The way a manufacturer ought to handle the problem themselves is to make their product more reliable so they need you less.
Ok, so they make their products more reliable (presuming that is possible). This guy is still out of business. Either way he is screwed and it's his fault for putting himself in that position. He decided to start a middleman business based on a perceived shortcoming in the product and/or the distribution system. Since he doesn't control the product or the distribution system he is in a bad competitive position. Most businesses fail, many due to shortcomings in the business model. This guy is no exception.
Not build a parallel repair infrastructure and lock you out of what you need to repair their stuff.
They aren't locking the ultimate customer out, just the middle man.
So anti-competitive vertical integration of your business is fine, so long as you hurt the consumer as much as possible.
Exactly what is anti competitive here? The camera makers cannot arbitrarily raise prices (it's a competitive market) and paying for a middle man markup when one is not needed is expensive and makes their products less competitive. Middlemen are not a desirable thing if you are a consumer. They exist in gaps in the infrastructure of a market. Often they are necessary but they are expensive. If you sell through a distributor the distributor has to make a profit. My company makes wire harnesses and we buy raw materials mostly through distributors. That means we typically endure at least 2-3 markups of around 50% each before a component gets to us. We mark our product up and we're a Tier 4 supplier so what we sell gets market up 3-4 more times before you buy it. A cable that we sell for $4 to our customer probably costs you close to $20 by the time you buy it.
at least one major camera manufacturer now refuses to sell parts to independent repair shops. So Kelly Chong seems to have a legitimate beef. Will anyone listen to him?
Probably not. If you build a business based upon the faults of someone else's products, do not be surprised when they decide to handle the problem themselves and put you out of business. If there is money to be made in repairs then you should not be surprised when the manufacturer gets into the repairs business. It's fine to make money on repairing and selling other people's products but if you are a middle man they WILL cut you out if they can.
You can not appreciate it if you want, but you are the one that said you are ignorant of spiritual wisdom.
I said nothing of the sort and since you seem to be unwilling to have a civil discussion, eat shit you condescending prick.
Do you not know what agnostic means? Atheism?
Probably better than you do.
To start with, have you actually read the bible or any other spiritual work YOURSELF, going back to the originals?
New and old testament, various apocrypha plus the koran, tao-de-ching, various writings of Confucius and quite a lot more besides. But thanks for just assuming I'm some uneducated fool who knows nothing about what he is criticizing.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. I'm guessing it's an allusion to *something* but I can't work out what.
ATRAC as implemented by Sony has a lot of pretty restrictive DRM - i.e. a "prison". MP3 has its drawbacks but is a lot more open. Even if ATRAC sounds better no one really wants to use it due to the extra helping of DRM.
As a musician, the actual sound quality isn't that important to me. I'm certainly not one of those golden-eared audiophiles that can tell the difference between different brands of mains fuses just by listening to the audio. However, I find mp3 pretty much unlistenable, even at 320kbps.
Those audiophiles you refer to seem to disappear every time an actual double blind study is performed. I don't deny that ATRAC may have some technical advantages but MP3s are hardly the only alternative format. The DRM problems with ATRAC more than outweigh any technical advantages it may possess. If sound quality is important you probably would want to use a lossless format anyway at least for the master recordings.
Yes, ignorance is bliss. Sometimes I wish I could return there.
I do not appreciate your implication that I am ignorant or your apparent claim to know something I do not without any substantiation of that claim. You really know almost nothing about me so I find that statement quite insulting and condescending.
Anyways, please don't confuse 'all available evidence' with the 'evidence' you are aware of.
If you have evidence I am not aware of then by all means present it. But I'm rather confident you have no such thing and are merely engaging in puffery.
Religion is individual personal spiritual experiences turned into dogma.
Just because people accept a particular church's dogma doesn't mean there is any truth or objectivity behind that dogma. It is easily demonstrable that many dogmas of religious institutions are incompatible with those of others. By simple logic they cannot all be correct. People are not accepting "personal experiences", they are accepting stories made up by others which cannot be independently verified. Religious dogma for christianity was established over a thousand years ago. It cannot be affected by your personal experiences. Furthermore with science you are (at least theoretically) able to verify claims whereas there appears to be no possibility of any verification of religious dogma.
The evidence to examine is spiritual experiences.
That is a content free statement. If it cannot be verified it is not evidence. In legal terms that would be considered hearsay. I shudder to think how you'll try to explain hallucinations of individuals and groups which are an "experience" of a malfunctioning brain.
Which is more irrational, to believe in your experiences or to not believe in your experiences because someone else tells you it's not possible?
