aviation. I just finished reading his biography, written by A. Scott Berg. Lindbergh helped to solve many practical problems and helped the early airlines set up routes. Over his lifetime, the problems of civil aviation were solved well enough that he saw little point in going for additional performance (supersonic commercial transport).
But where Lindbergh was Promethean in his outlook, NASA leadership seems to be Olympian. Wherever there has been a choice to be made between jealously guarding access to space and opening up "the high frontier," they have come down in favor of the status quo.
So, if NASA wants to be taken seriously, they need to address the credibility gap. They need to demonstrate their contributions to the "utilitarian applications of space technology" that Van Allen refers to. Their plan to scuttle the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission is the most recent demonstration of their values.
That does not mean that human spaceflight is a bad idea, only that NASA has not demonstrated why they should be entrusted with this responsibility.
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I found Mr Badnarik's position on nuclear proliferation very troubling. His position seems to presume that the leaders of nations who get nukes will behave in a rational manner. That there will never be a nuclear exchange as a result of erroneous brinkmanship. Neither assumption holds validity.
In the case of assuming rational behavior, there are too many counter-examples to mention, but I'll list one that is dirtectly pertinent. The Atlantic Monthly featured a story about Pakistan -- I believe it was 9/2000 by Robert D. Kaplan, but I'm not certain (Atlantic archives are no longer viewable without a subscription). In the article, a high-ranking former member of the Pakistani military said that he felt it would be a good idea to nuke India. The writer incredulously asked whether he was aware of the consequences of a nuclear exchange between the two nations. He assured that even considering the fallout (literal and figurative), he thought it was a good idea. Mind you, this is not some illiterate on the street. This is a guy who knows exactly what would happen.
As to infallibility, although there was never an inadvertent launch as in "Fail Safe" nor a misconception leading to an exchange, we came perilously close. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have resulted in an exchange merely as a result of miscommunication. McNamara said there were other incidents where an unlucky series of events could have resulted in a nuclear exchange -- in other words, we got lucky.
Leaders of countries like Iran and North Korea know exactly what they are doing and why. But I don't credit those leaders with enough rationality to believe that they would not use nukes against enemies in a first strike, under some irrational calculation, such as the hatred Iran's leaders have for Israel.
Unfortunately, I don't think the US has the international standing to make any serious case against them as a result of (a) the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and (b) our own programs to build new nukes. And no one else seems likely to take up the issue.
My sense is that nuclear weapons counter-proliferation is the most important national security issue we face. Even bio-weapons are probably less important, given that they are difficult to actually deploy. If an American city is nuked, our response to 9-11 will look like patty-cakes.
The constitution reserves the execution of foreign policy to the executive branch. It is not in the interest of Americans to have other Americans go implement their own foreign policies based on their own conceptions. The result would be a target on the back of all Americans, as a result of the actions of those interventionists.
Further, it does not require a vivid imagination to figure that violent partisan interventionists could really screw up negotiations. Imagine some delicate negotiation is going on, is nearing agreement, and then some butthead commits an assassination or sabotage in the country we are negotiating with.
An example of this is in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority does not have a monopoly on force (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc attacks), and Israel has not reined in illegal settlements. Troublemakers on both sides are holding the entire process hostage.
That there is hatred for Americans already does not mean that things cannot get worse.
Some of these issues have been well developed on slate's coverage and elsewhere. And I'm not advocating the abolition of the EC for some of the practical and political reasons you mentioned -- but I am interested in what the candidate thinks, hence the question. For 3rd party candidates, some sort of electoral reform has got to be a consideration given that Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote and no EC votes. If that is not a stunning example of something that should offend 3rd party candidates, I don't know what is.
As to the irrelevance of votes, ask yourself: how relevant is the vote of a Rep in CA or a Dem in TX? The Founding Fathers may not have anticipated the 2-party system becoming so entrenched in elections.
The "firewall" effect of state-by-state elections is an admirable quality of the current system. As to the interest in proportional electors, here are some issues to consider. First, why don't Maine and Nebraska go to winner-take-all, if the will of the majority is all that counts? Second, there are ways to implement such a change without directly confronting self-interest. For example, a state where party demographics are changing might approve such a measure. Or, they could impose such a change 10 years after the election, which means that the predictability of the effect is diminished.
