I use Siri probably 5 times per day on average, and I have a problem with maybe once per week.
I use it maybe once every month or two. Most of the time it comes up by accident when I don't want it to. I also am often in places where I don't want to say instructions out loud to Siri. I have no interest in announcing to the entire office that I'm going to the dentist on Friday.
I can make a calendar entry with Siri in 1/10th the time it takes to do it on the phone or desktop.
When it works, yes. But I routinely have to do it at least twice because it (or me) screws something up. It's almost always faster for me to search by typing and it can be absolutely terrible about addresses. Your mileage may vary but I've found Siri to usually be more hassle than help.
Not anywhere I go. Hell I run into more vendors that don't accept the chip on the card than ones who do. Mag readers aren't going away any time soon I'm afraid. Plus since they didn't implement chip+pin the entire point of the chip is rendered useless.
Credit card companies are shifting liability for fraudulent purchases onto businesses that still rely on mag strips.
And the vendors seem to not care one bit. They're more concerned about the cost of replacing their readers than the cost of the fraud.
It uses exactly the same EMV protocol as the chip on my credit card.
Except here in the US they couldn't be bothered to implement chip+pin so the chip is effectively pointless.
The only difference is that my credit card is a lot more portable than my phone and doesn't need a battery.
"More portable"? How many people do you run into these days who aren't carrying a phone of some sort? I would drop my wallet in a heartbeat if it were practical to do so.
The problem with Apple Pay is that it will never be ubiquitous enough.
Never is a very long time. I actually use Apple Pay on a fairly routine basis. I'd use it more if more vendors would join us in the 21st century.
Actually what annoys me more here in the US is that they didn't implement chip+pin on credit cards. I can't even do it optionally. Lots of vendors still don't accept the chip and even the ones that do cannot be bothered (or allowed) to implement chip+pin. So I strongly prefer Apple Pay over using a card on that basis as well as convenience.
The company can be. See BP, GM, Takata, etc. And if intentional actions can be shown then the penalties can be much more severe. See Enron, Arthur Anderson, and probably VW in the near future.
I am wondering who will quit their 6-digit salary paying swanky job in the Silicon Valley, just because they do not agree with the law enforcement.
People who are financially secure and who can get gainful employment elsewhere. Describes more than a few Apple programmers. They might prefer to work at Apple all other things being equal but they don't have to. Honestly if I felt strongly about being ordered to do something I felt was unethical or harmful I'd consider leaving my job and I doubt I'm unique in that.
Speaking of which, has anyone figured out how to get someone to Mars without being killed by exposure to the natural radiation in route?
There are Top People working on it. But that is just one of several show stopper problems we'll have to figure out before a visit to Mars becomes viable. And if we want to stay there for any length of time there are even more problems to solve. Probably doable but it's going to take a while to work them out. The precise length of "a while" will be contingent upon funding and societal motivation.
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
Antarctica, the Mariana's Trench, the top of Mount Everest, the surface of the Moon and low earth orbit are all barren and extremely inhospitable wastelands and we've visited all of those. There are plenty of good reasons to want to put people on the surface of Mars too. We can learn a lot from inhospitable places and even more from figuring out how to get there and stay alive. Furthermore what is uninhabitable today may become a viable destination with an adequate application of technology. Nobody is asking you to go.
Why do all of those have to be a function of the journal?
They don't but the functions still have to happen in some form or fashion and there are issues yet to be universally worked out in a standard way. Right now the publishers do a lot of this stuff but if you want to take the publishers out of the picture you need to figure out how to distribute that work and pay for it in a way that still makes sense, both economically and logistically.
Publishers talk about all of their costs... but I've yet to see a for-profit publisher who's actually given a breakdown of what their costs are.
Here you go. RELX (formerly Reed Elsevier PLC) is a publicly traded company and as such their financial statements are available. They publish The Lancet, Cell, Gray's Anatomy, and more through their Elsevier division. For the record, Elsevier has profit margins that would make Apple blush (around 37% NET) which explains a lot of this discussion.
That's no improvement on what we have now. You are merely trading one publisher for another. What possible expectation could we have that the new publisher will behave any better than the old?
How many of you realize that journals are charging both ends - the authors for publishing and the readers for reading.
I would say most professionals who read these journals are aware of this to at least some degree. It's a part of the anger many academics have towards these journals.
The editors, same people that do the job today. Typically these are academics who provide this as part of their service and get payed nominal fee.
