Sure but even if Tesla where churning out 10k Model 3's a month then they don't need tooling that lasts for millions especially if there is a possibility of a part redesign in the interim.
They have orders for 500K units already. They need tooling that can last.
The entirely rational thing might be to go with cheap tooling that only lasts for 10k
You'd think so but that's not how it works. You can get prototype tooling that will last for a short time but you do NOT want to do production runs with it if you can avoid it. I've seen auto companies do this and it rarely ends happily. It wears out in unpredictable ways much too quickly. Ends up costing you more in the long run. The cheap tooling is actually more expensive on a per unit basis when you are at production volumes because of downtime, replacement cost, and maintenance.
I'm not sure what sort of tooling is required for building a Tesla, but even a drill needs to be changed, and I'd be surprised if at least something wasn't tapped.
The tooling in question here isn't generally disposables like drills and taps but robots, paint, jigs, welding automation, material handling, presses, (big) die sets, etc. They aren't drilling and tapping anything on the main assembly line. All that stuff is done long before the parts reach the line. The tools in question are the ones on the line that can really affect production rates.
Toolings typically last for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of operations.
That depends entirely on the tooling in question. In many cases you are right but not always.
Tesla should still be on its first toolings UNLESS they've redesigned parts, forcing tooling changes or new tools altogether.
The problem Tesla has is that they apparently skipped prototype tooling and ordered the production tooling. That means that if they didn't get it right they'll have to tear it out and replace it or spend a lot of time and money fixing it. It's a gamble but one with a non-trivial chance of rolling snake eyes. If it works they get to production faster and save a lot of money. If it doesn't then they have a huge problem to fix.
Well, do you mean they aren't an ad company themselves? Or do you actually think they dont advertise?
You really can't figure this out? Look at the financial statements. Apple does not make a significant percentage of their revenue from advertisements. Advertising to them is a cost center, not a source of significant profit. Compare to Google and Facebook which make virtually all of their revenue by selling advertising space. Facebook doesn't make money advertising Facebook - they make money selling ad space to other companies.
It's called evolutionary pressure. Please spend 20 seconds looking up the term on wikipedia next time before you post. If you heavily fish a species it changes the genetic profile of the uncaught fish. If you catch and keep only the big fish then you have created an evolutionary pressure for the fish to be smaller. Really it's just a form of selective breeding at that point. And we have done this to fish species.
The USDA data says otherwise. So does data from the NIH. You might want to look into it. For many key crops the vast majority of acreage (80%+) is genetically engineered varieties.
Lol... what a fucked argument is that?
It's called evolution. Do I really have to spell it out for you? 90+% of your genome is identical to dozens of other species and double digit percentages of it is identical to most species on earth. That's how evolution works. We have DNA from every species up the chain in our evolutionary tree, most of which are not human.
ALL DNA in a human is either human or from an RNA virus, as sure as hell you have no Dandoline or jelly fish DNA in your body...
Wrong again my friend. A non-trivial percentage of your DNA is IDENTICAL to those species. And the origin of that DNA wasn't from humans.
You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib.
He can find it glib all he wants but that doesn't make it wrong.
The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay.
And there are obviously many more who can. Delivering a service under false or misleading pretenses is something I find reprehensible. Facebook isn't an honest broker of data about people and they have a long history of treating their users in a manner that could reasonably be described as contemptuous.
And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people
Which is demonstrably nonsense. It's one way to reach a lot of people but it is not even close to the only way. Apple sells tens of millions of devices each year so obviously they are reaching a very large audience and aren't relying on advertising to do it. Amazon gets only a tiny fraction of their revenue from advertising - they actually sell the stuff people want. Advertising is fine and useful but to pretend that it is the only way to reach a large audience is just ridiculous.
As AI spreads beyond the tech sector, it will fuel the rise of new firms that challenge incumbents. This is already happening in the car industry, with autonomous-vehicle startups and ride-hailing firms such as Uber.
Uber isn't a threat to any incumbent in the car industry. They don't make cars and aren't going to be making cars any time soon, if ever unless they actually somehow get the funding to buy a large auto manufacturer. Furthermore the car companies are heavily researching self driving cars and most of them are FAR better funded and equipped for the task than Uber is. Uber has literally no competitive advantage here over GM, Tesla, or Google. Plus there is a strong chance that Uber will be out of business before long considering their astronomical burn rate on cash with no obvious path to profitability.
