We can observe copyright applications over time, file sharing usage over time, non-filesharing internet use, tech sector growth, media sector growth, and economic growth over time.
You don't need to be a genius to come up with an endogenous model that accounts for the positive effects of IT spending, the negative impacts on value per copyright, the positive impacts on number of copyrights, and the positive impacts on the overall economy. But it helps. With the time series and time series path regression, you can show causation and get published. I'm too lazy to do it, just give me a thanks in your acknowledgments;)
Job Requirements:
Experience as CTO in large bureaucracy (>50,000 employees)
US Citizen for at least 10 years, has not lived overseas in that period (for security clearance)
On some list of top CTOs (to impress the Senate)
The real cost is that many old vehicles aren't safe to drive. Steering, brakes, crash test ratings, restraints, airbags, etc are all much better today than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago. In addition to fatal accidents, there are many accidents with hospitalizations or permanent injuries, or even just property damage to other vehicles.
We're talking about on the order of $300 billion a year in economic losses from auto crashes. I don't know what percentage of that is due to old vehicles that would be traded in, but if 1% of it is, that's enough to justify taking a million of these vehicles off the road.
Not scientists? Listen buddy - Go outside and ask a random person if they'd rather observe a Higgs boson or a million dollars in their bank account. And remember that to economists, a million dollars is never a significant figure.
Physicists have a good year when they can get a thousand observations of the value of c. Economists have a bad year if they only get a quadrillion observations of the value of a dollar.
If physicists want to run an experiment, they just have to manipulate a few particles. If economists want to run an experiment, we have to manipulate Congress.
If physicists make a mistake in an experiment, maybe a few thousand people die in a lab explosion. If economists make a mistake in an experiment, maybe a few hundred million people die in an economic implosion.
If a physicist makes an important discovery, he can create a billion dollar industry. If an economist makes an important discovery, he can create a trillion dollar industry.
That being said, you are right about the fragile egos:)
Portfolio theory, as a theory, works remarkably well 99% of the time. Your argument is like complaining quantum physics should have no Nobel prizes because it doesn't explain dark matter.
In China, the Communist Party decides who can make a profit, who is allowed to invest, who is allowed to live in places with jobs, and summarily executes anyone who criticizes the dictating this process.
In the US, a company like 3M, with $28 billion in assets, $4 billion a year in profits, 75,000 employees, and 106 years of leading the world in innovation has to spend a decade lobbying the Government to give $1 billion to a consortium of 20 companies.
This doesn't make any sense. You want watches, smoke detectors, iPods, laptops, electric Civics, SUVs, satellites, F-22s, submarines, and aircraft carriers to use interchangeable batteries?
Batteries are about as versatile as "electricity" or "hydrocarbons," and are substitutes for both.
Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the US. Now, almost no company in the US produces them, because: 1) Labor unions reduce productivity per dollar 2) Logistics/Supply Chains in the US are shit compared to Japan 3) Taxes are high compared to Korea 4) Japan and Korea give massive government subsidies to these strategic technologies
The cost of solar power generation is typically in the range of 12 (industrial scale in the middle of nowhere) to 30 (small scale in urban environment) cents per kilowatt-hour. But only if you believe the solar industry. Mind you, this is using the most current technology.
The cost of nuclear power generation is 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. But only if you believe the Department of Energy. Mind you, this is using technology from the 1960s.
Nuclear's end cost ends up much higher, because the US has a peculiar set of laws that ban reprocessing, making waste storage very expensive, and necessitating much higher safety costs. Those laws are relatively easy to change.
Please note that I say nothing about what I wish were true, nor do I defend any technology. I merely state that economic considerations are more important to whether a technology is used than carbon emissions.
The "science" part is a small part of reality. In reality, things have costs - solar and wind electricity typically cost five to ten times as much as coal or nuclear power.
If the author gets his way, you will open your electric bill every month, and it will be more than your mortgage. Renewable electricity prices would bankrupt millions of people. It would have more detrimental effects on the economy than medical costs, the housing bubble, and oil prices have in the last few years combined.
We've been giving solar and wind subsidies since the 70's, thinking one day they'll magically become competitive. They haven't and they won't.
Nope. Humans broke out of the Malthusian Cycle a long time ago.
Like most smarter animals, we don't breed until our children starve - we know that when food is too scarce, we don't reproduce. We can sense stress, population density, and resources - if a girl's body weight isn't high enough, she can't conceive. People in high density areas (Tokyo, Manhattan, etc) actually don't reproduce much. Japan and Russia have declining populations.
Birth control and abortions have also helped family planning - some children are unplanned, but very few children are truly unwanted in rich societies.
