And like the early iPhone, you only had a walkman if you had money.
I grew up with the walkman and remember when it first came out. The initial version cost something like $150 which is around $500 adjusted for inflation in todays money I think. It didn't take long for them to fall enough in price that they were almost everywhere. Most of my classmates in school had one at some point including me and my parents were far from rich.
I don't know if Sony was able to do that. I don't think I every had enough money to buy a real walkman.
For a long time Sony made a killing with the walkman. Go check out their old financial statements. It's pretty interesting. Your analogy to Apple isn't a terrible one in some ways. It was definitely the hot portable electronic gadget of the 80s. Probably more similar to Apple with the iPod than the iPhone though. The iPhone is FAR more useful than the Walkman could ever have hoped to be.
They never understood that every part of the product has to be well executed in order to charge a premium.
True. Especially true for their software. I have a Sony A9 camera. It's a fantastic piece of hardware with amazing capabilities. But the one glaring flaw it has is that the software interface and network connectivity is just atrocious. (to be fair I could say the same about Canon or Nikon) Sony built an amazing device but didn't get the user interface bit because they are just clueless when it comes to that. That's been my experience with a lot of Sony kit. Good hardware, interesting design, well made, but shits the bed in software. If they got that bit right they could absolutely mop up in certain product lines.
They invested a ton in R&D, and not nearly enough in manufacturing. That resulted in capturing only early adopters, and not the mass market.
That's not necessarily a problem if you outsource manufacturing. Apple invests rather little in manufacturing and instead outsourced most of it. Apple played to their strengths (software and design and brand) whereas Sony did not. When it comes to manufacturing you either have to be all in or get out. Samsung is all in. Apple is all out. Both are fine but you can't do it halfway like Sony has for so many years. You'll get eaten alive by lower cost producers.
Companies continue to find that making stuff doesn't make money.
There are a lot of very successful companies that are going to be astonished to hear that. I don't really get idiots like this who think there is not money in manufacturing. China and Germany and Japan and yes the USA are hugely successful at making stuff and being profitable doing it. Lots of money in manufacturing. The US manufacturing sector alone is worth about $3 Trillion annually. The notion that there is no money in making stuff is complete nonsense. There is and always will be money to be had in making stuff.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Monday joined the growing chorus of government officials concerned about tech monopolies.
How about the Treasury Secretary worry about banks that are a proven risk to the financial system first? The tech companies didn't cause a global recession within the last 10 years or require massive government bailouts or cheat people out of their homes and savings.
It's a tectonic shift for a company built on manufacturing prowess.
Sony was never really a manufacturing juggernaut though they certainly were/are competent at it. Manufacturing was always a means to an end for them. Their core competency was in engineering hardware historically and they were quite good. They ran into problems with software which to this day they still struggle with on many of their product lines - at least the bits of it that interface the customer. A lot of this was because they historically had a culture of hardware engineers who didn't really grok software. That's changed somewhat in recent years for some of their divisions though not all.
Sony is/was quite competitive on non-commodity hardware or hardware where they have patent protection. For example their mirrorless cameras are really good and they supply the camera sensors to much of the industry for digital cameras. (for example the iPhone has a Sony camera sensor in it) I use one of their A9 mirrorless cameras and it's a remarkable bit of tech. (though the software interface still sucks)
Sony popularized transistor radios, gave the world portable music with the Walkman and its TVs were considered top-of-the-line for decades
And all that was engineering prowess, not manufacturing prowess. Sony never was a low cost manufacturer so they usually had to compete towards the high end of the market. None of that has changed. The company has also diversified quite a lot. Sony is a huge insurance and financial services company. They also are big in entertainment (games, movies, etc) They're best known for consumer electronics but that provides increasingly less of their revenue anymore.
"Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have amassed a scary amount of power,"
Google has more power and more information and frankly more opportunities for abuse. Facebook just isn't clever enough to be subtle about it.