You don't think a couple hundred years of extensive fishing has not exerted a evolutionary selective pressure on them then?
I'm sure it has but didn't want to get bogged down with caveats. My point was that wild caught fish are the only possible exception compared with just about everything else which was very intentionally modified one way or another. You are quite right that we've probably caused some amount of genetic changes to seafood through selective pressures though comparatively minimal ones compared with something like a cow or a watermelon. I can think of a few others that perhaps were subject to selection pressures but not intentional modifications but the list isn't very long in a grocery store.
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine. Yes we should be doing it, we will continue to do it, and the techniques for doing it are only going to get more effective. It will be effectively impossible to feed the human population without GMOs. It's not even a choice really.
I won't be satisfied about the safety of GMO until we've had a couple hundred years of informed consent trials.
So you are saying you'll never be satisfied. That isn't going to happen. Seven billion people on the planet, widespread use of GMOs using modern techniques for decades now (plus thousands of years of older techniques) and zero evidence of any negative nutritional effects across generations. If that sort of evidence isn't good enough for you then you will never be satisfied. The nutritional question is settled for all practical purposes and any negative health effects from them that might exist are clearly extremely subtle at worst. The experiment has already been run and the evidence seems clear that GMOs aren't a nutritional health risk either in the short or long term.
Now if you want to make an argument about the effects of GMOs on ecosystems being potentially harmful then you might have an argument. There the evidence is a lot less clear and there is clear evidence that use of GMOs (think roundup ready) influences our behavior in ways that have clear and demonstrable harms both direct and indirect.
Also, I defy anyone to point out a time when Nature has allowed the mixing of tomato and frog genes to produce a superior tomato.
Your DNA is absolutely loaded with code from species that are not human. The fact that you can't wrap your brain around mixing genes from seemingly unrelated species isn't evidence of a problem. You talk about nature "allowing" things as if genetics is somehow planned. That's not how it works. Genetic code doesn't have an agenda beyond reproduction. Read The Selfish Gene sometime for a more eloquent argument.
It just ends up as proteins and starches when you eat it. Now if they produced some kind of chemical that ended up as poisonous that's a different story. The only reason you'd prefer one over the other as an end user is either taste or cost.
It's not that simple. It's not just how your body digests the food. It's also how the crops and animals that we modify affect the ecosystem and also the economic impacts. To date there is no evidence of adverse health effects from eating so called GMOs. This is hardly shocking since virtually all the food we eat has been substantially genetically modified by one means or another. But it's worth studying and taking a little time to make sure a new technique doesn't cause some unexpected problem. For the most part it's nothing to lose sleep over and I'm perfectly comfortable eating GMOs but a little science (and regulation where needed) up front checking for harm is not a bad idea.
The bigger problems as I see them tend to lie in how the genetically modified crops and animals affect the ecosystem around them. Not just genetically but in what human behaviors they facilitate. Modifying a crop to be resistant to an herbicide carries with it the risk that we will overuse herbicides and cause a lot of damage in the process both to non crop plants AND to the animals that depend on them. Sometimes the negative effects are second, third, or fourth order effects before they circle around and hurt us.
Then there are the economic impacts. Since we allow patents on genetically modified crops, that creates some rather powerful economic effects. Farmers are forced to depend on a relatively few companies to get their seeds to stay competitive. We tend to get monocultures. Not all of these economic effects are positive ones.
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants
I defy anyone to find me a crop we raise that is NOT genetically altered. Seriously, wander around any grocery store and find me a single vegetable, fruit, grain, or protein for sale that humans have not genetically altered substantially. The only item I can think of are wild caught seafood. The only difference between them is the techniques used but they ALL have been genetically altered. Same goes for your household pet, the fibers in the clothes you wear, etc. We've been at this genetic alteration game for as long as we've been raising crops. Odds are that a good approximations of none of the food you've ever eaten wasn't genetically modified by humans at some juncture.
