That's not really true. We've never experimented with a capitalism where no costs could be externalized.
But that's not the basic problem. The basic problems come down to an imbalance of power. When there is too much centralized power, those with a strong need to control and coerce others are pulled to the control points, and their decisions will usually be socially destructive. Others will also try to access those controls, but it's not just the more capable that will be able to grab the controls, it's a combination of luck, skill, connections, and [gr|n]eed. Those who feel the need for the power will be inspired to strive more vigorously for it, and those are precisely the people you don't want to have it.
When there are lots of minor points of control and no major ones that does not cause a problem. Thus while communications were weak and local mayors were the proximate power, with state governments being at one remove, and the federal government needing to act mainly through the state governments the US worked quite well...considering. Unfortunately, the railroads enabled rapid projection of force across multiple state boundaries and rapid communication, which increased both the control available to the federal and state governments. In my analysis this is the primary cause of the Civil War (1865). The trend increasing has lead to the further strengthening of the central ("Federal"*) government and even the state governments are relatively weak. At the same time a multitude of small companies have, for the same reasons, become a few major corporations. It's not clear to me what the optimal size of an organization is these days to maximize control, but it seems clear that as technology advances it's getting larger. Light speed will provide one absolute barrier.
Do note, however, I was considering at what size a megalomaniac ruler would find internal stresses least objectionable. This is not anything like what most people would find best.
That said, there are projects which can only be undertaken by organizations of a certain minimum size, though clever approaches can aid in allowing smaller organizations to do more than would be apparent. Building something large, like a major dam, or a trip to the moon, requires a certain minimum access to resources.
OTOH, most people are happier in smaller organizations where control can be looser. The work-around that has been successful is to have organizations that manage organizations, but don't control them. (If they control, you get the "centralized point of control" problem again.) Unfortunately, this requires notable (and different) skill, and not many examples of such successful meta-organizations exist. But these organizations could, in principle, all be capitalist. They would just need to operate within an environment that didn't allow them to externalize human costs. (Externalization of environmental costs have different reasons for being forbidden.)
THAT said, these comments are all only applicable while most of the decision makers are human. Expect them to become obsolete within the next 2-3 decades. What will replace them depends totally upon the nature of currently un-created AIs.
They don't want to be replaced by a real robot because they like eating.
The problem is, it's going to happen anyway. The process is already well underway. He estimated half of all jobs, but that doesn't require an advanced AI, just a cheap one. But advanced AIs are coming anyway, so it's more like 90% of all jobs, but this is probably over a longer time span. Basically, anyone who isn't top management is likely to be replaced within a few decades. And top management will hang on only because they are the ones making the hiring decisions.
I'm going to pretend idiot and answer you: The real need for hybrids is not because of high gas prices, that's only the enabler. The need is to reduce the rate at which CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. When the technology is more perfected hybrids will be replaced by electrics, and electrical production plants will be phased over to... I want to say non-polluting, but that's a lie. Lower polluting plants. Like wind, solar, and possibly even nuclear or fusion. Wind and solar still need better storage and distribution to be practical on a large scale, fission has numerous problems dealing with waste, safety, etc., and fusion isn't here yet. So a slow changeover seems necessary. But we need to have started the process much more vigorously than we have, and we need to have pushed research harder than we did. (Yes, research becomes less efficient when you push it harder, but you still get results faster, if you do it right.)
Currently the people who champion any one particular source of power as "The Answer" are blind to the faults of that source. They all currently have unacceptable drawbacks. But some of the drawbacks could be handled with significant investment (wind and solar). All could benefit from increased research results.
P.S.: I'd say that fission suffers from too much government regulation, but then I recall that they wouldn't build the existing plants without the government indemnifying them against liability in case of problems. If the builders don't think the plant is safe enough to build, why should I disagree?
You are assuming what the original purpose of the copyright law was. There is evidence to suggest that it was always about allowing an elite to control the distribution of works for financial gain...and by elite I do not mean the authors. I'd say media companies, but that would create an improper impression, as originally the works were all printed. (Well, there were also laws about what the bards were allowed to sing, different in different countries and times, but that was not usually for financial gain.)