Furthermore, we're not even close to subsistence level in most countries. In the incredibly expensive US, you can survive with a tent, blankets, and a pound of grains a day - retail price of less than $500 per year. The homeless in the US are significantly better off than the limits of human subsistence. Americans consume about 100 times the amount necessary for subsistence.
Bangladesh is a good example of the world off of humanity. The average per capita income of a Bangladeshi is about $300, but with cheaper prices there, this is equivalent to about $1000 in the US. Even Bangladeshis can survive (as evidenced by the fact that a hundred million of them exist today). Food is only about 50% of their income, which is relatively terrible, but survivable.
Almost all starvation that occurs in the world, for the last hundred years or so, has been because of breakdowns in distribution. Given a year or two of migration towards food sources, as in the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the starvation stops.
And we know that we still haven't got it all figured out yet. But you think you can write an algorithm to figure it out?
I was blocking a highway in Baghdad, waiting for the bomb squad to dispose of this bomb on the highway, and we were preventing anyone from getting close to it. It takes the bomb squad forever, and it gets dark. A vehicle drives straight at us, at maybe 90 miles per hour on the highway. That is exactly what suicide car bombs do, which is the biggest danger to American personnel. You have to shoot the driver, or they will ram you and 95% chance you and everyone around you will die.
Having about two seconds to either stop the vehicle, shoot the driver, or die, I had my buddy turn on the lights. The driver slammed on the breaks, skid to a stop maybe 200 meters from us, and threw it in reverse and got the hell out of there.
I knew he just saw a wide open highway, and wanted to see how fast he could go. At that speed, he couldn't have seen us in the twilight. The algorithm would have said to shoot him. He's alive because I'm a human.
Trains are actually much more efficient. 1 person in a car that gets 30 mpg gets 30 passenger miles per gallon. 6 people in a van that gets 20 mpg is 120 passenger miles per gallon. 6 people in a train that moves a ton 500 miles per gallon is 6000 passenger miles per gallon (assuming 160 lbs per adult).
So the train is 200 times as efficient as driving a car that exceeds CAFE standards to work.
"The WaterMill is designed to minimize energy use. It's so efficient that producing one liter of water costs only three to four cents. Alternative bottled water systems typically cost ten cents per liter or more."
You Dutch inspired this grand democracy experiment, so you're an eternal friend of Americans. So in violation of Slashdot rules, I'll explain our system politely:
1) How voting is done is left to States. North Dakota, for example, registers everyone by default. The premise is that, except for in Federal Elections, each State knows best for itself.
2) We don't require any "voting ticket." Or ID. You walk in, tell them who you are, and you vote. It has been decided by our courts that requiring something as difficult to obtain as an ID card is too high a burden to prevent someone from voting. Many states require you to present ID, and if you can't, then they give you a ballot which you can still vote, but may be invalidated if someone else walks in and tries to use your name with an ID.
3) The reasons for ineligibility would include: a) You don't meet the residency requirements (or else there would be a Mad Max style bus parade into every jurisdiction that was competitive every election day) b) Being a convicted felon, becoming a citizen of another country, being dead, not being a real person are basically the only ways you can be disqualified from voting. Being mentally disabled may disqualify you, but rules vary from state to state, and enforcement of the rules even more so. There are states that literally ban "idiots" from voting today, and yet *Party_Opposed_To_Your_Beliefs* still gets votes every election...
Wrong. These "religious fanatics" do quit. They call us "crusaders," and Israeli soldiers are technically fighting for a "Jewish state," not some secular democracy. As in almost all wars in human history, when the political will to fight wanes, soldiers stop getting paid, they'll find other jobs.
The myth that our enemies are "fanatics" is as absurd as the myth that the US President is a "fanatic." It's all a political ploy to prevent you from thinking logically about it.
The enemies are people who fight because their brother was killed, or because they can't get a job and need to feed their kids, or because if they quit the neighborhood gang, their mom's house will get torched. Yeah, they're usually religious too. But practicality always comes first, then family, then politics, and somewhere further down the line comes religion.
Mullahs and Ayatollahs don't dictate the laws, they merely interpret them, and the interpretations are always observed as just that. In Islam, there is no clergy at all - no one can come between the individual and Allah. These leaders just "lawyers" who study Allah's law. No one, anywhere, is ever bound to follow any of them.
Sure the total casualties are around 150,000. But this includes all violence in a country of 27 million over 5.5 years.
