What is wrong with letting the private sector do what they are best at--taking existing technology and refining it to the point of profitability?
You may have untintentionally set up a straw man. My present argument was against privatisation of space flight research, not for restricting the privilege of lucky entrepreneurs to spend money on fun projects which might then make them more money.
The OP is arguing about diverting government money to "the free market", or something, as if SpaceX's profit-based implementation efforts are a substitute for NASA's research efforts (worse, he may be suggesting that one proper function of government is to channel money to private corporations). It's part of a wider philosophical obsession with applying capitalism everywhere that has resulted in the privatisation, stagnation and price-gouging of various industries and services since the early '80s.
IMHO, the real test is to see if we can jump-start the real research in NASA
There is real research in NASA, although you're right that the political climate has taken us away from the sort of experimentation we were seeing 30 years ago. I wish government stopped thinking of its (ever shrinking) departments as working for clients rather than citizens, building a product rather than developing an idea and looking ever more like troughs for contractors. But market faith has all but supplanted religion as the least substantianted belief system and there is very little opposition to it. Apply what works only where it works.
If by "scratch" you mean using existing launch sites, applying NASA discoveries, tech and employees, and taking expertise from ("investing in") existing academic spin-offs and other established aerospace operations, then yes, SpaceX started from "scratch".
This is how it always is when an industry is privatised: following a period where politics deliberately stifles the government programme, there are calls for privatisation; the early gold-diggers plough funds into the project, essentially copying what has gone before and producing what appears to be progress but is in fact little more than a reimplementation of what has gone before. A decade later, we will be back to stagnation, but with control out of the hands of the people and reliance on a bulky corporate infrastructure with no incentive but profit.
The same pattern has been observed with every major industry since the early '80s yet we continue being suckers for punishment. And now we have soooo much choice and everything's so much better, right? If the only pace of government-sponsored technological development from the '50s through the '70s had been maintained for another 30 years! But, no, in the US it was redirected entirely to the purpose of toppling the USSR from the '80s, and then sold off to the friendliest bidder. And China, which is not so friendly, but knows how to be a good creditor.
Try all you like, you won't make a plough horse into a race horse.
Oh, you're one of those, "geniuses are special but secret people with a destiny and everyone needs to be handheld into brilliance just in case they're one of the chosen ones." I see that attitude as I see racism: an extremely simplistic understanding of human ability based on sense of privilege rather than an understanding of the value of smart learning and hard work.
How long it would take for another genius to do the same would vary on a case by case basis. Perhaps within weeks, perhaps never.
Yes, why don't you conjecture rather than providing evidence. "Perhaps never." There's an extrordinary hypothesis.
but only at about the same rate that Newton INVENTED it.
Newton's discovery of the calculus was very much an evolutionary step above what had gone on earlier that century. Put in context of the relatively tiny population in C17, let alone the number of people given the opportunity for good education, it's not surprising that only two people were known to have come up with it at the time. But the groundwork was being set in the previous decades. For area-finding, look at Roberval, Pascal or Isaac Barrow - hell, look at Fermat's approach to quadrature of the hyperbola using finite strips. Then see how Fermat uses appeal to the intuitive notion of adequality, which he claims to have been thanks to inspiration from Diophantus(!), to evaluation of extrema and tangents. We consider small deviations, then at some point later assume they can be treated as zero: the same unsubstantiated assumption Newton and Leibniz made and mathematicians continued to rely on until Cauchy et al. formalised analysis. And I haven't even started on Descartes' Geometry, one of the first works Newton was known to have mastered at Cambridge.
FWIW in places with decent education systems (i.e. most of the developed and the more fortunate parts in the third world, though not the US) good students have a fine grasp of calculus well before university.
You might not like it, but would you calmly explain to him that the only reason you get to stay there is that your race has more powerful representation in government than his race?
Data mining and surveillance by corporation-government is an atrocity. Every brick builds the same wall - just because one brick on its own doesn't look threatening it doesn't mean you should ignore it.
Oh, he's just mining the metal. Oh, he's just forming the metal. Oh, he's just packing the metal. Oh, he's just ordering the metal. Oh, he's just shipping the metal. Oh, he's just installing the metal. Oh, he's just looking at a moving image on glass. Oh, he's just pressing the button.