This particular case is not about censorship. "The Diary of Anne Frank" is readily available if you buy it. This particular case is about money.
That said, this law, and other similar laws, are enablers of censorship. Any law that allows someone other than the author to withhold public availability of a work is an enabler of censorship.
THAT said, this is not an argument either for or against this particular law. I've made that in other places. This is an argument in favor of thinking clearly about what one is favoring or opposed to.
There are exceptions. I think Tolkien was one. But you are generally correct. However extended copyrights allow for derivative works to have considerably broader protection than if the copyright were not extended. Consider any series of books by an author...especially those by "house names", e.g. the Tom Swift series. They've now faded into irrelevance, but the "house name" that wrote the series was allowed to keep the entire cast of characters and environment under copyright for considerably over 20 years. Or the E.E.Smith Lensman series. They got started in the 1930's, I think, and continued up into the 1950's.
Please note that this has both its good and bad points. It allows the copyright holder to maintain the "purity" of the series...which has both good and bad aspects. Consider the problems of doing a "shared worlds" series where not everyone has even read the background notes.
So there is value in extended copyrights...but not enough. And the downsides can be quite obnoxious.
Copyright is for 5 years and is infinitely renewable. Each issuance or renewal of the copyright costs 2^n * $1 where n is the number of renewals. (I.e., the initial issue costs $1, the first renewal $2, etc.)
I agree with a lot of your points, but I've encountered many managers that you wouldn't consider "good managers".
And WRT your final paragraph...automation is going to make a job based economy a guarantee that nearly everyone is at the very bottom rung. We are already at the point where the US and India are BOTH losing jobs to increased automation, and we are still in the early days. Projections call for over half of the existing jobs to disappear within around a decade. And I don't think anyone can predict which ones will be safe. (Except upper management, and that's because they are the ones making the decisions.) As this continues it will become more and more evident that it's foolish to take on a large debt with the intention of paying it off after entering a profitable career. It isn't clear to me what is going to motivate people to study for years. (Well, I would have done it because I was fascinated by math and physics, but mine is a minority perspective, and I would have studied, albeit in a less directed and intense way, even if college had been impossible.
I agree that trade has in the past acted to suppress war. I'm not sure it's working that way in the present. Certainly simple economic arguments don't apply. The US spent more to invade Iran than the entire wealth of the country would have represented if we'd carted it off, and we didn't bother. It was politics extremely much more than economics. (I've heard it asserted that the reason for the war was that Iran started negotiating to sell oil denominated in Euros rather than Dollars. I know of no evidence either pro or con, but it's the most reasonable reason I've heard, if it's true. And since all the other reasons seem utter garbage, I tend to believe it.)
The argument that trade suppresses war has it's shining examples, but there are also many cases where it appears that war is engaged in to control trade.
Now, "Our real problem isn't that China makes t-shirts": That's not clear, or perhaps not exact to the point I was asserting. T-shirts was an example of an industry that isn't inherently centralized. Another such industry is software construction, but notice that due to the laws, customs, and business regulations of the US most software development (for profit) *IS* centralized. How things could be changed is not a subject on which I am competent to speak, but I am competent to observe the pattern. My suspicion is that this has to do with the distribution system. I have heard that to get notable promotion by or positioning within a store, you need to... compensate... the store owner. I used compensate where I would have liked to say bribe. I feel the process should be as illegal as other sorts of kickback, and the laws against all forms of kickback should be more rigorously enforced. Even the existing laws against bundling are either not enforced, or need to be considerably stronger.
But these are details. There are nearly endless details, it's the summation of them that tends to encourage the formation of large organizations with centralized control, not any particular one. (An exception might be the wretched and unjust Citizens United decision...though I might go back to Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886) and find that it, and all decisions based upon it were likewise unjust. [Or perhaps the original decision was just, but the way that it was phrased made it unjust.])
At least not unless they feel extremely confident that nobody will be able to prove (in a preponderance of the evidence sense) that they are doing it. And given the uncertain nature of juries, that would be a pretty big risk.
MS may have been explicity about their purposes, but saying that they've been clear about their intentions requires that you believe them. And even if that's true, what their intentions are this week doesn't speak to what their intentions will be next year.
