If you can't do those types of "brain-teasers", you should definitely not pursue a career related to programming. There are nearly infinite ways to solve a programming problem. If you can't work out the logical implications, you will end up writing a bunch of pointless, brittle code instead of developing a solution based on the logical truth of the inputs, transformations, and expected outputs.
Sure, but STEM career != programming. There are many STEM careers that don't have programming skills requirements.
In using the Dunning-Kruger effect to explain the situation, you grossly overestimated your understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect---likely due to a lack of formal training in psychology.
Although I lack any format training in psychology, it seems to me that the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to this situation would indicate that men or women who were initially incompetent at STEM would likely overestimate their competence, and then when exposed to some limited STEM training (regardless of their aptitude for it) would be better at realizing their incompetence. However, if a certain man or a woman exhibited high ability in STEM, they would underestimate their high ability thinking since it was easy for them, they must be average and others must be superior.
So Dunning-Kruger were to explain this situation, it might imply that many men never got beyond the hump of incompetence and continued to overestimate their STEM ability and conversely many women are generally of high ability and thus underestimate their abilities and defer to either these incompetent men who think they have high STEM ability or those men of slightly better than average (but not high) ability.
I'm not sure this is exactly what the original poster had in mind when invoking the Dunning-Kruger effect on this situation, but you never know...
Actually, bizarrely, that is not what happened. If you RTFA it seems that the extra course decreased the gap in the maths skills between the men and women i.e. the women benefitted from the course more than the men but still ranked lower on average. However it decreased the women's confidence in their maths skills whereas for the men it was unchanged. So paradoxically the course did a great job in better preparing women for STEM careers while simultaneously making them think that they were unsuited for a STEM career.
What is needed now is some psychological study to figure out why women developed such a gap between their actual maths skills and the perceived maths skills while the men did not. If someone could figure out that perhaps we can develop a better way of teaching maths and physics that imparts the required knowledge without the drop in confidence.
My completely hairbrained idea on why the gap in confidence exists is that more men have a "fake-it-until-you-make-it" mentality which can often be a boost to confidence (or over confidence), where women have a tendency to be more deferential to other people judging them. I doubt this is genetic (because there are quite a few exceptions to this), so my conclusion is that it is basically a "nurture" issue.
The problem with math and physics is there is a big disconnect on what is required vs what is taught. Personally, I think lumping STEM into one big blob does the whole field a big disservice. Science is about discovery and experiment, Technology is about understanding the state of the art and the barriers (current and past), Engineering is about designing things in a practical way, and Mathematics is about analysis (quantitative and qualitative). All of these require different skills and not all of them require the same type of math and physics and to be ultimately successful in any of them of course requires skills beyond math and physics, so it is not necessary to "excel" in math and physics to be good at STEM.
I think the biggest thing to be good at STEM is to simply learn that there isn't "magic" inside a box, what typical things you might find in such a box, and that every box has limitations (unlike other academic disciplines which sometimes rely on boxes of nearly mystical authority).
Too often instruction in math and physics centered around "how" a problem is solved rather than understanding a principle (the "what"), and "where" to apply them. Witness the silly math word-problems like this...
" Your friend forgot your address, but she remembered that the 3 digits added to 10 and the sum of the first two equaled the third, also that the first number was the smallest of the three numbers, but was not even, what was the number?"
Do we collectively think that being good at that type of problem solving is a leading indicator of being qualified for a STEM career. I've seen these "brain-teaser" type question pop up people interviewing candidates for STEM careers, so I'm sure some do...
Perhaps people aren't demoralized by not being good at mastering brain-teasers masquerading as instructional material, they are demoralized by the thought of wasting their careers dabbling in insane word-problems like this, or trying to remember how to apply obscure trigonometric identities to algebraic equations...
Of course it takes $$$ to develop curriculum that imparts more "what" and "where" in addition to the "how". There's also a lot of inertia to keep things being taught the "traditional" way, so I don't expect progress overnight...
The remediation math class had a great team of volunteers who taught me fractions and got me up to speed to take algebra the following semester.
The biggest value of remedial classes is individualized instruction with instructors versed in multiple teaching methods. Unfortunately most folks have to go the generalized instruction route 20+:1 student instructor ratio...
