The US tried the same method in Vietnam, and look what happened. Just to reiterate, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries capable of hitting B-52s, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out. B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military. Period.
They had Wild Weasels (and other methods to suppress air defense) in Vietnam too, but that clearly didn't stop B-52s from being shot down. Heck, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out.
As with all things, we have an arms race. Air defense suppression techniques have got better, but so have air defenses. Unless advances in supression techniques have far outsripped advances in air defense (unlikely), we're in the same boat and B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military.
The B-52 is great at bombing people back into the stone age, so long as the people were not that advanced to begin with (i.e. as long as the people can't really shoot back). This was evident even back in the Vietnam war.
Want to bomb some insurgents in south Vietnam who don't have surface to air misses or fighter aircraft? No problem.
Want to bomb north Vietnam, which has some fighters and reasonably good surface to air missiles? Danger!
For example, look at operation Linebacker II, the American bombing campaign that "ended" the Vietnam War. The US used 207 B-52s, which flew 741 sorties during the operation. The North Vietnamize had 14 S-75 missile batteries distributed over their whole country. The S-75 design was about 15 years, so not super high tech even at the time. (The USSR had newer missilea, but they didn't give them to North Vietnam.) These 14 missile batteries shot down 15 B-52s. Granted, that's only a 2% loss rate per sortie, but imagine if North Vietnam had more than 14 missile batteries! Imagine that the missile batteries used modern technology rather than 1950s technology. The B52-s would be mincemeat even with more modern countermeasures. If the B-52 had a 2% loss rate in Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not be seeing the above headline.
That's the fundamental issue with the B-52. It's not a threat to a modern and competent foe like China or even Russia. Iran just bought a bunch of modern surface to air missiles (with a ~250 mile range) from Russia, so who knows how B-52s would fare in Iran.
Short version: The B-52 is great against people who wield AK-47s and drive around in Toyota pickup trucks. It's not clear how useful the B-52 is against a reasonably modern and competent military. I should add, rightly or wrongly, that is the logic for why the air force wants to ditch its A-10s, which fly at lower altitudes than the B-52 and are thus more vulnerable to man-portable surface to air missiles.
The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies -- which is not something you refuted. You quoted something about known supplies. It could well be that the GP's claim is true. Most of our *new* natural gas supplies are from fracking, which results in very little helium.
Moreover, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. You note that, "*A few* fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume," and then make the unsubstantiated claim that none of this He is recovered (which, if true, would prove what, exactly?) and that these few fields contain more than enough He for everyone. Citations please! The fact is that He prices are going up, and Econ 101 says the cause is demand increasing faster than supply.
That would be sound advice if he had an actual lawyer who knew that his ownership of a lockpick wasn't illegal. Instead, he only had an overburdened public defender who didn't know better. I wouldn't blame fightermagethief if he didn't break the law.
That's interesting. In the past, KDE has tried to make their software not dependent on linux functionality so that KDE can work in other places, like BSD and -- god help us -- Windows.
Since I only used KDE on linux, that's kind of frustrating. E.g. KDE refused to use FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to access remote files because FUSE wouldn't work on all their platforms (back in 2006). Instead, KDE rolls its own remote access solution which only truly works with KDE-aware applications. In contrast, GNOME uses FUSE behind the scenes so that non-GNOME can seamlessly access the remote files.
So, KDE refused to use FUSE because that was too linux specific (at the time) but now requires systemd? Ugh.
I don't have a problem with systemd, and I'm all for focusing on functionality for the setups that most users actually use (e.g. Windows' lack of FUSE shouldn't stop KDE from using FUSE on Linux, BSD, etc.), but they should come up with a consistent policy for when they rely on an external dependency and when they don't.
(Aside: I wish there was some way users could fund fixes for specific bugs/implementation of specific features on KDE. That way we wouldn't have to wait a decade to get features users have been clamoring for.)
Julia is aimed at people who do math-heavy problems (like computational physics), so that might be why you haven't heard of it. I think it's been on/. before.
I've never used Julia (the computing resources I have access to don't support Julia), but I've been following it, and the language looks pretty impressive: the ease of python/matlab with the speed of fortran/c. It's pretty impressive for a language you can use interactively.
I don't think pilots would be able to see the laser unless the beams are _really_ close to the plane.