You seem incapable of understanding the difference between accepting received "wisdom" that cannot be verified and accepting evidence that you can check yourself. In science it does not matter if someone tells you something is or isn't possible because you always have the opportunity to check for yourself.
Ok, so you're agnostic not atheist like the parent
Depends. If you are talking about the christian/jewish/islamic style god I might be considered some form of an atheist. All available evidence suggests it is a bunch of made up fables and I really don't see myself changing my mind about that. I think their stories are absurd, illogical, incoherent and inconsistent. I consider it just as likely as the existence of Zeus or Odin or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I've never seen evidence that would make me think otherwise. More generally I regard unproven religious propositions with the same skepticism as any other unproven proposition. I dismiss them unless they present some credible evidence that demands consideration on its own merits. I'm very comfortable acknowledging that there are many things in the universe I do not currently understand and I do not feel the need to confabulate a story to explain them.
Are you just trying to tell yourself you aren't a liar because you believe in the unprovable, i.e., there is no god.
Doubting something unproven is not lying, merely prudence. While based on the lack of evidence I am dubious that there is a god my answer is simply that there is not sufficient evidence to reasonably believe in a god as described in the judeo/christian or islamic traditions. In fact what evidence I do have actually seems to indicated against rather than for the existence of such an entity. While I cannot rule out the possibility that one exists I am unwilling to confabulate a story to try to describe such an entity, nor am I willing to accept other people's made up stories regarding the issue unless they can back them up with empirical evidence. I can tell you exactly what would be required for me to reverse my current position and should such evidence ever appear I would without hesitation alter my current opinion.
Wow, so you're that rare individual who has recreated every scientific experiment that's been done right?
Nice little strawman argument you have there. Pity I have to demolish it. There is a HUGE difference between accepting someone saying that something is true when I have ways of objectively evaluating the evidence and accepting an claim that by definition cannot be proven. The important part is that I have the option to examine the evidence for a scientific hypothesis whether I chose to or not. There is no evidence to examine for a religion. If you don't understand the difference then you really don't belong in this discussion.
No? Oh, so you're just a follower of the science religion?
Science is a process of reasoning. Calling it a religion is a rather clumsy attempt to confuse an irrational faith with a process of reasoning based on empirical evidence.
faith in something unprovable does not make you a liar.
The proper term for it in those cases is confabulation which is sometimes referred to as an "honest lie". There may be no intent to deceive but the person is making up a story that they cannot support with objectively verifiable facts. When you don't know an answer to a question and you make up an "answer", you are confabulating. Confabulation is considered a form of lying.
The Rutherford model isn't a bad model, neither the Dalton's model was bad, but better models happened as science advanced.
Missing the point. George Box put it best when he said "all models are wrong, some are useful". The Rutherford model was wrong but it was still good science (for the time). It put forth a hypothesis and then a model based on that hypothesis. Likewise economic models are based off of observed phenomena and have falsifiable models based off of hypotheses. The fact that gathering data and creating studies for economic models is more challenging in many ways than for physical phenomena does not mean that they are not science. Economics is a science that studies a type of behavior involving living organisms. It is essentially no different than studying herd migration patterns or some other aspect of biology. The fact that there is much we still do not understand about economics in no way changes the fact that economics cannot be usefully studied by any known process other than the scientific method.
The problem here is that these so called economic models aren't based on hard science.
The term "hard science" is a colloquial term based in perceptions with no utility in the actual practice of science. Science is a process or a method if you prefer based on observations in an objectively shared reality. The scientific method is based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to logic. Just because a field of study doesn't (directly) involve fundamental particles does not mean it cannot be studied with excellent scientific rigor.
This is the great misconception: the model must not explain anything, it should be just a matter of fact, a mathematical consequence of the hard science behind the hypothesis.
There is no misconception here at all excepting yours. Saying the "model must not explain anything" is to completely misunderstand how science works. A model is the description (an explanation if you will) of what is observed about the phenomenon. If the model provides useful and accurate predictions about how the phenomenon will behave in the future then the hypothesis is considered proven. A model IS the explanation of what is happening. The model (the explanation) can be proven wrong but that doesn't change what it actually is.
Even "disproven" hypothesis can still be useful under specific conditions. Newtonian physics has been supplanted by Relativity but for practical purposes (large objects at slow speeds) it is still useful as a model. Likewise many economic models are useful under specific conditions that may occur only rarely in the real world but they remain useful models from which we can build future hypothesis and models. Over time we refine these models as we learn more and more accurately describe with new models how the world works.
claiming oneself to be a believer in Islam while being an obsessive liar is a bit of a problem.