I recommend my friends use my real name on FB when setting up their accounts. It's interesting how much I know about me and how many things I'm into now.
What you're saying, very verbosely, is that most "nerds" are not very intelligent
Well, I'm saying more than that, but another nerd trait is overrating their precis skill and over-simplifying any situation because they find it hard to confront the complexity of real life;-).
Most genius level individuals are do their best work very young
Yes, but you're conflating "clever" and "genius level". Individuals who are clever are in great abundance and society would be much better off if they were cultivated into well-balanced individuals rather than being channeled into increasingly specialised, robotic tasks, alienating them from the wider civilisation which they're part of.
The problem is that it is difficult for the world at large to know ahead of time if a nerd is just an idiot with no social abilities or a true genius. Dismiss nerds and you dismiss the handful of geniuses that will change the world.
I think you overrate the contribution of the individual - even a dilettante of the history of science and mathematics will begin to observe that any apparent hero's output was in fact the culmination of the work of many others, often contemporary.
But it is true that geniuses should not be suppressed from making productive output. Fortunately, in the West, they aren't: any sufficiently healthy genius in the West has the opportunity to progress into academia and make a contribution. It's much more likely that, as hinted above, they will be seduced by businessmen - at least the financial types are honest about what they do, but "tech" corporations which output very little real scholarship are the worst. So, like I said, give the opportunity for everyone to live a well-rounded life which allows them to integrate into and understand society - if they wish to specialise, let them do so.
Rather than maximising the amount of money wasted on profit for corporations, when will government make it an aim to minimise the amount it does not produce in-house at cost? Entirely private innovation, where "private" means no connection to government or academia and "innovation" is meant in the technical rather than Apple marketing sense, is rare - if the need is to do something new, and the initial outlay is not too great, you'd be better off hiring and treating well the best people for the job. (Intelligence agencies know this, but no other branch of government seems to.)
Making a tablet is a matter of throwing a few existing components together. Government is large enough and sufficiently well-equipped to manage that bit. Hell, one man with good tooling equipment and soldering skills is, although you'd need something more than that to ensure a sturdy build.
But, no. Modern government is mostly a tool for skimming off funds for friends to those in government and collecting a nice kickback - if an advance fee hasn't already been paid as campaign funds.
There are two problems with government spending which explain most debt problems in the West:
Vastly inflating the cost of everything by farming off to the private sector - this includes war, much of which is on behalf of private interests;
Refusal to increase pension age in line with life expectancy.
The second problem, affecting the common man, is of course being dealt with in some European nations. The first, much more insidious, is being dealt with by selling off more government, making the problem worse.
Taking your stuff and selling it back to you has been the model for every big business since the '80s. Whether it's privatising industry, spectrum, or sequences of 0s and 1s, it's essential to create artificial scarcity in order that the powerful retain their rightful position.
I wasn't talking about "petty social conventions", though it's clear what your opinion is and that you wanted to talk about it anyway.
Nerds like to think that they are smart because they are part of a group of people who are commonly considered as smart. I would argue that the only common feature among nerds is that they are nerdy, i.e. that they have non-sporty obsessions which they're keen to get involved in, they think rigidly outside those obsessions, they lack social skills, etc. Hearing nerds talk of themselves as smart is like hearing people who self-diagnose with Internet Asperger's and then assert that people on the autism spectrum are often smart. In fact, the common feature of people on the autism spectrum is that they suffer from a disorder with the features of autism. Yes, it's great when people in a wheelchair can move fast in their chair, but we don't celebrate being crippled: we celebrate operating despite being crippled.
Newton may have been a mass of spiky extremes (Run, you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!), but he was a brilliant communicator. Opticks is pretty much a guide on writing new science in a manner accessible to the intelligent layperson, and Principia is worth any mathematician, scientist or engineer's time as an introduction to Newtonian mechanics. I'd argue that it's necessary to go back to Euclid to find another (supposedly) single mathematician/scientist's writing sufficiently comprehensive, complete and readable that it's worth any schoolchild going straight to the source to learn the fundamentals. Einstein had convictions; he had regrets; he had affairs - he may not have had a smart haircut but he was very much human.