So the question is "What personal information could the current system by coerced to reveal (without additional software 'upgrades')?". I must admit that I don't find the answer clear. The ZDNet article wasn't all that reassuring.
OTOH, as I do not have or use any MSWind installs, this is sort of academic. Many third parties are already so lax about their security that I should presume that any information about me they hold will be clandestinely copied. Just consider the recent story about pins being "stolen" from the IRS.
P.S.: Stolen is a very poor term for the process, as the original is (presumably) left in place. OTOH, "clandestinely copied" is too long and clumsy. What's needed is something short and pithy that falls easily off the tongue like, e.g., "snarfed". You are free to use my suggestion if you want to, but you'll need to use context to make your meaning clear until it enters common usage.
How about "both guys are basically right, but only telling a part of the story"?
Similarly for linux, some window managers (I think it's the window managers) seem to check for updates. I may have told them to, since if I were asked I would have asked that they do so. Others don't (or didn't a year ago). And I've never had a linux machine fail when disconnected from the desktop, but you could certainly state that "some of the functionality was broken". Guess what I mean. Then read the next paragraph.
.
.
When disconnected from the internet NTP doesn't properly reset the system clock for drifting. But if I didn't mention WHAT functionality was broken, you might fill in something rather different.
IIRC, this depends on how you distribute the code originally. I'd need to read the license again, but I think you're describing the terms that apply when the source is a part of the same distribution as the binary.
You overstate a basically correct position. The VC is not in business for your health or profit, and you can't trust a word they say, or an item of the contract that isn't readily enforceable. But there are times when it's still the appropriate option. But only AFTER you've published the current version under an irrevocable license...something that guarantees you future access without worries about either copyright or patents. The GPL is my favorite, but for many purposes BSD works as well or better. Also consider the MIT license. But publish this publicly before you sign the contract, and make certain that they have acknowledged the prior publication in a verifiable way. An attachment to the contract is probably best, but this is just my guess. A url to a github repository might suffice. Talk to a lawyer.
You not using a credit card doesn't keep your bank from transmitting weakly encrypted data. I've been told (by a counter clerk, so she may not have known) that they have a separate network from the Internet. So perhaps this is less of a problem than it appears. But I recall hearing of an isolated nuclear power plant that got infected by a virus because a contractor was plugged into two networks at once.
I already refuse to bank on-line, because of multiple past security issues. This would just mean that I would need to only buy things on-line with a purchased credit card...and never use one tied into my account. (I already have a separated account that I use for ALL credit card transactions.)
So there are ways and ways for individuals to get around exposing themselves. But there's no way for them to avoid having third parties expose them.
You're making the false assumption that the accepted protocols will be secure. This is historically not true. When the government mandates a monopoly, duopoly, etc. then implementation standards slip. And they're already pretty low.
While I tend to agree with you over the long term, over the short term safety is quite often correlated with higher expenses. And people tend to devalue long term gains. Much management won't look beyond the next quarter.
More directly to the point ANY change in procedures will be associated with a short term cost. And, in addition, most managers resent any limits on their ability to control their employees...even limits they don't intend to approach. (And some of the reasons for such resentment are quite valid, though others aren't.)
Do I think *who* in America would be richer if we produced more t-shirts and fewer aircraft and CPUs?
While the parent argument is not totally bogus, it's unfairly presuming that the wealth of a country distributes equally.
That said, increasing automation is rapidly making all this irrelevant. A headline just yesterday declared that BOTH "America" and India were losing jobs to automation. If India is losing jobs to automation, it's rather hard to believe that low wages will retain jobs.
Methanol is a well known starter compound for numerous synthetic pathways. I believe that in WWII it was used in Germany to power cars (though how often I don't know.)
I will agree that methanol would be a terrible jet fuel. It is not only low in energy density, it absorbs water like a sponge.
OTOH, many model aircraft used to use methanol for fuel, so it not totally unreasonable as a drone fuel.
In a different article (possibly about a different project) it was explicitly stated that the cost would currently be prohibitive, but that if oil ran out this could be a useful replacement.