Anyway this is nothing more than a stupid publicity stunt that they have to know cannot possibly happen, especially with the current administration and congress. They didn't break up the banks which nobody even seriously argues with the fact that they are a systemic threat to our financial system. If they didn't do that then Facebook certainly isn't going to get that kind of scrutiny here in the US. Maybe Europe could do something but I doubt it.
We honestly need - as a planet - to put in laws that stop this shite.
No we do not. You cannot legislate against businesses failing. You have to let people take risks (including big risks) as long as they do not endanger the entire financial system. Very few companies are significant enough to present that kind of risk because they are already very big and successful by that point.
I know the shareholders are the main ones being burned, but if after a year of operation you can't show overall profit
Do you have any idea how many companies you depend on that weren't profitable for far more than a year? Pretty much every drug company startup doesn't show a profit for the better part of a decade. Amazon wasn't profitable for many years as was Facebook. It's not at all unusual for companies to not be profitable for 2-3 years or more.
If the shareholders are ok with burning cash for a larger payout down the road then that is fine. It's their money and if you don't take any risks chances are you aren't going to see a big payday.
Yes, I have owned a business. It wasn't large, I don't claim that. But I never made a loss, not once.
Congratulations but that is very unusual. I've started 5 companies and several of them didn't ultimately make any profit.
Yes, that would mean no Amazon (or at least, an Amazon starting up in a very different way). But it would also mean that there wouldn't be a thousand Amazon wannabes all doing the same and losing people's money, because it's not JUST the shareholders who lose out. Everyone from employees to suppliers to the taxpayer loses out from such things.
That's complete nonsense. Taxpayers do not lose out in any way. The government still taxes income and that gets paid. Most companies are not C-Corps anyway. You cannot force companies to be successful. There is no way to run a robust economy without allowing people to fail.
Not exactly a high bar to set. Whole Foods sells to wealthy folks (not price sensitive) in well to do locations and prices accordingly.
has just as much organic produce
You do realize Whole Foods sells more than just organic produce, right? And is the produce they sell of equal quality? My guess is probably not even if it is acceptable.
and has union workers that aren't treated as disposible tissues to wipe Bezos' butt with.
I have nothing against unions. My father was a lifelong union member and that one fact alone helped paid for most of my education. I support the unions as a mechanism to fight management abuse and waste. But the simple fact is that many unions have long ago abandoned workers rights as their primary goal and have turned into an extortion racket that only serve to drive up prices for me as the customer with no improvement in customer service or productivity. If management is actually treating the workers badly then unions are a great answer. Problem is that if a union is successful they lose focus and gradually drive up prices and make the company less competitive because they don't know how to cooperate with management.
So explain to me what your union is doing that makes me care as a customer. I see no evidence that Whole Foods workers are treated worse than workers at other grocery store chains and you certainly haven't provided any. How to they improve prices, customer service, product selection, or in any way improve my experience as a customer?
I'd rather support them than a destructive/disruptive company like Amazon...
And I'd rather have a company that actually gives a shit about serving MY needs. Amazon is forcing a whole bunch of companies to step their game up to keep my business. Say what you want about Amazon, they do customer service very well and they provide a lot of value and are constantly improving and adding services. Companies that do not adopt a similar attitude deserve to go out of business.
. I'd argue cruise missile software is 2 to the Shuttle control systems (there were actually two, the primary by IBM and the backup by Rockwell). Otherwise your list is quite good!
Thanks though it wasn't intended to be a ranked list since I have no specific definition of sophisticated to rank by. I just enumerated them as I thought of them.
You don't need much code to write a TCP/IP implementation that will meet all standard use cases.
That doesn't mean it isn't sophisticated. Having a huge volume of code has little to do with the cleverness of the solution. Since TCP/IP is what enabled the internet I'd argue it's definitely sophisticated and worth considering. Probably not my choice to top the list either but still awfully clever.
As others have pointed out it depends on what you mean by sophisticated. Several candidates come to mind though each are sophisticated for different reasons. This is obviously a very incomplete list.
