Actually if you want to be green for that long trip, (depending on where it is), consider the train. IIRC, the only transport that uses less energy per passenger mile than a train is a bicycle - even walking uses more. It is unfortunately, slow in the US. But it's much more comfortable than driving or flying. You can work on the train (electric outlets right at the seats), or if you time it right, you can snooze on the train and save a motel bill. I also find that I quite commonly meet new friends on the train - for some reason it's relatively easy to get started talking to people on the train (except commuter trains). I've met two nice women on the train, ended up dating both of them (not at the same time).
??? Why not? It's not billiard-ball physics, but it is complex adaptive systems, which are increasingly well modeled by computational (numeric) models. It's at least as much science as weather, or ecosystems, or neural networks, all of which depend on similar computational models and none of which can be well defined by billiard ball physics or exact equations. Much of the understanding of all of these areas of study have advanced hugely since large parallel computing systems have opened up numerical approximations to the field. The example you deride is a fairly classic example of finding the minimum error locus (or maximum energy locus) of a multidimensional surface in a dynamic environment - like a ball running down the hill to the bottom of the valley.
Now, economics as it is presently practiced in the popular political and social world, based on 40 year old rules-of-thumb and linear approximations - you've got a point. But I would argue that those older models were equivalent to chemistry and physics, before the atomic and molecular models were well accepted and the periodic table was developed. Early chemistry was still chemistry, and the mathematical models developed by economists has driven a surprising amount of other science over the last 200 years. Just for two examples: Pareto and Bayes.
Just think of an economy as a kind of social ecosystem, or as a decision/neural network (many tiny nodes, all sending signals to each other), and look up complex adaptive systems, and your eyes will be opened - or at least I hope.:D
I just read a bit on this - I think it was on the National Geographic website. In fairness to the company, they never said it was unsinkable. That was the media doing what the media does. OTOH, the ship's architect had specified 64 lifeboats, but that would have blocked the view in first class or something so the company went with IIRC 32. Also, some of those were along part of the ship that, unlike its predecessor the Olympic, had been walled off so the boats were actually inaccessible. I think the architect resigned over the number of lifeboats. But even the 32 was about 3 times as many as were required at the time.
But the saucer section raises quistions on structural support, I am not sure if it would be possible to construct an unsupported, hanging saucer section without some sort of supports from below, in a feasible way. Having support columns from below for the saucer section would take away from the whole thing. Probably the main hull could be fully occupied hotel and attraction space and they might have to settle with a shell for saucer, with some places inside being built, such as the bridge and so on, unless a way can be found to build the saucer.
You realize, of course, that this analysis defeats the whole engineering model for the ship itself - ostensibly designed to handle the stresses of battle, which can easily exceed the pathetic 1G that the Earth would exert on it.:)
I always did think the engineering design of the Enterprise was a bit dicey for a military system - too much weight hanging out on skinny spars. But, having said that, I think it would be doable in the sense that one could build something that could handle the the weight, wind stress, etc. But it might have a problem with swaying and vibration. There are some pretty extreme buildings being built all over the world (mostly not including the US), like that one in China that looks like two upside-down 'L' shapes that meet at the corner.
Interesting point. I've been reading about Ultra WideBand - it's basically technically similar to Morse code in the sense that there is no carrier, just turning the transmitter on and off, where the transmitter puts out 'signal' across the entire spectrum. (Although IIRC the FCC has actually limited the allowed spectrum a bit.) At any given frequency the signal is down in the noise floor.
IANA signals guy, but it seems to be a pretty useful tech - unless you know the bit pattern that the signal is carried on, it's essentially impossible to figure it out, so it's very secure, and there are an almost unlimited number of bit patterns possible so there is very little limit on the number of transmitters working simultaneously. IIRC it's somewhat limited in range.
I sent an email to the LightSquared folks, suggesting that they consider changing their ground-based towers to a form of UWB, which would eliminate the threat of GPS interference. It beats loss of their business model and bankruptcy.
You do realize that the US is the only victorious nation in history that not as a matter of common practice did not take sovereignty over defeated nations (see "right of conquest") but actually spent large amounts of money rebuilding them? And pushed to incorporate those ideas into the UN charter, and the post-WWII rules of war? And has since then in most cases actively encouraged and enforced the idea that 'right of conquest' is no longer valid? And continues to negotiate treaties expanding global trade, often not in the short term best interest of the nation?