Explain to me how anyone who seriously claims to follow any organized religion is anything but an obsessive liar. They believe in a bunch of (mostly) made up stories that they by definition cannot prove to have any basis in fact. Hence they are liars at a minimum to themselves and quite probably to others. Making up stories shows no incompatibility with politics whatsoever.
You can predict is what the outcome of actions will be, you just can't predict what action people are going to take.
You cannot reliably predict the actions of individuals but it is demonstrably possible to predict the actions of statistically significant groups of people. Much of economics is statistical modeling of group dynamics. Adaptations of chaos theory, thermodynamics, Brownian motion, Bayes theory and many more statistical models have applications in economics that work just fine with groups.
I studied economics at university, the only thing I learnt was how little predictive power the theories have, and how they use certain axioms to ensure their rightness, regardless of the outcome.
And I have a master degree in finance to go along with my engineering degrees. A lot of economic models have perfectly fine predictive power as long as you are aware of the limitations of the model. For instance the Black-Scholes equation is quite useful so long as you do not greatly exceed the underlying assumptions of the model. It does not explain everything about derivative financial instruments and it is often applied inappropriately but it has useful predictive power in the proper set of circumstances.
Economic theory is incomplete but hardly without predictive power.
Economics is at best a pseudoscience that has built a cargo cult around the results of econometrics.
So because some people build bad or incomplete models, economics somehow does not use the scientific method? Curious logic you have there. Do you think that Rutherford model of the atom wasn't science just because it was later proven to be a bad model? Science is a PROCESS of putting forth a hypothesis and then a model to explain that hypothesis and then gathering evidence to support or refute that model. Economics absolutely is amenable to the scientific process. People put for testable models to explain hypothesis that are then either supported by evidence or refuted by contradictory findings. That IS the scientific process.
Economic models are often difficult to test because much evidence has to come from real world economies and often cannot be experimentally modeled under controlled conditions. It is the exact same problem we have with certain aspects of studying human biology and disease processes where for ethical and practical reasons we cannot simply do double blind experiments on everything. The fact that evidence gathering is challenging has no bearing on whether the field follows the scientific process or not.
ATRAC was bloody good for its day, and I still think it sounds better than MP3 did at far higher bitrates.
So the prison had a nicer view than the halfway house. Enjoy your stay there.
Here's a hint. Marginal improvements in sound quality are unimportant to most people most of the time. Enjoyment of music does not require being able to get every last bit (no pun intended) of nuance from the performance. For the rare occasions when one does care about perfect reproduction neither ATRAC nor MP3 are technologies that will be used anyway.
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress!
Citation needed. I can find no evidence to support this claim. Let's examine the timeline shall we? * In 1987 Sony purchased CBS Records which is renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991 * In 1992 Sony introduces the MiniDisc.
So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM. The companies that made competing products were not in the content creation business and thus had no internal conflict of interest. When MP3 players came along Sony continued to try to push DRM on their music players despite most competitors lacking similar restrictions. All these were internal decisions to the company that cannot be blamed on anyone but Sony themselves.
And somehow you think this is the fault of Congress?
Google doesn't care terribly much whether Android dominates the market or not. It's simply a way to bolster (through control) their ad revenues.
I disagree, I think Google cares quite a bit. Android is basically a defensive play for Google. The PC is an open platform whereas mobile is not. Without Android, Google could easily find themselves in a situation where they are beholden to Apple or Microsoft or some other company. Since mobile appears likely to be where much of the future advertising (and other) revenue will come from Google is being very smart and trying to control their own destiny. Then no one can choke off their air supply AND the more Android dominates the market the more Google can influence the direction of the mobile market to their own preferences.
Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.?
Hard to do since quality of drawings is poorly measured. If you can't/don't track it, it is hard to improve it. Trying to solve a problem by threatening termination is rarely a useful strategy. It's a bit like shooting your dog for peeing on the carpet. It does provide a sort of solution but not one you'll be very happy with for long.
How is it elsewhere?
Pretty much the same no matter where you go in my experience. In the last twelve months I've seen prints from Japan, China, Canada and the US. Same issues no matter where you go. A print I quoted from a Japanese auto maker with a good quality reputation a few months ago was missing most of the detail from the bill of materials (including part numbers), some of what was present was wrong or open to multiple interpretations. I just quoted a trailer maker for a body harness that included over $1000 of gold plated terminals that were completely unnecessary.
What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?