Most third world countries have violence. Rumor is Caracas still has a murder per thousand people per year, which makes it more violence than Iraq has been over the course of the war. Johannesburg, Bogota, Kingston, Moscow - there are a lot of places that are nearly as violent as Iraq, and yet have no "war."
This year, Baghdad is SAFER than those places - trending toward around 3000 killings in a city of 7 million. But you don't read about the 50 murders a day in Moscow (18000 per year of 12 million people), because no American politicians have anything to gain from quoting it. People take vacations there, take a picture next to the Kremlin, no worries that it's three times as dangerous as Baghdad, then come home and show everyone the little Russian dolls they bought.
We "win" when we accomplish all of our political objectives. We had a lot of objectives, and some of them have changed:
1) Prevent a Chemical/Biological attack from Iraqi weapon stockpiles Status: Well, it's certainly not possible anymore.
3) Enforce UN Security Council Resolutions Status: Accomplished
2) Depose Saddam Hussein and his regime Status: Accomplished
3) Eliminate regions threats from Iraqi military Status: Accomplished
4) Prevent Hussein regime from carrying out economic, ecological, and humanitarian "scorched earth" policies Status: Accomplished
5) Create a unified national government for Iraq Status: Accomplished, more or less
6) Dictate liberal values, including democratic election, gender equality, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and systems of checks and balances Status: Accomplished
7) Train and equip Iraqi national forces and inculcate national loyalty Status: Mostly there
8) Attract and eliminate regional al-Qaeda sympathizers Status: Mostly there
9) Build out a robust, effective, stable democratic civil government Status: Getting there
10) Protect the population against insurgents and gangs Status: Working on it
11) Integrate insurgent and gang leadership into democratic processes Status: Working on it
12) Relinquish control of Iraq to Iraqi national forces Status: Mostly there
13) Maintain a deterrence force to keep stability, while pulling the combat troops out Status: Incomplete
No, they want to see if it's worth the time and money to get one. No sense devoting that kind of resources if know one even knows how its going to be useful in theory.
It takes a pile of existing research to convince politicians to spend military budget money on actually important technology rather than something stupid that is made in their district.
Slashdot Mirror
Give the H1B visa holders citizenship. Done.
THIS is a Dick Roll.
We can observe copyright applications over time, file sharing usage over time, non-filesharing internet use, tech sector growth, media sector growth, and economic growth over time.
You don't need to be a genius to come up with an endogenous model that accounts for the positive effects of IT spending, the negative impacts on value per copyright, the positive impacts on number of copyrights, and the positive impacts on the overall economy. But it helps. With the time series and time series path regression, you can show causation and get published. I'm too lazy to do it, just give me a thanks in your acknowledgments ;)
Job Requirements:
Experience as CTO in large bureaucracy (>50,000 employees)
US Citizen for at least 10 years, has not lived overseas in that period (for security clearance)
On some list of top CTOs (to impress the Senate)
The real cost is that many old vehicles aren't safe to drive. Steering, brakes, crash test ratings, restraints, airbags, etc are all much better today than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago. In addition to fatal accidents, there are many accidents with hospitalizations or permanent injuries, or even just property damage to other vehicles.
We're talking about on the order of $300 billion a year in economic losses from auto crashes. I don't know what percentage of that is due to old vehicles that would be traded in, but if 1% of it is, that's enough to justify taking a million of these vehicles off the road.
Not scientists? Listen buddy - Go outside and ask a random person if they'd rather observe a Higgs boson or a million dollars in their bank account. And remember that to economists, a million dollars is never a significant figure.
Physicists have a good year when they can get a thousand observations of the value of c. Economists have a bad year if they only get a quadrillion observations of the value of a dollar.
If physicists want to run an experiment, they just have to manipulate a few particles. If economists want to run an experiment, we have to manipulate Congress.
If physicists make a mistake in an experiment, maybe a few thousand people die in a lab explosion. If economists make a mistake in an experiment, maybe a few hundred million people die in an economic implosion.
If a physicist makes an important discovery, he can create a billion dollar industry. If an economist makes an important discovery, he can create a trillion dollar industry.
That being said, you are right about the fragile egos :)
Portfolio theory, as a theory, works remarkably well 99% of the time. Your argument is like complaining quantum physics should have no Nobel prizes because it doesn't explain dark matter.
In China, the Communist Party decides who can make a profit, who is allowed to invest, who is allowed to live in places with jobs, and summarily executes anyone who criticizes the dictating this process.
In the US, a company like 3M, with $28 billion in assets, $4 billion a year in profits, 75,000 employees, and 106 years of leading the world in innovation has to spend a decade lobbying the Government to give $1 billion to a consortium of 20 companies.
Which is communist indeed.