There is a book that covers this pretty well. I think it is called "Getting to Yes" but that may be another, related book. The thesis is that we all have three numbers: What I would love to get, the absolute minimum, and what I'm willing to get. The key to the whole thing is that every party has a BATNA - "Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement". This is what I know I can get without negotiating. The zone that is bounded by the parties' BATNAs is the area of negotiation.
Often the hardest part of negotiating, or facilitating or arbitrating a negotiation, is to find out what each party's BATNA really is.
IIRC this system was used by Jimmy Carter's negotiating team when they got Israel and Egypt together at Camp David and got them to sign a peace treaty.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about 10 years ago based on energy throughput. Turns out, the Earth can support at least 1 trillion people - about 150 times as many as we have now. Life would not be the same as it is now, but for those in that environment it will all be familiar to them. At the present rate of world population growth (1.1% per year), we will reach that population in about 450 years. Mean population density of all land (not counting Greenland, etc.) would be about the same as Los Angeles county or Bangladesh, IIRC. Just think of every location today being 150 times as populous as it is now. Of course it's not that simple, but you get the idea - we're not that far off. Just f perspective, Wikipedia estimates that we have grown 150 times since about 1000 BC - population of 50,000,000.
I'll just add, that I made not have made it clear that if the 'market' does do as you say, then it is probably due to laws or other governmental intrusions that skewed the system to allow it. In particular, governments that encourage bigness and monopolies are sacrificing the energy and dynamic response of the system. Monopolies can only exist with government support. That is why the US founders placed firm limits on the lengths of monopolies via patents and copyrights, recognizing that there needs to be a time for new things to be protected, (like putting a fence around your baby trees, to keep them from being eaten by deer), but that eventually all entities/organisms must survive on their own in the garden. The best government is an organic gardener.
I don't see why it would converge to a global maximum, and even if it did, what it is maximizing is not necessarily desirable.
However what the common good is, may not be what any individual or group happens to think it is.
Exactly... so we let the invisible hand dictate to us what "the common good" is, and have faith that it will be beneficial to mankind? What if the solution market forces are converging to is the extinction of mankind as a species (or the exhaustion of all the Earth's resources) , and free market forces are leading us down the most efficient path to that optimal solution? How could any reasonable person still call that "the common good (for mankind)"?
I'm tempted to say, "Them's the breaks, man," but that would be cavalier, and also wrong.:) In the long run, market forces won't do that. That scenario is unlikely for the same reason that ecosystems don't often do that. The 'edge of chaos' - the transition between too much order and too much randomness - is the fuzzy but dynamically most energy-efficient area of that surface. It takes more energy (in society think of money and power) to maintain either a monopoly or the anarchic 'wheat field' where every member has the same position in society and nobody runs anything. Monopolies, as we can see, have to use an ever-increasing amount of money/power to maintain that monopoly. And it takes a lot of energy, pesticides, re-seeding, etc. to keep a monoculture going as the jungle always gets footholds and starts to disrupt it.
Ecosystems, and economies and polities like them, can and do sometimes result in extinction of one or more member species. That can happen in two ways that are basically the same - the conditions change in a way that makes life untenable for a species, or the rules that govern interactions among individuals and species change in just such a way. The true role of governments is to assure that the rules keep us on the edge of chaos, which will maximize diversity and minimize monopoly. That is how we make the most robust economy and the most robust political systems, versus any disruptive force.
Note that apparent 'monopolies' in ecosystems may look very monotonic - for example a climax redwood forest where the vast majority of the mass is in the form of a single species of large trees and little light reaches the ground. But actually there is a lot of other life going on there, depending on those trees in various ways. Similarly the global economy has a large number of very large organizations (nations, companies, NGOs, unions, etc., which all act in many similar ways) but at the same time there are one or more orders of magnitude smaller organizations that thrive in, under and within those large ones. In an optimal system, the size (using various measures) of those organizations vs. number will follow an inverse power law, which is commonly characteristic of living systems.
Oh, and by the way - a few years ago I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what it would look like to have a trillion people on Earth. It would be much different than what we are used to, but it could actually work.
Only if sales are monotonically increasing. I think a many folks were put off by that whole 'catching fire' issue a few months back, so now memories have faded maybe things are getting back to normal.