I would be very surprised if the same caveat didn't apply to this project, presuming it's not the same project.
Contracts aren't necessarily worth any more than the paper they are written on. What are your enforcement powers? How expensive is it to enforce the contract? Do you trust the party that wrote the contract to honestly tell you what it means? (Do they even know?) Etc.
Once you make yourself dependent on someone else, you are dependent on them. A contract *MAY* give you the tools to damage them somewhat if they disregard it, but that won't give you back your lost time and effort. It may well not even pay your attorney's fees.
While you are technically correct, people who are not invested in a company won't follow the details of internal politics...in fact those are usually hidden even from those that do, so as a short-cut technique for figuring out how much to trust a company you attend to its externally visible actions. This does require that you treat the company as an entity, and ignore the details about who decided what...but that's usually secret anyway.
So yes, this is an invalid way to think about a company. It is, however, a useful tool. And if corporations can be ruled to be legally persons, it seems improper to castigate someone using that same shortcut in a non-detrimental to citizens way.
I've generally avoided MS software because of reliability problems. MSWord is an exception, and, yes, I've had documents that wouldn't transfer between versions of MSWord. They were actually worse about it than Apple. I will admit that that was a rare event, but it happened. Eventually someone published a way to work around it, but that was after it no longer mattered to me.
Most of the problems, however, were with 3rd party proprietary file formats. Companies that went out of business, companies that discontinued a product, companies with incompatible file formats between versions, and no way to convert, etc. And it wasn't relatively rare applications like CNC, I'm talking about graphics programs designed for children to use, music score editing programs, various other things along the same line. (Sometimes the program would be picked up again a few years later, but that was a rare event, and usually by the time it had happened I'd already had to switch to something else. And at least once the new version wouldn't read the files from the old version...I didn't usually even check, so I don't really know how frequent that was.)
Open file formats have been a life-saver, and even when Linux was a pain to use (1998-200?.. varies depending on the application) they were more than enough recompense.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really true. We've never experimented with a capitalism where no costs could be externalized.
But that's not the basic problem. The basic problems come down to an imbalance of power. When there is too much centralized power, those with a strong need to control and coerce others are pulled to the control points, and their decisions will usually be socially destructive. Others will also try to access those controls, but it's not just the more capable that will be able to grab the controls, it's a combination of luck, skill, connections, and [gr|n]eed. Those who feel the need for the power will be inspired to strive more vigorously for it, and those are precisely the people you don't want to have it.
When there are lots of minor points of control and no major ones that does not cause a problem. Thus while communications were weak and local mayors were the proximate power, with state governments being at one remove, and the federal government needing to act mainly through the state governments the US worked quite well...considering. Unfortunately, the railroads enabled rapid projection of force across multiple state boundaries and rapid communication, which increased both the control available to the federal and state governments. In my analysis this is the primary cause of the Civil War (1865). The trend increasing has lead to the further strengthening of the central ("Federal"*) government and even the state governments are relatively weak. At the same time a multitude of small companies have, for the same reasons, become a few major corporations. It's not clear to me what the optimal size of an organization is these days to maximize control, but it seems clear that as technology advances it's getting larger. Light speed will provide one absolute barrier.
Do note, however, I was considering at what size a megalomaniac ruler would find internal stresses least objectionable. This is not anything like what most people would find best.
That said, there are projects which can only be undertaken by organizations of a certain minimum size, though clever approaches can aid in allowing smaller organizations to do more than would be apparent. Building something large, like a major dam, or a trip to the moon, requires a certain minimum access to resources.
OTOH, most people are happier in smaller organizations where control can be looser. The work-around that has been successful is to have organizations that manage organizations, but don't control them. (If they control, you get the "centralized point of control" problem again.) Unfortunately, this requires notable (and different) skill, and not many examples of such successful meta-organizations exist. But these organizations could, in principle, all be capitalist. They would just need to operate within an environment that didn't allow them to externalize human costs. (Externalization of environmental costs have different reasons for being forbidden.)
THAT said, these comments are all only applicable while most of the decision makers are human. Expect them to become obsolete within the next 2-3 decades. What will replace them depends totally upon the nature of currently un-created AIs.