1) The code to control the Space Shuttle 2) The code for the Voyager probes 3) The code controlling the Curiosity rover, particular the bit to land it 4) Emacs 5) Unix and derivatives 6) GNU software stack 7) Encryption software 8) Self driving car code 9) Cruise missile control code 10) Weather modeling code 11) Code to control the Large Hadron Collider 12) Microsoft Windows 13) Control software for the F22 and F35 14) Sonar code for navy nuclear submarines 15) TCP/IP 16) Code to evaluate the human genome and proteome. 17) Nuclear explosion simulation software 18) Code breaking software
You are quite right: modern economics is little more than a huge pile of bullshit.
I'm sure you really believe that too even though that statement makes it clear you haven't actually studied economics and are substituting ideology for evidence.
That's mainly because its assertions cannot be tested, so no one knows whether what economists say is true.
That is not even remotely true for a wide array of economic research. They have testable models which are used all the time. Heck there is money to be made by making testable models - do you really think all the investment banks would spend so much money on quantitative analysis if it didn't provide actual results?
There's also a lot of truth and valuable ideas in Karl Marx,
Yeah you just shot yourself in the foot there if you think Marx is any sort of a refutation of modern economic research.
Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money
Your education is incomplete. There are multiple ways to calculate GDP and they use several of them for official numbers to ensure some amount of consistency. In principle each method should give (roughly) equal results though in practice it isn't always so easy. The Economist has a decent article on how it generally is calculated.
Right and I for one would like to see some actual ROI thank you very much.
You do understand that some ROI isn't a direct cash transaction, right? Much NASA research and data has resulted in huge value to our economy but isn't a transactional ROI. It ends up being an indirect benefit to the economy through business growth and jobs. Harder to calculate but just as real.
There no reason if the business etc that actually derive economic value from it should not shoulder the burden of supporting it.
As a general principle I tend to agree. There are some exceptions that make sense but in general for profit companies should bear some of the cost and risk.
Fee for service government is actually a GREAT model.
Depends on how it is implemented. Some things absolutely should not be fee for service (police for instance). For others it is quite reasonable.
Same goes for roads - toll roads are great! The people who use them can pay - the shippers that run the vehicles that ware the roads most can pay the most.
Toll roads are fine. Until you have too many of them and then they no longer are fine. Most roads should NOT be toll roads and you can accomplish the same results of having the vehicles that use the road the most pay the most through fuel taxes. (more fuel use correlates strongly with more road use) And you don't have to have the administrative burden and conflict of interests that come with toll roads.
Big question is whether we have enough oil to keep ICE cars on the roads until then.
We have plenty of oil. Current reserves are estimated at about 50 years and it's understood that is a very conservative estimate with the real number being notably higher. The big question is how much damage we are going to do to the environment before we can transition away from ICE powered cars. I'm worried we are watching a slow motion train wreck. If we actually pump and burn all the oil that HAS to have some pretty major effects on the global ecosystem none of which are going to be good news.
China, Russia and other authoritarian countries inflate their official GDP figures by anywhere from 15 to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data.
This is nothing new. When I was getting my graduate degrees (one of which is in business) 15 years ago it was widely understood that China fudged their official numbers as a matter of routine. No real reason to believe this has changed. Economists who study this stuff are well aware that the numbers out of certain countries are unreliable and they make efforts to correct for the problem to the best of their ability.
In England, Scotland and other Commonwealth countries they teach maths
Oh you and your crazy idioms.
Mathematics is plural, you know.
So is economics but nobody shortens that to "econs". If you want to say "maths" instead of "math" go ahead. I promise I won't care. But let's not pretend any particular dialect of english is somehow self consistent or makes much sense.
And mathematics is a subject which by definition is singular. The word "mathematics" is both the singular and plural form. You can refer to the subject (singular) as well as the multiple parts of the subject (plural) with the same word. Same with "maths" or "math". They mean the same thing and are both singular and plural depending on context.
The poor, undereducated, disadvantaged will still have kids at the same old rate. So we shift our population towards failure.