If only it was possible to individualize instruction to everyone. Although individualization is the holy grail of computerized instruction, right now they are using this technology to scale the other way (e.g., 1000+:1 ratio) and there's not an end in sight on this trend (sadly the computerized folks have latched on to the idea of "super" teachers).
In any case, if you are in the unfortunate position of needing to learn something from someone who for whatever reason is not teaching it they way that you personally can efficiently learn it (e.g, visual vs spoken, repetitive vs holistic, top-down vs bottom-up, or simply competently taught vs incompetent, etc), well, you are often shit out of luck on the traditional learning route.
And more importantly, he received $38 *million* back in his tax returns. Sure, he probably paid more than the entirety of slashdot, but he also probably got a larger percentage of that money back than we receive in our tax returns.
[citation needed] According to this, he had a tax liability of $38,435,451 when he finalized his return. Payments by trump were that he had $433,365 of federal taxes withheld on W-2/1099 forms, he made estimated tax payments of $13,291,993 through the year, and then payed an additional $22,400,000 on April 15th with his request to file an extension, which left him an additional $2,292,945 short when he finalized his return which cost him $68,738 in underpayment penalties and $88,564 in interest.
I don't see anywhere he received $38 *million* back in his tax returns...
There may be countries that will adapt to this brave new world with minimal disruption. I somehow don't think the US is going to be one of them.
The US may fair better than countries that currently base their economy on manufacturing cheap labor, though... The primary risk to automation in the US are service sector jobs in the retail and business services area (about 20% of the economy). Certainly that will hurt, but the job mix in the US isn't too much different than most developed western economies like Germany, Japan, UK, etc...
The reason Costco sells them cheap is because they deal in volume - instead of making balls in hundreds of thousands, they can make balls by the millions, extracting mass production cost benefits.
And because they were partnered up with another company who designed the balls, they got a good quality ball, made quite cheaply in volumes that out-do the other manufacturers since Costco does stuff in bulk.
Apparently the golf balls in question are a OEM ball manufactured by Nassau Golf Company (located in South Korea). Nassau has also sold OEM golf balls to TaylorMade (a golf equipment subsidiary of Adidas). Although I suspect nobody knows for sure, the word on the street was it manufacturing over-run which is unlikely to be repeated.
The interesting thing that most folks are missing is that Costco is pre-emptively suing Acushnet (the seller of Titleist balls) seeking declartory judgement (yes, Costco is doing the suing) in response to a lawyer letter sent by Acushnet. This is mostly because they need to defend the tag line "meet or exceed the quality standards of leading national brands" of their Kirkland branded products, not because they want to sell more golf balls (although they probably do, it's not the main reason for their lawsuit). They want to establish a legal precedent that they can use this tag line in the rest of their business to deter future lawsuits on this basis.
Let's strap a couple rockets to it and move it to lunar orbit. Empty it out of personnel, let it do a nice, slow burn to lunar orbit. Slower is cheaper in space. Let it take however long it does to get there, and then we can start sending unmanned Dragon capsules back out to resupply it and lunar shuttles via SpaceX. This would be a good "next step" toward eventually building a permanent structure on the lunar service, and could eventually serve as a sort of waystation for missions on the way out to Mars.
Bear in mind: The lunar soil is full of O3 and H3, which both make for excellent rocket fuel. An unmanned refinery on the moon could turn Luna into a gas station for any interplanetary mission at a fraction of the cost of lifting all that material out of Earth's orbit.
You forgot the small fact that the ISS is basically a collection of thin metal tubes with minimal thrusters. Some people have estimated that it would take about 150 years and about 150 fueling trips to make a lunar orbit transfer. I suspect the ISS couldn't take the stress of a burn that it would take to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., strap-on-rockets). Even if a tractable method was found, the ISS needs to be supplied by the Earth. Putting the ISS by the moon makes this exponentially more expensive (every kg has to leave our gravity well, not just make it to near-earth-orbit).
A more permanent lunar space station needs to be designed for the task (i.e., more self-sufficient), not a re-purposed piece of cold-war space history.
why not create a UN body responsible for it and allow all mankind to use it and pay for its maintenance ? it would be a lot better than de-orbit it and let russia/china have to invest money to build their own from scratch.
There's that small detail of a "man-kind" tax that needs to be solved. Besides, UN pays basically means US pays for 1/4 of it and other countries kibbitz. Better for the US to pay for all of it ($3B/year) and forgo the kibbitzing...