The problem isn't specific in my experience to the US or any other country and I've dealt with engineers from around the globe. There are at least two problems (and probably more) at work, one of communication and one of verification. People tend to forget that they aren't doing the drawings for themselves, they are doing them for someone else. As a result they forget that certain bits of information that they take for granted are often not obvious to others. I'm both an engineer and an accountant and the same problem exists in accounting. Work processes have to be described in rather a lot of detail and many people (including engineers) really aren't very good at this. Even when they are good at it, time and budget constraints often come into play. These problems are magnified if with distance and/or language barriers between the two parties. Worse it is hard to know what you might have left out of a document so verification comes into play but often this step is not handled adequately.
No it really doesn't. Their stock price is not based off of any fundamentals, merely opinion and short term speculation. Their competitive position has not changed and it remains unclear if consumers will buy their latest products in sufficient volume.
Last september/october it was around $6-$7 a share, now it is more than doubled.
So did SCO when they announced their lawsuit against IBM. Their stock price jumped and then steadily dropped as people realized they were doomed. Stock prices do not in the short term reflect objective facts about a company, merely opinion. If their stock continues to grow for the next 3 years then and only then will you have a valid argument.
You forgot to add "... in the long run". Market share without profits can be very useful if the purpose is to drive other companies out of the market over a relatively short time period. Ask Amazon. However if a company is competing solely on price but cannot drive others out of the industry (think airline industry) then competition will drive most/all of the profits out of the industry. Apple doesn't compete primarily on price whereas Windows PC makers primarily do. If Apple were to dump OS X and sell Windows on their computers instead, their profit margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Same if they dumped iOS for Android.
RIM knows this and that is why they aren't going to Android. If they do there is nothing to make them stand out from Samsung, HTC and the rest and their profit margins are very likely to disappear.
I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want.
We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us. For most products we make I can send you a well formatted spreadsheet and if you fill it out completely you'll get exactly the product you want from us. It really isn't all that complicated but does require a certain attention to detail which seems to be lacking.
The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't.
There is no maybe about it. The human component is not solved the problems are not separable. Humans design things and humans are the ones that make the bad drawings.
I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.
We've built parts for aerospace companies. In my experience they are at most marginally better than engineers in other industries. I've actually worked at Boeing while in school and while they have some very smart people working their corporate work culture is not heavy on collaboration. (That's a nice way of saying they don't cooperate well with others)
When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well.
"Solved problem"? HAAHAHAHHHAAHHAAAAA....
You don't manufacture things for a living do you? I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer - we don't design things, we just take prints and build what is on the prints. I can count on my fingers on one hand the number of prints we have gotten from customers which were correct and sufficiently detailed such that the product could be built without asking any questions. There pretty much always are critical details left out of the prints. About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length. About 10% have missing parts and about 25% have incompatible parts. About 20% specify needlessly expensive parts like gold plated terminals that cost more but provide no actual performance benefit. Most of them leave off at least one critical tolerance. I've even seen drawings with dimension in inches and tolerances in metric.
Why does this happen? For the most part because an alarming number of engineers doing the drawings aren't actually very good at their job. Some of them are just plain lazy. The electrical engineers usually can specify a wire schematic but often have no idea whether something can actually be built or know much about industry standards. The more mechanical engineers (yes mechanical engineers can and do design circuits) tend to create bad designs and specify the wrong parts because they don't know any better. Sometimes they are trying to do a good job but they don't bother to consult manufacturing during the design process and they come up with a stupid design or something that is impossible to build.
I have run into some good engineers but they are the exception.
Anyone who has ever worked in or near the securities industry. GS is a company that is respected because they are smart but not because anyone thinks they are trustworthy. This is a company that has bet against their own clients. They sold clients securities and then shorted those same securities that they had good reason to believe were going to fail. That's pretty much the definition of conflict of interest.
GS is an audited and publicly traded company with pretty clean books -- at least compared to some of their competitors.
I'm a certified accountant and let me let you in on a little secret. "Clean books" means nothing. Enron had "clean" books even while they were screwing people out of billions. It is unbelievably easy to manipulate financial statements and do so without breaking any laws. Auditing is a good thing but do not ever overestimate its value. Audits are not perfect and never will be.
Furthermore if you look at GS financial statements (and I have) I defy you to tell me how exactly they are making money. They are pretty much inscrutable even to people who examine financial statements for a living. I have Masters degrees in both engineering and finance and I can't make heads or tails of their financial statements. Neither can anyone else. Let me assure you that that is no accident either. There is no large banking concern on the planet that you can read their financial statements and really, truly understand what they are doing.
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The way a manufacturer ought to handle the problem themselves is to make their product more reliable so they need you less.