Some journals work that way but many do not. And even when it does work as you describe you still have the problem of funding if you take the publishers out of the equation. Hard to pay someone to do a job when the organization that handles the funds is taken out of the process.
Who does that now? Not the journals. This typically picked up during the peer review process or post-publication.
Bet me. Go ahead and plagiarize something from Nature. I assure you that it won't be anyone doing peer review that contacts you. More likely it will be someone from a legal department. Not all journals are peer reviewed and even those that are aren't well equipped to catch fraud or plagiarism. No, to properly deal with that you need people whose job it is to deal with those issues (read lawyers) and that costs money which gets back to the original problem of funding.
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia. 2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish) 3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists. 4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
In principle yes they should be free, especially if the research received grant money from taxpayers. However should != can. There are a few problems to resolve before that is possible.
1) How do you pay for the hosting, publishing, editing, etc? Those things aren't free so someone, somewhere has to pay for them. 2) Who is responsible for quality control and coordinating peer review when applicable? 3) Who defends against plagiarism and fraud? (particularly the well funded kind)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate of research (mostly) being widely disseminated for the lowest possible cost but there are some serious logistic and funding issues to work out first. The publishing companies are causing a lot of problems but they do provide some value which would have to be replicated in some fashion to make scientific papers freely available as a practical matter.
The VAST bulk of these "subsidies" are not real money. No one is paying $400 billion a year to Exxon or BP.
Well I happen to be a certified accountant and the fact that some of these subsidies are not cash money doesn't make them any less real. In cost accounting it's called an externalized cost. Literally a cost someone else pays. There is a very real and measurable cost to that pollution which the companies selling fossil fuels do not have to pay for. That is in effect a subsidy to those companies because it relieves them of having to pay the full cost of the product they sell. It would be no different than a government helping a car maker to sell their car without having to pay for the steel they built the car with. It's no different than cigarette makers not having to pay for the health care costs that smokers incur from using their product. The fact that cash did not change hands directly does not make these costs any less real nor does it mean they are not subsidies.
You can argue about the exact number but that completely misses the point. The point is that there are HUGE externalized costs that we are not forcing oil and gas companies to deal with. That IS a subsidy. AND on top of that we also subsidize them directly to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollar annually worldwide.
Except, it never likely will. The problem with solar is not the cost of the panels, those are already dirt cheap. The cost is in land, labor, and other items needed to build solar out, either utility scale or distributed scale.
The panels are NOT "dirt cheap" though they are getting cheaper. The cost of land is generally not an issue - there is plenty of available land on rooftops or available cheaply in sparsely populated areas. The grid is already built. It needs upgrades but it needs those even if you don't consider solar in the equation.
We really AREN'T subsidizing fossil fuels. No one is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to Exxon to pump more oil.
Nonsense. We absolutely are paying billions to oil companies to pump more oil. It's not even a debate. 20 Seconds on Google would disabuse you of this false notion.
So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
To some degree you could say the same about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by governments to the tune of something like $5 trillion worldwide. Solar is just a small percentage of that.
The only difference is that you don't notice the subsidies for oil and gas but there is no question that they are there and substantial.
So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.
That's to be expected for an emerging technology. You subsidize a technology like this until it can scale up to the point where it can compete on its own merits. Solar is getting there but without some continued support the technology will not advance sufficiently rapidly. What doesn't make sense is subsidizing fossil fuels which are a mature technology and one we wish to deprecate the use of.
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state
That would be correct. Any changes are going to be from the current state and any change that results in a regression or stagnation in performance or performance/cost should be rejected.
The correct default state is actually no education.
Nonsense. This isn't drug testing where we are comparing against a placebo to see if it has any effect. Any change to the educational system that doesn't improve on what we already have (cost and/or outcomes) is wasteful. To disprove the null hypothesis requires that a given change (say customized curriculums) will result in a statistically significant improvement in outcomes and/or cost. There is no point in proving that a method is an improvement over no education unless it is also better than our current system.
Like the effect filesharing has had on music/movie distribution costs, computers and the Internet reduce most of the cost-reducing benefit of a uniform curriculum to near zero.
First off there is no such thing as a uniform curriculum in the real world. The fact that we require certain subjects to be taught to all isn't the same thing as a uniform curriculum. Second, your comparison with file sharing is specious and has no bearing on the actual economics of education because education doesn't work like you are supposing. The internet doesn't magically make the marginal cost of teaching a student go anywhere close to zero, nor do tools to customize a curriculum. They can help but they are hardly the magical elixir you are supposing.