Newton's later religious and monetary obsessions coincided with a decline in scientific output. It's certainly true that clever people often seem to burn out or become consumed in their own egos. It'd be interesting to study whether this is because of the laudation heaped upon them - in all fields, humans have a habit of praising the man rather than the output.
(Sometimes, I think, people become marketing consultants for their former image - Steve Jobs may the best person at this in the world at the moment.)
There is this belief among nerds that nerd = intelligent. IME, the vast majority of clever people are fairly well-adjusted and are better off spending most of their childhood and even first couple of years at university enjoying themselves at sport, socialising and generally becoming well-connected before getting down to serious work in the final years. Meanwhile, the majority of nerds may possess above average intelligence but are rarely geniuses - for the usual mark of a genius is the ability to quickly analyse and adapt, and nerds' abilities are usually too narrow to manage that.
Any public sector jobs have far stricter rules regarding the procurement of employees
...rules for government overseen by government, without separation of powers or accessibility of information for the public to audit.
The British empire was built on hypocrisy: the appearance of fair rules and staunch ability to look offended at the thought that they might be disobeyed; the implementation of anything but. Its legacy remains throughout government, and things have got much worse since the profit motive of private-public partnerships was reintroduced - John Company is back from the dead.
The whole risk=reward philosophy is just a way for people who are comfortable and have never needed to take any risks to push others to do so, so they can leech off them. Tell people that something will make them a man and they'll run into the middle of a battlefield.
A society's advance is measured by risk reduction, so stuff can be achieved without a large proportion of people being harmed in the process.
It is much worse when space scientists wonder about bricklaying. For while humanity may be better off with space scientists left to do their job, it needs bricklayers to be left to do theirs.
I absolutely agree with you that research should be public, but "it would be better off free!" is not a justification for taking away that ownership by force.
That betrays a false assumption often made by Internet libertarian types. The default is not to have protected property - the default is for stuff to merely exist and for it to end up with whoever is strongest and wants to have it. Any more sophisticated notion of ownership requires force to protect. To argue that it's only "force" when someone takes something from you but not "force" when the police stop someone else from taking something is deliberately redefining "force" to suit your viewpoint.
Our current notions of property exist because they benefit enough of society that people have approved the appropriate force required to enforce those notions. If some modification of the notion of property is proposed which does not benefit society, it is entirely inappropriate to approve the force required to deploy it.
Applied to this situation, there should be no protection against dissemination of scientific research. You're welcome to ask nicely but the people, i.e. the government, have no good reason to help you out.
(1) Notification of all data retention and breaches by government as a result of government legislation, since the EU demands all sorts of data retention for "law enforcement";
(2) Equivalent rules for everyone doing business in the EU even if they store data outside the EU;
(3) The requirement for governments to terminate contracts with any businesses involved in breaches more than n number of times (actually, I'd prefer no public-private partnerships on IT work whatever, but simply requiring competent contractors would go a great way toward this).
I don't put any rating on myself. Where I stand a chance of applying my own intellect and/or dexterity to something, I'll do it. Where I know that mere effort won't get me anywhere (I have neither the manual skill nor the operating table to perform even the simplest surgery), I'm happy to delegate.
But in no case would I assert myself competent enough to take another's place, i.e. represent another person. That's where the overrating takes place. When you base your country's comfort on slave labour (in the Far East), you have to make up an economy by creating a variety of entirely unnecessary service industries.
For routine applications of the appropriate discipline, any moderately competent man is able to program for himself or represent himelf in law. But where would your programmer salary go if you admitted this? Sure, the market's dealing with overpaid underachieving (ex-)programmers quite well, but it's yet to do the same for lawyers because of the regulatory framework and the immense fear of the law instilled in the average citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
What is wrong with letting the private sector do what they are best at--taking existing technology and refining it to the point of profitability?
You may have untintentionally set up a straw man. My present argument was against privatisation of space flight research, not for restricting the privilege of lucky entrepreneurs to spend money on fun projects which might then make them more money.