If the laser beam is passing through empty space, there's no way to see it. The beam has to hit something to be visible. The atmosphere has some stuff in it, even on a clear night, which is why shining laser pointers at the sky is useful for pointing out starts. However, my guess is that the beam will only be visible to people nearly colinear with the beam and won't be like a blaster shot that's visible even if it pases far from you.
In short if you're shining a beam more than ~20 m from a plane on a clear night, I doubt anyone would even notice it. If you get closer than 20 m, then at best, you're being seriously negligent. If the sky isn't clear, why on earth are you shining a laser into the sky?
I hear this a lot, and while I'll take your word for it that it's true in practice, I'm not convinced it's true in principle. There are a lot of federal and state subsidies to rural areas -- both direct and indirect. E.g. the only reason there's any telecommunications services out there is the Universal Service Fund -- a transfer from urban/suburban to rural areas.
I've seen it argued that the subsidies go the other way: the federal government sends more money per capita in direct subsidies to urban and suburban areas than rural areas. That ignores state subsidies (for schools, roads, etc.), but more importantly, spending per capita is not the right measure. The measure should be the ratio of government subsidies to government tax receipts from an area -- because that covers the implicit subsidies as well. I haven't seen this broken down on a country by county basis, but if you look at a state by state basis, rural states get some serious subsidies. E.g. Mississippi (the state in TFA) gets $2.34 in federal spending for every $1 it pays in tax revenue. It's $1.81 in Indiana. In contrast, it's $0.48 for New Jersey, the most densely populated state, and $0.54 in your home state. (Source) I don't know if you benefit directly from this, but you definitely benefit from others who are subsidized.
In other words I think the cost of living in rural areas is artificially deflated, and if the federal tax code and subsidies get tweaked, there could be a "giant sucking sound" in rural parts of the country.
The internet can attract jobs back to rural areas.
Yes, I'm sure that good internet access can attract some jobs back to rural areas. However, I don't believe that the carrying capacity is that high; you're mostly talking about small business and self employed people. In contrast _a lot_ of people are leaving rural areas. A lot of recent job growth has been in the service sector, but that only happens where there's a reasonably high population density.
If you don’t at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust.
Unless rural Mississippi has some major perks that I'm unaware of, I'm not sure better internet access will really help those rural areas retain young people. Young people leaving rural areas is not a problem unique to Mississippi. It's happening all over the US, largely due to economic reasons such as the increasing efficiency of agriculture requiring fewer people. (See Rural Flight.) Unfortunately, instead of seeing rural flight as a natural response to economics, some chalk rural depopulation up to incredibly dumb Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, which I'm guessing most slashdoters haven't heard of but which some state legislatures seem to take seriously.
FWIW, I speak as someone who really likes rural areas, but I realize that it's not really compatible with the employment I want. The best I can hope for is living in/near a smallish city and getting enough money to buy a cabin in the woods for weekends.
Putin can get away with what he's doing becaus the Russian people support it... Putin got away with what he did in Ukraine because he was able to keep the deaths of hundreds of Russian soldiers largely out of the press, and dismiss those who did tell their stories as full of shit.
Yes, the Russian people support Putin, but I'm guessing that a lot of that is because he controls the media and can manufacture crises at will. In short, I think the second sentence in your quote explains the first rather than the other way around.
Look at this plot of Putin's populairity rateing. His popularity had been slowly but steadily declining from 2008 to late 2013 -- dropping to a low of ~60% around the end of that period. What happens after that? A fortuitously timed olympics that stirred patriotism, and a manufactured Ukraine crisis to amp things up further. Putin's popularity jumped to something like 85%.
Yes, a 60% approval rating is high by international standards but is low by the standards of a media-controlling leader with authoritarian tendencies. I don't think it's a coincidence that a manufactured crisis followed a steady decline to a 60% approval rating. Perhaps he saw what was happening, decided 60% was a lower limit on what he would tolerate, and brilliantly boosed it after that. (He got lucky with the timing of the olympics, which would have boosted his popularity above 60% on its own since Russia did so well at the olympics, but maybe he decided that boost wasn't enough or would be temporary.)
Bottom line the Japanese have no real trouble right now. I have never seen more jap. Tourists outside of Japan since the last decades.