And anyway he's offering to pay for the experiment so what are you complaining about?
That he is presuming the outcome prior to the experiment. I should have thought that was obvious.
Around 2000, computers and the Internet (better, cheaper communications) made it feasible for you to custom-order exactly what options you want in your car and have the factory manufacture it that way.
The error in your thinking is presuming that the economics of education work like those of manufacturing. They don't. Education is very difficult to scale effectively. The notion that the internet and other technology tools has reduced marginal cost to provide teaching services to zero is demonstrably untrue.
We're pretty much experimenting with our kids education every day.
That doesn't mean we're experimenting with the policies surrounding their education every day at a regional, state or national level. Changes come slowly in education for the most part.
Common Core has been a miserable disaster and it was a large-scale, government run, "scientifically backed" curriculum deployment.
Since Common Core has only been in operation for a few years it's a little premature to declare it a "miserable disaster". I'm not arguing for or against it but I think it's going to take a little while to really determine if it works or not. My guess is that if it ultimately works it's going to take a while to work the kinks out.
Unfortunately the funding isn't there, teachers don't understand the rules and guidelines, kids are most certainly not picking up on the material in any sort of ground-breaking way, and parents are upset and frustrated
Presuming that is all true that speaks to a botched implementation but doesn't really say much clearly about the fundamental idea, good or bad.
You can't form a single education plan and universally apply it to 50 million children.
Sure you can and other countries have done just that with some success. You just can't make it the entire plan for all those children. There is a reason it is called Common Core and not Common Plan. Will Common Core be a good thing at the end of the day? I have no idea but I'm pretty sure the path to get there will be bumpy.
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
The ocean is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little mineral exploration isn't going to harm it at all.
Nonsense The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years back would indicate otherwise. The ocean is big but it's also fragile in a lot of ways. It wouldn't be hard at all for us to cause some pretty catastrophic damage. We've already filled good portions of it with plastic and we're adding more daily. We've affected the temperature of the oceans and in some places the salinity. We've created massive dead zones thanks to agricultural runoff. The notion that the oceans are so big we can't harm them is clearly and demonstrably wrong.
Will Space X reduce the cost of space travel to make asteroid mining economical?
SpaceX is barely touching the problems for asteroid mining. They're just trying to get the cost to orbit to something manageable which is super important but just a first step in a long journey. They aren't dealing at all the practical problems of actually turning an asteroid into useful materials. There is a lot more to it than just getting into space.
Do asteroids have mineral resources that are worth exploiting?
Almost certainly they have valuable materials. However that doesn't mean they can be exploited economically.
Will techniques for undersea mining prove economical?
We're already doing undersea mining (oil and gas) so the answer is a pretty clear yes.
100% false. We can study a lot in orbit but there are limits. You cannot study much about biological issues on other planetary bodies in orbit. For that you have to go there.
Now if you set human biology aside just for a moment,
Setting aside human biology is akin to dumping the whole point of a manned space program. Can't do it.
it would be more precise to say "some things are easier to study with human-run experiments than robots."
Not only are some things easier, the differences can be vast in some cases. Furthermore some things really cannot be studied by robot effectively.
I'd like to see humans on Mars, but I think the shortest path to that happening starts with a sustained and regular program of robotic exploration.
I think that is part of the equation but not all of it. Robotic exploration alone will never develop the technology needed to sustain life in space. It would be very easy to over-focus on robotic exploration and starve the (harder and more expensive) manned exploration. The longer you wait to start research about the life support systems, biology, physiology, etc the longer it will be before we are doing something more interesting than orbiting 400 miles above earth's surface.
The reasons for doing a manned mission will be a question for anthropology and political science, not economics or engineering.
Disagree. The reasons for doing a manned mission will be either existential or economic. We went to the moon because we were competing with Russia and considered the idea of Russia getting ahead of us in space to be an existential threat. It's likely China will play that role next. We send satellites into orbit now because there are economic benefits to doing so. The technology we develop though our space program has (huge) economic benefit. Any reason to establish a base on the Moon or Mars or elsewhere will need to have some sort of economic benefit.
There are certainly things we can study with manned missions that we cannot robotically. However the political/financial will is not there.
The fact that currently there is a lack of political will does not mean there never will be. What is the most inspirational thing ever done in space? Sending people to the moon. Why did we go? To beat the Russians. What superpower is emerging now? China. Think the US and China are going to compete in space? You better believe it. China is going to want to show off and the US is nothing if not competitive. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson was more or less correct that we do big missions when either there is A) an existential threat or B) money to be made. Sooner or later one of those things will come about and the money will flow.