If that were actually a valid argument then no country could ever improve its standard of living. It doesn't actually work like that as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. Disadvantaged people don't have to remain so forever and as the saying goes a rising tide lifts all boats.
Solar is still insignificant on a global scale, especially where it concerns transportation fuels.
What's your point? Yes it's a small percentage today but it is also rising very quickly. Nobody (rational) is under the illusion that solar dominate within a decade.
Tesla is only producing a few thousand fully electric cars in a week, while we have a billion cars driving around using fossil fuels.
Tesla is just the tip of the spear and other companies actually sell more EVs and hybrids. Nobody is arguing that ICEs are going to disappear and time soon. Just that they are going to gradually lose marketshare as electrification happens.
It's going to take more than 'the next few' years to catch up.
Depends on where you set the goal posts and exactly what sort of time scale you are talking about. I don't think saying "next few years" is out of line if you think big picture. You'll (probably) see widespread and increasing electrification of cars (EVs and hybrids) over the next 2 decades with a reasonable approximation of full electrification happening in key markets in probably 40-60 years. Possible it could happen quicker but I doubt it. If you think big picture that's a pretty short time scale. Similar with grid scale solar and wind. They will likely steadily increase as a portion of our power portfolio over the next several decades probably peaking somewhere between 20-40%. I could see them getting higher but that would take a coordinated government policy to get distributed storage (prob batteries) for it to really work and it's unclear that the political will will be there for that.
Sustainable can mean a lot of things. Clarify the conditions you consider to be sustainable ones.
I don't know the exact number, but I'm pretty sure we're at least an order of magnitude too high right now.
You should have put the period in that sentence after "I don't know". You have no objective basis for your claim that that the global population should be 700 million people instead of the ~7 billion it currently is. Furthermore there is no evidence that our current population is unsustainable. Some of our activities probably are unsustainable but that is a separate issue and not contingent on the population size for the most part.
Births are dropping because Americans are becoming less religious
Might be a portion of it but I doubt that is the primary reason. The US is still quite religious compared to other peer countries. The most effective form of birth control is educating and raising the standard of living for women. As women get more education they choose to have fewer children and have them later. As their standard of living and participation in the labor force goes up the number of children they have goes down. And to your point as they get the right to control their bodies and reproduction they tend to have fewer children or have them later.
To be honest the solution right now isn't to pay us more, it's to bring in more labor from overseas. It's hard to argue with that since it's working. It just sucks if you're a member of the working class.
We've always been a nation of immigrants. We just have too many folks who are in denial about that fact and think that because they got here first it somehow makes them special and entitles them to be xenophobic.
Why is it America's job to do everything for the world?
It isn't and never was and we don't. That's a nice rhetorical strawman you have there though combined with a nice little dash of jingoism.
It's just expected everything will be free of charge. GPS, military protection, US Navy keeping the sea routes open for wealthy nations like Germany to make a mint on exports,
Ok so let's cut the military spending. We spend WAY too much money on it anyway.
Oh, and GPS isn't provided for free nor is US military protection. There are royalties involved with GPS and if you think US military protection doesn't come with strings attached you are an idiot.
American citizens dying from hyper expensive medical costs while the world benefits from cures we develop, the list goes on.
Oh spare me. The only reason our medical costs are so high is because we have a weapons grade stupid system for financing our medical care. Literally every other advanced country realized a long time ago that the government HAS to be an active player to keep costs reasonable and to ensure that EVERYONE has access to health care. They treat it as a fundamental human right and we do not. Our expensive medical system is our own stupid fault and no one elses.
It's bankrupting us to carry all these free riders along.
No it really is not. Our oversized military budget, unwillingness have a rational healthcare system, unwillingness (by some) to assess enough taxes to pay for it all is what is bankrupting us.
Slashdot Mirror
And like the early iPhone, you only had a walkman if you had money.
I grew up with the walkman and remember when it first came out. The initial version cost something like $150 which is around $500 adjusted for inflation in todays money I think. It didn't take long for them to fall enough in price that they were almost everywhere. Most of my classmates in school had one at some point including me and my parents were far from rich.
