1) Assuming the capital (factories, roads, dams, mines, ships, etc) will magically disappear isn't sound. You're assuming something of infinitessimal probability (destruction of all durable goods, but survival of hundreds of millions of humans, and our environment). Also, if all that capital were gone, who could read this project?
2) Do you know how long it took us to do it the first time? The big problem of building the world isn't the technology - the problem is the shear cost of it all. It took something like 15,000 years to go from good stone tools to steam ships. That also required an increase in population from around 20 million to around 1 billion.
3) If there were a "post-apocalypse," the cost minimization strategy wouldn't be about knowing about technology, but rather establishing institutions that would enable collective effort. Same reason Africa has modern technology, but the farmers can't afford steel hoes let alone GM crops and combine harvesters.
If half of the world died, we'd have big problems. But half the coal miners, and half the geneticists and nuclear physicists, and half the politicians would likely survive. The shear numbers of these "specialists" in as large a population as we have on Earth would make the proportion of survivors roughly equal to the proportion of survivors in the general population.
Additionally, if our national product was cut in half, we'd be living like they did in the 1984. If cut into a quarter, life would regress to 1962. If to one tenth, to 1940. If to one twentieth, 1915. If to 100th, to 1872. Assuming we get back to 1872 means (in general) 1% of our population, and 1% of our capital (assuming technology benefits and lack of new job experience cancel each other out).
The worst known disease outbreak (smallpox in the Americas) killed about 95% over several centuries. Nuclear warfare between superpowers *might* be able to accomplish the same, but I personally doubt it. If both happened simultaneously and instantaneously, we'd be back to 1839. The amount of destructive effort necessary to take us back to before the Industrial Revolution is mind-bogglingly huge. Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.
You have to understand no one has ever seen free trade before.
Firstly, IAAEconomist, though I don't do economic history...
While the powers that be commend your faith in their absolute control, free trade has existed as more of a rule than an exception in human history. Tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade need to be enforced, requiring significant political control. There was long distance trade tens of thousands of years ago, and I'm fairly sure there weren't tariffs back then.
Laws are created and then imposed - lawlessness is the default state. Coke can't enforce their monopoly over their trademark in many places, for example parts of India where they recently found pesticides in "Coke" products. Rumor has it there are even copyright violating files on the Internet! Something like 90%?
Physical security has traditionally been the limiting factor of trade - not legal barriers. Toll roads were invented to protect merchants from highwaymen. Pirates are still a major threat today, off the Horn of Africa and around Indonesia. Often, the only thing to scare them away are the US Navy, which polices trade routes important to us.
The "Wild West" is common, even in the 21st century world. Indonesia doesn't really enforce their trade relations with Singapore - two relevent nations whose trade is estimated by different measures as somewhere between $2 and $8 Billion per year. That $6 billion gap is the difference between "official" and the realistic estimate is the smuggling. Just 75%.
Back in the old days, the Phoenicians and Greeks had trade empires, basically because they invented naval trade. No restrictions but fate. Which means you paid the priests to make sure nothing bad happened...
For most of Roman times, the only "taxes" on trade were more or less whatever the local prefect decided he wanted you to pay. No tariffs. Today, that same "tax" regimen is enforced in a lot more places than you'd think. Later, Diocletian introduced the concept of a periodic tax instead of taking what they wanted when they wanted it.
In 1789, the biggest tariff in the US was 10%, which was probably less than the cost of port fees, longshoremen and porters to break bulk. But it was only really practical to enforce in major ports, even though it was the biggest (almost only) source of government revenue. For all intents and purposes, that's free trade.
Much of the way you view the world is a result of when and where you live. Places like South Africa or Columbia or Sri Lanka today are more concerned with stopping the floods of murders in their streets than worrying about catching tax dodgers or smugglers. Sadly, (unless you're a smuggler) that is the norm on earth today.
Proposed Amendment - any adult who gets a 10,000 signature petition signed and would otherwise be eligible to run for the office is eligible. I'm more worried about people who don't care than idiots.
If someone is killed by a terrorist it is bad, but if an innocent person is killed by the police, it is a lot worse.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to not be killed by either. Given a choice of being killed by terrorists or police, I will take the police because: 1) better compensation package from the Police Dept than from the Local Terrorist Guild 2) I'd rather people be afraid of my Mayor's law enforcement than Osama bin Laden's law enforcement 3) If many people are killed by police, the political response would be to have investigations of the police force. If many people are killed by terrorist, the political response is to stop questioning authority and give them the power to kill more people.