The only question is if the $2B saved could be reallocated to deep space exploration. Seems to me that it's more likely the money would be swallowed up in the general budget if not earmarked for Nasa/ISS. There would be no guarantee that Nasa would see a dime of it.
I think this would pair nicely with your SpaceX business, don't you?
Since the international space station isn't likely to be a technology that will help them get to Mars, I doubt it.
If you remember, SpaceX mentioned that it didn't compete for the Ansari X-Prize because it was a distraction. They aren't even competing for the Lunar X-Prize (although they are launching one of the competitors). Managing a disintegrating international space station would be a distraction which would dwarf these other distractions.
I seems unlikely Mr. Musk would be spending any of his money on something that won't advance his Mars goal. As of now, he's banking now on his Interplanetary Transport System which relies on ITS-tanker launches, not a refueling station (which is probably all the ISS could be used as). But as demonstrated by his newfound moon-orbit project, if someone actually payed him to do it, he's be more than happy to oblige...
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
1. The xray machines for carryon baggage can't easily distinguish modern explosives from lithium-ion batteries which take up a large part of the volume of modern electronic devices. 2. It's probably easier to get some confederates inside the security operation in these countries. 3. An explosion in an airplane hold inside a bag won't have as much force as a tablet held against a the cabin wall.
So, the authorities are just taking a limited countermeasure to this threat (not banning cabin tablets from everywhere, just a few countries). This probably won't reduce the probability of the threat over time, but probably disrupt some threat that they currently got some chatter about. Unfortunately, we will have to live with the aftermath of this long after the specific threat has subsided...
I don't think most people really understand why the West is (more or less) organised, developed, peaceful, democratic (more or less).
And I wish there was a simple answer. But the list of factors just keeps growing. There are many lands in the world where nation states just will not start up, no matter how much aid is given nor ordinance be dropped.
Well, we don't have to look to far to see historically what happened. There generally were a whole bunch of people with money that had a common enemy. Then they started up a war by themselves. Large geopolitical foes of the enemy then dropped some cash and troops to help them along.
Winning is a bit random (depends a bit on the relative strength and will of the large geopolitical forces), but if the small country won, the country needed to be rich enough to survive without the support once the large benefactors lost interest. Those that weren't rich enough to begin with basically reverted and it all started over again. This implies that you can generally never expect poor countries develop into a peaceful democracy by an armed conflict as part of a larger geo-political struggle (although they might be able to make a peaceful democracy by themselves).
This is probably why there cannot be peace in the middle east. As long as it's a geopolitical war between large parties, even if one faction were to emerge victorious, if it is not naturally economically self supporting as a democracy, as soon as the benefactors lose interest, the power vacuum will be filled by forces that are largely tribal because that is where the residual economic base of the region comes from (economic power begets political power).
Penniless student protesters don't make a democracy. Monied interests make a democracy (or a cleptocracy, depending on your political view). The "peaceful-west" is an illusion, in the west there are major geopolitical conflicts that have involved the west all throughout the short history of democracy, it is simply that they have not recently touched our shores because of our economic/military might. Strength (economic and military) keeps the relative peace, democracy simply allows the tribal factions a temporary pressure outlet. Without the economic might to drown the dissent, democracy simply isn't enough of a pressure relief. You can't give a country an economy (or democracy), they need to learn to fish...
I wonder if this is where HIV hides when people who are HIV+ are on meds and the virus is undetectable. I don't really know anything, but it was my first thought.
FWIW, researcher have already discovered that HIV hides in the lymph nodes... But nice try.
The thing that struck home is a survey of STEM new grads, that shows a ~0.7 disparity as well. Seems like that's the most apples to apples comparison there could be, before things like family and work home balance start to factor in.
I guess she could be lying about all of her data though.
Interesting that she did note the observed effect of "devaluation" (as more women move into the field, both the wage discrepancy *AND* the wages decrease). Presumably this is similar to the effect of right-to-work law changes on union jobs strongholds, right? Which is not really that different than the H1b discussion.
I'm not trying justifying discrimination, but just observing that apparently the laws of economics don't give a rats ass about what basis discrimination occurs. Discrimination will help some and hurts others, but if the goal is to end discrimination, then to help others, you must hurt some. The net economic result may be higher, but probably not high enough so in the end somebody has to lose... Generally, some of those won't want to lose, so expect friction. Hopefully this is obvious.