This doesn't make any sense. You want watches, smoke detectors, iPods, laptops, electric Civics, SUVs, satellites, F-22s, submarines, and aircraft carriers to use interchangeable batteries?
Batteries are about as versatile as "electricity" or "hydrocarbons," and are substitutes for both.
Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the US. Now, almost no company in the US produces them, because:
1) Labor unions reduce productivity per dollar
2) Logistics/Supply Chains in the US are shit compared to Japan
3) Taxes are high compared to Korea
4) Japan and Korea give massive government subsidies to these strategic technologies
The cost of solar power generation is typically in the range of 12 (industrial scale in the middle of nowhere) to 30 (small scale in urban environment) cents per kilowatt-hour. But only if you believe the solar industry. Mind you, this is using the most current technology.
The cost of nuclear power generation is 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. But only if you believe the Department of Energy. Mind you, this is using technology from the 1960s.
Nuclear's end cost ends up much higher, because the US has a peculiar set of laws that ban reprocessing, making waste storage very expensive, and necessitating much higher safety costs. Those laws are relatively easy to change.
Please note that I say nothing about what I wish were true, nor do I defend any technology. I merely state that economic considerations are more important to whether a technology is used than carbon emissions.
The "science" part is a small part of reality. In reality, things have costs - solar and wind electricity typically cost five to ten times as much as coal or nuclear power.
If the author gets his way, you will open your electric bill every month, and it will be more than your mortgage. Renewable electricity prices would bankrupt millions of people. It would have more detrimental effects on the economy than medical costs, the housing bubble, and oil prices have in the last few years combined.
We've been giving solar and wind subsidies since the 70's, thinking one day they'll magically become competitive. They haven't and they won't.
Nope. Humans broke out of the Malthusian Cycle a long time ago.
Like most smarter animals, we don't breed until our children starve - we know that when food is too scarce, we don't reproduce. We can sense stress, population density, and resources - if a girl's body weight isn't high enough, she can't conceive. People in high density areas (Tokyo, Manhattan, etc) actually don't reproduce much. Japan and Russia have declining populations.
Birth control and abortions have also helped family planning - some children are unplanned, but very few children are truly unwanted in rich societies.
Furthermore, we're not even close to subsistence level in most countries. In the incredibly expensive US, you can survive with a tent, blankets, and a pound of grains a day - retail price of less than $500 per year. The homeless in the US are significantly better off than the limits of human subsistence. Americans consume about 100 times the amount necessary for subsistence.
Bangladesh is a good example of the world off of humanity. The average per capita income of a Bangladeshi is about $300, but with cheaper prices there, this is equivalent to about $1000 in the US. Even Bangladeshis can survive (as evidenced by the fact that a hundred million of them exist today). Food is only about 50% of their income, which is relatively terrible, but survivable.
Almost all starvation that occurs in the world, for the last hundred years or so, has been because of breakdowns in distribution. Given a year or two of migration towards food sources, as in the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the starvation stops.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fort%20hood%2C%20tx%20to%20One%20Dell%20Way%20round%20rock%2C%20tx%2078682
50 miles as the Apache flies - they can do it on their lunch break
And we know that we still haven't got it all figured out yet. But you think you can write an algorithm to figure it out?
I was blocking a highway in Baghdad, waiting for the bomb squad to dispose of this bomb on the highway, and we were preventing anyone from getting close to it. It takes the bomb squad forever, and it gets dark. A vehicle drives straight at us, at maybe 90 miles per hour on the highway. That is exactly what suicide car bombs do, which is the biggest danger to American personnel. You have to shoot the driver, or they will ram you and 95% chance you and everyone around you will die.
Having about two seconds to either stop the vehicle, shoot the driver, or die, I had my buddy turn on the lights. The driver slammed on the breaks, skid to a stop maybe 200 meters from us, and threw it in reverse and got the hell out of there.
I knew he just saw a wide open highway, and wanted to see how fast he could go. At that speed, he couldn't have seen us in the twilight. The algorithm would have said to shoot him. He's alive because I'm a human.
Are these people going to drink the water and not pee it out? Stingy bastards.
Trains are actually much more efficient. 1 person in a car that gets 30 mpg gets 30 passenger miles per gallon. 6 people in a van that gets 20 mpg is 120 passenger miles per gallon. 6 people in a train that moves a ton 500 miles per gallon is 6000 passenger miles per gallon (assuming 160 lbs per adult).
So the train is 200 times as efficient as driving a car that exceeds CAFE standards to work.
http://www.elementfour.com/products/the-watermill
"The WaterMill is designed to minimize energy use. It's so efficient that producing one liter of water costs only three to four cents. Alternative bottled water systems typically cost ten cents per liter or more."