No, it really does continuously converge toward an optimal energy (minimum error) surface in an n-dimensional space, which can be reasonably described as the 'common good'. (Think of an economic/political system as similar to a kind of neural network - call it a complex decision network.) However what the common good is, may not be what any individual or group happens to think it is. what is important is to keep the system balanced between centralized (monopoly) power and overly decentralized (no power), both of which are dead.
For an absurd example, it may turn out (in a few thousand years) that the common good will have been the evolution of humans to a hive society with a small caste of 'queens' whose eggs are extracted and merged with selected sperm from another caste of 'drones' and genetically matched by computer to construct optimal eggs for the needs of the day. Everyone else is essentially infertile. And the populace lives in complex concrete-and-steel mounds hundreds of miles wide, delving a mile or two into the ground and two miles into the atmosphere, with a billion people in each one. And the vast majority of people never leave their home-cube once they are placed in it after the gestation and creche period. And, just because I want it, the system sends out a seedship every year to another solar system, spreading life throughout the galaxy.
That, for all we know, may be the common good. I wouldn't like living in it, and I expect neither would you. But those who are brought up in it, have been genetically engineered to live in it, will think it's just fine. And what if it means that the Earth can support a trillion humans (about 150 times as many as we have now - not so far away), without so-called 'destroying the Earth' (whatever that means)? What have we to say? That's essentially what an African termite mound does now, on a smaller scale.
Market forces gravitate towards what is cheaper, and more efficient (in terms of monetary costs). How is that necessarily the "common good"?
If monetary costs were the only criteria, we'd all drive Yugos. What drives the market is 'satisficing' (a real word in econ classes that means essentially 'good enough' - satisfy+suffice, or satisfy+sacriice) - the Ford Pootah costs $100 less than the Chevy Bangrove and comes in my favorite shade of blue, but the Chevy has a shinier shift knob and fits in my garage slightly better. We, the market, all weigh these factors in our minds and come up with a 'price' that includes all those tangible and intangible differences, and then we choose based on that optimal 'price' that satisfices us. Neither is perfect so we have to trade off one desire against another.
Pure monetary cost only applies for commodities, and every retail product tries its best to stay out of the commodity class by adding features (perceived or real) that 'add value'. Which is why cars never have the identical feature set.
Other non-monetary factors in that balance are the externality-related ones - greenness (perceived and real), pride of ownership, what my coworkers will say, my take on foreign oil, what I think of coal vs. nuclear, whether my wife or husband likes it, etc., and last but not least, my own perception of what constitutes the common good and how this purchase fits into it. Obviously (for most values of 'I') I'm not going to buy a car with genuine Whale penis upholstery, but if I eat beef I might consider cow leather - that ties in with another whole set of ethical and personal choices.
If you are a democrat though this all sounds great...spending other peoples money is the best way to do things and it is is always for some "noble" reason.
Corn subsidies. Oil subsidies. Sugar tariffs. Corporate tax loopholes. Why aren't the republicans talking about any of this? Face it, they both like "spending other peoples money".
- A big chunk of the Republicans are talking about this, and have been for 40 years that I'm aware of. Depending on how you count, they've been talking about it since before FDR. The conflict between the moderate/progressive, big government wing and the conservative, small government was a big deal back when Teddy Roosevelt (moderate/progressive) ran for President.
Actually there has been a dichotomy within the Republican Party since its founding. Lincoln was on the evidence, a big-government establishment Republican, perhaps the biggest ever. The Tea Party is just the most recent representative of the rural/suburban, self-reliant land-owning small town, small government side of the party. Those two groups will probably never really come together as a permanent cohesive unit with common goals.
Actually it is not zero-sum. As can be seen in many nations today, as people come into the middle class, their increased purchasing power increases economic activity both internally and externally, which has a multiplier effect (it's been a while since my econ classes so my terminology is lame, but hey). Each of those new 'middle class' incomes generates (by some estimates) as much as five additional jobs, as the first worker buys a car, buys more groceries, etc. those industries require more workers. That is largely why, despite the migration of many jobs and a lot of production to other nations, the standard of living here has not gone down proportionally. It has only stagnated a bit. In fact, compared to the standard of living in the 1960s I would say it has advanced quite a bit.