My hope is that robotic missions will advance science more cheaply, and at some point there will be a discovery that will make political or corporate manned missions a no-brainer. For right now though manned exploration is not something we have the will to do, and this seems to maybe be the best path to get there.
I think your reasoning is backwards there. First off there won't be "a discovery" that makes manned missions attractive. It will be multi-factorial. You will almost certainly never find a reason to send people into space by sending probes and hoping for the best. You (ideally) want to send people and use that as a halo project to attract funding for the robotic missions. Almost nobody outside of us geeks actually gives shit about the latest probe mission to Mars. It certainly doesn't hold anyone's attention for long even if you can get their attention in the first place. No, you need something more inspirational than a probe.
What you (ideally) want to do is send people and use that to build the funding. You need to give the politicians a reason to care they have a hard time ignoring. Robotic probes will not do that. You have to think about how to market space exploration. Some people are going to be against it no matter what but you don't need to convince everyone, just enough. Believe me if China sends a manned mission to the moon, you can be the US will sit up and take interest. I think we're not being clever enough about what we are doing in space. Instead of having the ISS in low earth orbit, why didn't we put it in an Earth/Moon orbit for example? Focus on the technology and economic benefits we get from the space program. The ROI is astounding but we barely hear a whisper about that.
I don't think anyone is saying there is zero scientific value to sending humans to Mars, so that is a bit of a strawman.
I've seen respected scientific journalists saying almost exactly that, or that there is so little to be learned that it isn't worth it. Not to mention plenty of people here. They are clearly saying that we should starve or stop the manned spaceflight program and focus on robotics exclusively or almost so.
The argument is that the cost to benefit ratio is way out of proportion, especially considering a large portion of the human physiological portion knowledge could be learned in LEO, with diminishing returns from going to the Moon.
The cost benefit ratio only seems off if you aren't looking at very deeply or have a short ROI expectation. The benefits of manned spaceflight generally take longer to realize so it just seems bad when your cost/benefit analysis has an unreasonably short time horizon.
I think it is an objective truth that sending humans to space is costlier and more error prone than unmanned probes.
But it is not the important issue. Yes human spaceflight is costlier and more difficult but we also learn more from doing it. Human spaceflight forces us into lines of scientific inquiry and to develop technologies that would never come up with robotic missions. Much of the most valuable technology that has come out of the space program has come from the manned program. There are things that cannot be easily or productively studied with robotic probes, not the least of which is human physiology and biology.
Whether we have achieved all the value we can from unmanned probes such that we need to send humans to make further progress is the part that is subject to continued debate.
I think that incorrectly frames the issue. It's not about doing everything we can with robots before sending humans. We should do everything we can with robots AND send humans. We'll learn far more by doing both than by doing either exclusively.
I think this is the type of mission we should be doing more of. We need more landers and rovers, everywhere we can put them.
I agree.
The science benefit is high, but the cost is magnitudes lower than launching meatbags and all the attendant support they need.
Sigh... Getting tired of this meme. The science value of sending robots versus sending people DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU ARE STUDYING. Some lines of scientific inquiry it is clearly more economically efficient to send robots. For a different set of problems it is more valuable to send people. In fact there are some problems that you literally cannot study with robots. (Human physiology not the least among them) While I agree that robotic probes are hugely valuable and we should send more, it doesn't follow that there is no value (scientific or otherwise) in sending humans into space. Yes sending people is expensive and difficult. But the good news is that we learn FAR more by sending people. We have to develop all sorts of technology that would otherwise never come about. We are forced down avenues of inquiry that would never come up on any robotic mission. And we can study things that cannot be studied by robots. By all means, keep sending robots but shutting down human spaceflight is both shortsighted and ill advised.
Lowes and Menards are better, cheaper, and have already replaced many Home Depot locations.
Lowes is in no way, shape or form cheaper than Home Depot. There is very little difference in price between the two on average and I shop in both routinely. There is also plenty of evidence of people price comparing the two (spend two seconds on Google looking) and they almost always come out pretty close in price. You might find a deal in one or the other but if you think Lowes is cheaper you are not basing that on objective evidence.
You can get better prices than either sometimes going to specialty stores but whether that is worthwhile depends on how much running around you plan to do.
I can't speak for Menards as there isn't one near me but I'm dubious their prices are meaningfully less.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Siri probably 5 times per day on average, and I have a problem with maybe once per week.