Not to mention they only want able bodied young males of fit mind and morals...
You Dutch inspired this grand democracy experiment, so you're an eternal friend of Americans. So in violation of Slashdot rules, I'll explain our system politely:
1) How voting is done is left to States. North Dakota, for example, registers everyone by default. The premise is that, except for in Federal Elections, each State knows best for itself.
2) We don't require any "voting ticket." Or ID. You walk in, tell them who you are, and you vote. It has been decided by our courts that requiring something as difficult to obtain as an ID card is too high a burden to prevent someone from voting. Many states require you to present ID, and if you can't, then they give you a ballot which you can still vote, but may be invalidated if someone else walks in and tries to use your name with an ID.
3) The reasons for ineligibility would include:
a) You don't meet the residency requirements (or else there would be a Mad Max style bus parade into every jurisdiction that was competitive every election day)
b) Being a convicted felon, becoming a citizen of another country, being dead, not being a real person are basically the only ways you can be disqualified from voting. Being mentally disabled may disqualify you, but rules vary from state to state, and enforcement of the rules even more so. There are states that literally ban "idiots" from voting today, and yet *Party_Opposed_To_Your_Beliefs* still gets votes every election...
Wrong. These "religious fanatics" do quit. They call us "crusaders," and Israeli soldiers are technically fighting for a "Jewish state," not some secular democracy. As in almost all wars in human history, when the political will to fight wanes, soldiers stop getting paid, they'll find other jobs.
The myth that our enemies are "fanatics" is as absurd as the myth that the US President is a "fanatic." It's all a political ploy to prevent you from thinking logically about it.
The enemies are people who fight because their brother was killed, or because they can't get a job and need to feed their kids, or because if they quit the neighborhood gang, their mom's house will get torched. Yeah, they're usually religious too. But practicality always comes first, then family, then politics, and somewhere further down the line comes religion.
Mullahs and Ayatollahs don't dictate the laws, they merely interpret them, and the interpretations are always observed as just that. In Islam, there is no clergy at all - no one can come between the individual and Allah. These leaders just "lawyers" who study Allah's law. No one, anywhere, is ever bound to follow any of them.
Sure the total casualties are around 150,000. But this includes all violence in a country of 27 million over 5.5 years.
Most third world countries have violence. Rumor is Caracas still has a murder per thousand people per year, which makes it more violence than Iraq has been over the course of the war. Johannesburg, Bogota, Kingston, Moscow - there are a lot of places that are nearly as violent as Iraq, and yet have no "war."
This year, Baghdad is SAFER than those places - trending toward around 3000 killings in a city of 7 million. But you don't read about the 50 murders a day in Moscow (18000 per year of 12 million people), because no American politicians have anything to gain from quoting it. People take vacations there, take a picture next to the Kremlin, no worries that it's three times as dangerous as Baghdad, then come home and show everyone the little Russian dolls they bought.
We "win" when we accomplish all of our political objectives. We had a lot of objectives, and some of them have changed:
1) Prevent a Chemical/Biological attack from Iraqi weapon stockpiles
Status: Well, it's certainly not possible anymore.
3) Enforce UN Security Council Resolutions
Status: Accomplished
2) Depose Saddam Hussein and his regime
Status: Accomplished
3) Eliminate regions threats from Iraqi military
Status: Accomplished
4) Prevent Hussein regime from carrying out economic, ecological, and humanitarian "scorched earth" policies
Status: Accomplished
5) Create a unified national government for Iraq
Status: Accomplished, more or less
6) Dictate liberal values, including democratic election, gender equality, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and systems of checks and balances
Status: Accomplished
7) Train and equip Iraqi national forces and inculcate national loyalty
Status: Mostly there
8) Attract and eliminate regional al-Qaeda sympathizers
Status: Mostly there
9) Build out a robust, effective, stable democratic civil government
Status: Getting there
10) Protect the population against insurgents and gangs
Status: Working on it
11) Integrate insurgent and gang leadership into democratic processes
Status: Working on it
12) Relinquish control of Iraq to Iraqi national forces
Status: Mostly there
13) Maintain a deterrence force to keep stability, while pulling the combat troops out
Status: Incomplete
No, they want to see if it's worth the time and money to get one. No sense devoting that kind of resources if know one even knows how its going to be useful in theory.
It takes a pile of existing research to convince politicians to spend military budget money on actually important technology rather than something stupid that is made in their district.
Farmers and construction workers aren't so stupid they can't tell when the sun is up.