Regardless of the cause of Japan's 1990ish mess, the fact is that their situation has not really improved since. Seriously, their GDP per capita has gone nowhere over the last two decades; your anecdote about Japanese tourists doesn't disprove that. Japan is still a wealthy country because they were ahead of the curve in 1990, so there have always been a lot of Japanese tourists.
so they employ people to do jobs that machines could do cheaper, because if you lay them all off, they will be a burden on society.
Why wouldn't they be able to find new jobs? Does society really benefit when you keep employing people to dig ditches by hand when you could just use an excavator? Why focus on making jobs rather than making progress?
Note that Japan has a _lower_ labor force participation rate (the number of employed people as a fraction of employable people) than the US (59.6% vs 62.5%). So even if Japan is not replacing people with machines in order to keep people employed, the result seems to be fewer people employed!
This effect is not news to economists, although it can be counterintuitive. The focus on keeping jobs at the cost of technological progress is known as the "make work bias", and it really isn't beneficial for anyone in the long term. See this for an economist explaining the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at a plot of GDP per capita over time for Japan. It has basically gone nowhere since 1990 (there's been some up and down but the trend is basically flat). Japan had a notably higher GDP per capita than the USA in 1990. The current situation is reversed by roughly the same amount.
Now, is this proof that old technology is to blame for Japan's famously stagnate economy? No, but it's telling that Japan has both 1990 technology and 1990 GDP per capita. In contrast, the USA has been continuously modernizing its technology and GDP per capita has followed suit, and a lot of the US economy's growth has been in the tech sector.
So yes, they have no proof, but it does sound about right.
Maybe. But it's telling that relativistic effects were considered in the design phase; the designers identified relativistic effects as being important. Perhaps they could have corrected for it after the fact. (Was/is the system really capable of being updated every two minutes?) If the designers didn't account for relativistic effects, they would have had a rude shock to discover that their multibillion dollar program kept failing every two minutes... I think a better argument is that they could have designed a system that didn't account for relativistic effects _if_ they knew that the effects existed, were important, and required a frequent-update mechanism to correct for.
Regardless, GPS has other examples of basic science turning into innovation. How about the atomic clock? It was first proposed with a concrete theory in 1930 (Rabi), but the first accurate one was produced in 1955. There's a good reason they didn't put a casio wrist watch in the satellite.
You can probably get away with just Special Relativity, rather than needing full blown General Relativity
It's actually closer to the other way around. The effect from general relativity is ~5 times stronger than the effect from special relativity (link below). I wouldn't have guessed that either.
Allowing for relativistic effects makes it more accurate, but it would work fairly well without doing this.
No, GPS would be inaccurate to the point of being useless without accounting for relativistic effects. There are many references explaining this out there (see google), but here is one (emphasis added):
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time. This kind of accumulated error is akin to measuring my location while standing on my front porch in Columbus, Ohio one day, and then making the same measurement a week later and having my GPS receiver tell me that my porch and I are currently somewhere in the air kilometers away.
You only say that because you are thinking of computers that are a generation behind the cutting edge of technology. Thankfully, the government is not as behind the times as you think.
The intelligence community (NSA et al.) are _major_ funders of quantum computing research in the USA (since working quantum computers could break current encryption methods, the NSA can't afford to get they second). The funding comes through IARPA -- NSA's equivalent of DARPA.
They've done a good enough job advancing the state of the art that corporations recently began to see quantum computers as viable and are now getting in on the game. Google recently poached one of the NSA's major funding recipients (John Martinis at UCSB), and I know that Northrop Grumman (the major defense contractor) is now spending its own money on quantum computers.
Quantum computers are not useful yet, but when they're here, you can thank the NSA.
So yes, defense/intelligence funding currently driving innovation by funding basic research, and it's paying off.
Basic science doesn't "drive" innovation, but basic science sure as hell enables innovation.
Einstein published his work on general relativity in 1915. The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design) began development in 1973.
Einstein published his work on stimulated emission in 1916. The first laser (which requires a knowledge of stimulated emission to design) was built in 1960.
For those keeping score, those are gaps of 58 and 44 years, respectively, to go from basic science to innovation. Neither of those innovations were simply bumbled into by tinkerers. The designers knew the science from the get-go, and the inventions would not have happened without knowing the science from the get-go. The days of Edison and similar tinkerers has long passed. Good luck inventing any modern technology by chance. The low hanging fruit have already been picked.