I use it maybe once every month or two. Most of the time it comes up by accident when I don't want it to. I also am often in places where I don't want to say instructions out loud to Siri. I have no interest in announcing to the entire office that I'm going to the dentist on Friday.
I can make a calendar entry with Siri in 1/10th the time it takes to do it on the phone or desktop.
When it works, yes. But I routinely have to do it at least twice because it (or me) screws something up. It's almost always faster for me to search by typing and it can be absolutely terrible about addresses. Your mileage may vary but I've found Siri to usually be more hassle than help.
Mag swipe readers are being phased out.
Not anywhere I go. Hell I run into more vendors that don't accept the chip on the card than ones who do. Mag readers aren't going away any time soon I'm afraid. Plus since they didn't implement chip+pin the entire point of the chip is rendered useless.
Credit card companies are shifting liability for fraudulent purchases onto businesses that still rely on mag strips.
And the vendors seem to not care one bit. They're more concerned about the cost of replacing their readers than the cost of the fraud.
It uses exactly the same EMV protocol as the chip on my credit card.
Except here in the US they couldn't be bothered to implement chip+pin so the chip is effectively pointless.
The only difference is that my credit card is a lot more portable than my phone and doesn't need a battery.
"More portable"? How many people do you run into these days who aren't carrying a phone of some sort? I would drop my wallet in a heartbeat if it were practical to do so.
The problem with Apple Pay is that it will never be ubiquitous enough.
Never is a very long time. I actually use Apple Pay on a fairly routine basis. I'd use it more if more vendors would join us in the 21st century.
Actually what annoys me more here in the US is that they didn't implement chip+pin on credit cards. I can't even do it optionally. Lots of vendors still don't accept the chip and even the ones that do cannot be bothered (or allowed) to implement chip+pin. So I strongly prefer Apple Pay over using a card on that basis as well as convenience.
Can you be convicted for "Oops"? Probably not.
The company can be. See BP, GM, Takata, etc. And if intentional actions can be shown then the penalties can be much more severe. See Enron, Arthur Anderson, and probably VW in the near future.
I am wondering who will quit their 6-digit salary paying swanky job in the Silicon Valley, just because they do not agree with the law enforcement.
People who are financially secure and who can get gainful employment elsewhere. Describes more than a few Apple programmers. They might prefer to work at Apple all other things being equal but they don't have to. Honestly if I felt strongly about being ordered to do something I felt was unethical or harmful I'd consider leaving my job and I doubt I'm unique in that.
Speaking of which, has anyone figured out how to get someone to Mars without being killed by exposure to the natural radiation in route?
There are Top People working on it. But that is just one of several show stopper problems we'll have to figure out before a visit to Mars becomes viable. And if we want to stay there for any length of time there are even more problems to solve. Probably doable but it's going to take a while to work them out. The precise length of "a while" will be contingent upon funding and societal motivation.
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
Antarctica, the Mariana's Trench, the top of Mount Everest, the surface of the Moon and low earth orbit are all barren and extremely inhospitable wastelands and we've visited all of those. There are plenty of good reasons to want to put people on the surface of Mars too. We can learn a lot from inhospitable places and even more from figuring out how to get there and stay alive. Furthermore what is uninhabitable today may become a viable destination with an adequate application of technology. Nobody is asking you to go.
Why do all of those have to be a function of the journal?
They don't but the functions still have to happen in some form or fashion and there are issues yet to be universally worked out in a standard way. Right now the publishers do a lot of this stuff but if you want to take the publishers out of the picture you need to figure out how to distribute that work and pay for it in a way that still makes sense, both economically and logistically.
Publishers talk about all of their costs ... but I've yet to see a for-profit publisher who's actually given a breakdown of what their costs are.
Here you go. RELX (formerly Reed Elsevier PLC) is a publicly traded company and as such their financial statements are available. They publish The Lancet, Cell, Gray's Anatomy, and more through their Elsevier division. For the record, Elsevier has profit margins that would make Apple blush (around 37% NET) which explains a lot of this discussion.
Publication fees.
That's no improvement on what we have now. You are merely trading one publisher for another. What possible expectation could we have that the new publisher will behave any better than the old?
How many of you realize that journals are charging both ends - the authors for publishing and the readers for reading.
I would say most professionals who read these journals are aware of this to at least some degree. It's a part of the anger many academics have towards these journals.
The editors, same people that do the job today. Typically these are academics who provide this as part of their service and get payed nominal fee.