Ok, so they make their products more reliable (presuming that is possible). This guy is still out of business. Either way he is screwed and it's his fault for putting himself in that position. He decided to start a middleman business based on a perceived shortcoming in the product and/or the distribution system. Since he doesn't control the product or the distribution system he is in a bad competitive position. Most businesses fail, many due to shortcomings in the business model. This guy is no exception.
Not build a parallel repair infrastructure and lock you out of what you need to repair their stuff.
They aren't locking the ultimate customer out, just the middle man.
So anti-competitive vertical integration of your business is fine, so long as you hurt the consumer as much as possible.
Exactly what is anti competitive here? The camera makers cannot arbitrarily raise prices (it's a competitive market) and paying for a middle man markup when one is not needed is expensive and makes their products less competitive. Middlemen are not a desirable thing if you are a consumer. They exist in gaps in the infrastructure of a market. Often they are necessary but they are expensive. If you sell through a distributor the distributor has to make a profit. My company makes wire harnesses and we buy raw materials mostly through distributors. That means we typically endure at least 2-3 markups of around 50% each before a component gets to us. We mark our product up and we're a Tier 4 supplier so what we sell gets market up 3-4 more times before you buy it. A cable that we sell for $4 to our customer probably costs you close to $20 by the time you buy it.
at least one major camera manufacturer now refuses to sell parts to independent repair shops. So Kelly Chong seems to have a legitimate beef. Will anyone listen to him?
Probably not. If you build a business based upon the faults of someone else's products, do not be surprised when they decide to handle the problem themselves and put you out of business. If there is money to be made in repairs then you should not be surprised when the manufacturer gets into the repairs business. It's fine to make money on repairing and selling other people's products but if you are a middle man they WILL cut you out if they can.
You can not appreciate it if you want, but you are the one that said you are ignorant of spiritual wisdom.
I said nothing of the sort and since you seem to be unwilling to have a civil discussion, eat shit you condescending prick.
Do you not know what agnostic means? Atheism?
Probably better than you do.
To start with, have you actually read the bible or any other spiritual work YOURSELF, going back to the originals?
New and old testament, various apocrypha plus the koran, tao-de-ching, various writings of Confucius and quite a lot more besides. But thanks for just assuming I'm some uneducated fool who knows nothing about what he is criticizing.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. I'm guessing it's an allusion to *something* but I can't work out what.
ATRAC as implemented by Sony has a lot of pretty restrictive DRM - i.e. a "prison". MP3 has its drawbacks but is a lot more open. Even if ATRAC sounds better no one really wants to use it due to the extra helping of DRM.
As a musician, the actual sound quality isn't that important to me. I'm certainly not one of those golden-eared audiophiles that can tell the difference between different brands of mains fuses just by listening to the audio. However, I find mp3 pretty much unlistenable, even at 320kbps.
Those audiophiles you refer to seem to disappear every time an actual double blind study is performed. I don't deny that ATRAC may have some technical advantages but MP3s are hardly the only alternative format. The DRM problems with ATRAC more than outweigh any technical advantages it may possess. If sound quality is important you probably would want to use a lossless format anyway at least for the master recordings.
Yes, ignorance is bliss. Sometimes I wish I could return there.
I do not appreciate your implication that I am ignorant or your apparent claim to know something I do not without any substantiation of that claim. You really know almost nothing about me so I find that statement quite insulting and condescending.
Anyways, please don't confuse 'all available evidence' with the 'evidence' you are aware of.
If you have evidence I am not aware of then by all means present it. But I'm rather confident you have no such thing and are merely engaging in puffery.
Religion is individual personal spiritual experiences turned into dogma.
Just because people accept a particular church's dogma doesn't mean there is any truth or objectivity behind that dogma. It is easily demonstrable that many dogmas of religious institutions are incompatible with those of others. By simple logic they cannot all be correct. People are not accepting "personal experiences", they are accepting stories made up by others which cannot be independently verified. Religious dogma for christianity was established over a thousand years ago. It cannot be affected by your personal experiences. Furthermore with science you are (at least theoretically) able to verify claims whereas there appears to be no possibility of any verification of religious dogma.
The evidence to examine is spiritual experiences.
That is a content free statement. If it cannot be verified it is not evidence. In legal terms that would be considered hearsay. I shudder to think how you'll try to explain hallucinations of individuals and groups which are an "experience" of a malfunctioning brain.
Which is more irrational, to believe in your experiences or to not believe in your experiences because someone else tells you it's not possible?