Re 'freedom-lacking' - a second point, which is the reasoning behind much of the globalization activity that goes back as far as Nixon's opening up relations with China and even back after WWII, is the theory that free and open trade tends to increase the forces toward free and open political systems. While the process is slow, and often twisty, I think the evidence bears that out. Nations that participate in global trade continuously move toward more free politics. Individuals who join the middle class soon start to exert various kinds of pressure on their governments - viz. Libya, Tunisia, etc., even Syria. A big part of that is the requirement for more free communications to support that trade. Syria can not completely turn off the Internet, lest the economy shut down and die. I don't want to go on too long here so I'll have to leave it at this hand-waving level, but I hope my point comes across. China itself has been rapidly evolving toward a more open polity, despite the efforts of the ruling party to slow down the changes. Today even the ruling elite are making the right noises about openness.
The thing that will 'kill' offshoring is when wages and costs finally level out worldwide. It wasn't that long ago that the unions in Detroit were fighting tooth and nail to prevent the big car companies from building 'green field' plants in Tennessee and other southern states. The arguments were basically the same, and just as ill-conceived.t
I have an older citation, but one that was critically important to the early success of the US and the gradual decline of great Britain. Look up a guy named Slater. At the end of the 18th century, the loom technology in England was a state secret. Those who were trained to use and build the machinery by which UK was supplying fabric to the world were not allowed to leave England. Slater (supposedly dressed as a girl) skipped the country, came to the US with the plans for building looms and other machinery in his head, and set up shop with a couple of mill owners here. Over the next 20 years the Industrial Revolution in the US was largely based on this initial impetus and the growth of the industrial engine of New England.
That industrial might and the financial lock it gave the New Englanders over the Southern plantation states (which the New Englanders actively prevented from building their own mills) was a large part of the financial basis for the Civil War, and also a large part of the reason the South lost - the South had little industrial capability, which is the key to success in a long war.
On a side note, I presently work in a mill that was originally constructed by the company that became Fruit of the Loom. It lay empty for 20-30 years after all of the industry went first to the South, then overseas. Life, and change, goes on.
Having seen your sig, I had to know - what is the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs?
So, I assumed a 747-8F, the latest freighter version. Payload is 148 tons, volume capacity is 21,347 cubic feet. CDs weigh an average of 0.58 ounces, plus 0.11 ounces for a paper sleeve for a total weight of 0.69 ounces or 0.043 lbs. A CD is 1.2 mm (0.047... inches) thick, the sleeve is about 2/250 or 0.008 inches thick, and the CD is 4.7 inches in diameter for a total volume of 0.96 cubic inches or 0.000555 cu. ft. I ignored the extra width and height of the sleeve.
So, in sum, ignoring other packaging issues, I figure the 747 can carry up to about 6,863,768 CDs by weight, or about 38,486,563 CDs by volume. Weight is thus the limiting factor. Using 750 MB CDs, that provides a packet size of 5,147,826,087 MB, at an average flight speed of 480 knots(552 mph, 889 km/hr). If we ignore loading and other ground time, and assume a typical flight from US east coast to US west coast of 3000 miles, that's about a 5.6 hour, or 20048 second flight. So we have a bandwidth of about 5147826087/20048 = 254234 MB/second or 1.94 terabits/second, within an order of magnitude given the sloppy estimating.
Not bad, but the latency really sucks. BTW - I note that the fastest internet II speeds are cited as 272,000 terabit-meters per second. So, using 5000000 meters (3000 miles), I figured that the 747 can do 9,698,256 terabit-meters per second, about 35 times faster.
IIRC a long time ago (early 1980s?) an IBM Research Fellow published a paper about signature recognition (for the same essential purpose of authentication). He/she found that the actual strokes were not so important but the acceleration was. IOW, your actual signature varies quite a bit from one to another, but the series of accelerations are more similar.
So, I think this could be used. You could just 'sign' our phone. A reasonable 'signature' would have to my mind at least 50 data points of acceleration or deflection. Since we do vary the sig, some kind of fuzzy matching with the accepted vector would be required - say 90%. Then if it matches, the signature recognizer could use the correct data as the key to the decryption.