Some journals work that way but many do not. And even when it does work as you describe you still have the problem of funding if you take the publishers out of the equation. Hard to pay someone to do a job when the organization that handles the funds is taken out of the process.
Who does that now? Not the journals. This typically picked up during the peer review process or post-publication.
Bet me. Go ahead and plagiarize something from Nature. I assure you that it won't be anyone doing peer review that contacts you. More likely it will be someone from a legal department. Not all journals are peer reviewed and even those that are aren't well equipped to catch fraud or plagiarism. No, to properly deal with that you need people whose job it is to deal with those issues (read lawyers) and that costs money which gets back to the original problem of funding.
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists.
4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
In principle yes they should be free, especially if the research received grant money from taxpayers. However should != can. There are a few problems to resolve before that is possible.
1) How do you pay for the hosting, publishing, editing, etc? Those things aren't free so someone, somewhere has to pay for them.
2) Who is responsible for quality control and coordinating peer review when applicable?
3) Who defends against plagiarism and fraud? (particularly the well funded kind)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate of research (mostly) being widely disseminated for the lowest possible cost but there are some serious logistic and funding issues to work out first. The publishing companies are causing a lot of problems but they do provide some value which would have to be replicated in some fashion to make scientific papers freely available as a practical matter.
The VAST bulk of these "subsidies" are not real money. No one is paying $400 billion a year to Exxon or BP.
Well I happen to be a certified accountant and the fact that some of these subsidies are not cash money doesn't make them any less real. In cost accounting it's called an externalized cost. Literally a cost someone else pays. There is a very real and measurable cost to that pollution which the companies selling fossil fuels do not have to pay for. That is in effect a subsidy to those companies because it relieves them of having to pay the full cost of the product they sell. It would be no different than a government helping a car maker to sell their car without having to pay for the steel they built the car with. It's no different than cigarette makers not having to pay for the health care costs that smokers incur from using their product. The fact that cash did not change hands directly does not make these costs any less real nor does it mean they are not subsidies.
You can argue about the exact number but that completely misses the point. The point is that there are HUGE externalized costs that we are not forcing oil and gas companies to deal with. That IS a subsidy. AND on top of that we also subsidize them directly to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollar annually worldwide.
Except, it never likely will. The problem with solar is not the cost of the panels, those are already dirt cheap. The cost is in land, labor, and other items needed to build solar out, either utility scale or distributed scale.
The panels are NOT "dirt cheap" though they are getting cheaper. The cost of land is generally not an issue - there is plenty of available land on rooftops or available cheaply in sparsely populated areas. The grid is already built. It needs upgrades but it needs those even if you don't consider solar in the equation.
We really AREN'T subsidizing fossil fuels. No one is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to Exxon to pump more oil.
Nonsense. We absolutely are paying billions to oil companies to pump more oil. It's not even a debate. 20 Seconds on Google would disabuse you of this false notion.
So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
To some degree you could say the same about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by governments to the tune of something like $5 trillion worldwide. Solar is just a small percentage of that.
The only difference is that you don't notice the subsidies for oil and gas but there is no question that they are there and substantial.
So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.
That's to be expected for an emerging technology. You subsidize a technology like this until it can scale up to the point where it can compete on its own merits. Solar is getting there but without some continued support the technology will not advance sufficiently rapidly. What doesn't make sense is subsidizing fossil fuels which are a mature technology and one we wish to deprecate the use of.
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state
That would be correct. Any changes are going to be from the current state and any change that results in a regression or stagnation in performance or performance/cost should be rejected.
The correct default state is actually no education.
Nonsense. This isn't drug testing where we are comparing against a placebo to see if it has any effect. Any change to the educational system that doesn't improve on what we already have (cost and/or outcomes) is wasteful. To disprove the null hypothesis requires that a given change (say customized curriculums) will result in a statistically significant improvement in outcomes and/or cost. There is no point in proving that a method is an improvement over no education unless it is also better than our current system.
Like the effect filesharing has had on music/movie distribution costs, computers and the Internet reduce most of the cost-reducing benefit of a uniform curriculum to near zero.
First off there is no such thing as a uniform curriculum in the real world. The fact that we require certain subjects to be taught to all isn't the same thing as a uniform curriculum. Second, your comparison with file sharing is specious and has no bearing on the actual economics of education because education doesn't work like you are supposing. The internet doesn't magically make the marginal cost of teaching a student go anywhere close to zero, nor do tools to customize a curriculum. They can help but they are hardly the magical elixir you are supposing.