You seem incapable of understanding the difference between accepting received "wisdom" that cannot be verified and accepting evidence that you can check yourself. In science it does not matter if someone tells you something is or isn't possible because you always have the opportunity to check for yourself.
Ok, so you're agnostic not atheist like the parent
Depends. If you are talking about the christian/jewish/islamic style god I might be considered some form of an atheist. All available evidence suggests it is a bunch of made up fables and I really don't see myself changing my mind about that. I think their stories are absurd, illogical, incoherent and inconsistent. I consider it just as likely as the existence of Zeus or Odin or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I've never seen evidence that would make me think otherwise. More generally I regard unproven religious propositions with the same skepticism as any other unproven proposition. I dismiss them unless they present some credible evidence that demands consideration on its own merits. I'm very comfortable acknowledging that there are many things in the universe I do not currently understand and I do not feel the need to confabulate a story to explain them.
What gnosis do you want, perhaps I can help?
I'm comfortable where I am but thank you.
Are you just trying to tell yourself you aren't a liar because you believe in the unprovable, i.e., there is no god.
Doubting something unproven is not lying, merely prudence. While based on the lack of evidence I am dubious that there is a god my answer is simply that there is not sufficient evidence to reasonably believe in a god as described in the judeo/christian or islamic traditions. In fact what evidence I do have actually seems to indicated against rather than for the existence of such an entity. While I cannot rule out the possibility that one exists I am unwilling to confabulate a story to try to describe such an entity, nor am I willing to accept other people's made up stories regarding the issue unless they can back them up with empirical evidence. I can tell you exactly what would be required for me to reverse my current position and should such evidence ever appear I would without hesitation alter my current opinion.
Wow, so you're that rare individual who has recreated every scientific experiment that's been done right?
Nice little strawman argument you have there. Pity I have to demolish it. There is a HUGE difference between accepting someone saying that something is true when I have ways of objectively evaluating the evidence and accepting an claim that by definition cannot be proven. The important part is that I have the option to examine the evidence for a scientific hypothesis whether I chose to or not. There is no evidence to examine for a religion. If you don't understand the difference then you really don't belong in this discussion.
No? Oh, so you're just a follower of the science religion?
Science is a process of reasoning. Calling it a religion is a rather clumsy attempt to confuse an irrational faith with a process of reasoning based on empirical evidence.
faith in something unprovable does not make you a liar.
The proper term for it in those cases is confabulation which is sometimes referred to as an "honest lie". There may be no intent to deceive but the person is making up a story that they cannot support with objectively verifiable facts. When you don't know an answer to a question and you make up an "answer", you are confabulating. Confabulation is considered a form of lying.
The Rutherford model isn't a bad model, neither the Dalton's model was bad, but better models happened as science advanced.
Missing the point. George Box put it best when he said "all models are wrong, some are useful". The Rutherford model was wrong but it was still good science (for the time). It put forth a hypothesis and then a model based on that hypothesis. Likewise economic models are based off of observed phenomena and have falsifiable models based off of hypotheses. The fact that gathering data and creating studies for economic models is more challenging in many ways than for physical phenomena does not mean that they are not science. Economics is a science that studies a type of behavior involving living organisms. It is essentially no different than studying herd migration patterns or some other aspect of biology. The fact that there is much we still do not understand about economics in no way changes the fact that economics cannot be usefully studied by any known process other than the scientific method.
The problem here is that these so called economic models aren't based on hard science.
The term "hard science" is a colloquial term based in perceptions with no utility in the actual practice of science. Science is a process or a method if you prefer based on observations in an objectively shared reality. The scientific method is based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to logic. Just because a field of study doesn't (directly) involve fundamental particles does not mean it cannot be studied with excellent scientific rigor.
This is the great misconception: the model must not explain anything, it should be just a matter of fact, a mathematical consequence of the hard science behind the hypothesis.
There is no misconception here at all excepting yours. Saying the "model must not explain anything" is to completely misunderstand how science works. A model is the description (an explanation if you will) of what is observed about the phenomenon. If the model provides useful and accurate predictions about how the phenomenon will behave in the future then the hypothesis is considered proven. A model IS the explanation of what is happening. The model (the explanation) can be proven wrong but that doesn't change what it actually is.
Even "disproven" hypothesis can still be useful under specific conditions. Newtonian physics has been supplanted by Relativity but for practical purposes (large objects at slow speeds) it is still useful as a model. Likewise many economic models are useful under specific conditions that may occur only rarely in the real world but they remain useful models from which we can build future hypothesis and models. Over time we refine these models as we learn more and more accurately describe with new models how the world works.
claiming oneself to be a believer in Islam while being an obsessive liar is a bit of a problem.