From TFA:
It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them.
Industry does not function on the timespan of 4, 5, or 6 DECADES. There is zero chance that modern industry could do that.* The argument in TFA is total bullshit.
*That said, once upon a time industry did kind of do this _a little_. I did research with Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), and I decided to look into the history of the devices. Where was the first SQUID made? Ford (the car company) research labs back in 1963 ( http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... ). Once upon a time, large corporations were flush with cash and without shareholders who wanted to wring every ounce of profit from them, so corporations _sometimes_ funded basic research just because they could -- _sometimes_ without applications in mind. However, that has long gone the way of the dodo. And no, they didn't abandon the business because the government was funding it instead. Modern corporations will never spend the money to do real basic research because it is not economically useful (either in 1963 or now) to invent something and have someone else use it 5 decades later. They learned that lesson decades ago. Ford has never made use of a SQUID, and real applications are still on the horizon (tho they may not be far away today).
Part of the problem here is that the FDA requires generics do need to undergo testing similar to the original product (instead of merely proving that the ingredients in the generic are the same as in the original product), which can take years and millions of dollars. These FDA requirements make generics expensive to produce -- meaning that generic versions of many drugs do not exist. Without the FDA requirements, the market would take care of ridiculous price bumps by bringing in competitors.
Now, I just claimed that the FDA makes it hard to bring generics to the market, so how did a competitor spring up so quickly in this case? The answer is that the new manufacture seriously bent FDA rules: the product mentioned in the description is _not_ FDA approved. The company making the product is not a standard drug manufacturer; it is a "compounding pharmacy" -- meaning that it can skirt FDA rules by making batches of drugs for one individual at a time (not making huge batches and selling them to Wallgreen's, CVS, etc.) Since this drug is not widely used, this approach may work. However, the FDA regulations are still a burden in general (and the FDA still has some power to put the kibosh on compounding pharmacy).
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The US tried the same method in Vietnam, and look what happened. Just to reiterate, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries capable of hitting B-52s, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out. B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military. Period.
They had Wild Weasels (and other methods to suppress air defense) in Vietnam too, but that clearly didn't stop B-52s from being shot down. Heck, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out.
As with all things, we have an arms race. Air defense suppression techniques have got better, but so have air defenses. Unless advances in supression techniques have far outsripped advances in air defense (unlikely), we're in the same boat and B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military.
I should change "distributed over their whole country" to "in the whole country." The missiles were not very well distributed.
The B-52 is great at bombing people back into the stone age, so long as the people were not that advanced to begin with (i.e. as long as the people can't really shoot back). This was evident even back in the Vietnam war.
Want to bomb some insurgents in south Vietnam who don't have surface to air misses or fighter aircraft? No problem.
Want to bomb north Vietnam, which has some fighters and reasonably good surface to air missiles? Danger!
For example, look at operation Linebacker II, the American bombing campaign that "ended" the Vietnam War. The US used 207 B-52s, which flew 741 sorties during the operation. The North Vietnamize had 14 S-75 missile batteries distributed over their whole country. The S-75 design was about 15 years, so not super high tech even at the time. (The USSR had newer missilea, but they didn't give them to North Vietnam.) These 14 missile batteries shot down 15 B-52s. Granted, that's only a 2% loss rate per sortie, but imagine if North Vietnam had more than 14 missile batteries! Imagine that the missile batteries used modern technology rather than 1950s technology. The B52-s would be mincemeat even with more modern countermeasures. If the B-52 had a 2% loss rate in Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not be seeing the above headline.
That's the fundamental issue with the B-52. It's not a threat to a modern and competent foe like China or even Russia. Iran just bought a bunch of modern surface to air missiles (with a ~250 mile range) from Russia, so who knows how B-52s would fare in Iran.
Short version: The B-52 is great against people who wield AK-47s and drive around in Toyota pickup trucks. It's not clear how useful the B-52 is against a reasonably modern and competent military. I should add, rightly or wrongly, that is the logic for why the air force wants to ditch its A-10s, which fly at lower altitudes than the B-52 and are thus more vulnerable to man-portable surface to air missiles.
Fair enough. Cut off the first sentence of my post if you'd like; the rest still stands.