Thus, we would not need to remember a long key, just let our muscle memory do its thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if you want to be green for that long trip, (depending on where it is), consider the train. IIRC, the only transport that uses less energy per passenger mile than a train is a bicycle - even walking uses more. It is unfortunately, slow in the US. But it's much more comfortable than driving or flying. You can work on the train (electric outlets right at the seats), or if you time it right, you can snooze on the train and save a motel bill. I also find that I quite commonly meet new friends on the train - for some reason it's relatively easy to get started talking to people on the train (except commuter trains). I've met two nice women on the train, ended up dating both of them (not at the same time).
??? Why not? It's not billiard-ball physics, but it is complex adaptive systems, which are increasingly well modeled by computational (numeric) models. It's at least as much science as weather, or ecosystems, or neural networks, all of which depend on similar computational models and none of which can be well defined by billiard ball physics or exact equations. Much of the understanding of all of these areas of study have advanced hugely since large parallel computing systems have opened up numerical approximations to the field. The example you deride is a fairly classic example of finding the minimum error locus (or maximum energy locus) of a multidimensional surface in a dynamic environment - like a ball running down the hill to the bottom of the valley.
Now, economics as it is presently practiced in the popular political and social world, based on 40 year old rules-of-thumb and linear approximations - you've got a point. But I would argue that those older models were equivalent to chemistry and physics, before the atomic and molecular models were well accepted and the periodic table was developed. Early chemistry was still chemistry, and the mathematical models developed by economists has driven a surprising amount of other science over the last 200 years. Just for two examples: Pareto and Bayes.
Just think of an economy as a kind of social ecosystem, or as a decision/neural network (many tiny nodes, all sending signals to each other), and look up complex adaptive systems, and your eyes will be opened - or at least I hope. :D
Sorry, I've seen studies that go just the opposite. Got data?
I just read a bit on this - I think it was on the National Geographic website. In fairness to the company, they never said it was unsinkable. That was the media doing what the media does. OTOH, the ship's architect had specified 64 lifeboats, but that would have blocked the view in first class or something so the company went with IIRC 32. Also, some of those were along part of the ship that, unlike its predecessor the Olympic, had been walled off so the boats were actually inaccessible. I think the architect resigned over the number of lifeboats. But even the 32 was about 3 times as many as were required at the time.
But the saucer section raises quistions on structural support, I am not sure if it would be possible to construct an unsupported, hanging saucer section without some sort of supports from below, in a feasible way. Having support columns from below for the saucer section would take away from the whole thing. Probably the main hull could be fully occupied hotel and attraction space and they might have to settle with a shell for saucer, with some places inside being built, such as the bridge and so on, unless a way can be found to build the saucer.
You realize, of course, that this analysis defeats the whole engineering model for the ship itself - ostensibly designed to handle the stresses of battle, which can easily exceed the pathetic 1G that the Earth would exert on it. :)
I always did think the engineering design of the Enterprise was a bit dicey for a military system - too much weight hanging out on skinny spars. But, having said that, I think it would be doable in the sense that one could build something that could handle the the weight, wind stress, etc. But it might have a problem with swaying and vibration. There are some pretty extreme buildings being built all over the world (mostly not including the US), like that one in China that looks like two upside-down 'L' shapes that meet at the corner.
exactly. :)
Interesting point. I've been reading about Ultra WideBand - it's basically technically similar to Morse code in the sense that there is no carrier, just turning the transmitter on and off, where the transmitter puts out 'signal' across the entire spectrum. (Although IIRC the FCC has actually limited the allowed spectrum a bit.) At any given frequency the signal is down in the noise floor.
IANA signals guy, but it seems to be a pretty useful tech - unless you know the bit pattern that the signal is carried on, it's essentially impossible to figure it out, so it's very secure, and there are an almost unlimited number of bit patterns possible so there is very little limit on the number of transmitters working simultaneously. IIRC it's somewhat limited in range.
I sent an email to the LightSquared folks, suggesting that they consider changing their ground-based towers to a form of UWB, which would eliminate the threat of GPS interference. It beats loss of their business model and bankruptcy.
So several Cakes would be a Lie group?
They are assuming spherical people in a vacuum.
You do realize that the US is the only victorious nation in history that not as a matter of common practice did not take sovereignty over defeated nations (see "right of conquest") but actually spent large amounts of money rebuilding them? And pushed to incorporate those ideas into the UN charter, and the post-WWII rules of war? And has since then in most cases actively encouraged and enforced the idea that 'right of conquest' is no longer valid? And continues to negotiate treaties expanding global trade, often not in the short term best interest of the nation?