Long tail enthusiasts: The integral from just below the median to infinity is more than 50%! Long tail rejectionists: The integral from zero to just above the median is more than 50%!
As an economics person who uses Paretian distributions to model everything, this isn't bad news at all. It's not news, and it's good that it keeps us economists employed.
IIRC from various law and IP classes, the FTC has the power to force the party into any behavioral remedy, such as requiring them to license their technologies, as a court allows, which would effectively make those patents accessible.
It's not just Iowa, it's every corn farming state.
Ethanol is not a solution, it is a political tool. Rural politicians are supporting ethanol subsidies because its really just farm subsidies with a different name. Ethanol from corn isn't an efficient process, ethanol isn't a viable alternative to gasoline. In the 79 years between the first internal combustion engine (1807) and the gasoline combustion engine patent (1886), researchers tried to run it on everything, and only gasoline made sense. And in the 1800's, we knew how to make white lightning much better than gasoline.
The only real alternative to oil is other sources of gasoline and diesel, like coal.
I love Hector Ruiz, and AMD has had excellent execution since he's taken the helm, but I've got to wonder what he's thinking here. If he needs better integrated chipsets, you can enter a long term contract, and not hurt ATi's Intel business, or AMD's nVidia business as much. He's done a good job getting AMD down to a real CPU business, spinning off Spansion, and getting ready to ditch Geode. Why enter three new markets? (Chipsets, GPU, Handhelds)
I think a reason is that this is a rebuilding year for AMD, and today begins the bloodletting of the price war. AMD more likely needs the cashflow and manufacturing licenses to survive an Intel assault in the next four quarters. Look up 'big bath' theory...
I think Charlie's got it right - PCIE will be replaced with GPUs on motherboard, a la the HT2 multi socket idea. Whatever the reason, they need a real paradigm breaker, and to execute it well to make this hardball (nearly backstabbing nVidia) move look smart. I think the HT2 is just that, IF the integration of ATi's people works.
This discomfort plus Conroe performance specs means that for the first time in seven years I'm pricing Intel parts.
I hadn't really thought about it much, but I had a serious neural trauma when I was about 2. Incidently, my neurosurgeon was Dr. White, who is now known as a bit of a freak himself. It makes you wonder what the guy was up to when he had your brains splayed open...
The Burmese Government is more likely trying to use this to bring in tourists and try to make people forget that they are a brutally repressive regime, that habitually lies to their people and outsiders.
Ok, I try to be polite, but this is pure ignorance. When was the last time you did a wholesale money transaction? You didn't, and you've never used SWIFT. SWIFT is not like a credit card company. SWIFT is who credit card companies sell $150 million of receivebles through to their counterpary in securitization deals. Unless your net worth is in hundreds of millions, you almost certainly have never used SWIFT for personal transactions.
Now, if you're a "charity" that just so happens to send money to other "charities" in Jordan that send that money to other "charities" in Syria who have no audit trail, then the Feds might reasonably be worried about your transactions. Did I mention that Hamas and Hezbollah are technically charities?
Despite having a grant of over a billion dollars it only seems to have about 20 students ?!?
Grants are generally structured so that half of the money they make gets reinvested in the grant, and half goes out to the cause. So a $1 bil grant with professional managers might make 8% this yeat, 4% gets reinvested, and the other 4% goes out to scholarships. Obviously, $40 million should get more than 20 students a full ride, but the initial years have marketing costs and structural costs that have to come out of that 4%. The point, however, is that this grant goes on indefinately growing, and when its giving out >100 full rides a year in a couple of years, it will definitely be a major source of money to the scholarship system.
But while it's easy to be dazzled by the sheer numbers here I'm not at all sure that I trust the B&MG Foundation to spend their money in a way that would be selected by the masses
Sheer numbers aren't the important part of non-profits, its the management. Lots of people get into the non-profit sector thinking its not business, and without adequate budgetary and fiscal discipline. BMGF is notable because it has excellent management, and it isnt one of those charities where most of the money disappears, or is spent inefficiently. I hope you can at least respect that.
"Millions of years ago, the Earth was a great, molten mass, called Pangaea."