Explain to me how anyone who seriously claims to follow any organized religion is anything but an obsessive liar. They believe in a bunch of (mostly) made up stories that they by definition cannot prove to have any basis in fact. Hence they are liars at a minimum to themselves and quite probably to others. Making up stories shows no incompatibility with politics whatsoever.
You can predict is what the outcome of actions will be, you just can't predict what action people are going to take.
You cannot reliably predict the actions of individuals but it is demonstrably possible to predict the actions of statistically significant groups of people. Much of economics is statistical modeling of group dynamics. Adaptations of chaos theory, thermodynamics, Brownian motion, Bayes theory and many more statistical models have applications in economics that work just fine with groups.
I studied economics at university, the only thing I learnt was how little predictive power the theories have, and how they use certain axioms to ensure their rightness, regardless of the outcome.
And I have a master degree in finance to go along with my engineering degrees. A lot of economic models have perfectly fine predictive power as long as you are aware of the limitations of the model. For instance the Black-Scholes equation is quite useful so long as you do not greatly exceed the underlying assumptions of the model. It does not explain everything about derivative financial instruments and it is often applied inappropriately but it has useful predictive power in the proper set of circumstances.
Economic theory is incomplete but hardly without predictive power.
Economics is at best a pseudoscience that has built a cargo cult around the results of econometrics.
So because some people build bad or incomplete models, economics somehow does not use the scientific method? Curious logic you have there. Do you think that Rutherford model of the atom wasn't science just because it was later proven to be a bad model? Science is a PROCESS of putting forth a hypothesis and then a model to explain that hypothesis and then gathering evidence to support or refute that model. Economics absolutely is amenable to the scientific process. People put for testable models to explain hypothesis that are then either supported by evidence or refuted by contradictory findings. That IS the scientific process.
Economic models are often difficult to test because much evidence has to come from real world economies and often cannot be experimentally modeled under controlled conditions. It is the exact same problem we have with certain aspects of studying human biology and disease processes where for ethical and practical reasons we cannot simply do double blind experiments on everything. The fact that evidence gathering is challenging has no bearing on whether the field follows the scientific process or not.
ATRAC was bloody good for its day, and I still think it sounds better than MP3 did at far higher bitrates.
So the prison had a nicer view than the halfway house. Enjoy your stay there.
Here's a hint. Marginal improvements in sound quality are unimportant to most people most of the time. Enjoyment of music does not require being able to get every last bit (no pun intended) of nuance from the performance. For the rare occasions when one does care about perfect reproduction neither ATRAC nor MP3 are technologies that will be used anyway.
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress!
Citation needed. I can find no evidence to support this claim.
Let's examine the timeline shall we?
* In 1987 Sony purchased CBS Records which is renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991
* In 1992 Sony introduces the MiniDisc.
So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM. The companies that made competing products were not in the content creation business and thus had no internal conflict of interest. When MP3 players came along Sony continued to try to push DRM on their music players despite most competitors lacking similar restrictions. All these were internal decisions to the company that cannot be blamed on anyone but Sony themselves.
And somehow you think this is the fault of Congress?
Google doesn't care terribly much whether Android dominates the market or not. It's simply a way to bolster (through control) their ad revenues.
I disagree, I think Google cares quite a bit. Android is basically a defensive play for Google. The PC is an open platform whereas mobile is not. Without Android, Google could easily find themselves in a situation where they are beholden to Apple or Microsoft or some other company. Since mobile appears likely to be where much of the future advertising (and other) revenue will come from Google is being very smart and trying to control their own destiny. Then no one can choke off their air supply AND the more Android dominates the market the more Google can influence the direction of the mobile market to their own preferences.
Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.?
Hard to do since quality of drawings is poorly measured. If you can't/don't track it, it is hard to improve it. Trying to solve a problem by threatening termination is rarely a useful strategy. It's a bit like shooting your dog for peeing on the carpet. It does provide a sort of solution but not one you'll be very happy with for long.
How is it elsewhere?
Pretty much the same no matter where you go in my experience. In the last twelve months I've seen prints from Japan, China, Canada and the US. Same issues no matter where you go. A print I quoted from a Japanese auto maker with a good quality reputation a few months ago was missing most of the detail from the bill of materials (including part numbers), some of what was present was wrong or open to multiple interpretations. I just quoted a trailer maker for a body harness that included over $1000 of gold plated terminals that were completely unnecessary.
What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?