The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies -- which is not something you refuted. You quoted something about known supplies. It could well be that the GP's claim is true. Most of our *new* natural gas supplies are from fracking, which results in very little helium.
Moreover, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. You note that, "*A few* fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume," and then make the unsubstantiated claim that none of this He is recovered (which, if true, would prove what, exactly?) and that these few fields contain more than enough He for everyone. Citations please! The fact is that He prices are going up, and Econ 101 says the cause is demand increasing faster than supply.
That would be sound advice if he had an actual lawyer who knew that his ownership of a lockpick wasn't illegal. Instead, he only had an overburdened public defender who didn't know better. I wouldn't blame fightermagethief if he didn't break the law.
That's interesting. In the past, KDE has tried to make their software not dependent on linux functionality so that KDE can work in other places, like BSD and -- god help us -- Windows.
Since I only used KDE on linux, that's kind of frustrating. E.g. KDE refused to use FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to access remote files because FUSE wouldn't work on all their platforms (back in 2006). Instead, KDE rolls its own remote access solution which only truly works with KDE-aware applications. In contrast, GNOME uses FUSE behind the scenes so that non-GNOME can seamlessly access the remote files.
So, KDE refused to use FUSE because that was too linux specific (at the time) but now requires systemd? Ugh.
I don't have a problem with systemd, and I'm all for focusing on functionality for the setups that most users actually use (e.g. Windows' lack of FUSE shouldn't stop KDE from using FUSE on Linux, BSD, etc.), but they should come up with a consistent policy for when they rely on an external dependency and when they don't.
(Aside: I wish there was some way users could fund fixes for specific bugs/implementation of specific features on KDE. That way we wouldn't have to wait a decade to get features users have been clamoring for.)
Take a look at the benchmarks on the Julia frontpage and reevaluate your statement.
Julia is aimed at people who do math-heavy problems (like computational physics), so that might be why you haven't heard of it. I think it's been on /. before.
I've never used Julia (the computing resources I have access to don't support Julia), but I've been following it, and the language looks pretty impressive: the ease of python/matlab with the speed of fortran/c. It's pretty impressive for a language you can use interactively.
I don't think pilots would be able to see the laser unless the beams are _really_ close to the plane.
If the laser beam is passing through empty space, there's no way to see it. The beam has to hit something to be visible. The atmosphere has some stuff in it, even on a clear night, which is why shining laser pointers at the sky is useful for pointing out starts. However, my guess is that the beam will only be visible to people nearly colinear with the beam and won't be like a blaster shot that's visible even if it pases far from you.
In short if you're shining a beam more than ~20 m from a plane on a clear night, I doubt anyone would even notice it. If you get closer than 20 m, then at best, you're being seriously negligent. If the sky isn't clear, why on earth are you shining a laser into the sky?
Everything is cheaper here.
I hear this a lot, and while I'll take your word for it that it's true in practice, I'm not convinced it's true in principle. There are a lot of federal and state subsidies to rural areas -- both direct and indirect. E.g. the only reason there's any telecommunications services out there is the Universal Service Fund -- a transfer from urban/suburban to rural areas.
I've seen it argued that the subsidies go the other way: the federal government sends more money per capita in direct subsidies to urban and suburban areas than rural areas. That ignores state subsidies (for schools, roads, etc.), but more importantly, spending per capita is not the right measure. The measure should be the ratio of government subsidies to government tax receipts from an area -- because that covers the implicit subsidies as well. I haven't seen this broken down on a country by county basis, but if you look at a state by state basis, rural states get some serious subsidies. E.g. Mississippi (the state in TFA) gets $2.34 in federal spending for every $1 it pays in tax revenue. It's $1.81 in Indiana. In contrast, it's $0.48 for New Jersey, the most densely populated state, and $0.54 in your home state. (Source) I don't know if you benefit directly from this, but you definitely benefit from others who are subsidized.
In other words I think the cost of living in rural areas is artificially deflated, and if the federal tax code and subsidies get tweaked, there could be a "giant sucking sound" in rural parts of the country.
The internet can attract jobs back to rural areas.
Yes, I'm sure that good internet access can attract some jobs back to rural areas. However, I don't believe that the carrying capacity is that high; you're mostly talking about small business and self employed people. In contrast _a lot_ of people are leaving rural areas. A lot of recent job growth has been in the service sector, but that only happens where there's a reasonably high population density.