They don't want to be replaced by a real robot because they like eating.
The problem is, it's going to happen anyway. The process is already well underway. He estimated half of all jobs, but that doesn't require an advanced AI, just a cheap one. But advanced AIs are coming anyway, so it's more like 90% of all jobs, but this is probably over a longer time span. Basically, anyone who isn't top management is likely to be replaced within a few decades. And top management will hang on only because they are the ones making the hiring decisions.
Troll or idiot?
I'm going to pretend idiot and answer you: ... I want to say non-polluting, but that's a lie. Lower polluting plants. Like wind, solar, and possibly even nuclear or fusion. Wind and solar still need better storage and distribution to be practical on a large scale, fission has numerous problems dealing with waste, safety, etc., and fusion isn't here yet. So a slow changeover seems necessary. But we need to have started the process much more vigorously than we have, and we need to have pushed research harder than we did. (Yes, research becomes less efficient when you push it harder, but you still get results faster, if you do it right.)
The real need for hybrids is not because of high gas prices, that's only the enabler. The need is to reduce the rate at which CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. When the technology is more perfected hybrids will be replaced by electrics, and electrical production plants will be phased over to
Currently the people who champion any one particular source of power as "The Answer" are blind to the faults of that source. They all currently have unacceptable drawbacks. But some of the drawbacks could be handled with significant investment (wind and solar). All could benefit from increased research results.
P.S.: I'd say that fission suffers from too much government regulation, but then I recall that they wouldn't build the existing plants without the government indemnifying them against liability in case of problems. If the builders don't think the plant is safe enough to build, why should I disagree?
You are assuming what the original purpose of the copyright law was. There is evidence to suggest that it was always about allowing an elite to control the distribution of works for financial gain...and by elite I do not mean the authors. I'd say media companies, but that would create an improper impression, as originally the works were all printed. (Well, there were also laws about what the bards were allowed to sing, different in different countries and times, but that was not usually for financial gain.)
This particular case is not about censorship. "The Diary of Anne Frank" is readily available if you buy it. This particular case is about money.
That said, this law, and other similar laws, are enablers of censorship. Any law that allows someone other than the author to withhold public availability of a work is an enabler of censorship.
THAT said, this is not an argument either for or against this particular law. I've made that in other places. This is an argument in favor of thinking clearly about what one is favoring or opposed to.
There are exceptions. I think Tolkien was one. But you are generally correct. However extended copyrights allow for derivative works to have considerably broader protection than if the copyright were not extended. Consider any series of books by an author...especially those by "house names", e.g. the Tom Swift series. They've now faded into irrelevance, but the "house name" that wrote the series was allowed to keep the entire cast of characters and environment under copyright for considerably over 20 years. Or the E.E.Smith Lensman series. They got started in the 1930's, I think, and continued up into the 1950's.
Please note that this has both its good and bad points. It allows the copyright holder to maintain the "purity" of the series...which has both good and bad aspects. Consider the problems of doing a "shared worlds" series where not everyone has even read the background notes.
So there is value in extended copyrights...but not enough. And the downsides can be quite obnoxious.
I sort of like that idea, but would modify it.
Copyright is for 5 years and is infinitely renewable. Each issuance or renewal of the copyright costs 2^n * $1 where n is the number of renewals. (I.e., the initial issue costs $1, the first renewal $2, etc.)
Successful revolutions have always required sponsorship by at least a part of the elite.
I agree with a lot of your points, but I've encountered many managers that you wouldn't consider "good managers".
And WRT your final paragraph...automation is going to make a job based economy a guarantee that nearly everyone is at the very bottom rung. We are already at the point where the US and India are BOTH losing jobs to increased automation, and we are still in the early days. Projections call for over half of the existing jobs to disappear within around a decade. And I don't think anyone can predict which ones will be safe. (Except upper management, and that's because they are the ones making the decisions.) As this continues it will become more and more evident that it's foolish to take on a large debt with the intention of paying it off after entering a profitable career. It isn't clear to me what is going to motivate people to study for years. (Well, I would have done it because I was fascinated by math and physics, but mine is a minority perspective, and I would have studied, albeit in a less directed and intense way, even if college had been impossible.