Good point! I hope the experiment is useful. The beauty of the US system is that sometimes, experiments like this can happen. And if California eventually adopts it for state elections, we could see a national trend (often CA leads the nation in these sorts of things).
;-)
The implementation of the SF system might however slow down its adoption, if some of the wackier pathologies occur.
Some of the anticipated effects of ranked voting might rankle the Founding Fathers: they were very leery of "cabals" and collaboration between candidates. I'm currently reading a general audience book "A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution" by Carol Berkin, and she details their extreme suspicion.
And say hello to Aunt Minnie and Aunt Sally for me...
(not that there's anything wrong with it)
Maybe the question we should ask the candidate is:
Do you think alternative voting systems have a snowball's chance in hell of passing the Aunt Minnie test?
(The Aunt Minnie test. as I see it, is whether Aunt Minnie would be too suspicious of these "schemes" to support them, even if a successfully implemented system would yield a result more representative of the will of the electorate. Substitute Uncle Ernie if you see fit.)
There have been proposals to eliminate the electoral college. Notably, Slate has run a series of pieces calling it "America's worst college." Slate's coverage has examined some of the political difficulties in trying to change the system and has proposed some possible solutions.
It's clear from the results of 1992 that the electoral college, as currently implemented at the national and state level, tends to turn small spreads into large ones, and eliminates 3rd parties altogether. As a 3rd party candidate, this must be an important issue to you (after ballot access, perhaps the most important one).
How do you propose to address this? Would you support an amendment to the US Constitution to abolish the Electors in favor of direct popular vote? Or, would it make more sense to address it state by state, using legislation to split the electors proportionately within each state (as Maine and Nebraska do)?
"Perhaps, but what you receive in benefits does not depend on how the government manages the fund, at least until it runs out."
There is essentially no trust fund.
"Not only do they not get what they could because of investments, but neither does anyone else. "
True, and Peterson agrees that there should be mandatory savings accounts, invested in global index funds (see interview). He does not whole-heartedly endorse Bush's personal savings accounts under Social Security. Bush has not said how to make up the loss in payments, and far more is needed to prevent a crisis.
I oppose term limits because I believe the result would be that the power of staffers, consultants, and lobbyists would be increased. A neophyte congressman would be (IMO) more susceptible to manipulation and pressure from these anonymous power brokers.
That is not to say that I like the status quo. One big problem is congressional district gerrymandering, by which a huge percentage of Congressional Reps are in politically "safe" districts (strongly Dem or Rep). They would basically have to commit murder to be unseated. I forget who said it, but "voters don't choose the candidates, candidates choose their voters."
The other issue that I think bears mention is the "rules" by which the House and Senate are run. This is another case where the rules are made by those who must then live by those rules.
I'm not sure how to deal with these issues, but I'm not convinced that term limits would do the trick either.
"From what I've heard, in the best of time Social Security ended up rendering about 2% interest in terms of average payouts."
There is a very important difference between Social Security and investment accounts. SS is continually being raided (every dollar coming in is sent out to granny immediately -- actually there's a little more coming in than going out, but very minor). The analogy that would fit would be if you took out a loan on your 401k for your kid's Ivy League education (removing the entire principal). No principal means no earnings.
This is not the same problem as year-to-year account deficits. Peterson estimates that the year-to-year deficits would be $783B in 2020, increasing to trillions later. Even Robert Rubin and the other economic experts on Clinton's team cannot pull off those kinds of savings and revenue increases without radical reforms of the entitlements.
Peterson does propose some relatively minor tweaks which will add up to big effects -- indexing COLAs to inflation instead of wages, legally mandatory savings accounts, and a variety of reforms of Medicare.
I do not believe that the radical options presented in the Gokhale/Smetters study are serious proposals for reform so much as illustrations of just how serious the problem is. I'm not saying that they are disingenuous at all, merely that they expressed the seriousness of the inter-generational debt in a way that the politicians can understand.
"Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think" -- Ken Wharton
At the risk of jumping on him for what might be a comment that has been taken out of context:
That's an interesting way to envision how the unpredictable actions of huge collectives could be predicted: just assume that they will be manipulated by demagogues, and that the demagogues' aims will be obvious from their (necessarily public) rhetoric.
Still, I don't buy it, except over such short timespans that no particular skill is required to make predictions. For example, "bin Ladin Determined to Strike within the United States." What was their first clue? His declaration of war on the US in 1998?
