Don't get me wrong, I respect Elon Musk for his devotion to the long game (setting aside alleged labor scandals at his companies.) The point is that innovation is expensive -- you need deep pockets or an alternate source of revenue in order to make bold new ideas happen. That's why government has a role to play in the funding of research that the private sector is not likely to have the fortitude to pursue.
Canada has a set of per-province plans that originally covered just major injury, then were upgraded to include proactive doctor visits. The doctors are private, the hospitals are typically from bond drives in the cities and the payments are collected by employers, separate from taxes.
Works reasonably well, and backstops low-cost benefits plans the employers offer, like dental and drug plans.
For example, as a kid my parents paid into the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan, and dad campaigned door to door on a bond drive for the Chatham General Hospital. When I broke my heel, it got fixed in that same hospital, and OHIP paid for it.
This. When I was in graduate school in Canada, I had a reconstruction of a torn ACL. Didn't pay a dime for it. (But paid taxes of course, and willingly.)
This is exactly why I'm okay with people dying because they can't afford insulin. "Sorry! If you needed that insulin so badly you should have been a billionaire and bought up the patents before that other guy jacked up the price. Can't all get what we want."
I see that Martin Shkreli has behaved well enough to earn access to Slashdot.
Even in Norway, a woman can't just walk in and get a breast enlargement anytime she wants, and expect someone else to pay for it.
I fail to see how that strengthens your argument. Is there one, single country that has a national health-care program that pays for breast augmentation? (Aside from the obvious worthy case of cosmetic restoration for a medically-necessary mastectomy.)
I find this argument hilarious given Democrats had both Congress and the Presidency and when it was passed nobody said anything about keeping costs down.
It's only hilarious because the Democrats let the Republicans have a seat at the table. So how come the Republicans couldn't repeal it with both houses and the presidency?
Health care is the Gordian Knot of US economy and society. The left struggles to involve the government selectively in order to bend the cost-curve downwards. And the right tries to fix the problem by opening up the private sector. Obamacare was a herculean attempt to join those two propositions, and it just made it past the post, with the barely-required 60 votes in the senate. Republicans discovered that moving in the other direction was just as difficult, and failed repeatedly to change anything. (Except for repealing the individual mandate, which amounts to sabotage rather than reform.)
Meanwhile, all other industrialized nations have realized what the US may never realize: you need a national health-care plan to ensure that everyone gets care at a reasonable cost. The left would love to see that happen. The right sees it as fire-breathing Marxism, and fights with all it has to keep it from happening.
Then I think we differ on the definition of "emergent property." I'd argue that the different phases of matter can be viewed as emerging from its atomic structure and the amounts of kinetic energy the atoms/molecules possess in relation to the forces of attraction between them. Seeing phase transitions as an emergent property does not imply ignorance of the smaller-scale properties that give rise to them.
In the spirit of John Cage, it takes ZERO monkeys to make music. He made a recording of it already.
Good point. Thanks for the improvement. Cage's famous 4'33" consists of the ambient sounds one hears when the piece is "performed."
BTW, 4'33" is not his only piece. He wrote some fascinating music, particularly for "prepared" piano, whose strings were stuffed with various items to change their timbre. The sound can evoke a sense of a javanese gamelan.
Note also that he was not fond of recording, as he considered performance to be the principal way that his music should be experienced.
What for me is interesting is the monkey wrench quantum entanglement adds to the equation. It implies information exchange but defies distance and energy exchange physics.
gweihir's comment on this thread has it right: quantum entanglement cannot be used for information exchange.
Here's an analogy. Suppose you and a friend possess two magic coins: when they are flipped simultaneously, they show opposite sides: one is heads, the other is tails. Your friend goes to the opposite side of the earth. At an agreed time, you both flip your coins. You see heads, and you know instantly (i.e., faster than a light-signal) that your friend sees tails. But here's the catch: you cannot control whether you see heads or tails, so you cannot send information using these magic coins.
The ultimate classical chicken and egg quantum physics paradox, who came first the physicist or the equation?
The physicist. The equation is created by the physicist in an attempt to summarize the behaviour of nature, which preceded both.
Agreed, "deep and thoughtful" is not an indicator of accuracy. However, if something is deep and thoughtful, it may be worthy of consideration.
It's easy to dismiss philosophy as so much mental masturbation, but I often find I need to give it a pass. Philosophers struggle with concepts that other fields would never touch. Sometimes they try to nail jello to a tree, and occasionally they succeed.