Fortunately, I graduated STEM, not liberal arts;^b One of these days there will be grammar checker as well as a spell checker on text entry boxes, but apparently I won't be the one to invent that...
I haven't read any studies on being drunk and its effect on the ability to comprehend scientific studies.
FWIW, apparently there is real thing called state dependent memory. There are actually studies you can read about this.
As a personal anecdote, in university, if I studied for an exam when drunk (which was occasionally), I realized tended did much better if I was also a bit drunk when I actually took the exam (not a hang-over, but just a bit buzzed). I was also a much better bridge player when I was drunk. I suspect that being a bit drunk allows you to be a bit more creative and think outside the box, which might be good for recall or problem solving on an exam, but perhaps the effect is not relavent for reading/comprehending the scientific discoveries of other people. But I'm not aware of any studies on the comprehension aspect, but it isn't inconceivable that it has positive aspects.
In any case, it might be better to read these studies whilst drunk, if you want to remember them whilst partaking in a drunk BS pissing match;^)
Getting mad at Google when you've decided to use their automated tools to place your ads is kinda stupid. Place your ads intentionally instead of automatically and you won't have this problem.
AFAIK Google doesn't allow this...
YouTube's terms of service strictly prohibits burning visual ads into uploaded videos (other than title cards) and Advertisers cannot specify which videos where Ads are placed (other than by general demographics) except for high volume partnership relationships on sponsored channels.
Apparently, the only way to win is not to play the game which is what these advertisers seem to be doing now.
In fact, without the Jobs' of the world, it's highly likely that chip fabs wouldn't have been built and Woz would never have been able to build the first Apple computer.
I challenge you to name a Job-esqe person that enabled the fab for the MosTech 6502 that were in the first Apple computer...
The secret sauce of the 6502 wasn't anything about its design, but special techniques used by manufacturing group at Mos Technology used to manufacture the masks which greatly increased their chip yield resulting in a lower selling price (which convinced Woz to use the $25 6502 vs the more powerful 6800 at $175).
The other side of Mos Technology's business was collapsing (the fixed function calculator business), and no amount of marketing was going to save it, so save the unsung technological advancements by Mos Technologies manufacturing group, there would be no Mos Technologies fab meaning there would be no 6502 for Woz to design into the first Apple computer and it would probably have cost a lot more than $666.66 and history may have never heard of The Apple Computer Company...
Are you implying that the wheeled suitcase was invented 1000 years ago, but nobody could make one because of a 17 year patent that couldn't have existed more than 227 years ago?
In fact, it was not invented into 1970, with the patent being granted in 1972; it was available in stores before the patent was granted. Upright wheeled luggage was invented and hit the market in 1987, a full two years before the roll-flat luggage patent expired. Prior to roll-flat luggage, collapsible luggage carts were available; they were quite popular in the 1960's.
No prior patent existed which prevented the invention or sale of the 1970 roll-flat luggage, and the 1972 roll-flat patent did not prevent the 1987 invention of the upright wheeled design, nor did it delay its entry into the marketplace.
How did patents hurt us, here?
Well, maybe the patent hurt us because it obscures the history of "true" inventor of the wheeled luggage in 1958 one D. Dudly Bloom...
Just because you patented it, doesn't mean you invented it.
I don't think Ponds & Fleishman could have thought that they could get very far with a scam, especially with something so trivially demonstrable that a grade school student could disprove it in two days with ten minutes of effort. The ecat thing is another story.
I agree, E-cat doesn't really pass the smell test at all and is probably a simple con-job...
I think cold fusion, at least the original incantation was likely just bad science followed by a bad release process, ie, going to the papers first which assuming the original science was not bad would be understandable more than trying sell magic. Probably the same with the em drive. How long did it take to solve the voyager anomaly?
As an aside, one of my physics professors had a spool of platinum wire left over from an experiment and access to the nuclear engineering department's big low background radiation lead room and I spent a few nights recording Geiger counter ticks.:)
Perhaps you don't fully understand the motivation of these historical "projectors". They weren't con artists in the sense in they knew they were fooling their marks. They were generally so caught up in their "inventions" that they overlooked issues like "theory" and "repeatably" in their zealous pursuit of fame and/or fortune. I don't think this is just "bad" science. The herd mentality surrounding Millikan's oil drop experiment alluded to in Feynman's famous cargo-cult science commencement address is bad science, "projectors" is a totally different phenomena...