I don't know if Sony was able to do that. I don't think I every had enough money to buy a real walkman.
For a long time Sony made a killing with the walkman. Go check out their old financial statements. It's pretty interesting. Your analogy to Apple isn't a terrible one in some ways. It was definitely the hot portable electronic gadget of the 80s. Probably more similar to Apple with the iPod than the iPhone though. The iPhone is FAR more useful than the Walkman could ever have hoped to be.
You do realize that a camera and a sensor are not the same?
Thanks Captain Pedantic! You saved the day again.
They never understood that every part of the product has to be well executed in order to charge a premium.
True. Especially true for their software. I have a Sony A9 camera. It's a fantastic piece of hardware with amazing capabilities. But the one glaring flaw it has is that the software interface and network connectivity is just atrocious. (to be fair I could say the same about Canon or Nikon) Sony built an amazing device but didn't get the user interface bit because they are just clueless when it comes to that. That's been my experience with a lot of Sony kit. Good hardware, interesting design, well made, but shits the bed in software. If they got that bit right they could absolutely mop up in certain product lines.
They invested a ton in R&D, and not nearly enough in manufacturing. That resulted in capturing only early adopters, and not the mass market.
That's not necessarily a problem if you outsource manufacturing. Apple invests rather little in manufacturing and instead outsourced most of it. Apple played to their strengths (software and design and brand) whereas Sony did not. When it comes to manufacturing you either have to be all in or get out. Samsung is all in. Apple is all out. Both are fine but you can't do it halfway like Sony has for so many years. You'll get eaten alive by lower cost producers.
Companies continue to find that making stuff doesn't make money.
There are a lot of very successful companies that are going to be astonished to hear that. I don't really get idiots like this who think there is not money in manufacturing. China and Germany and Japan and yes the USA are hugely successful at making stuff and being profitable doing it. Lots of money in manufacturing. The US manufacturing sector alone is worth about $3 Trillion annually. The notion that there is no money in making stuff is complete nonsense. There is and always will be money to be had in making stuff.
What happens when nobody makes anything anymore?
What color is the sky on your planet?
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Monday joined the growing chorus of government officials concerned about tech monopolies.
How about the Treasury Secretary worry about banks that are a proven risk to the financial system first? The tech companies didn't cause a global recession within the last 10 years or require massive government bailouts or cheat people out of their homes and savings.
It was those yellow walkmans in the 90s. Those where like a 90s iPhone, every kid had to have one.
You do realize that every iPhone has a Sony camera in it?
Also I'd suggest that the Playstation at least at one point qualified as a hit gadget.
It's a tectonic shift for a company built on manufacturing prowess.
Sony was never really a manufacturing juggernaut though they certainly were/are competent at it. Manufacturing was always a means to an end for them. Their core competency was in engineering hardware historically and they were quite good. They ran into problems with software which to this day they still struggle with on many of their product lines - at least the bits of it that interface the customer. A lot of this was because they historically had a culture of hardware engineers who didn't really grok software. That's changed somewhat in recent years for some of their divisions though not all.
Sony is/was quite competitive on non-commodity hardware or hardware where they have patent protection. For example their mirrorless cameras are really good and they supply the camera sensors to much of the industry for digital cameras. (for example the iPhone has a Sony camera sensor in it) I use one of their A9 mirrorless cameras and it's a remarkable bit of tech. (though the software interface still sucks)
Sony popularized transistor radios, gave the world portable music with the Walkman and its TVs were considered top-of-the-line for decades
And all that was engineering prowess, not manufacturing prowess. Sony never was a low cost manufacturer so they usually had to compete towards the high end of the market. None of that has changed. The company has also diversified quite a lot. Sony is a huge insurance and financial services company. They also are big in entertainment (games, movies, etc) They're best known for consumer electronics but that provides increasingly less of their revenue anymore.
"Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have amassed a scary amount of power,"
Google has more power and more information and frankly more opportunities for abuse. Facebook just isn't clever enough to be subtle about it.