Of course you're right. But humans animals respond to incentives. So we should minimize punishment and have it only to ensure a deterrent effect and consider other methods of ensuring law and order that are more humane.
Not just humans. Any animal that can observe its environment and override its instinctual behaviour(*) can respond to incentives.
Any good dog-trainer will tell you that rewards are much more effective than punishment. Punishment stops behaviour, it doesn't train it. It doesn't work on subjects who don't understand why they're being punished.
(*) I suppose that's the same as saying the animal can make a choice, i.e., has free will. On the other hand, if you think animals do not have free will, then you accept that all behaviour is instinctual.
For instance: How many monkeys banging on things with sticks does it take to make music? There's no definitive answer, but that doesn't mean that monkeys banging on things with sticks can't be music. It can, if it's ordered properly.
I'll have a go at this question. (Disclosure: my answer is shaped after a comment I read by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, and a perspective in the spirit of American composer John Cage.)
It takes only one monkey to make music. The key thing is this: intent.
- If the monkey is banging things on sticks with its own intent to make music, then the monkey is making music. - If someone brings a monkey on stage and has them bang something with sticks, then the monkey's handler is making music, because the handler is expressing intent in the presentation. - If someone observes a monkey banging on something with sticks and finds that it conveys something interesting, then the observer is making music (out of her/his environment) because s/he infers intent in the observation.
It ought to be legal to lynch criminals who create scams like this. Bring back lynching. It would do a tremendous about of good for society.
I don't recall that lynching was ever legal. Certainly it was never just.
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it. What if a mob decided that you were guilty of something, and they were not prepared to wait for a trial to determine your fate?
In my world, "justice" includes things like a trial in which the prosecution must prove charges beyond a reasonable doubt, conviction, and sentencing in a court of law.
God knows, I'm with you fully on the need for a fair trial for someone who is accused.
That being said, justice and the law are two related, but separate things. They're like morality and ethics: one is an innate sense of what is right, and the other is an attempt by humans to codify it into a set of rules and procedures.
Nobody in this thread claimed that astronomers were more important than anyone else. The point is that they have a legitimate complaint about the impact of satellites like this.
Why do astronomers care about this? It's only up there for 9 months get over it. Also it orbits the planet every 90 minutes. It's just an artificial shooting star. You'll see a streak, then it's gone.
Astronomers care because it's not a legitimate satellite put into space to provide communication, research, or monitoring. It's an in-your-face disco-ball whose sole purpose is to make itself visible. That's obnoxious, and just not cool. Astronomers already deal (willingly) with good-faith satellites that can interfere with observations. They don't want to deal with useless crap like this.
Because it's space. This is the first space troll. Space trolling on a commercial scale. Now you need space cops to put them in space jail. But you have to get to space first.
The people who did this are on earth, not in space.
There is such a thing as space law. Per the info at this link, it covers such principles as:
non-appropriation of outer space by any one country, arms control, the freedom of exploration, liability for damage caused by space objects, the safety and rescue of spacecraft and astronauts, the prevention of harmful interference with space activities and the environment, the notification and registration of space activities, scientific investigation and the exploitation of natural resources in outer space and the settlement of disputes.
(Emphasis mine.) Has Rocket Lab broken space law? I don't know, IANAspaceL. But whether they have or not, I suppose they could be sued by anyone who is harmed or nuisanced by their activity, just like you could sue a neighbor who shines a spotlight into your front window, or plays their stereo too loud.
Indeed. Clinton would not become anything if Trump was removed from office. Speaker Paul Ryan would become Vice President, per the U.S. Presidential line of secession.
Slashdot Mirror
Profit driven research doesn't tend to innovate.
Go tell that to Elon Musk.
I suspect Elon might agree with the GP, given that his two most visible enterprises are having trouble earning a profit:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Don't get me wrong, I respect Elon Musk for his devotion to the long game (setting aside alleged labor scandals at his companies.) The point is that innovation is expensive -- you need deep pockets or an alternate source of revenue in order to make bold new ideas happen. That's why government has a role to play in the funding of research that the private sector is not likely to have the fortitude to pursue.
I'd like to see some examples of successful publicly funded research projects.
The irony of someone typing that on a computer, communicating over the world wide web on the internet is obviously completely lost.
Not to mention the fact that some of those internet hops may very well occur via satellites.