There is a book that covers this pretty well. I think it is called "Getting to Yes" but that may be another, related book. The thesis is that we all have three numbers: What I would love to get, the absolute minimum, and what I'm willing to get. The key to the whole thing is that every party has a BATNA - "Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement". This is what I know I can get without negotiating. The zone that is bounded by the parties' BATNAs is the area of negotiation.
Often the hardest part of negotiating, or facilitating or arbitrating a negotiation, is to find out what each party's BATNA really is.
IIRC this system was used by Jimmy Carter's negotiating team when they got Israel and Egypt together at Camp David and got them to sign a peace treaty.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about 10 years ago based on energy throughput. Turns out, the Earth can support at least 1 trillion people - about 150 times as many as we have now. Life would not be the same as it is now, but for those in that environment it will all be familiar to them. At the present rate of world population growth (1.1% per year), we will reach that population in about 450 years. Mean population density of all land (not counting Greenland, etc.) would be about the same as Los Angeles county or Bangladesh, IIRC. Just think of every location today being 150 times as populous as it is now. Of course it's not that simple, but you get the idea - we're not that far off. Just f perspective, Wikipedia estimates that we have grown 150 times since about 1000 BC - population of 50,000,000.
I'll just add, that I made not have made it clear that if the 'market' does do as you say, then it is probably due to laws or other governmental intrusions that skewed the system to allow it. In particular, governments that encourage bigness and monopolies are sacrificing the energy and dynamic response of the system. Monopolies can only exist with government support. That is why the US founders placed firm limits on the lengths of monopolies via patents and copyrights, recognizing that there needs to be a time for new things to be protected, (like putting a fence around your baby trees, to keep them from being eaten by deer), but that eventually all entities/organisms must survive on their own in the garden. The best government is an organic gardener.
I don't see why it would converge to a global maximum, and even if it did, what it is maximizing is not necessarily desirable.
However what the common good is, may not be what any individual or group happens to think it is.
Exactly... so we let the invisible hand dictate to us what "the common good" is, and have faith that it will be beneficial to mankind? What if the solution market forces are converging to is the extinction of mankind as a species (or the exhaustion of all the Earth's resources) , and free market forces are leading us down the most efficient path to that optimal solution? How could any reasonable person still call that "the common good (for mankind)"?
I'm tempted to say, "Them's the breaks, man," but that would be cavalier, and also wrong. :) In the long run, market forces won't do that. That scenario is unlikely for the same reason that ecosystems don't often do that. The 'edge of chaos' - the transition between too much order and too much randomness - is the fuzzy but dynamically most energy-efficient area of that surface. It takes more energy (in society think of money and power) to maintain either a monopoly or the anarchic 'wheat field' where every member has the same position in society and nobody runs anything. Monopolies, as we can see, have to use an ever-increasing amount of money/power to maintain that monopoly. And it takes a lot of energy, pesticides, re-seeding, etc. to keep a monoculture going as the jungle always gets footholds and starts to disrupt it.
Ecosystems, and economies and polities like them, can and do sometimes result in extinction of one or more member species. That can happen in two ways that are basically the same - the conditions change in a way that makes life untenable for a species, or the rules that govern interactions among individuals and species change in just such a way. The true role of governments is to assure that the rules keep us on the edge of chaos, which will maximize diversity and minimize monopoly. That is how we make the most robust economy and the most robust political systems, versus any disruptive force.
Note that apparent 'monopolies' in ecosystems may look very monotonic - for example a climax redwood forest where the vast majority of the mass is in the form of a single species of large trees and little light reaches the ground. But actually there is a lot of other life going on there, depending on those trees in various ways. Similarly the global economy has a large number of very large organizations (nations, companies, NGOs, unions, etc., which all act in many similar ways) but at the same time there are one or more orders of magnitude smaller organizations that thrive in, under and within those large ones. In an optimal system, the size (using various measures) of those organizations vs. number will follow an inverse power law, which is commonly characteristic of living systems.
Oh, and by the way - a few years ago I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what it would look like to have a trillion people on Earth. It would be much different than what we are used to, but it could actually work.