I agree that trade has in the past acted to suppress war. I'm not sure it's working that way in the present. Certainly simple economic arguments don't apply. The US spent more to invade Iran than the entire wealth of the country would have represented if we'd carted it off, and we didn't bother. It was politics extremely much more than economics. (I've heard it asserted that the reason for the war was that Iran started negotiating to sell oil denominated in Euros rather than Dollars. I know of no evidence either pro or con, but it's the most reasonable reason I've heard, if it's true. And since all the other reasons seem utter garbage, I tend to believe it.)
The argument that trade suppresses war has it's shining examples, but there are also many cases where it appears that war is engaged in to control trade.
Now, "Our real problem isn't that China makes t-shirts": That's not clear, or perhaps not exact to the point I was asserting. T-shirts was an example of an industry that isn't inherently centralized. Another such industry is software construction, but notice that due to the laws, customs, and business regulations of the US most software development (for profit) *IS* centralized. How things could be changed is not a subject on which I am competent to speak, but I am competent to observe the pattern. My suspicion is that this has to do with the distribution system. I have heard that to get notable promotion by or positioning within a store, you need to ... compensate ... the store owner. I used compensate where I would have liked to say bribe. I feel the process should be as illegal as other sorts of kickback, and the laws against all forms of kickback should be more rigorously enforced. Even the existing laws against bundling are either not enforced, or need to be considerably stronger.
But these are details. There are nearly endless details, it's the summation of them that tends to encourage the formation of large organizations with centralized control, not any particular one. (An exception might be the wretched and unjust Citizens United decision...though I might go back to Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886) and find that it, and all decisions based upon it were likewise unjust. [Or perhaps the original decision was just, but the way that it was phrased made it unjust.])
At least not unless they feel extremely confident that nobody will be able to prove (in a preponderance of the evidence sense) that they are doing it. And given the uncertain nature of juries, that would be a pretty big risk.
MS may have been explicity about their purposes, but saying that they've been clear about their intentions requires that you believe them. And even if that's true, what their intentions are this week doesn't speak to what their intentions will be next year.
So the question is "What personal information could the current system by coerced to reveal (without additional software 'upgrades')?". I must admit that I don't find the answer clear. The ZDNet article wasn't all that reassuring.
OTOH, as I do not have or use any MSWind installs, this is sort of academic. Many third parties are already so lax about their security that I should presume that any information about me they hold will be clandestinely copied. Just consider the recent story about pins being "stolen" from the IRS.
P.S.: Stolen is a very poor term for the process, as the original is (presumably) left in place. OTOH, "clandestinely copied" is too long and clumsy. What's needed is something short and pithy that falls easily off the tongue like, e.g., "snarfed". You are free to use my suggestion if you want to, but you'll need to use context to make your meaning clear until it enters common usage.
How about "both guys are basically right, but only telling a part of the story"?
Similarly for linux, some window managers (I think it's the window managers) seem to check for updates. I may have told them to, since if I were asked I would have asked that they do so. Others don't (or didn't a year ago). And I've never had a linux machine fail when disconnected from the desktop, but you could certainly state that "some of the functionality was broken". Guess what I mean. Then read the next paragraph.
.
.
When disconnected from the internet NTP doesn't properly reset the system clock for drifting. But if I didn't mention WHAT functionality was broken, you might fill in something rather different.
IIRC, this depends on how you distribute the code originally. I'd need to read the license again, but I think you're describing the terms that apply when the source is a part of the same distribution as the binary.
You overstate a basically correct position. The VC is not in business for your health or profit, and you can't trust a word they say, or an item of the contract that isn't readily enforceable. But there are times when it's still the appropriate option. But only AFTER you've published the current version under an irrevocable license...something that guarantees you future access without worries about either copyright or patents. The GPL is my favorite, but for many purposes BSD works as well or better. Also consider the MIT license. But publish this publicly before you sign the contract, and make certain that they have acknowledged the prior publication in a verifiable way. An attachment to the contract is probably best, but this is just my guess. A url to a github repository might suffice. Talk to a lawyer.