Anyway this is nothing more than a stupid publicity stunt that they have to know cannot possibly happen, especially with the current administration and congress. They didn't break up the banks which nobody even seriously argues with the fact that they are a systemic threat to our financial system. If they didn't do that then Facebook certainly isn't going to get that kind of scrutiny here in the US. Maybe Europe could do something but I doubt it.
We honestly need - as a planet - to put in laws that stop this shite.
No we do not. You cannot legislate against businesses failing. You have to let people take risks (including big risks) as long as they do not endanger the entire financial system. Very few companies are significant enough to present that kind of risk because they are already very big and successful by that point.
I know the shareholders are the main ones being burned, but if after a year of operation you can't show overall profit
Do you have any idea how many companies you depend on that weren't profitable for far more than a year? Pretty much every drug company startup doesn't show a profit for the better part of a decade. Amazon wasn't profitable for many years as was Facebook. It's not at all unusual for companies to not be profitable for 2-3 years or more.
If the shareholders are ok with burning cash for a larger payout down the road then that is fine. It's their money and if you don't take any risks chances are you aren't going to see a big payday.
Yes, I have owned a business. It wasn't large, I don't claim that. But I never made a loss, not once.
Congratulations but that is very unusual. I've started 5 companies and several of them didn't ultimately make any profit.
Yes, that would mean no Amazon (or at least, an Amazon starting up in a very different way). But it would also mean that there wouldn't be a thousand Amazon wannabes all doing the same and losing people's money, because it's not JUST the shareholders who lose out. Everyone from employees to suppliers to the taxpayer loses out from such things.
That's complete nonsense. Taxpayers do not lose out in any way. The government still taxes income and that gets paid. Most companies are not C-Corps anyway. You cannot force companies to be successful. There is no way to run a robust economy without allowing people to fail.
is cheaper than Whole Foods
Not exactly a high bar to set. Whole Foods sells to wealthy folks (not price sensitive) in well to do locations and prices accordingly.
has just as much organic produce
You do realize Whole Foods sells more than just organic produce, right? And is the produce they sell of equal quality? My guess is probably not even if it is acceptable.
and has union workers that aren't treated as disposible tissues to wipe Bezos' butt with.
I have nothing against unions. My father was a lifelong union member and that one fact alone helped paid for most of my education. I support the unions as a mechanism to fight management abuse and waste. But the simple fact is that many unions have long ago abandoned workers rights as their primary goal and have turned into an extortion racket that only serve to drive up prices for me as the customer with no improvement in customer service or productivity. If management is actually treating the workers badly then unions are a great answer. Problem is that if a union is successful they lose focus and gradually drive up prices and make the company less competitive because they don't know how to cooperate with management.
So explain to me what your union is doing that makes me care as a customer. I see no evidence that Whole Foods workers are treated worse than workers at other grocery store chains and you certainly haven't provided any. How to they improve prices, customer service, product selection, or in any way improve my experience as a customer?
I'd rather support them than a destructive/disruptive company like Amazon...
And I'd rather have a company that actually gives a shit about serving MY needs. Amazon is forcing a whole bunch of companies to step their game up to keep my business. Say what you want about Amazon, they do customer service very well and they provide a lot of value and are constantly improving and adding services. Companies that do not adopt a similar attitude deserve to go out of business.
. I'd argue cruise missile software is 2 to the Shuttle control systems (there were actually two, the primary by IBM and the backup by Rockwell). Otherwise your list is quite good!
Thanks though it wasn't intended to be a ranked list since I have no specific definition of sophisticated to rank by. I just enumerated them as I thought of them.
You don't need much code to write a TCP/IP implementation that will meet all standard use cases.
That doesn't mean it isn't sophisticated. Having a huge volume of code has little to do with the cleverness of the solution. Since TCP/IP is what enabled the internet I'd argue it's definitely sophisticated and worth considering. Probably not my choice to top the list either but still awfully clever.
As others have pointed out it depends on what you mean by sophisticated. Several candidates come to mind though each are sophisticated for different reasons. This is obviously a very incomplete list.