Only if sales are monotonically increasing. I think a many folks were put off by that whole 'catching fire' issue a few months back, so now memories have faded maybe things are getting back to normal.
Haha. Well and succinctly put.
No, it really does continuously converge toward an optimal energy (minimum error) surface in an n-dimensional space, which can be reasonably described as the 'common good'. (Think of an economic/political system as similar to a kind of neural network - call it a complex decision network.) However what the common good is, may not be what any individual or group happens to think it is. what is important is to keep the system balanced between centralized (monopoly) power and overly decentralized (no power), both of which are dead.
For an absurd example, it may turn out (in a few thousand years) that the common good will have been the evolution of humans to a hive society with a small caste of 'queens' whose eggs are extracted and merged with selected sperm from another caste of 'drones' and genetically matched by computer to construct optimal eggs for the needs of the day. Everyone else is essentially infertile. And the populace lives in complex concrete-and-steel mounds hundreds of miles wide, delving a mile or two into the ground and two miles into the atmosphere, with a billion people in each one. And the vast majority of people never leave their home-cube once they are placed in it after the gestation and creche period. And, just because I want it, the system sends out a seedship every year to another solar system, spreading life throughout the galaxy.
That, for all we know, may be the common good. I wouldn't like living in it, and I expect neither would you. But those who are brought up in it, have been genetically engineered to live in it, will think it's just fine. And what if it means that the Earth can support a trillion humans (about 150 times as many as we have now - not so far away), without so-called 'destroying the Earth' (whatever that means)? What have we to say? That's essentially what an African termite mound does now, on a smaller scale.
Market forces gravitate towards what is cheaper, and more efficient (in terms of monetary costs). How is that necessarily the "common good"?
If monetary costs were the only criteria, we'd all drive Yugos. What drives the market is 'satisficing' (a real word in econ classes that means essentially 'good enough' - satisfy+suffice, or satisfy+sacriice) - the Ford Pootah costs $100 less than the Chevy Bangrove and comes in my favorite shade of blue, but the Chevy has a shinier shift knob and fits in my garage slightly better. We, the market, all weigh these factors in our minds and come up with a 'price' that includes all those tangible and intangible differences, and then we choose based on that optimal 'price' that satisfices us. Neither is perfect so we have to trade off one desire against another.
Pure monetary cost only applies for commodities, and every retail product tries its best to stay out of the commodity class by adding features (perceived or real) that 'add value'. Which is why cars never have the identical feature set.
Other non-monetary factors in that balance are the externality-related ones - greenness (perceived and real), pride of ownership, what my coworkers will say, my take on foreign oil, what I think of coal vs. nuclear, whether my wife or husband likes it, etc., and last but not least, my own perception of what constitutes the common good and how this purchase fits into it. Obviously (for most values of 'I') I'm not going to buy a car with genuine Whale penis upholstery, but if I eat beef I might consider cow leather - that ties in with another whole set of ethical and personal choices.
Corn subsidies. Oil subsidies. Sugar tariffs. Corporate tax loopholes. Why aren't the republicans talking about any of this? Face it, they both like "spending other peoples money".
- A big chunk of the Republicans are talking about this, and have been for 40 years that I'm aware of. Depending on how you count, they've been talking about it since before FDR. The conflict between the moderate/progressive, big government wing and the conservative, small government was a big deal back when Teddy Roosevelt (moderate/progressive) ran for President.
Actually there has been a dichotomy within the Republican Party since its founding. Lincoln was on the evidence, a big-government establishment Republican, perhaps the biggest ever. The Tea Party is just the most recent representative of the rural/suburban, self-reliant land-owning small town, small government side of the party. Those two groups will probably never really come together as a permanent cohesive unit with common goals.
... and a towel. I was told this by a visitor from the future.
Actually it is not zero-sum. As can be seen in many nations today, as people come into the middle class, their increased purchasing power increases economic activity both internally and externally, which has a multiplier effect (it's been a while since my econ classes so my terminology is lame, but hey). Each of those new 'middle class' incomes generates (by some estimates) as much as five additional jobs, as the first worker buys a car, buys more groceries, etc. those industries require more workers. That is largely why, despite the migration of many jobs and a lot of production to other nations, the standard of living here has not gone down proportionally. It has only stagnated a bit. In fact, compared to the standard of living in the 1960s I would say it has advanced quite a bit.