You do realize that your post is an oxymoron?
Self-insurance is inconsistent with a spread-out risk-pool.
Canada has a set of per-province plans that originally covered just major injury, then were upgraded to include proactive doctor visits. The doctors are private, the hospitals are typically from bond drives in the cities and the payments are collected by employers, separate from taxes.
Works reasonably well, and backstops low-cost benefits plans the employers offer, like dental and drug plans.
For example, as a kid my parents paid into the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan, and dad campaigned door to door on a bond drive for the Chatham General Hospital. When I broke my heel, it got fixed in that same hospital, and OHIP paid for it.
This. When I was in graduate school in Canada, I had a reconstruction of a torn ACL. Didn't pay a dime for it. (But paid taxes of course, and willingly.)
This is exactly why I'm okay with people dying because they can't afford insulin. "Sorry! If you needed that insulin so badly you should have been a billionaire and bought up the patents before that other guy jacked up the price. Can't all get what we want."
I see that Martin Shkreli has behaved well enough to earn access to Slashdot.
Don't drop the soap, Martin.
Even in Norway, a woman can't just walk in and get a breast enlargement anytime she wants, and expect someone else to pay for it.
I fail to see how that strengthens your argument. Is there one, single country that has a national health-care program that pays for breast augmentation? (Aside from the obvious worthy case of cosmetic restoration for a medically-necessary mastectomy.)
I find this argument hilarious given Democrats had both Congress and the Presidency and when it was passed nobody said anything about keeping costs down.
It's only hilarious because the Democrats let the Republicans have a seat at the table. So how come the Republicans couldn't repeal it with both houses and the presidency?
Health care is the Gordian Knot of US economy and society. The left struggles to involve the government selectively in order to bend the cost-curve downwards. And the right tries to fix the problem by opening up the private sector. Obamacare was a herculean attempt to join those two propositions, and it just made it past the post, with the barely-required 60 votes in the senate. Republicans discovered that moving in the other direction was just as difficult, and failed repeatedly to change anything. (Except for repealing the individual mandate, which amounts to sabotage rather than reform.)
Meanwhile, all other industrialized nations have realized what the US may never realize: you need a national health-care plan to ensure that everyone gets care at a reasonable cost. The left would love to see that happen. The right sees it as fire-breathing Marxism, and fights with all it has to keep it from happening.
as you weather the temper-tantrums, you can get the person to do whatever you want.
Putin knew that going in.
And he got what he wanted.
Or perhaps Putin has leverage over Trump.
We're all still waiting to see Trump's tax returns.
Covfefe covfefe covfefe covfefe, covfefe covfefe covfefe.
Then I think we differ on the definition of "emergent property." I'd argue that the different phases of matter can be viewed as emerging from its atomic structure and the amounts of kinetic energy the atoms/molecules possess in relation to the forces of attraction between them. Seeing phase transitions as an emergent property does not imply ignorance of the smaller-scale properties that give rise to them.
In the spirit of John Cage, it takes ZERO monkeys to make music. He made a recording of it already.
Good point. Thanks for the improvement. Cage's famous 4'33" consists of the ambient sounds one hears when the piece is "performed."
BTW, 4'33" is not his only piece. He wrote some fascinating music, particularly for "prepared" piano, whose strings were stuffed with various items to change their timbre. The sound can evoke a sense of a javanese gamelan.
Note also that he was not fond of recording, as he considered performance to be the principal way that his music should be experienced.
Wait, there were sequels to The Matrix?
https://xkcd.com/566/
What for me is interesting is the monkey wrench quantum entanglement adds to the equation. It implies information exchange but defies distance and energy exchange physics.
gweihir's comment on this thread has it right: quantum entanglement cannot be used for information exchange.
Here's an analogy. Suppose you and a friend possess two magic coins: when they are flipped simultaneously, they show opposite sides: one is heads, the other is tails. Your friend goes to the opposite side of the earth. At an agreed time, you both flip your coins. You see heads, and you know instantly (i.e., faster than a light-signal) that your friend sees tails. But here's the catch: you cannot control whether you see heads or tails, so you cannot send information using these magic coins.
The ultimate classical chicken and egg quantum physics paradox, who came first the physicist or the equation?
The physicist. The equation is created by the physicist in an attempt to summarize the behaviour of nature, which preceded both.