The OP is arguing about diverting government money to "the free market", or something, as if SpaceX's profit-based implementation efforts are a substitute for NASA's research efforts (worse, he may be suggesting that one proper function of government is to channel money to private corporations). It's part of a wider philosophical obsession with applying capitalism everywhere that has resulted in the privatisation, stagnation and price-gouging of various industries and services since the early '80s.
IMHO, the real test is to see if we can jump-start the real research in NASA
There is real research in NASA, although you're right that the political climate has taken us away from the sort of experimentation we were seeing 30 years ago. I wish government stopped thinking of its (ever shrinking) departments as working for clients rather than citizens, building a product rather than developing an idea and looking ever more like troughs for contractors. But market faith has all but supplanted religion as the least substantianted belief system and there is very little opposition to it. Apply what works only where it works.
If by "scratch" you mean using existing launch sites, applying NASA discoveries, tech and employees, and taking expertise from ("investing in") existing academic spin-offs and other established aerospace operations, then yes, SpaceX started from "scratch".
This is how it always is when an industry is privatised: following a period where politics deliberately stifles the government programme, there are calls for privatisation; the early gold-diggers plough funds into the project, essentially copying what has gone before and producing what appears to be progress but is in fact little more than a reimplementation of what has gone before. A decade later, we will be back to stagnation, but with control out of the hands of the people and reliance on a bulky corporate infrastructure with no incentive but profit.
The same pattern has been observed with every major industry since the early '80s yet we continue being suckers for punishment. And now we have soooo much choice and everything's so much better, right? If the only pace of government-sponsored technological development from the '50s through the '70s had been maintained for another 30 years! But, no, in the US it was redirected entirely to the purpose of toppling the USSR from the '80s, and then sold off to the friendliest bidder. And China, which is not so friendly, but knows how to be a good creditor.
Try all you like, you won't make a plough horse into a race horse.
Oh, you're one of those, "geniuses are special but secret people with a destiny and everyone needs to be handheld into brilliance just in case they're one of the chosen ones." I see that attitude as I see racism: an extremely simplistic understanding of human ability based on sense of privilege rather than an understanding of the value of smart learning and hard work.
How long it would take for another genius to do the same would vary on a case by case basis. Perhaps within weeks, perhaps never.
Yes, why don't you conjecture rather than providing evidence. "Perhaps never." There's an extrordinary hypothesis.
but only at about the same rate that Newton INVENTED it.
Newton's discovery of the calculus was very much an evolutionary step above what had gone on earlier that century. Put in context of the relatively tiny population in C17, let alone the number of people given the opportunity for good education, it's not surprising that only two people were known to have come up with it at the time. But the groundwork was being set in the previous decades. For area-finding, look at Roberval, Pascal or Isaac Barrow - hell, look at Fermat's approach to quadrature of the hyperbola using finite strips. Then see how Fermat uses appeal to the intuitive notion of adequality, which he claims to have been thanks to inspiration from Diophantus(!), to evaluation of extrema and tangents. We consider small deviations, then at some point later assume they can be treated as zero: the same unsubstantiated assumption Newton and Leibniz made and mathematicians continued to rely on until Cauchy et al. formalised analysis. And I haven't even started on Descartes' Geometry, one of the first works Newton was known to have mastered at Cambridge.
FWIW in places with decent education systems (i.e. most of the developed and the more fortunate parts in the third world, though not the US) good students have a fine grasp of calculus well before university.
You might not like it, but would you calmly explain to him that the only reason you get to stay there is that your race has more powerful representation in government than his race?
I was tangentially involved with the group setting them up.
Colour me surprised. Any other government corporate welfare programs you benefit from?
Data mining and surveillance by corporation-government is an atrocity. Every brick builds the same wall - just because one brick on its own doesn't look threatening it doesn't mean you should ignore it.
Oh, he's just mining the metal. Oh, he's just forming the metal. Oh, he's just packing the metal. Oh, he's just ordering the metal. Oh, he's just shipping the metal. Oh, he's just installing the metal. Oh, he's just looking at a moving image on glass. Oh, he's just pressing the button.
ya massa i be good product an' abide by de ToS
I recommend my friends use my real name on FB when setting up their accounts. It's interesting how much I know about me and how many things I'm into now.