More importantly, if the Universe is a simulation, that -- by definition -- means that there are supernatural beings (aka "gods") out there, which would totally crush atheism.
It's quite possible that we live in a *natural* simulation. Like the allegory of the cave, reality as we understand it could merely be the "shadows" or a natural simulation of an objective reality (if there is such a thing) that we cannot understand or comprehend. It isn't required that it be setup by "beings". However as with this allegory, it might be impossible to describe this objective reality in the language of our reality, so projecting this description down to our reality, things might get lost in translation. What to one person might be atheism, to another is a god of nature (e.g., the God of Deism)...
In many ways, even our best Quantum view of the world can be considered as projecting a shadow on cave for what most people think of as objective reality. It doesn't really make total sense at all and we already know that it isn't even accurate enough to describe what we observe in enough detail.
On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
This has been going on in Physics since at least the 70's. Tao of Physics anyone?
Well, historically Physics (aka "natural philosophy") has had a long association with crack-pot "inventors". Apparently, in the 17th century such crack-pots were called "projectors" and often touted demonstration prototypes using some basis physics, but were often elaborate ponzi-like investment schemes for unrealizable inventions. This tradition continues today with things like Mars One... Some might place things like "cold-fusion", "dwave", and "em-drive" in this category as well, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, however, on appearances, they seem no better than the "projectors" of historical yore...
Fitz: But what is a projector? I would conceive.
Eng: Why one, sir, that projects ways to enrich men or to make them great.
-- Ben Jonson "The Devil is an Ass"
However, if you are of the same ilk as a projector and lack any technical skills to make a physical prototype of your magical theory, but you are good talker, that's when you go the meta-physical route as an alternate route to riches (electric universe theory, anyone?)...
Slashdot Mirror
What is this new-fangled Dynamic memory you speak of? I'm still using static me#@$@$^*
It's like Magnetic-Core memory, except it forgets... Segmentation fault (core dumped)
If you can't do those types of "brain-teasers", you should definitely not pursue a career related to programming. There are nearly infinite ways to solve a programming problem. If you can't work out the logical implications, you will end up writing a bunch of pointless, brittle code instead of developing a solution based on the logical truth of the inputs, transformations, and expected outputs.
Sure, but STEM career != programming. There are many STEM careers that don't have programming skills requirements.
Your post is almost fractal in its unbrilliance.
In using the Dunning-Kruger effect to explain the situation, you grossly overestimated your understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect---likely due to a lack of formal training in psychology.
Although I lack any format training in psychology, it seems to me that the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to this situation would indicate that men or women who were initially incompetent at STEM would likely overestimate their competence, and then when exposed to some limited STEM training (regardless of their aptitude for it) would be better at realizing their incompetence. However, if a certain man or a woman exhibited high ability in STEM, they would underestimate their high ability thinking since it was easy for them, they must be average and others must be superior.
So Dunning-Kruger were to explain this situation, it might imply that many men never got beyond the hump of incompetence and continued to overestimate their STEM ability and conversely many women are generally of high ability and thus underestimate their abilities and defer to either these incompetent men who think they have high STEM ability or those men of slightly better than average (but not high) ability.
I'm not sure this is exactly what the original poster had in mind when invoking the Dunning-Kruger effect on this situation, but you never know...
Actually, bizarrely, that is not what happened. If you RTFA it seems that the extra course decreased the gap in the maths skills between the men and women i.e. the women benefitted from the course more than the men but still ranked lower on average. However it decreased the women's confidence in their maths skills whereas for the men it was unchanged. So paradoxically the course did a great job in better preparing women for STEM careers while simultaneously making them think that they were unsuited for a STEM career.
What is needed now is some psychological study to figure out why women developed such a gap between their actual maths skills and the perceived maths skills while the men did not. If someone could figure out that perhaps we can develop a better way of teaching maths and physics that imparts the required knowledge without the drop in confidence.
My completely hairbrained idea on why the gap in confidence exists is that more men have a "fake-it-until-you-make-it" mentality which can often be a boost to confidence (or over confidence), where women have a tendency to be more deferential to other people judging them. I doubt this is genetic (because there are quite a few exceptions to this), so my conclusion is that it is basically a "nurture" issue.