1) The code to control the Space Shuttle
2) The code for the Voyager probes
3) The code controlling the Curiosity rover, particular the bit to land it
4) Emacs
5) Unix and derivatives
6) GNU software stack
7) Encryption software
8) Self driving car code
9) Cruise missile control code
10) Weather modeling code
11) Code to control the Large Hadron Collider
12) Microsoft Windows
13) Control software for the F22 and F35
14) Sonar code for navy nuclear submarines
15) TCP/IP
16) Code to evaluate the human genome and proteome.
17) Nuclear explosion simulation software
18) Code breaking software
You are quite right: modern economics is little more than a huge pile of bullshit.
I'm sure you really believe that too even though that statement makes it clear you haven't actually studied economics and are substituting ideology for evidence.
That's mainly because its assertions cannot be tested, so no one knows whether what economists say is true.
That is not even remotely true for a wide array of economic research. They have testable models which are used all the time. Heck there is money to be made by making testable models - do you really think all the investment banks would spend so much money on quantitative analysis if it didn't provide actual results?
There's also a lot of truth and valuable ideas in Karl Marx,
Yeah you just shot yourself in the foot there if you think Marx is any sort of a refutation of modern economic research.
Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money
Your education is incomplete. There are multiple ways to calculate GDP and they use several of them for official numbers to ensure some amount of consistency. In principle each method should give (roughly) equal results though in practice it isn't always so easy. The Economist has a decent article on how it generally is calculated.
Right and I for one would like to see some actual ROI thank you very much.
You do understand that some ROI isn't a direct cash transaction, right? Much NASA research and data has resulted in huge value to our economy but isn't a transactional ROI. It ends up being an indirect benefit to the economy through business growth and jobs. Harder to calculate but just as real.
There no reason if the business etc that actually derive economic value from it should not shoulder the burden of supporting it.
As a general principle I tend to agree. There are some exceptions that make sense but in general for profit companies should bear some of the cost and risk.
Fee for service government is actually a GREAT model.
Depends on how it is implemented. Some things absolutely should not be fee for service (police for instance). For others it is quite reasonable.
Same goes for roads - toll roads are great! The people who use them can pay - the shippers that run the vehicles that ware the roads most can pay the most.
Toll roads are fine. Until you have too many of them and then they no longer are fine. Most roads should NOT be toll roads and you can accomplish the same results of having the vehicles that use the road the most pay the most through fuel taxes. (more fuel use correlates strongly with more road use) And you don't have to have the administrative burden and conflict of interests that come with toll roads.
Big question is whether we have enough oil to keep ICE cars on the roads until then.
We have plenty of oil. Current reserves are estimated at about 50 years and it's understood that is a very conservative estimate with the real number being notably higher. The big question is how much damage we are going to do to the environment before we can transition away from ICE powered cars. I'm worried we are watching a slow motion train wreck. If we actually pump and burn all the oil that HAS to have some pretty major effects on the global ecosystem none of which are going to be good news.
China, Russia and other authoritarian countries inflate their official GDP figures by anywhere from 15 to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data.
This is nothing new. When I was getting my graduate degrees (one of which is in business) 15 years ago it was widely understood that China fudged their official numbers as a matter of routine. No real reason to believe this has changed. Economists who study this stuff are well aware that the numbers out of certain countries are unreliable and they make efforts to correct for the problem to the best of their ability.
In England, Scotland and other Commonwealth countries they teach maths
Oh you and your crazy idioms.
Mathematics is plural, you know.
So is economics but nobody shortens that to "econs". If you want to say "maths" instead of "math" go ahead. I promise I won't care. But let's not pretend any particular dialect of english is somehow self consistent or makes much sense.
And mathematics is a subject which by definition is singular. The word "mathematics" is both the singular and plural form. You can refer to the subject (singular) as well as the multiple parts of the subject (plural) with the same word. Same with "maths" or "math". They mean the same thing and are both singular and plural depending on context.
Let it go.