You not using a credit card doesn't keep your bank from transmitting weakly encrypted data. I've been told (by a counter clerk, so she may not have known) that they have a separate network from the Internet. So perhaps this is less of a problem than it appears. But I recall hearing of an isolated nuclear power plant that got infected by a virus because a contractor was plugged into two networks at once.
I already refuse to bank on-line, because of multiple past security issues. This would just mean that I would need to only buy things on-line with a purchased credit card...and never use one tied into my account. (I already have a separated account that I use for ALL credit card transactions.)
So there are ways and ways for individuals to get around exposing themselves. But there's no way for them to avoid having third parties expose them.
You're making the false assumption that the accepted protocols will be secure. This is historically not true. When the government mandates a monopoly, duopoly, etc. then implementation standards slip. And they're already pretty low.
Bingo!
This has been tried before, and failed abysmally. Not only was it unenforceable, mere threat of enforcement drove work off-shore.
While I tend to agree with you over the long term, over the short term safety is quite often correlated with higher expenses. And people tend to devalue long term gains. Much management won't look beyond the next quarter.
More directly to the point ANY change in procedures will be associated with a short term cost. And, in addition, most managers resent any limits on their ability to control their employees...even limits they don't intend to approach. (And some of the reasons for such resentment are quite valid, though others aren't.)
Do I think *who* in America would be richer if we produced more t-shirts and fewer aircraft and CPUs?
While the parent argument is not totally bogus, it's unfairly presuming that the wealth of a country distributes equally.
That said, increasing automation is rapidly making all this irrelevant. A headline just yesterday declared that BOTH "America" and India were losing jobs to automation. If India is losing jobs to automation, it's rather hard to believe that low wages will retain jobs.
Thanks.
Someone please mod parent informative.
Methanol is a well known starter compound for numerous synthetic pathways. I believe that in WWII it was used in Germany to power cars (though how often I don't know.)
I will agree that methanol would be a terrible jet fuel. It is not only low in energy density, it absorbs water like a sponge.
OTOH, many model aircraft used to use methanol for fuel, so it not totally unreasonable as a drone fuel.
In a different article (possibly about a different project) it was explicitly stated that the cost would currently be prohibitive, but that if oil ran out this could be a useful replacement.
I would be very surprised if the same caveat didn't apply to this project, presuming it's not the same project.
Contracts aren't necessarily worth any more than the paper they are written on. What are your enforcement powers? How expensive is it to enforce the contract? Do you trust the party that wrote the contract to honestly tell you what it means? (Do they even know?) Etc.
Once you make yourself dependent on someone else, you are dependent on them. A contract *MAY* give you the tools to damage them somewhat if they disregard it, but that won't give you back your lost time and effort. It may well not even pay your attorney's fees.
While you are technically correct, people who are not invested in a company won't follow the details of internal politics...in fact those are usually hidden even from those that do, so as a short-cut technique for figuring out how much to trust a company you attend to its externally visible actions. This does require that you treat the company as an entity, and ignore the details about who decided what...but that's usually secret anyway.
So yes, this is an invalid way to think about a company. It is, however, a useful tool. And if corporations can be ruled to be legally persons, it seems improper to castigate someone using that same shortcut in a non-detrimental to citizens way.
I've generally avoided MS software because of reliability problems. MSWord is an exception, and, yes, I've had documents that wouldn't transfer between versions of MSWord. They were actually worse about it than Apple. I will admit that that was a rare event, but it happened. Eventually someone published a way to work around it, but that was after it no longer mattered to me.
Most of the problems, however, were with 3rd party proprietary file formats. Companies that went out of business, companies that discontinued a product, companies with incompatible file formats between versions, and no way to convert, etc. And it wasn't relatively rare applications like CNC, I'm talking about graphics programs designed for children to use, music score editing programs, various other things along the same line. (Sometimes the program would be picked up again a few years later, but that was a rare event, and usually by the time it had happened I'd already had to switch to something else. And at least once the new version wouldn't read the files from the old version...I didn't usually even check, so I don't really know how frequent that was.)
Open file formats have been a life-saver, and even when Linux was a pain to use (1998-200? .. varies depending on the application) they were more than enough recompense.