And anyway he's offering to pay for the experiment so what are you complaining about?
That he is presuming the outcome prior to the experiment. I should have thought that was obvious.
Around 2000, computers and the Internet (better, cheaper communications) made it feasible for you to custom-order exactly what options you want in your car and have the factory manufacture it that way.
The error in your thinking is presuming that the economics of education work like those of manufacturing. They don't. Education is very difficult to scale effectively. The notion that the internet and other technology tools has reduced marginal cost to provide teaching services to zero is demonstrably untrue.
We're pretty much experimenting with our kids education every day.
That doesn't mean we're experimenting with the policies surrounding their education every day at a regional, state or national level. Changes come slowly in education for the most part.
Common Core has been a miserable disaster and it was a large-scale, government run, "scientifically backed" curriculum deployment.
Since Common Core has only been in operation for a few years it's a little premature to declare it a "miserable disaster". I'm not arguing for or against it but I think it's going to take a little while to really determine if it works or not. My guess is that if it ultimately works it's going to take a while to work the kinks out.
Unfortunately the funding isn't there, teachers don't understand the rules and guidelines, kids are most certainly not picking up on the material in any sort of ground-breaking way, and parents are upset and frustrated
Presuming that is all true that speaks to a botched implementation but doesn't really say much clearly about the fundamental idea, good or bad.
You can't form a single education plan and universally apply it to 50 million children.
Sure you can and other countries have done just that with some success. You just can't make it the entire plan for all those children. There is a reason it is called Common Core and not Common Plan. Will Common Core be a good thing at the end of the day? I have no idea but I'm pretty sure the path to get there will be bumpy.
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
The ocean is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little mineral exploration isn't going to harm it at all.
Nonsense The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years back would indicate otherwise. The ocean is big but it's also fragile in a lot of ways. It wouldn't be hard at all for us to cause some pretty catastrophic damage. We've already filled good portions of it with plastic and we're adding more daily. We've affected the temperature of the oceans and in some places the salinity. We've created massive dead zones thanks to agricultural runoff. The notion that the oceans are so big we can't harm them is clearly and demonstrably wrong.
Will Space X reduce the cost of space travel to make asteroid mining economical?
SpaceX is barely touching the problems for asteroid mining. They're just trying to get the cost to orbit to something manageable which is super important but just a first step in a long journey. They aren't dealing at all the practical problems of actually turning an asteroid into useful materials. There is a lot more to it than just getting into space.
Do asteroids have mineral resources that are worth exploiting?
Almost certainly they have valuable materials. However that doesn't mean they can be exploited economically.
Will techniques for undersea mining prove economical?
We're already doing undersea mining (oil and gas) so the answer is a pretty clear yes.
All of which could be studied in orbit.
100% false. We can study a lot in orbit but there are limits. You cannot study much about biological issues on other planetary bodies in orbit. For that you have to go there.
Now if you set human biology aside just for a moment,
Setting aside human biology is akin to dumping the whole point of a manned space program. Can't do it.
it would be more precise to say "some things are easier to study with human-run experiments than robots."
Not only are some things easier, the differences can be vast in some cases. Furthermore some things really cannot be studied by robot effectively.
I'd like to see humans on Mars, but I think the shortest path to that happening starts with a sustained and regular program of robotic exploration.
I think that is part of the equation but not all of it. Robotic exploration alone will never develop the technology needed to sustain life in space. It would be very easy to over-focus on robotic exploration and starve the (harder and more expensive) manned exploration. The longer you wait to start research about the life support systems, biology, physiology, etc the longer it will be before we are doing something more interesting than orbiting 400 miles above earth's surface.
The reasons for doing a manned mission will be a question for anthropology and political science, not economics or engineering.
Disagree. The reasons for doing a manned mission will be either existential or economic. We went to the moon because we were competing with Russia and considered the idea of Russia getting ahead of us in space to be an existential threat. It's likely China will play that role next. We send satellites into orbit now because there are economic benefits to doing so. The technology we develop though our space program has (huge) economic benefit. Any reason to establish a base on the Moon or Mars or elsewhere will need to have some sort of economic benefit.
There are certainly things we can study with manned missions that we cannot robotically. However the political/financial will is not there.
The fact that currently there is a lack of political will does not mean there never will be. What is the most inspirational thing ever done in space? Sending people to the moon. Why did we go? To beat the Russians. What superpower is emerging now? China. Think the US and China are going to compete in space? You better believe it. China is going to want to show off and the US is nothing if not competitive. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson was more or less correct that we do big missions when either there is A) an existential threat or B) money to be made. Sooner or later one of those things will come about and the money will flow.