The problem with math and physics is there is a big disconnect on what is required vs what is taught. Personally, I think lumping STEM into one big blob does the whole field a big disservice. Science is about discovery and experiment, Technology is about understanding the state of the art and the barriers (current and past), Engineering is about designing things in a practical way, and Mathematics is about analysis (quantitative and qualitative). All of these require different skills and not all of them require the same type of math and physics and to be ultimately successful in any of them of course requires skills beyond math and physics, so it is not necessary to "excel" in math and physics to be good at STEM.
I think the biggest thing to be good at STEM is to simply learn that there isn't "magic" inside a box, what typical things you might find in such a box, and that every box has limitations (unlike other academic disciplines which sometimes rely on boxes of nearly mystical authority).
Too often instruction in math and physics centered around "how" a problem is solved rather than understanding a principle (the "what"), and "where" to apply them. Witness the silly math word-problems like this...
" Your friend forgot your address, but she remembered that the 3 digits added to 10 and the sum of the first two equaled the third, also that the first number was the smallest of the three numbers, but was not even, what was the number?"
Do we collectively think that being good at that type of problem solving is a leading indicator of being qualified for a STEM career. I've seen these "brain-teaser" type question pop up people interviewing candidates for STEM careers, so I'm sure some do...
Perhaps people aren't demoralized by not being good at mastering brain-teasers masquerading as instructional material, they are demoralized by the thought of wasting their careers dabbling in insane word-problems like this, or trying to remember how to apply obscure trigonometric identities to algebraic equations...
Of course it takes $$$ to develop curriculum that imparts more "what" and "where" in addition to the "how". There's also a lot of inertia to keep things being taught the "traditional" way, so I don't expect progress overnight...
The remediation math class had a great team of volunteers who taught me fractions and got me up to speed to take algebra the following semester.
The biggest value of remedial classes is individualized instruction with instructors versed in multiple teaching methods. Unfortunately most folks have to go the generalized instruction route 20+:1 student instructor ratio...
If only it was possible to individualize instruction to everyone. Although individualization is the holy grail of computerized instruction, right now they are using this technology to scale the other way (e.g., 1000+:1 ratio) and there's not an end in sight on this trend (sadly the computerized folks have latched on to the idea of "super" teachers).
In any case, if you are in the unfortunate position of needing to learn something from someone who for whatever reason is not teaching it they way that you personally can efficiently learn it (e.g, visual vs spoken, repetitive vs holistic, top-down vs bottom-up, or simply competently taught vs incompetent, etc), well, you are often shit out of luck on the traditional learning route.
And more importantly, he received $38 *million* back in his tax returns. Sure, he probably paid more than the entirety of slashdot, but he also probably got a larger percentage of that money back than we receive in our tax returns.
[citation needed]
According to this, he had a tax liability of $38,435,451 when he finalized his return. Payments by trump were that he had $433,365 of federal taxes withheld on W-2/1099 forms, he made estimated tax payments of $13,291,993 through the year, and then payed an additional $22,400,000 on April 15th with his request to file an extension, which left him an additional $2,292,945 short when he finalized his return which cost him $68,738 in underpayment penalties and $88,564 in interest.
I don't see anywhere he received $38 *million* back in his tax returns...
There may be countries that will adapt to this brave new world with minimal disruption. I somehow don't think the US is going to be one of them.
The US may fair better than countries that currently base their economy on manufacturing cheap labor, though...
The primary risk to automation in the US are service sector jobs in the retail and business services area (about 20% of the economy). Certainly that will hurt, but the job mix in the US isn't too much different than most developed western economies like Germany, Japan, UK, etc...
The reason Costco sells them cheap is because they deal in volume - instead of making balls in hundreds of thousands, they can make balls by the millions, extracting mass production cost benefits.
And because they were partnered up with another company who designed the balls, they got a good quality ball, made quite cheaply in volumes that out-do the other manufacturers since Costco does stuff in bulk.
Apparently the golf balls in question are a OEM ball manufactured by Nassau Golf Company (located in South Korea). Nassau has also sold OEM golf balls to TaylorMade (a golf equipment subsidiary of Adidas). Although I suspect nobody knows for sure, the word on the street was it manufacturing over-run which is unlikely to be repeated.