The problem isn't specific in my experience to the US or any other country and I've dealt with engineers from around the globe. There are at least two problems (and probably more) at work, one of communication and one of verification. People tend to forget that they aren't doing the drawings for themselves, they are doing them for someone else. As a result they forget that certain bits of information that they take for granted are often not obvious to others. I'm both an engineer and an accountant and the same problem exists in accounting. Work processes have to be described in rather a lot of detail and many people (including engineers) really aren't very good at this. Even when they are good at it, time and budget constraints often come into play. These problems are magnified if with distance and/or language barriers between the two parties. Worse it is hard to know what you might have left out of a document so verification comes into play but often this step is not handled adequately.
Their stock price says it all.
No it really doesn't. Their stock price is not based off of any fundamentals, merely opinion and short term speculation. Their competitive position has not changed and it remains unclear if consumers will buy their latest products in sufficient volume.
Last september/october it was around $6-$7 a share, now it is more than doubled.
So did SCO when they announced their lawsuit against IBM. Their stock price jumped and then steadily dropped as people realized they were doomed. Stock prices do not in the short term reflect objective facts about a company, merely opinion. If their stock continues to grow for the next 3 years then and only then will you have a valid argument.
market share is useless if you lose money on it
You forgot to add "... in the long run". Market share without profits can be very useful if the purpose is to drive other companies out of the market over a relatively short time period. Ask Amazon. However if a company is competing solely on price but cannot drive others out of the industry (think airline industry) then competition will drive most/all of the profits out of the industry. Apple doesn't compete primarily on price whereas Windows PC makers primarily do. If Apple were to dump OS X and sell Windows on their computers instead, their profit margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Same if they dumped iOS for Android.
RIM knows this and that is why they aren't going to Android. If they do there is nothing to make them stand out from Samsung, HTC and the rest and their profit margins are very likely to disappear.
I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want.
We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us. For most products we make I can send you a well formatted spreadsheet and if you fill it out completely you'll get exactly the product you want from us. It really isn't all that complicated but does require a certain attention to detail which seems to be lacking.
The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't.
There is no maybe about it. The human component is not solved the problems are not separable. Humans design things and humans are the ones that make the bad drawings.
I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.
We've built parts for aerospace companies. In my experience they are at most marginally better than engineers in other industries. I've actually worked at Boeing while in school and while they have some very smart people working their corporate work culture is not heavy on collaboration. (That's a nice way of saying they don't cooperate well with others)
When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well.
"Solved problem"? HAAHAHAHHHAAHHAAAAA....
You don't manufacture things for a living do you? I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer - we don't design things, we just take prints and build what is on the prints. I can count on my fingers on one hand the number of prints we have gotten from customers which were correct and sufficiently detailed such that the product could be built without asking any questions. There pretty much always are critical details left out of the prints. About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length. About 10% have missing parts and about 25% have incompatible parts. About 20% specify needlessly expensive parts like gold plated terminals that cost more but provide no actual performance benefit. Most of them leave off at least one critical tolerance. I've even seen drawings with dimension in inches and tolerances in metric.
Why does this happen? For the most part because an alarming number of engineers doing the drawings aren't actually very good at their job. Some of them are just plain lazy. The electrical engineers usually can specify a wire schematic but often have no idea whether something can actually be built or know much about industry standards. The more mechanical engineers (yes mechanical engineers can and do design circuits) tend to create bad designs and specify the wrong parts because they don't know any better. Sometimes they are trying to do a good job but they don't bother to consult manufacturing during the design process and they come up with a stupid design or something that is impossible to build.
I have run into some good engineers but they are the exception.
Who said Goldman Sachs isn't trustworthy?
Anyone who has ever worked in or near the securities industry. GS is a company that is respected because they are smart but not because anyone thinks they are trustworthy. This is a company that has bet against their own clients. They sold clients securities and then shorted those same securities that they had good reason to believe were going to fail. That's pretty much the definition of conflict of interest.
GS is an audited and publicly traded company with pretty clean books -- at least compared to some of their competitors.
I'm a certified accountant and let me let you in on a little secret. "Clean books" means nothing. Enron had "clean" books even while they were screwing people out of billions. It is unbelievably easy to manipulate financial statements and do so without breaking any laws. Auditing is a good thing but do not ever overestimate its value. Audits are not perfect and never will be.
Furthermore if you look at GS financial statements (and I have) I defy you to tell me how exactly they are making money. They are pretty much inscrutable even to people who examine financial statements for a living. I have Masters degrees in both engineering and finance and I can't make heads or tails of their financial statements. Neither can anyone else. Let me assure you that that is no accident either. There is no large banking concern on the planet that you can read their financial statements and really, truly understand what they are doing.