The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk,"
While I'm not remotely against GMOs and gene editing, claiming that there is "no risk" given our current knowledge is more than a little absurd. Every researcher I've ever spoken with about CRISPR (my wife works with several of them) says something to the effect of "whoa that's powerful stuff... we should be careful until we understand it better". (their real concerns tend to be more in the area of bio-weapons and pathogens but crops are a mild concern of theirs) While it might turn out that there is actually no meaningful risk from CRISPR on crops, that doesn't mean we should rush headlong into the unknown without thinking through each step and making sure we know what we are doing as best we can. Modifying plants demonstrably affects ecosystems, sometimes in ways we didn't predict. Sometimes the modifications themselves aren't harmful but the actions they permit are - see modifying crops to be resistant to chemicals like glyphosate where the genetic modification isn't harmful itself but the herbicides or behaviors they facilitate clearly are harmful on some level. I see no evidence that we shouldn't use technologies like CRISPR but spending some years testing and learning seems like a practical first step and if we need some regulations to make that happen, so be it.
Our ancestors (most of them) worked all day from before the sun rose to after it set just to survive, farming, gathering, hunting, whatever it took.
And they had short(er) often brutal lives to show for it. They did that because they had no alternative. It wasn't a lifestyle choice.
People today would not be able to cope with what they had to.
Just because we don't have to doesn't mean we cannot if the need arises. Our ancestors would have happily traded their situation for the comfortable situation many of us enjoy today in a heartbeat. They didn't live that way because they had a choice.
Scientists have turned their attention to investigating that most annoying of human habits -- the sound made when you crack your knuckles
It annoys the crap out of me when the media talks about "scientists" as if they are some sort of monolithic entity. WHICH SCIENTISTS are they talking about? What are their names and specialties?
Anyway this sounds like a candidate for an IgNobel prize if I ever heard one.
No he doesn't. He makes the final decision but NOBODY who is a CEO of a company that size makes decisions alone or without help on a regular basis. There are lots of people providing him data, opinions, and context to every decision he makes. If you think otherwise then you have never seen top management of large companies in action up close. They spend a huge percent of their day in meetings gathering information and opinions. Even legendarily domineering CEOs like Steve Jobs listen more than they order and certainly do not get their way all the time. Business is a team sport and those who fail to recognize that don't thrive.
Part of being an American "rugged individual" is making decisions without leaning on a board of directors or the typical fawning corporate staff.
No it is not. The "rugged individual" concept is largely a mythology that we tell ourselves when the reality is that we are highly interdependent. It certainly doesn't come from having a domineering CEO who foolishly ignores his board of directors.
Individuals that make decisions without consulting the smart people around them tend to fail rather rapidly. I assure you that Elon Musk spends a LOT of his time soliciting information from the people that work for him. Far more than you might imagine given his prominence in the company.
Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.
That's why he hires people. Very little of consequence in this world is ever done by a single person. We Americans tend to like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists but the reality is that we depend heavily on each other for even the most basic of necessities.
Elon's job is not to do these projects but rather to hire the people who can do them. Think of his job like that of Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs. He allocates capital, set a direction for the company, and hire the right people to make it happen, and sells the vision of the company. He likes to get involved with the engineering because that helps him understand how well his employees are doing their job (and because its fun) - similar to Steve Jobs in that respect but that isn't his real job. Elon's real job is to provide capital where it is needed, hire the right people, and to act as chief sales person. And he seems to be rather good at that.
Engineering IS science. It is the practical application of the scientific method to a real world problem resulting in a product or process. Calling it an "art" really doesn't accurately describe what is going on because the term "art" is so vague as to be effectively meaningless in this context.
As thought, it can be independent of resource constraints (money and time).
If it is just a thought experiment then it isn't engineering. Engineering always results in a tangible product or process. Thought experiments are just theoretical physics or math. It doesn't become engineering until you actually build something to test the solution. Engineering is NEVER independent of resource constraints (time, money, labor, and/or materials).
Engineering has worked despite nobody in the world knowing the underlying science.
What is your point? Even pure science doesn't have a perfect grasp of the world so I'm not really sure where you are going with your argument. Science is at its core a method of investigation rather than a body of knowledge. The body of knowledge that results is a second order effect of the process. Engineering IS a branch of science because it follows the scientific method. It would not work if it did not. One does not have to have a conscious awareness of what the scientific method is to follow the scientific method.
You can make a bridge by trial and error, and that's pretty much how engineering worked for most of its existence.