The poor, undereducated, disadvantaged will still have kids at the same old rate. So we shift our population towards failure.
If that were actually a valid argument then no country could ever improve its standard of living. It doesn't actually work like that as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. Disadvantaged people don't have to remain so forever and as the saying goes a rising tide lifts all boats.
Solar is still insignificant on a global scale, especially where it concerns transportation fuels.
What's your point? Yes it's a small percentage today but it is also rising very quickly. Nobody (rational) is under the illusion that solar dominate within a decade.
Tesla is only producing a few thousand fully electric cars in a week, while we have a billion cars driving around using fossil fuels.
Tesla is just the tip of the spear and other companies actually sell more EVs and hybrids. Nobody is arguing that ICEs are going to disappear and time soon. Just that they are going to gradually lose marketshare as electrification happens.
It's going to take more than 'the next few' years to catch up.
Depends on where you set the goal posts and exactly what sort of time scale you are talking about. I don't think saying "next few years" is out of line if you think big picture. You'll (probably) see widespread and increasing electrification of cars (EVs and hybrids) over the next 2 decades with a reasonable approximation of full electrification happening in key markets in probably 40-60 years. Possible it could happen quicker but I doubt it. If you think big picture that's a pretty short time scale. Similar with grid scale solar and wind. They will likely steadily increase as a portion of our power portfolio over the next several decades probably peaking somewhere between 20-40%. I could see them getting higher but that would take a coordinated government policy to get distributed storage (prob batteries) for it to really work and it's unclear that the political will will be there for that.
One that is sustainable.
Sustainable can mean a lot of things. Clarify the conditions you consider to be sustainable ones.
I don't know the exact number, but I'm pretty sure we're at least an order of magnitude too high right now.
You should have put the period in that sentence after "I don't know". You have no objective basis for your claim that that the global population should be 700 million people instead of the ~7 billion it currently is. Furthermore there is no evidence that our current population is unsustainable. Some of our activities probably are unsustainable but that is a separate issue and not contingent on the population size for the most part.
Births are dropping because Americans are becoming less religious
Might be a portion of it but I doubt that is the primary reason. The US is still quite religious compared to other peer countries. The most effective form of birth control is educating and raising the standard of living for women. As women get more education they choose to have fewer children and have them later. As their standard of living and participation in the labor force goes up the number of children they have goes down. And to your point as they get the right to control their bodies and reproduction they tend to have fewer children or have them later.
To be honest the solution right now isn't to pay us more, it's to bring in more labor from overseas. It's hard to argue with that since it's working. It just sucks if you're a member of the working class.
We've always been a nation of immigrants. We just have too many folks who are in denial about that fact and think that because they got here first it somehow makes them special and entitles them to be xenophobic.
Why is it America's job to do everything for the world?
It isn't and never was and we don't. That's a nice rhetorical strawman you have there though combined with a nice little dash of jingoism.
It's just expected everything will be free of charge. GPS, military protection, US Navy keeping the sea routes open for wealthy nations like Germany to make a mint on exports,
Ok so let's cut the military spending. We spend WAY too much money on it anyway.
Oh, and GPS isn't provided for free nor is US military protection. There are royalties involved with GPS and if you think US military protection doesn't come with strings attached you are an idiot.
American citizens dying from hyper expensive medical costs while the world benefits from cures we develop, the list goes on.
Oh spare me. The only reason our medical costs are so high is because we have a weapons grade stupid system for financing our medical care. Literally every other advanced country realized a long time ago that the government HAS to be an active player to keep costs reasonable and to ensure that EVERYONE has access to health care. They treat it as a fundamental human right and we do not. Our expensive medical system is our own stupid fault and no one elses.
It's bankrupting us to carry all these free riders along.
No it really is not. Our oversized military budget, unwillingness have a rational healthcare system, unwillingness (by some) to assess enough taxes to pay for it all is what is bankrupting us.
Wow a rigged demo? Those never happen. Couldn't possibly be that it doesn't work perfectly and that they made a pre-recorded and staged demo.