They kick you into compliance and you thank them: welcome to modern government-corporation rule.
Any activist who uses Google for anonymity would do well to be banned from Google before his stupidity means he takes other activists down with him.
What you're saying, very verbosely, is that most "nerds" are not very intelligent
Well, I'm saying more than that, but another nerd trait is overrating their precis skill and over-simplifying any situation because they find it hard to confront the complexity of real life ;-).
Most genius level individuals are do their best work very young
Yes, but you're conflating "clever" and "genius level". Individuals who are clever are in great abundance and society would be much better off if they were cultivated into well-balanced individuals rather than being channeled into increasingly specialised, robotic tasks, alienating them from the wider civilisation which they're part of.
The problem is that it is difficult for the world at large to know ahead of time if a nerd is just an idiot with no social abilities or a true genius. Dismiss nerds and you dismiss the handful of geniuses that will change the world.
I think you overrate the contribution of the individual - even a dilettante of the history of science and mathematics will begin to observe that any apparent hero's output was in fact the culmination of the work of many others, often contemporary.
But it is true that geniuses should not be suppressed from making productive output. Fortunately, in the West, they aren't: any sufficiently healthy genius in the West has the opportunity to progress into academia and make a contribution. It's much more likely that, as hinted above, they will be seduced by businessmen - at least the financial types are honest about what they do, but "tech" corporations which output very little real scholarship are the worst. So, like I said, give the opportunity for everyone to live a well-rounded life which allows them to integrate into and understand society - if they wish to specialise, let them do so.
Rather than maximising the amount of money wasted on profit for corporations, when will government make it an aim to minimise the amount it does not produce in-house at cost? Entirely private innovation, where "private" means no connection to government or academia and "innovation" is meant in the technical rather than Apple marketing sense, is rare - if the need is to do something new, and the initial outlay is not too great, you'd be better off hiring and treating well the best people for the job. (Intelligence agencies know this, but no other branch of government seems to.)
Making a tablet is a matter of throwing a few existing components together. Government is large enough and sufficiently well-equipped to manage that bit. Hell, one man with good tooling equipment and soldering skills is, although you'd need something more than that to ensure a sturdy build.
But, no. Modern government is mostly a tool for skimming off funds for friends to those in government and collecting a nice kickback - if an advance fee hasn't already been paid as campaign funds.
There are two problems with government spending which explain most debt problems in the West:
The second problem, affecting the common man, is of course being dealt with in some European nations. The first, much more insidious, is being dealt with by selling off more government, making the problem worse.
Taking your stuff and selling it back to you has been the model for every big business since the '80s. Whether it's privatising industry, spectrum, or sequences of 0s and 1s, it's essential to create artificial scarcity in order that the powerful retain their rightful position.
We get it, Steve, you have trouble maintaining weight since the cancer, and now this Playbook thing...
I wasn't talking about "petty social conventions", though it's clear what your opinion is and that you wanted to talk about it anyway.
Nerds like to think that they are smart because they are part of a group of people who are commonly considered as smart. I would argue that the only common feature among nerds is that they are nerdy, i.e. that they have non-sporty obsessions which they're keen to get involved in, they think rigidly outside those obsessions, they lack social skills, etc. Hearing nerds talk of themselves as smart is like hearing people who self-diagnose with Internet Asperger's and then assert that people on the autism spectrum are often smart. In fact, the common feature of people on the autism spectrum is that they suffer from a disorder with the features of autism. Yes, it's great when people in a wheelchair can move fast in their chair, but we don't celebrate being crippled: we celebrate operating despite being crippled.
Newton may have been a mass of spiky extremes (Run, you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!), but he was a brilliant communicator. Opticks is pretty much a guide on writing new science in a manner accessible to the intelligent layperson, and Principia is worth any mathematician, scientist or engineer's time as an introduction to Newtonian mechanics. I'd argue that it's necessary to go back to Euclid to find another (supposedly) single mathematician/scientist's writing sufficiently comprehensive, complete and readable that it's worth any schoolchild going straight to the source to learn the fundamentals. Einstein had convictions; he had regrets; he had affairs - he may not have had a smart haircut but he was very much human.