If you don’t at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust.
Unless rural Mississippi has some major perks that I'm unaware of, I'm not sure better internet access will really help those rural areas retain young people. Young people leaving rural areas is not a problem unique to Mississippi. It's happening all over the US, largely due to economic reasons such as the increasing efficiency of agriculture requiring fewer people. (See Rural Flight.) Unfortunately, instead of seeing rural flight as a natural response to economics, some chalk rural depopulation up to incredibly dumb Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, which I'm guessing most slashdoters haven't heard of but which some state legislatures seem to take seriously.
FWIW, I speak as someone who really likes rural areas, but I realize that it's not really compatible with the employment I want. The best I can hope for is living in/near a smallish city and getting enough money to buy a cabin in the woods for weekends.
Putin can get away with what he's doing becaus the Russian people support it... Putin got away with what he did in Ukraine because he was able to keep the deaths of hundreds of Russian soldiers largely out of the press, and dismiss those who did tell their stories as full of shit.
Yes, the Russian people support Putin, but I'm guessing that a lot of that is because he controls the media and can manufacture crises at will. In short, I think the second sentence in your quote explains the first rather than the other way around.
Look at this plot of Putin's populairity rateing. His popularity had been slowly but steadily declining from 2008 to late 2013 -- dropping to a low of ~60% around the end of that period. What happens after that? A fortuitously timed olympics that stirred patriotism, and a manufactured Ukraine crisis to amp things up further. Putin's popularity jumped to something like 85%.
Yes, a 60% approval rating is high by international standards but is low by the standards of a media-controlling leader with authoritarian tendencies. I don't think it's a coincidence that a manufactured crisis followed a steady decline to a 60% approval rating. Perhaps he saw what was happening, decided 60% was a lower limit on what he would tolerate, and brilliantly boosed it after that. (He got lucky with the timing of the olympics, which would have boosted his popularity above 60% on its own since Russia did so well at the olympics, but maybe he decided that boost wasn't enough or would be temporary.)
Bottom line the Japanese have no real trouble right now. I have never seen more jap. Tourists outside of Japan since the last decades.
Regardless of the cause of Japan's 1990ish mess, the fact is that their situation has not really improved since. Seriously, their GDP per capita has gone nowhere over the last two decades; your anecdote about Japanese tourists doesn't disprove that. Japan is still a wealthy country because they were ahead of the curve in 1990, so there have always been a lot of Japanese tourists.
so they employ people to do jobs that machines could do cheaper, because if you lay them all off, they will be a burden on society.
Why wouldn't they be able to find new jobs? Does society really benefit when you keep employing people to dig ditches by hand when you could just use an excavator? Why focus on making jobs rather than making progress?
Note that Japan has a _lower_ labor force participation rate (the number of employed people as a fraction of employable people) than the US (59.6% vs 62.5%). So even if Japan is not replacing people with machines in order to keep people employed, the result seems to be fewer people employed!
This effect is not news to economists, although it can be counterintuitive. The focus on keeping jobs at the cost of technological progress is known as the "make work bias", and it really isn't beneficial for anyone in the long term. See this for an economist explaining the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at a plot of GDP per capita over time for Japan. It has basically gone nowhere since 1990 (there's been some up and down but the trend is basically flat). Japan had a notably higher GDP per capita than the USA in 1990. The current situation is reversed by roughly the same amount.
Now, is this proof that old technology is to blame for Japan's famously stagnate economy? No, but it's telling that Japan has both 1990 technology and 1990 GDP per capita. In contrast, the USA has been continuously modernizing its technology and GDP per capita has followed suit, and a lot of the US economy's growth has been in the tech sector.
So yes, they have no proof, but it does sound about right.
Maybe. But it's telling that relativistic effects were considered in the design phase; the designers identified relativistic effects as being important. Perhaps they could have corrected for it after the fact. (Was/is the system really capable of being updated every two minutes?) If the designers didn't account for relativistic effects, they would have had a rude shock to discover that their multibillion dollar program kept failing every two minutes... I think a better argument is that they could have designed a system that didn't account for relativistic effects _if_ they knew that the effects existed, were important, and required a frequent-update mechanism to correct for.