The lessons of the post-Cold-War period are that history is driven as much by chaotic regions like Afghanistan as by tightly controlled ones like North Korea. By definition, events in chaotic regions cannot be predicted.
Another source of chaos is diseases like SARS and AIDS. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the USSR, poor government responses to such diseases could result in the collapse (or reform) of those governments. We could quibble about whether a disaster like Chernobyl was or was not predictable in the decaying USSR. We can also debate about whether it's all that important in the grand march of history -- maybe it sped up the collapseof the USSR but not by much. OK, but (for those who credit Reagan for ending the Cold War by playing chicken with the USSR) consider how different history might be, had John Hinckley's aim been a little different.
Control, and predictability, are illusions. At least, to the degree proposed in Foundation. I seem to recall however that Foundation acknowledged the difficulties posed by unruly leaders coming from out of nowhere.
You're right. I should have checked. I knew it was one of them thar Commie SOBs.
thanks
I think Marx said that a capitalist is a person who will sell you the rope with which to hang him.
Outsourcing also inevitably results in skill erosion here in the US and skill development overseas. For example, if you outsource a software job by lobbing a requirements spec over the wall, just reading that requirements spec gives the vendor a better idea of the sorts of skills and ideas needed to do it themselves next time.
So, the split incentives of capitalism may result in general losses in economic value. That's why the economy is regulated. (Samuelson did not prescribe protectionism, and I don't think that's the right answer in low-skill areas, but perhaps educational subsidies and R&D credits, etc.)
According to the article, economist Jagdish Bhagwati (a former student of Samuelson) agrees with the theory but says it is not all that significant in practice. Speaking of the labor force that can compete with Americans for high-value IT jobs, he says:
"You have a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they are qualified. That sort of thinking is really generalizing based on the kind of Indian and Chinese people who manage to make it to Silicon Valley."
This may be true now, but Samuelson's argument is about whether the past benefits of global trade will inevitably continue. This has nothing to do with the current state of affairs. When you look at the structural issues, it does seem likely that outsourcing of high-value jobs is here to stay. There will probably be some slowing of the trend eventually -- it's easy for the Chinese economy to grow quickly, because it's "underutilized." But as their economy matures, it will slow down. Of course, by then, they will have taken many more American jobs.
The other issue is that even where there is no direct competition, the low cost of Chinese and Indian skilled labor can depress American wage growth indirectly. Even if your job cannot be outsourced, a general wage pressure is present, and employers will use the *threat* of outsourcing to press employees for more work.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think I managed to explain my point.
The contract is between the customer (government) and the contractor performing the work. If the contract is written such that payment is contingent on mission success, then the contractor must monetize the risk (more financial risk means more financial reward must be present). That's how any free market operates: more risk means more reward. I suppose the most obvious examples would be Lloyd's of London, any hedge fund, or commodities futures such as fuel contracts bought by airlines to hedge against price shocks. You can trade money for risk, or you can just assume the risk.
To give a concrete example: Genesis was a $264M contract according to the news coverage. If 100% of that is contingent on a successful conclusion, then the contractor would bid a price based on the anticipated costs plus a profit, and then divide the bid by the estimated probability of success. So if 1/3 of these probes are successful (let's say), a $264M contract would turn into a $792M contract. There is no way that any contractor would take on the risk without being compensated for that risk. The same goes in Vegas.
Assuming that the penalties are low, it amounts to the customer (govt) having assumed the risks, which is how most NASA and military projects work. They are doing complex, risky things, and the govt seems to think it's better to assume the risk of failure instead of paying more for success.
That does not mean there is no accountability in the awarding of contracts. I suspect that some award fees were at stake for a lot of mission milestones, possibly including successful landing. Also, this failure will reflect on those involved, to their discredit. Since this is a government contract, you could probably get a copy of the contract under FOIA and satisfy your curiosity.
As to hiring the engineers directly -- I don't think that having a LockMart badge automatically makes you a better engineer than a NASA civil servant, or vice versa. JPL is not really part of NASA (it's a Federally Funded Research & Development Center, similar to the Dept of Energy labs). But JPL has built and operated probes, and not always successfully.