Trial and error is still science as long as you learn from the errors. You form a hypothesis (design a bridge), perform an experiment to test it (build a bridge), and refine your model based on the results (did it fall down?) and repeat the experiment as necessary. That is science in it's most basic form. Understanding every last detail of what is going on is not required for the process to follow the scientific method.
President Trump escalated his attack on Amazon on Thursday, saying that the e-commerce giant does not pay enough taxes, and strongly suggested that he may try to rein in the e-commerce business.
In the words of Trump himself "That makes them smart".
I'm not a physicist so I can't say for sure how much they are talking out their ass, but in principle you are incorrect.
Always possible but I very much doubt it in this case. What we are calling "dark matter" very plausibly might not actually be matter at all. Until we can actually prove that it is matter or something similar it is improper to say there is X quantity of it.
People figured out how to do basic microbiology to make yogurt, ferment beverages, etc before they had a meaningful idea of what microbes were.
Missing the point. They weren't making claims that it was some mysterious "dark yogurt". They simply shrugged and said they didn't know. "Dark matter" is a placeholder term we use to explain a phenomena in terms of something we think we do understand.
To bring it back to physics, we can have a really model in an equation that matches reality really well without knowing why the constants have the values they do when you run the derivatives and integrals.
Having a model that works does not excuse improperly claiming it describes things you don't fully understand. There is nothing wrong with saying "we don't know yet" instead of saying "there is a bunch of matter we cannot see" when you aren't actually certain it is matter.
Please, note that there is are some very powerful distinctions between practical engineering and the predictive power of science.
There are but literally every bit of engineering is based on scientific evidence. Whether or not the person doing the engineering fully and properly understands that science does not make it less true. Engineering doesn't work unless it is based on the ability of science to make predictions. There is science independent of engineering but not the other way around.
People sometimes call engineering "applied science". I think that definition is incomplete. I think it is "applied science with economic and temporal constraints". Engineering is science applied to practical tasks within the constraints of a budget and with a deadline.
The thing is, our theory of gravity (general relativity) makes a lot of other predictions on scales of the same order, and they seem to work fine.
So do Newtonian mechanics but that was proven to be a useful but incomplete model. Likewise it's hardly inconceivable that there are aspects of gravity not adequately described by general relativity. That doesn't mean general relativity is wrong or useless just like Newtonian mechanics are still useful.
Now obviously it very well could be some sort of matter and there is evidence to suggest that is a reasonable proposition. But until we get more evidence the possibility of it being an error in our mathematical models remains non-zero. I think this fact tends to get dismissed because it's a lot less glamorous than to imagine some sort of exotic matter or new particles. But we've seen it happen before where we invoked fanciful solutions (epicyles anyone?) to explain something that was better explained with an improved model.
The Standard Model is incomplete (there are observations it can't account for), and when extending the standard model in ways to account for those observations, many models wind up including particles that would behave consistently with dark matter.
Exactly. The Standard Model is amazing and highly predictive but we still haven't reconciled it with gravity and we know for a fact that it is incomplete. Therefore it's not at all a stretch to imagine that dark matter is evidence of what the Standard Model is still missing. And that is an exciting prospect. I hope we figure out this mystery during my lifetime.
This suggests there is unseen, but substantial, mass holding stars in orbit. In the Milky Way there is about 30 times more dark matter than normal matter.
This is an improper statement of what we actually know. It's like saying a UFO must be an alien from another planet while forgetting what the U stands for. We have close to NO IDEA what the phenomena we call dark matter actually is so saying there is 30X as much of it is a nonsensical statement. It could be some sort of matter but we are not at all certain of that. You could say that our current models of gravitation due to matter only explain a few percent of what we see and that would be an accurate statement of what we know. It's possible that the 30X statement is correct but we don't know that yet. If "dark matter" ultimately turns out to be some flaw in the model of general relativity or the like then saying there is 30X as much dark matter as "normal" matter will sound idiotic. If we want to talk in terms of force then fine - saying there is 30X as much gravitational force makes perfect sense.
Short version. We don't know what it is so it's illogical to keep saying how much of it there is until we know what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure but even if Tesla where churning out 10k Model 3's a month then they don't need tooling that lasts for millions especially if there is a possibility of a part redesign in the interim.
They have orders for 500K units already. They need tooling that can last.