My hope is that robotic missions will advance science more cheaply, and at some point there will be a discovery that will make political or corporate manned missions a no-brainer. For right now though manned exploration is not something we have the will to do, and this seems to maybe be the best path to get there.
I think your reasoning is backwards there. First off there won't be "a discovery" that makes manned missions attractive. It will be multi-factorial. You will almost certainly never find a reason to send people into space by sending probes and hoping for the best. You (ideally) want to send people and use that as a halo project to attract funding for the robotic missions. Almost nobody outside of us geeks actually gives shit about the latest probe mission to Mars. It certainly doesn't hold anyone's attention for long even if you can get their attention in the first place. No, you need something more inspirational than a probe.
What you (ideally) want to do is send people and use that to build the funding. You need to give the politicians a reason to care they have a hard time ignoring. Robotic probes will not do that. You have to think about how to market space exploration. Some people are going to be against it no matter what but you don't need to convince everyone, just enough. Believe me if China sends a manned mission to the moon, you can be the US will sit up and take interest. I think we're not being clever enough about what we are doing in space. Instead of having the ISS in low earth orbit, why didn't we put it in an Earth/Moon orbit for example? Focus on the technology and economic benefits we get from the space program. The ROI is astounding but we barely hear a whisper about that.
I don't think anyone is saying there is zero scientific value to sending humans to Mars, so that is a bit of a strawman.
I've seen respected scientific journalists saying almost exactly that, or that there is so little to be learned that it isn't worth it. Not to mention plenty of people here. They are clearly saying that we should starve or stop the manned spaceflight program and focus on robotics exclusively or almost so.
The argument is that the cost to benefit ratio is way out of proportion, especially considering a large portion of the human physiological portion knowledge could be learned in LEO, with diminishing returns from going to the Moon.
The cost benefit ratio only seems off if you aren't looking at very deeply or have a short ROI expectation. The benefits of manned spaceflight generally take longer to realize so it just seems bad when your cost/benefit analysis has an unreasonably short time horizon.
I think it is an objective truth that sending humans to space is costlier and more error prone than unmanned probes.
But it is not the important issue. Yes human spaceflight is costlier and more difficult but we also learn more from doing it. Human spaceflight forces us into lines of scientific inquiry and to develop technologies that would never come up with robotic missions. Much of the most valuable technology that has come out of the space program has come from the manned program. There are things that cannot be easily or productively studied with robotic probes, not the least of which is human physiology and biology.
Whether we have achieved all the value we can from unmanned probes such that we need to send humans to make further progress is the part that is subject to continued debate.
I think that incorrectly frames the issue. It's not about doing everything we can with robots before sending humans. We should do everything we can with robots AND send humans. We'll learn far more by doing both than by doing either exclusively.
I think this is the type of mission we should be doing more of. We need more landers and rovers, everywhere we can put them.
I agree.
The science benefit is high, but the cost is magnitudes lower than launching meatbags and all the attendant support they need.
Sigh... Getting tired of this meme. The science value of sending robots versus sending people DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU ARE STUDYING. Some lines of scientific inquiry it is clearly more economically efficient to send robots. For a different set of problems it is more valuable to send people. In fact there are some problems that you literally cannot study with robots. (Human physiology not the least among them) While I agree that robotic probes are hugely valuable and we should send more, it doesn't follow that there is no value (scientific or otherwise) in sending humans into space. Yes sending people is expensive and difficult. But the good news is that we learn FAR more by sending people. We have to develop all sorts of technology that would otherwise never come about. We are forced down avenues of inquiry that would never come up on any robotic mission. And we can study things that cannot be studied by robots. By all means, keep sending robots but shutting down human spaceflight is both shortsighted and ill advised.
Lowes and Menards are better, cheaper, and have already replaced many Home Depot locations.
Lowes is in no way, shape or form cheaper than Home Depot. There is very little difference in price between the two on average and I shop in both routinely. There is also plenty of evidence of people price comparing the two (spend two seconds on Google looking) and they almost always come out pretty close in price. You might find a deal in one or the other but if you think Lowes is cheaper you are not basing that on objective evidence.
You can get better prices than either sometimes going to specialty stores but whether that is worthwhile depends on how much running around you plan to do.
I can't speak for Menards as there isn't one near me but I'm dubious their prices are meaningfully less.