"if I engineer a building and it falls down, I'm liable for the whole thing" -- do you know for a fact that buildings are contracted this way? Also, buildings are designed and constructed more conservatively than spacecraft. You can't afford that kind of conservatism on spacecraft -- it would weigh too much.
If 100% of the contract value were on the line against mission success, no contractor would bid with the modest ROI built into NASA contracts. Although parachute entry systems are far from cutting-edge technology, the systems integration needed to build a one-off space probe is far from simple. I'm disappointed that Genesis failed the final test, after having passed every one so far. But this is not easy stuff, and NASA's space sciencce program is trying to do it on a fraction of what the manned program costs.
There is some motion towards "completion form" contracts, on smaller increments of work. This means that the contractor is paid for some discrete delivery under some set of conditions (schedule, passes QA tests, etc).
Under the proposals of the Moon-Mars Commission, NASA may begin offering contracts under some sort of "bounty" arrangement. But any contractor undertaking it would need to build the odds of failure into the bid -- just like a Vulture Capitalist.
From the Moon-Mars Commission Report:
"Recommendation 5-2
The Commission recommends that Congress increase the potential for commercial opportunities related to the national space exploration vision by providing incentives for entrepreneurial investment in space, by creating significant monetary prizes for the accomplishment of space missions and/or technology developments and by assuring appropriate property rights for those who seek to develop space resources and infrastructure."
Isn't it ironic that NASA tried to cut funding for TRMM, a measly $28M for continued operations? Makes you wonder if hurricanes have a sense of humor.
There is no economically, scientifically or technologically defensible reason to return Shuttle to flight and to complete ISS. There is no reason to keep going on these twin technological dead ends. Completion of ISS will cost about $40-50B. Wouldn't that amount of money be put to better use on basic and applied research in furtherance of the Moon-Mars program? Why waste the money on a dead end? The only obvious answers: political and diplomatic expediency.
OK, I'll admit that ISS assembly has contributed to the knowledge base of "how to live and work in space." But how much more will be learned by repeating the same sorts of assembly operations that have already been performed? Is that knowledge worth $50B?
How about the remaining research goals of ISS, namely the effects of microgravity and space radiation on humans? Given that we have one known method of mitigating microgravity (namely, centrifugal acceleration, presumably using tethers), it's hard to take NASA's research program seriously. They are searching for an excuse for ISS, not a practical solution to a real problem. The radiation problem is hardly isolated to humans: much more effective (and ethical) research can be performed on Petri dishes full of bio-goo than on human subjects.
If I offered $50B to go investigate these problems and propose solutions, no reasonable person would go about it this way.
I would have preferred for NASA to have turned away from Shuttle and ISS based on rational analysis, but if a hurricane does it for them, that's fine too. Maybe we'll see the Shuttles flying sooner than we expected.
Now that is an explanation I can believe. Especially if you also say that the replicants are *designed* to be as strong as possible without being detectible, so that they can perform clandestine infiltration operations against some enemy.
If Void-Comp had been just a throwaway device, it would have bothered me less, but the movie spent sooo much time on it that it could not be ignored.
Thanks for the explanation, but I'm not satisfied. I could probably give PKD a break on this given when the story wwas written, but by the time the film came out, I think the inconsistency was basically papered over.
One of the tests of any novel (not just sci-fi) is that it creates a convincing scenario. As much as I enjoyed the story and atmosphere of Blade Runner, it fails that test. That the replicants are genetically engineered to be physiologically superior to humans is believable. That the engineering is imperfect (resulting in short lifespan) is believable. But the notion that there is no genetic assay to ID them is just beyond belief.
If someone is given superior muscular strength by geneticc engineering, the physiologically and chemically observable traces would not be limited to the bone marrow.
This criticism is not applicable to scenarios that require other sorts of suspension of disbelief -- faster than light travel cannot be explained in scientific terms, but it does not generally create the same glaring inconsistency.
Can anyone explain how the replicants are physiologically superior to regular humans, yet the only way to identify them is to ask them stupid questions while videotaping their irises?
Wouldn't some sort of DNA test, or blood protein assay, work a lot easier?
(But then there wouldn't be much of a movie, would there.)
"Do Androids Dream..." was written in 1968, but the idea of genetic assays might not have been known to Philip K Dick. But the film was not until 1982...