The entirely rational thing might be to go with cheap tooling that only lasts for 10k
You'd think so but that's not how it works. You can get prototype tooling that will last for a short time but you do NOT want to do production runs with it if you can avoid it. I've seen auto companies do this and it rarely ends happily. It wears out in unpredictable ways much too quickly. Ends up costing you more in the long run. The cheap tooling is actually more expensive on a per unit basis when you are at production volumes because of downtime, replacement cost, and maintenance.
I'm not sure what sort of tooling is required for building a Tesla, but even a drill needs to be changed, and I'd be surprised if at least something wasn't tapped.
The tooling in question here isn't generally disposables like drills and taps but robots, paint, jigs, welding automation, material handling, presses, (big) die sets, etc. They aren't drilling and tapping anything on the main assembly line. All that stuff is done long before the parts reach the line. The tools in question are the ones on the line that can really affect production rates.
Toolings typically last for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of operations.
That depends entirely on the tooling in question. In many cases you are right but not always.
Tesla should still be on its first toolings UNLESS they've redesigned parts, forcing tooling changes or new tools altogether.
The problem Tesla has is that they apparently skipped prototype tooling and ordered the production tooling. That means that if they didn't get it right they'll have to tear it out and replace it or spend a lot of time and money fixing it. It's a gamble but one with a non-trivial chance of rolling snake eyes. If it works they get to production faster and save a lot of money. If it doesn't then they have a huge problem to fix.
Well, do you mean they aren't an ad company themselves? Or do you actually think they dont advertise?
You really can't figure this out? Look at the financial statements. Apple does not make a significant percentage of their revenue from advertisements. Advertising to them is a cost center, not a source of significant profit. Compare to Google and Facebook which make virtually all of their revenue by selling advertising space. Facebook doesn't make money advertising Facebook - they make money selling ad space to other companies.
Actually? No? Why would it? How would it work?
It's called evolutionary pressure. Please spend 20 seconds looking up the term on wikipedia next time before you post. If you heavily fish a species it changes the genetic profile of the uncaught fish. If you catch and keep only the big fish then you have created an evolutionary pressure for the fish to be smaller. Really it's just a form of selective breeding at that point. And we have done this to fish species.
GMO is not wide spread.
The USDA data says otherwise. So does data from the NIH. You might want to look into it. For many key crops the vast majority of acreage (80%+) is genetically engineered varieties.
Lol ... what a fucked argument is that?
It's called evolution. Do I really have to spell it out for you? 90+% of your genome is identical to dozens of other species and double digit percentages of it is identical to most species on earth. That's how evolution works. We have DNA from every species up the chain in our evolutionary tree, most of which are not human.
ALL DNA in a human is either human or from an RNA virus, as sure as hell you have no Dandoline or jelly fish DNA in your body ...
Wrong again my friend. A non-trivial percentage of your DNA is IDENTICAL to those species. And the origin of that DNA wasn't from humans.
You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib.
He can find it glib all he wants but that doesn't make it wrong.
The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay.
And there are obviously many more who can. Delivering a service under false or misleading pretenses is something I find reprehensible. Facebook isn't an honest broker of data about people and they have a long history of treating their users in a manner that could reasonably be described as contemptuous.
And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people
Which is demonstrably nonsense. It's one way to reach a lot of people but it is not even close to the only way. Apple sells tens of millions of devices each year so obviously they are reaching a very large audience and aren't relying on advertising to do it. Amazon gets only a tiny fraction of their revenue from advertising - they actually sell the stuff people want. Advertising is fine and useful but to pretend that it is the only way to reach a large audience is just ridiculous.
As AI spreads beyond the tech sector, it will fuel the rise of new firms that challenge incumbents. This is already happening in the car industry, with autonomous-vehicle startups and ride-hailing firms such as Uber.
Uber isn't a threat to any incumbent in the car industry. They don't make cars and aren't going to be making cars any time soon, if ever unless they actually somehow get the funding to buy a large auto manufacturer. Furthermore the car companies are heavily researching self driving cars and most of them are FAR better funded and equipped for the task than Uber is. Uber has literally no competitive advantage here over GM, Tesla, or Google. Plus there is a strong chance that Uber will be out of business before long considering their astronomical burn rate on cash with no obvious path to profitability.