Re 'freedom-lacking' - a second point, which is the reasoning behind much of the globalization activity that goes back as far as Nixon's opening up relations with China and even back after WWII, is the theory that free and open trade tends to increase the forces toward free and open political systems. While the process is slow, and often twisty, I think the evidence bears that out. Nations that participate in global trade continuously move toward more free politics. Individuals who join the middle class soon start to exert various kinds of pressure on their governments - viz. Libya, Tunisia, etc., even Syria. A big part of that is the requirement for more free communications to support that trade. Syria can not completely turn off the Internet, lest the economy shut down and die. I don't want to go on too long here so I'll have to leave it at this hand-waving level, but I hope my point comes across. China itself has been rapidly evolving toward a more open polity, despite the efforts of the ruling party to slow down the changes. Today even the ruling elite are making the right noises about openness.
The thing that will 'kill' offshoring is when wages and costs finally level out worldwide. It wasn't that long ago that the unions in Detroit were fighting tooth and nail to prevent the big car companies from building 'green field' plants in Tennessee and other southern states. The arguments were basically the same, and just as ill-conceived.t
I have an older citation, but one that was critically important to the early success of the US and the gradual decline of great Britain. Look up a guy named Slater. At the end of the 18th century, the loom technology in England was a state secret. Those who were trained to use and build the machinery by which UK was supplying fabric to the world were not allowed to leave England. Slater (supposedly dressed as a girl) skipped the country, came to the US with the plans for building looms and other machinery in his head, and set up shop with a couple of mill owners here. Over the next 20 years the Industrial Revolution in the US was largely based on this initial impetus and the growth of the industrial engine of New England.
That industrial might and the financial lock it gave the New Englanders over the Southern plantation states (which the New Englanders actively prevented from building their own mills) was a large part of the financial basis for the Civil War, and also a large part of the reason the South lost - the South had little industrial capability, which is the key to success in a long war.
On a side note, I presently work in a mill that was originally constructed by the company that became Fruit of the Loom. It lay empty for 20-30 years after all of the industry went first to the South, then overseas. Life, and change, goes on.
Having seen your sig, I had to know - what is the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs?
So, I assumed a 747-8F, the latest freighter version. Payload is 148 tons, volume capacity is 21,347 cubic feet.
CDs weigh an average of 0.58 ounces, plus 0.11 ounces for a paper sleeve for a total weight of 0.69 ounces or 0.043 lbs.
A CD is 1.2 mm (0.047... inches) thick, the sleeve is about 2/250 or 0.008 inches thick, and the CD is 4.7 inches in diameter for a total volume of 0.96 cubic inches or 0.000555 cu. ft. I ignored the extra width and height of the sleeve.
So, in sum, ignoring other packaging issues, I figure the 747 can carry up to about 6,863,768 CDs by weight, or about 38,486,563 CDs by volume. Weight is thus the limiting factor. Using 750 MB CDs, that provides a packet size of 5,147,826,087 MB, at an average flight speed of 480 knots(552 mph, 889 km/hr). If we ignore loading and other ground time, and assume a typical flight from US east coast to US west coast of 3000 miles, that's about a 5.6 hour, or 20048 second flight. So we have a bandwidth of about 5147826087/20048 = 254234 MB/second or 1.94 terabits/second, within an order of magnitude given the sloppy estimating.
Not bad, but the latency really sucks. BTW - I note that the fastest internet II speeds are cited as 272,000 terabit-meters per second. So, using 5000000 meters (3000 miles), I figured that the 747 can do 9,698,256 terabit-meters per second, about 35 times faster.
IIRC a long time ago (early 1980s?) an IBM Research Fellow published a paper about signature recognition (for the same essential purpose of authentication). He/she found that the actual strokes were not so important but the acceleration was. IOW, your actual signature varies quite a bit from one to another, but the series of accelerations are more similar.
So, I think this could be used. You could just 'sign' our phone. A reasonable 'signature' would have to my mind at least 50 data points of acceleration or deflection. Since we do vary the sig, some kind of fuzzy matching with the accepted vector would be required - say 90%. Then if it matches, the signature recognizer could use the correct data as the key to the decryption.
Thus, we would not need to remember a long key, just let our muscle memory do its thing.