Not completely accurate. 1) We don't really know if Earth was ever totally molten. While the core has been molten, most of the surface might not have been. We really have no clue for the first few hundred million years. 2) If the surface was molten, there were no oceans or solid land masses - thus no continents. 3) Pangaea was the last fused continent. It was not the first. Pangaea was about 180 to 250 million years ago, while other continental collisions (Panotia, Rodinia) also occured within the last billion years. 4) While billions are in fact also millions, the Earth was a molten mass 4 to 5 billions of years ago.
...about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900...
That's the most interesting part to me - especially since environmentalists tend to forget that the long term change in land use could be more relevent than burning coal. An exploding human population needs farmland, which is notably not forests or jungles buffering the CO2 content of the air. If cutting down forests and jungles to grow food for humans is actually the problem, then what is the solution? Starving the poor and firing all the farmers are even less popular than shutting down polluting powerplants...
Getting 40% of list on an obsolete product you can't sell gives you a higher margin than 0% of list.
The key issue for Intel (and AMD) is covering their fixed costs. A $5 billion fab is extremely expensive to have not producing. The marginal costs are actually shockingly small.
From a strategic standpoint, Intel needs to get more aggressive with AMD now. If AMD can afford to open new fabs, that's a long run bad thing for Intel. Capacity drives this industry.
You state that there is an excess of uranium. Is that why uranium prices have increased over 500% in the last six years? Commodity prices in general have been soaring, and many other countries use uranium. Electrification of India (nuclea power) and China (also nuclear power) is creating a surge in power consumption.
The Soviet materials have been mostly reprocessed. Consumption has reached 80 thousand tonnes per year, and production is still less than 50 thousand tonnes. Additionally, GE has already signed to build a facility in the US. Obviously someone thinks it's worth the investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Afghanistan's PCI GDP today is about $800. In the United States, we had a real GDP of $900 (2006 dollars) around 1710 if I'm not mistaken...
1) Assuming the capital (factories, roads, dams, mines, ships, etc) will magically disappear isn't sound. You're assuming something of infinitessimal probability (destruction of all durable goods, but survival of hundreds of millions of humans, and our environment). Also, if all that capital were gone, who could read this project?
2) Do you know how long it took us to do it the first time? The big problem of building the world isn't the technology - the problem is the shear cost of it all. It took something like 15,000 years to go from good stone tools to steam ships. That also required an increase in population from around 20 million to around 1 billion.
3) If there were a "post-apocalypse," the cost minimization strategy wouldn't be about knowing about technology, but rather establishing institutions that would enable collective effort. Same reason Africa has modern technology, but the farmers can't afford steel hoes let alone GM crops and combine harvesters.
If half of the world died, we'd have big problems. But half the coal miners, and half the geneticists and nuclear physicists, and half the politicians would likely survive. The shear numbers of these "specialists" in as large a population as we have on Earth would make the proportion of survivors roughly equal to the proportion of survivors in the general population.
Additionally, if our national product was cut in half, we'd be living like they did in the 1984. If cut into a quarter, life would regress to 1962. If to one tenth, to 1940. If to one twentieth, 1915. If to 100th, to 1872. Assuming we get back to 1872 means (in general) 1% of our population, and 1% of our capital (assuming technology benefits and lack of new job experience cancel each other out).
The worst known disease outbreak (smallpox in the Americas) killed about 95% over several centuries. Nuclear warfare between superpowers *might* be able to accomplish the same, but I personally doubt it. If both happened simultaneously and instantaneously, we'd be back to 1839. The amount of destructive effort necessary to take us back to before the Industrial Revolution is mind-bogglingly huge. Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.
You have to understand no one has ever seen free trade before.
Firstly, IAAEconomist, though I don't do economic history...
While the powers that be commend your faith in their absolute control, free trade has existed as more of a rule than an exception in human history. Tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade need to be enforced, requiring significant political control. There was long distance trade tens of thousands of years ago, and I'm fairly sure there weren't tariffs back then.
Laws are created and then imposed - lawlessness is the default state. Coke can't enforce their monopoly over their trademark in many places, for example parts of India where they recently found pesticides in "Coke" products. Rumor has it there are even copyright violating files on the Internet! Something like 90%?