You don't think a couple hundred years of extensive fishing has not exerted a evolutionary selective pressure on them then?
I'm sure it has but didn't want to get bogged down with caveats. My point was that wild caught fish are the only possible exception compared with just about everything else which was very intentionally modified one way or another. You are quite right that we've probably caused some amount of genetic changes to seafood through selective pressures though comparatively minimal ones compared with something like a cow or a watermelon. I can think of a few others that perhaps were subject to selection pressures but not intentional modifications but the list isn't very long in a grocery store.
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine. Yes we should be doing it, we will continue to do it, and the techniques for doing it are only going to get more effective. It will be effectively impossible to feed the human population without GMOs. It's not even a choice really.
I won't be satisfied about the safety of GMO until we've had a couple hundred years of informed consent trials.
So you are saying you'll never be satisfied. That isn't going to happen. Seven billion people on the planet, widespread use of GMOs using modern techniques for decades now (plus thousands of years of older techniques) and zero evidence of any negative nutritional effects across generations. If that sort of evidence isn't good enough for you then you will never be satisfied. The nutritional question is settled for all practical purposes and any negative health effects from them that might exist are clearly extremely subtle at worst. The experiment has already been run and the evidence seems clear that GMOs aren't a nutritional health risk either in the short or long term.
Now if you want to make an argument about the effects of GMOs on ecosystems being potentially harmful then you might have an argument. There the evidence is a lot less clear and there is clear evidence that use of GMOs (think roundup ready) influences our behavior in ways that have clear and demonstrable harms both direct and indirect.
Also, I defy anyone to point out a time when Nature has allowed the mixing of tomato and frog genes to produce a superior tomato.
Your DNA is absolutely loaded with code from species that are not human. The fact that you can't wrap your brain around mixing genes from seemingly unrelated species isn't evidence of a problem. You talk about nature "allowing" things as if genetics is somehow planned. That's not how it works. Genetic code doesn't have an agenda beyond reproduction. Read The Selfish Gene sometime for a more eloquent argument.
It just ends up as proteins and starches when you eat it. Now if they produced some kind of chemical that ended up as poisonous that's a different story. The only reason you'd prefer one over the other as an end user is either taste or cost.
It's not that simple. It's not just how your body digests the food. It's also how the crops and animals that we modify affect the ecosystem and also the economic impacts. To date there is no evidence of adverse health effects from eating so called GMOs. This is hardly shocking since virtually all the food we eat has been substantially genetically modified by one means or another. But it's worth studying and taking a little time to make sure a new technique doesn't cause some unexpected problem. For the most part it's nothing to lose sleep over and I'm perfectly comfortable eating GMOs but a little science (and regulation where needed) up front checking for harm is not a bad idea.
The bigger problems as I see them tend to lie in how the genetically modified crops and animals affect the ecosystem around them. Not just genetically but in what human behaviors they facilitate. Modifying a crop to be resistant to an herbicide carries with it the risk that we will overuse herbicides and cause a lot of damage in the process both to non crop plants AND to the animals that depend on them. Sometimes the negative effects are second, third, or fourth order effects before they circle around and hurt us.
Then there are the economic impacts. Since we allow patents on genetically modified crops, that creates some rather powerful economic effects. Farmers are forced to depend on a relatively few companies to get their seeds to stay competitive. We tend to get monocultures. Not all of these economic effects are positive ones.
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants
I defy anyone to find me a crop we raise that is NOT genetically altered. Seriously, wander around any grocery store and find me a single vegetable, fruit, grain, or protein for sale that humans have not genetically altered substantially. The only item I can think of are wild caught seafood. The only difference between them is the techniques used but they ALL have been genetically altered. Same goes for your household pet, the fibers in the clothes you wear, etc. We've been at this genetic alteration game for as long as we've been raising crops. Odds are that a good approximations of none of the food you've ever eaten wasn't genetically modified by humans at some juncture.