Newton's later religious and monetary obsessions coincided with a decline in scientific output. It's certainly true that clever people often seem to burn out or become consumed in their own egos. It'd be interesting to study whether this is because of the laudation heaped upon them - in all fields, humans have a habit of praising the man rather than the output.
(Sometimes, I think, people become marketing consultants for their former image - Steve Jobs may the best person at this in the world at the moment.)
There is this belief among nerds that nerd = intelligent. IME, the vast majority of clever people are fairly well-adjusted and are better off spending most of their childhood and even first couple of years at university enjoying themselves at sport, socialising and generally becoming well-connected before getting down to serious work in the final years. Meanwhile, the majority of nerds may possess above average intelligence but are rarely geniuses - for the usual mark of a genius is the ability to quickly analyse and adapt, and nerds' abilities are usually too narrow to manage that.
Any public sector jobs have far stricter rules regarding the procurement of employees
...rules for government overseen by government, without separation of powers or accessibility of information for the public to audit.
The British empire was built on hypocrisy: the appearance of fair rules and staunch ability to look offended at the thought that they might be disobeyed; the implementation of anything but. Its legacy remains throughout government, and things have got much worse since the profit motive of private-public partnerships was reintroduced - John Company is back from the dead.
The whole risk=reward philosophy is just a way for people who are comfortable and have never needed to take any risks to push others to do so, so they can leech off them. Tell people that something will make them a man and they'll run into the middle of a battlefield.
A society's advance is measured by risk reduction, so stuff can be achieved without a large proportion of people being harmed in the process.
Thanks - I like Amazon. It's useful for browsing sample pages and reading reviews before buying elsewhere.
It is much worse when space scientists wonder about bricklaying. For while humanity may be better off with space scientists left to do their job, it needs bricklayers to be left to do theirs.
Three miles from here there is a field full of rape .
What does this tell us?
It tells us that a word can have two meanings.
I absolutely agree with you that research should be public, but "it would be better off free!" is not a justification for taking away that ownership by force.
That betrays a false assumption often made by Internet libertarian types. The default is not to have protected property - the default is for stuff to merely exist and for it to end up with whoever is strongest and wants to have it. Any more sophisticated notion of ownership requires force to protect. To argue that it's only "force" when someone takes something from you but not "force" when the police stop someone else from taking something is deliberately redefining "force" to suit your viewpoint.
Our current notions of property exist because they benefit enough of society that people have approved the appropriate force required to enforce those notions. If some modification of the notion of property is proposed which does not benefit society, it is entirely inappropriate to approve the force required to deploy it.
Applied to this situation, there should be no protection against dissemination of scientific research. You're welcome to ask nicely but the people, i.e. the government, have no good reason to help you out.
Data is not owned. Consider an infinitely long random sequence of bits - who owns it?
OK, could this please include:
(1) Notification of all data retention and breaches by government as a result of government legislation, since the EU demands all sorts of data retention for "law enforcement";
(2) Equivalent rules for everyone doing business in the EU even if they store data outside the EU;
(3) The requirement for governments to terminate contracts with any businesses involved in breaches more than n number of times (actually, I'd prefer no public-private partnerships on IT work whatever, but simply requiring competent contractors would go a great way toward this).
I don't put any rating on myself. Where I stand a chance of applying my own intellect and/or dexterity to something, I'll do it. Where I know that mere effort won't get me anywhere (I have neither the manual skill nor the operating table to perform even the simplest surgery), I'm happy to delegate.
But in no case would I assert myself competent enough to take another's place, i.e. represent another person. That's where the overrating takes place. When you base your country's comfort on slave labour (in the Far East), you have to make up an economy by creating a variety of entirely unnecessary service industries.
For routine applications of the appropriate discipline, any moderately competent man is able to program for himself or represent himelf in law. But where would your programmer salary go if you admitted this? Sure, the market's dealing with overpaid underachieving (ex-)programmers quite well, but it's yet to do the same for lawyers because of the regulatory framework and the immense fear of the law instilled in the average citizen.