Physical security has traditionally been the limiting factor of trade - not legal barriers. Toll roads were invented to protect merchants from highwaymen. Pirates are still a major threat today, off the Horn of Africa and around Indonesia. Often, the only thing to scare them away are the US Navy, which polices trade routes important to us.
The "Wild West" is common, even in the 21st century world. Indonesia doesn't really enforce their trade relations with Singapore - two relevent nations whose trade is estimated by different measures as somewhere between $2 and $8 Billion per year. That $6 billion gap is the difference between "official" and the realistic estimate is the smuggling. Just 75%.
Back in the old days, the Phoenicians and Greeks had trade empires, basically because they invented naval trade. No restrictions but fate. Which means you paid the priests to make sure nothing bad happened...
For most of Roman times, the only "taxes" on trade were more or less whatever the local prefect decided he wanted you to pay. No tariffs. Today, that same "tax" regimen is enforced in a lot more places than you'd think. Later, Diocletian introduced the concept of a periodic tax instead of taking what they wanted when they wanted it.
In 1789, the biggest tariff in the US was 10%, which was probably less than the cost of port fees, longshoremen and porters to break bulk. But it was only really practical to enforce in major ports, even though it was the biggest (almost only) source of government revenue. For all intents and purposes, that's free trade.
Much of the way you view the world is a result of when and where you live. Places like South Africa or Columbia or Sri Lanka today are more concerned with stopping the floods of murders in their streets than worrying about catching tax dodgers or smugglers. Sadly, (unless you're a smuggler) that is the norm on earth today.
Proposed Amendment - any adult who gets a 10,000 signature petition signed and would otherwise be eligible to run for the office is eligible. I'm more worried about people who don't care than idiots.
As opposed to exploding Li-Ion? Or gasoline tanks? I think we're gonna need to dance with the devil to get to the next level in batteries.
If someone is killed by a terrorist it is bad, but if an innocent person is killed by the police, it is a lot worse.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to not be killed by either. Given a choice of being killed by terrorists or police, I will take the police because:
1) better compensation package from the Police Dept than from the Local Terrorist Guild
2) I'd rather people be afraid of my Mayor's law enforcement than Osama bin Laden's law enforcement
3) If many people are killed by police, the political response would be to have investigations of the police force. If many people are killed by terrorist, the political response is to stop questioning authority and give them the power to kill more people.
Long tail enthusiasts: The integral from just below the median to infinity is more than 50%!
Long tail rejectionists: The integral from zero to just above the median is more than 50%!
Will we ever know who is to triumph?!?!
As an economics person who uses Paretian distributions to model everything, this isn't bad news at all. It's not news, and it's good that it keeps us economists employed.
IIRC from various law and IP classes, the FTC has the power to force the party into any behavioral remedy, such as requiring them to license their technologies, as a court allows, which would effectively make those patents accessible.
It's not just Iowa, it's every corn farming state.
Ethanol is not a solution, it is a political tool. Rural politicians are supporting ethanol subsidies because its really just farm subsidies with a different name. Ethanol from corn isn't an efficient process, ethanol isn't a viable alternative to gasoline. In the 79 years between the first internal combustion engine (1807) and the gasoline combustion engine patent (1886), researchers tried to run it on everything, and only gasoline made sense. And in the 1800's, we knew how to make white lightning much better than gasoline.
The only real alternative to oil is other sources of gasoline and diesel, like coal.
I love Hector Ruiz, and AMD has had excellent execution since he's taken the helm, but I've got to wonder what he's thinking here. If he needs better integrated chipsets, you can enter a long term contract, and not hurt ATi's Intel business, or AMD's nVidia business as much. He's done a good job getting AMD down to a real CPU business, spinning off Spansion, and getting ready to ditch Geode. Why enter three new markets? (Chipsets, GPU, Handhelds)
I think a reason is that this is a rebuilding year for AMD, and today begins the bloodletting of the price war. AMD more likely needs the cashflow and manufacturing licenses to survive an Intel assault in the next four quarters. Look up 'big bath' theory...
I think Charlie's got it right - PCIE will be replaced with GPUs on motherboard, a la the HT2 multi socket idea. Whatever the reason, they need a real paradigm breaker, and to execute it well to make this hardball (nearly backstabbing nVidia) move look smart. I think the HT2 is just that, IF the integration of ATi's people works.
This discomfort plus Conroe performance specs means that for the first time in seven years I'm pricing Intel parts.
as an AMD stockholder
You really need to learn how to sell, buddy.