The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk,"
While I'm not remotely against GMOs and gene editing, claiming that there is "no risk" given our current knowledge is more than a little absurd. Every researcher I've ever spoken with about CRISPR (my wife works with several of them) says something to the effect of "whoa that's powerful stuff... we should be careful until we understand it better". (their real concerns tend to be more in the area of bio-weapons and pathogens but crops are a mild concern of theirs) While it might turn out that there is actually no meaningful risk from CRISPR on crops, that doesn't mean we should rush headlong into the unknown without thinking through each step and making sure we know what we are doing as best we can. Modifying plants demonstrably affects ecosystems, sometimes in ways we didn't predict. Sometimes the modifications themselves aren't harmful but the actions they permit are - see modifying crops to be resistant to chemicals like glyphosate where the genetic modification isn't harmful itself but the herbicides or behaviors they facilitate clearly are harmful on some level. I see no evidence that we shouldn't use technologies like CRISPR but spending some years testing and learning seems like a practical first step and if we need some regulations to make that happen, so be it.
I thought that most (not all) college classes had options for scheduling.
To some degree but it's not infinitely flexible. Sometimes the classes you need to take are only offered at a time that isn't ideal for you.
Our ancestors (most of them) worked all day from before the sun rose to after it set just to survive, farming, gathering, hunting, whatever it took.
And they had short(er) often brutal lives to show for it. They did that because they had no alternative. It wasn't a lifestyle choice.
People today would not be able to cope with what they had to.
Just because we don't have to doesn't mean we cannot if the need arises. Our ancestors would have happily traded their situation for the comfortable situation many of us enjoy today in a heartbeat. They didn't live that way because they had a choice.
Scientists have turned their attention to investigating that most annoying of human habits -- the sound made when you crack your knuckles
It annoys the crap out of me when the media talks about "scientists" as if they are some sort of monolithic entity. WHICH SCIENTISTS are they talking about? What are their names and specialties?
Anyway this sounds like a candidate for an IgNobel prize if I ever heard one.
All the while, the Parker probe will collect a constellation of data to help answer scientists' burning questions....
Pun intended I hope
Musk often makes decisions alone.
No he doesn't. He makes the final decision but NOBODY who is a CEO of a company that size makes decisions alone or without help on a regular basis. There are lots of people providing him data, opinions, and context to every decision he makes. If you think otherwise then you have never seen top management of large companies in action up close. They spend a huge percent of their day in meetings gathering information and opinions. Even legendarily domineering CEOs like Steve Jobs listen more than they order and certainly do not get their way all the time. Business is a team sport and those who fail to recognize that don't thrive.
Part of being an American "rugged individual" is making decisions without leaning on a board of directors or the typical fawning corporate staff.
No it is not. The "rugged individual" concept is largely a mythology that we tell ourselves when the reality is that we are highly interdependent. It certainly doesn't come from having a domineering CEO who foolishly ignores his board of directors.
Individuals that make decisions without consulting the smart people around them tend to fail rather rapidly. I assure you that Elon Musk spends a LOT of his time soliciting information from the people that work for him. Far more than you might imagine given his prominence in the company.
Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.
That's why he hires people. Very little of consequence in this world is ever done by a single person. We Americans tend to like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists but the reality is that we depend heavily on each other for even the most basic of necessities.
Elon's job is not to do these projects but rather to hire the people who can do them. Think of his job like that of Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs. He allocates capital, set a direction for the company, and hire the right people to make it happen, and sells the vision of the company. He likes to get involved with the engineering because that helps him understand how well his employees are doing their job (and because its fun) - similar to Steve Jobs in that respect but that isn't his real job. Elon's real job is to provide capital where it is needed, hire the right people, and to act as chief sales person. And he seems to be rather good at that.
Engineering is the art of applying science.
Engineering IS science. It is the practical application of the scientific method to a real world problem resulting in a product or process. Calling it an "art" really doesn't accurately describe what is going on because the term "art" is so vague as to be effectively meaningless in this context.
As thought, it can be independent of resource constraints (money and time).
If it is just a thought experiment then it isn't engineering. Engineering always results in a tangible product or process. Thought experiments are just theoretical physics or math. It doesn't become engineering until you actually build something to test the solution. Engineering is NEVER independent of resource constraints (time, money, labor, and/or materials).
Engineering has worked despite nobody in the world knowing the underlying science.
What is your point? Even pure science doesn't have a perfect grasp of the world so I'm not really sure where you are going with your argument. Science is at its core a method of investigation rather than a body of knowledge. The body of knowledge that results is a second order effect of the process. Engineering IS a branch of science because it follows the scientific method. It would not work if it did not. One does not have to have a conscious awareness of what the scientific method is to follow the scientific method.