Regardless, GPS has other examples of basic science turning into innovation. How about the atomic clock? It was first proposed with a concrete theory in 1930 (Rabi), but the first accurate one was produced in 1955. There's a good reason they didn't put a casio wrist watch in the satellite.
You can probably get away with just Special Relativity, rather than needing full blown General Relativity
It's actually closer to the other way around. The effect from general relativity is ~5 times stronger than the effect from special relativity (link below). I wouldn't have guessed that either.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-stat...
Allowing for relativistic effects makes it more accurate, but it would work fairly well without doing this.
No, GPS would be inaccurate to the point of being useless without accounting for relativistic effects. There are many references explaining this out there (see google), but here is one (emphasis added):
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time. This kind of accumulated error is akin to measuring my location while standing on my front porch in Columbus, Ohio one day, and then making the same measurement a week later and having my GPS receiver tell me that my porch and I are currently somewhere in the air kilometers away.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-stat...
You only say that because you are thinking of computers that are a generation behind the cutting edge of technology. Thankfully, the government is not as behind the times as you think.
The intelligence community (NSA et al.) are _major_ funders of quantum computing research in the USA (since working quantum computers could break current encryption methods, the NSA can't afford to get they second). The funding comes through IARPA -- NSA's equivalent of DARPA.
They've done a good enough job advancing the state of the art that corporations recently began to see quantum computers as viable and are now getting in on the game. Google recently poached one of the NSA's major funding recipients (John Martinis at UCSB), and I know that Northrop Grumman (the major defense contractor) is now spending its own money on quantum computers.
Quantum computers are not useful yet, but when they're here, you can thank the NSA.
So yes, defense/intelligence funding currently driving innovation by funding basic research, and it's paying off.
Basic science doesn't "drive" innovation, but basic science sure as hell enables innovation.
Einstein published his work on general relativity in 1915. The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design) began development in 1973.
Einstein published his work on stimulated emission in 1916. The first laser (which requires a knowledge of stimulated emission to design) was built in 1960.
For those keeping score, those are gaps of 58 and 44 years, respectively, to go from basic science to innovation. Neither of those innovations were simply bumbled into by tinkerers. The designers knew the science from the get-go, and the inventions would not have happened without knowing the science from the get-go. The days of Edison and similar tinkerers has long passed. Good luck inventing any modern technology by chance. The low hanging fruit have already been picked.
From TFA:
It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them.
Industry does not function on the timespan of 4, 5, or 6 DECADES. There is zero chance that modern industry could do that.* The argument in TFA is total bullshit.
*That said, once upon a time industry did kind of do this _a little_. I did research with Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), and I decided to look into the history of the devices. Where was the first SQUID made? Ford (the car company) research labs back in 1963 ( http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... ). Once upon a time, large corporations were flush with cash and without shareholders who wanted to wring every ounce of profit from them, so corporations _sometimes_ funded basic research just because they could -- _sometimes_ without applications in mind. However, that has long gone the way of the dodo. And no, they didn't abandon the business because the government was funding it instead. Modern corporations will never spend the money to do real basic research because it is not economically useful (either in 1963 or now) to invent something and have someone else use it 5 decades later. They learned that lesson decades ago. Ford has never made use of a SQUID, and real applications are still on the horizon (tho they may not be far away today).
Part of the problem here is that the FDA requires generics do need to undergo testing similar to the original product (instead of merely proving that the ingredients in the generic are the same as in the original product), which can take years and millions of dollars. These FDA requirements make generics expensive to produce -- meaning that generic versions of many drugs do not exist. Without the FDA requirements, the market would take care of ridiculous price bumps by bringing in competitors.
Now, I just claimed that the FDA makes it hard to bring generics to the market, so how did a competitor spring up so quickly in this case? The answer is that the new manufacture seriously bent FDA rules: the product mentioned in the description is _not_ FDA approved. The company making the product is not a standard drug manufacturer; it is a "compounding pharmacy" -- meaning that it can skirt FDA rules by making batches of drugs for one individual at a time (not making huge batches and selling them to Wallgreen's, CVS, etc.) Since this drug is not widely used, this approach may work. However, the FDA regulations are still a burden in general (and the FDA still has some power to put the kibosh on compounding pharmacy).
See http://marginalrevolution.com/... for more information
So increasing the minimum wage does decrease employment. Who woulda thunk?