Time to just switch to metric already. Maybe if we all tell our Congressmen that it will make gas prices look cheaper...
I hadn't really thought about it much, but I had a serious neural trauma when I was about 2. Incidently, my neurosurgeon was Dr. White, who is now known as a bit of a freak himself. It makes you wonder what the guy was up to when he had your brains splayed open...
The Burmese Government is more likely trying to use this to bring in tourists and try to make people forget that they are a brutally repressive regime, that habitually lies to their people and outsiders.
Ok, I try to be polite, but this is pure ignorance. When was the last time you did a wholesale money transaction? You didn't, and you've never used SWIFT. SWIFT is not like a credit card company. SWIFT is who credit card companies sell $150 million of receivebles through to their counterpary in securitization deals. Unless your net worth is in hundreds of millions, you almost certainly have never used SWIFT for personal transactions.
Now, if you're a "charity" that just so happens to send money to other "charities" in Jordan that send that money to other "charities" in Syria who have no audit trail, then the Feds might reasonably be worried about your transactions. Did I mention that Hamas and Hezbollah are technically charities?
Despite having a grant of over a billion dollars it only seems to have about 20 students ?!?
Grants are generally structured so that half of the money they make gets reinvested in the grant, and half goes out to the cause. So a $1 bil grant with professional managers might make 8% this yeat, 4% gets reinvested, and the other 4% goes out to scholarships. Obviously, $40 million should get more than 20 students a full ride, but the initial years have marketing costs and structural costs that have to come out of that 4%. The point, however, is that this grant goes on indefinately growing, and when its giving out >100 full rides a year in a couple of years, it will definitely be a major source of money to the scholarship system.
But while it's easy to be dazzled by the sheer numbers here I'm not at all sure that I trust the B&MG Foundation to spend their money in a way that would be selected by the masses
Sheer numbers aren't the important part of non-profits, its the management. Lots of people get into the non-profit sector thinking its not business, and without adequate budgetary and fiscal discipline. BMGF is notable because it has excellent management, and it isnt one of those charities where most of the money disappears, or is spent inefficiently. I hope you can at least respect that.
No way, man. DVD will never beat Laserdisc!
"Millions of years ago, the Earth was a great, molten mass, called Pangaea."
Not completely accurate.
1) We don't really know if Earth was ever totally molten. While the core has been molten, most of the surface might not have been. We really have no clue for the first few hundred million years.
2) If the surface was molten, there were no oceans or solid land masses - thus no continents.
3) Pangaea was the last fused continent. It was not the first. Pangaea was about 180 to 250 million years ago, while other continental collisions (Panotia, Rodinia) also occured within the last billion years.
4) While billions are in fact also millions, the Earth was a molten mass 4 to 5 billions of years ago.
...about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900...
That's the most interesting part to me - especially since environmentalists tend to forget that the long term change in land use could be more relevent than burning coal. An exploding human population needs farmland, which is notably not forests or jungles buffering the CO2 content of the air. If cutting down forests and jungles to grow food for humans is actually the problem, then what is the solution? Starving the poor and firing all the farmers are even less popular than shutting down polluting powerplants...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1602361. stm
Same story, only BBC broke this in 2001.
Getting 40% of list on an obsolete product you can't sell gives you a higher margin than 0% of list.
The key issue for Intel (and AMD) is covering their fixed costs. A $5 billion fab is extremely expensive to have not producing. The marginal costs are actually shockingly small.
From a strategic standpoint, Intel needs to get more aggressive with AMD now. If AMD can afford to open new fabs, that's a long run bad thing for Intel. Capacity drives this industry.
I wish we had this in my Economics Department... Video games for college credit is possibly the best idea ever.
If Civ counted for History credit, I'd probably have a PhD in it by now.
Look how many people now know of the dangers of dysentery on The Oregon Trail.
You state that there is an excess of uranium. Is that why uranium prices have increased over 500% in the last six years? Commodity prices in general have been soaring, and many other countries use uranium. Electrification of India (nuclea power) and China (also nuclear power) is creating a surge in power consumption.
The Soviet materials have been mostly reprocessed. Consumption has reached 80 thousand tonnes per year, and production is still less than 50 thousand tonnes. Additionally, GE has already signed to build a facility in the US. Obviously someone thinks it's worth the investment.