Bonus points if you answer the following questions:
1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
2. What do Electric Sheep dream of?
Thanks for posting it -- this is the first time I've seen the story in this much detail, and it corrected some misconceptions I had about the case. In fact the root of the problem seems to have been a race condition between the user interface, the control software, and the hardware. This raises a very important point about critical, real-time systems: if you impose a software wait state that is designed to permit the hardware to reach some necessary state, be very careful and make certain that the wait state is enforced properly and understood by other contributors as a critical component.
What was lacking: FMECA (failure modes, effects and criticality analysis).
When I think about some of the bugs I have found (and coded), the Whyline approach seems very far-fetched. The degree of self-awareness (introspection) required by something like this makes it seem like the program would be able to avoid the trap in the first place. It would require the "analyst" or "observer" module to observe not only a stack trace and PC trail, but also would require the module to understand what is supposed to occur.
I don't expect this early research tool to catch all of these, but I'd like to hear the researchers' response on how their system might (after years of development) answer questions about some of these bugs:
- Why did the Mars Pathfinder software deadlock (priority inversion)
- Why did the Mars Polar Lander crash (improper state management)
- Why did the Ariane 5 blow up (arithmetic overflow in a register)
- Why did the Patriot missiles miss in the 1991 Gulf War (accumulated time error)
- Why did a radiation therapy machine zap patients with the wrong doses (inconsistent state between GUI display and internal software state)
I'm sure there are some others on comp.risks and elsewhere.
Another point: this approach is still "just" a testing tool. In other words, it can only find errors on paths that have actually been taken in tests, which means the testing program must cover enough cases to generate the runtime errors in the first place. In all of the above cases, it was the testing program that permitted the bugs to be fielded.
One of the frustrating things about NASA's plans to return the Shuttle to flight and complete the Space Station is the opportunity cost. Is there no better way to spend $50B and 6 years of the collective efforts of thousands of talented engineers? Come on. It's not only ridiculous, but it also makes NASA look ridiculous for saying so.
Your point is right on. People say that space flight is a way to avoid putting humanity's eggs in one basket (Earth). By the same reasoning, NASA should be trying to solve the problems of human spaceflight using a multiplicity of approaches and possible solutions. NASA people might say: (a) that the taxpayers will not foot the bill for competitive programs (waste?) and (b) that Congress does not give NASA enough money for multiple research programs. But given NASA's history of serial monogamy in trying to develop new launch systems to replace Shuttle, you would think that they would try something new.
They might say that their approach to CEV is indeed competitive, but at the end of the day, NASA will still only have one system. As to the argument of NASA lacking the money for parallel research programs, the reason they lack the money is that they spend so freakin' much money on operations (approx $6-7B per year).
From the article:
Casting an eye on the space shuttle's contribution to science, van Allen suggests they have been modest, "and its contribution to utilitarian applications of space technology has been insignificant."
The still only partly put together International Space Station, van Allen points out, has already garnered a price tag of some $30 billion. "If it is actually completed by 2010, after a total lapse of 26 years, the cumulative cost will be at least $80 billion, and the exuberant hopes for its important commercial and scientific achievements will have been all but abandoned," he argues.
Given that NASA has not and will not renounce, abjure, and utterly forsake the folly of the last 25 years of their human spaceflight program (Shuttle and Space Station), I think he has a valid point. Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, says that NASA "gets it" in relation to the need to change, but I don't see much evidence of that. They seem to understand the need to improve their effectiveness, but they don't seem to understand that the bigger problem is a lack of relevance.
To give an example, consider the contributions of Charles Lindbergh to aviation. I just finished reading his biography, written by A. Scott Berg. Lindbergh helped to solve many practical problems and helped the early airlines set up routes. Over his lifetime, the problems of civil aviation were solved well enough that he saw little point in going for additional performance (supersonic commercial transport).
But where Lindbergh was Promethean in his outlook, NASA leadership seems to be Olympian. Wherever there has been a choice to be made between jealously guarding access to space and opening up "the high frontier," they have come down in favor of the status quo.
So, if NASA wants to be taken seriously, they need to address the credibility gap. They need to demonstrate their contributions to the "utilitarian applications of space technology" that Van Allen refers to. Their plan to scuttle the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission is the most recent demonstration of their values.
That does not mean that human spaceflight is a bad idea, only that NASA has not demonstrated why they should be entrusted with this responsibility.