You can make a bridge by trial and error, and that's pretty much how engineering worked for most of its existence.
Trial and error is still science as long as you learn from the errors. You form a hypothesis (design a bridge), perform an experiment to test it (build a bridge), and refine your model based on the results (did it fall down?) and repeat the experiment as necessary. That is science in it's most basic form. Understanding every last detail of what is going on is not required for the process to follow the scientific method.
President Trump escalated his attack on Amazon on Thursday, saying that the e-commerce giant does not pay enough taxes, and strongly suggested that he may try to rein in the e-commerce business.
In the words of Trump himself "That makes them smart".
I'm not a physicist so I can't say for sure how much they are talking out their ass, but in principle you are incorrect.
Always possible but I very much doubt it in this case. What we are calling "dark matter" very plausibly might not actually be matter at all. Until we can actually prove that it is matter or something similar it is improper to say there is X quantity of it.
People figured out how to do basic microbiology to make yogurt, ferment beverages, etc before they had a meaningful idea of what microbes were.
Missing the point. They weren't making claims that it was some mysterious "dark yogurt". They simply shrugged and said they didn't know. "Dark matter" is a placeholder term we use to explain a phenomena in terms of something we think we do understand.
To bring it back to physics, we can have a really model in an equation that matches reality really well without knowing why the constants have the values they do when you run the derivatives and integrals.
Having a model that works does not excuse improperly claiming it describes things you don't fully understand. There is nothing wrong with saying "we don't know yet" instead of saying "there is a bunch of matter we cannot see" when you aren't actually certain it is matter.
Please, note that there is are some very powerful distinctions between practical engineering and the predictive power of science.
There are but literally every bit of engineering is based on scientific evidence. Whether or not the person doing the engineering fully and properly understands that science does not make it less true. Engineering doesn't work unless it is based on the ability of science to make predictions. There is science independent of engineering but not the other way around.
People sometimes call engineering "applied science". I think that definition is incomplete. I think it is "applied science with economic and temporal constraints". Engineering is science applied to practical tasks within the constraints of a budget and with a deadline.
The thing is, our theory of gravity (general relativity) makes a lot of other predictions on scales of the same order, and they seem to work fine.
So do Newtonian mechanics but that was proven to be a useful but incomplete model. Likewise it's hardly inconceivable that there are aspects of gravity not adequately described by general relativity. That doesn't mean general relativity is wrong or useless just like Newtonian mechanics are still useful.
Now obviously it very well could be some sort of matter and there is evidence to suggest that is a reasonable proposition. But until we get more evidence the possibility of it being an error in our mathematical models remains non-zero. I think this fact tends to get dismissed because it's a lot less glamorous than to imagine some sort of exotic matter or new particles. But we've seen it happen before where we invoked fanciful solutions (epicyles anyone?) to explain something that was better explained with an improved model.
The Standard Model is incomplete (there are observations it can't account for), and when extending the standard model in ways to account for those observations, many models wind up including particles that would behave consistently with dark matter.
Exactly. The Standard Model is amazing and highly predictive but we still haven't reconciled it with gravity and we know for a fact that it is incomplete. Therefore it's not at all a stretch to imagine that dark matter is evidence of what the Standard Model is still missing. And that is an exciting prospect. I hope we figure out this mystery during my lifetime.
This suggests there is unseen, but substantial, mass holding stars in orbit. In the Milky Way there is about 30 times more dark matter than normal matter.
This is an improper statement of what we actually know. It's like saying a UFO must be an alien from another planet while forgetting what the U stands for. We have close to NO IDEA what the phenomena we call dark matter actually is so saying there is 30X as much of it is a nonsensical statement. It could be some sort of matter but we are not at all certain of that. You could say that our current models of gravitation due to matter only explain a few percent of what we see and that would be an accurate statement of what we know. It's possible that the 30X statement is correct but we don't know that yet. If "dark matter" ultimately turns out to be some flaw in the model of general relativity or the like then saying there is 30X as much dark matter as "normal" matter will sound idiotic. If we want to talk in terms of force then fine - saying there is 30X as much gravitational force makes perfect sense.
Short version. We don't know what it is so it's illogical to keep saying how much of it there is until we know what it is.