Agreed, "deep and thoughtful" is not an indicator of accuracy. However, if something is deep and thoughtful, it may be worthy of consideration.
It's easy to dismiss philosophy as so much mental masturbation, but I often find I need to give it a pass. Philosophers struggle with concepts that other fields would never touch. Sometimes they try to nail jello to a tree, and occasionally they succeed.
"Emergent property" is a Science joke. It means "we have no clue how that works or why that happened". There are no "emergent properties" in Physics.
Um, what about phase-transitions in matter?
Of course you're right. But humans animals respond to incentives. So we should minimize punishment and have it only to ensure a deterrent effect and consider other methods of ensuring law and order that are more humane.
Not just humans. Any animal that can observe its environment and override its instinctual behaviour(*) can respond to incentives.
Any good dog-trainer will tell you that rewards are much more effective than punishment. Punishment stops behaviour, it doesn't train it. It doesn't work on subjects who don't understand why they're being punished.
(*) I suppose that's the same as saying the animal can make a choice, i.e., has free will. On the other hand, if you think animals do not have free will, then you accept that all behaviour is instinctual.
If we do not have free will, wouldn't that imply that it is wrong to punish people for their crimes? What if we have suffering but not free will?
If we don't have free will then it isn't our choice to punish you, either.
FTFY
Whoa. Found the psychopath.
For instance: How many monkeys banging on things with sticks does it take to make music? There's no definitive answer, but that doesn't mean that monkeys banging on things with sticks can't be music. It can, if it's ordered properly.
I'll have a go at this question. (Disclosure: my answer is shaped after a comment I read by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, and a perspective in the spirit of American composer John Cage.)
It takes only one monkey to make music. The key thing is this: intent.
- If the monkey is banging things on sticks with its own intent to make music, then the monkey is making music.
- If someone brings a monkey on stage and has them bang something with sticks, then the monkey's handler is making music, because the handler is expressing intent in the presentation.
- If someone observes a monkey banging on something with sticks and finds that it conveys something interesting, then the observer is making music (out of her/his environment) because s/he infers intent in the observation.
It ought to be legal to lynch criminals who create scams like this. Bring back lynching. It would do a tremendous about of good for society.
I don't recall that lynching was ever legal. Certainly it was never just.
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it. What if a mob decided that you were guilty of something, and they were not prepared to wait for a trial to determine your fate?
In my world, "justice" includes things like a trial in which the prosecution must prove charges beyond a reasonable doubt, conviction, and sentencing in a court of law.
God knows, I'm with you fully on the need for a fair trial for someone who is accused.
That being said, justice and the law are two related, but separate things. They're like morality and ethics: one is an innate sense of what is right, and the other is an attempt by humans to codify it into a set of rules and procedures.
Nobody in this thread claimed that astronomers were more important than anyone else. The point is that they have a legitimate complaint about the impact of satellites like this.
Why do astronomers care about this?
It's only up there for 9 months get over it.
Also it orbits the planet every 90 minutes. It's just an artificial shooting star. You'll see a streak, then it's gone.
Astronomers care because it's not a legitimate satellite put into space to provide communication, research, or monitoring. It's an in-your-face disco-ball whose sole purpose is to make itself visible. That's obnoxious, and just not cool. Astronomers already deal (willingly) with good-faith satellites that can interfere with observations. They don't want to deal with useless crap like this.
For now, it's just one satellite with a 9-month mission. But if others follow, we could wind up with a mess of orbiting billboards that pollute the night sky.
Because it's space. This is the first space troll. Space trolling on a commercial scale. Now you need space cops to put them in space jail. But you have to get to space first.
The people who did this are on earth, not in space.
There is such a thing as space law. Per the info at this link, it covers such principles as:
non-appropriation of outer space by any one country, arms control, the freedom of exploration, liability for damage caused by space objects, the safety and rescue of spacecraft and astronauts, the prevention of harmful interference with space activities and the environment, the notification and registration of space activities, scientific investigation and the exploitation of natural resources in outer space and the settlement of disputes.
(Emphasis mine.) Has Rocket Lab broken space law? I don't know, IANAspaceL. But whether they have or not, I suppose they could be sued by anyone who is harmed or nuisanced by their activity, just like you could sue a neighbor who shines a spotlight into your front window, or plays their stereo too loud.
Indeed. Clinton would not become anything if Trump was removed from office. Speaker Paul Ryan would become Vice President, per the U.S. Presidential line of secession.