The interesting thing that most folks are missing is that Costco is pre-emptively suing Acushnet (the seller of Titleist balls) seeking declartory judgement (yes, Costco is doing the suing) in response to a lawyer letter sent by Acushnet. This is mostly because they need to defend the tag line "meet or exceed the quality standards of leading national brands" of their Kirkland branded products, not because they want to sell more golf balls (although they probably do, it's not the main reason for their lawsuit). They want to establish a legal precedent that they can use this tag line in the rest of their business to deter future lawsuits on this basis.
Let's strap a couple rockets to it and move it to lunar orbit. Empty it out of personnel, let it do a nice, slow burn to lunar orbit. Slower is cheaper in space. Let it take however long it does to get there, and then we can start sending unmanned Dragon capsules back out to resupply it and lunar shuttles via SpaceX. This would be a good "next step" toward eventually building a permanent structure on the lunar service, and could eventually serve as a sort of waystation for missions on the way out to Mars.
Bear in mind: The lunar soil is full of O3 and H3, which both make for excellent rocket fuel. An unmanned refinery on the moon could turn Luna into a gas station for any interplanetary mission at a fraction of the cost of lifting all that material out of Earth's orbit.
You forgot the small fact that the ISS is basically a collection of thin metal tubes with minimal thrusters. Some people have estimated that it would take about 150 years and about 150 fueling trips to make a lunar orbit transfer. I suspect the ISS couldn't take the stress of a burn that it would take to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., strap-on-rockets). Even if a tractable method was found, the ISS needs to be supplied by the Earth. Putting the ISS by the moon makes this exponentially more expensive (every kg has to leave our gravity well, not just make it to near-earth-orbit).
A more permanent lunar space station needs to be designed for the task (i.e., more self-sufficient), not a re-purposed piece of cold-war space history.
why not create a UN body responsible for it and allow all mankind to use it and pay for its maintenance ?
it would be a lot better than de-orbit it and let russia/china have to invest money to build their own from scratch.
There's that small detail of a "man-kind" tax that needs to be solved. Besides, UN pays basically means US pays for 1/4 of it and other countries kibbitz. Better for the US to pay for all of it ($3B/year) and forgo the kibbitzing...
The only question is if the $2B saved could be reallocated to deep space exploration. Seems to me that it's more likely the money would be swallowed up in the general budget if not earmarked for Nasa/ISS. There would be no guarantee that Nasa would see a dime of it.
I think this would pair nicely with your SpaceX business, don't you?
Since the international space station isn't likely to be a technology that will help them get to Mars, I doubt it.
If you remember, SpaceX mentioned that it didn't compete for the Ansari X-Prize because it was a distraction. They aren't even competing for the Lunar X-Prize (although they are launching one of the competitors). Managing a disintegrating international space station would be a distraction which would dwarf these other distractions.
I seems unlikely Mr. Musk would be spending any of his money on something that won't advance his Mars goal. As of now, he's banking now on his Interplanetary Transport System which relies on ITS-tanker launches, not a refueling station (which is probably all the ISS could be used as). But as demonstrated by his newfound moon-orbit project, if someone actually payed him to do it, he's be more than happy to oblige...
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
1. The xray machines for carryon baggage can't easily distinguish modern explosives from lithium-ion batteries which take up a large part of the volume of modern electronic devices.
2. It's probably easier to get some confederates inside the security operation in these countries.
3. An explosion in an airplane hold inside a bag won't have as much force as a tablet held against a the cabin wall.
So, the authorities are just taking a limited countermeasure to this threat (not banning cabin tablets from everywhere, just a few countries). This probably won't reduce the probability of the threat over time, but probably disrupt some threat that they currently got some chatter about. Unfortunately, we will have to live with the aftermath of this long after the specific threat has subsided...
I don't think most people really understand why the West is (more or less) organised, developed, peaceful, democratic (more or less).
And I wish there was a simple answer. But the list of factors just keeps growing. There are many lands in the world where nation states just will not start up, no matter how much aid is given nor ordinance be dropped.
Well, we don't have to look to far to see historically what happened. There generally were a whole bunch of people with money that had a common enemy. Then they started up a war by themselves. Large geopolitical foes of the enemy then dropped some cash and troops to help them along.
Winning is a bit random (depends a bit on the relative strength and will of the large geopolitical forces), but if the small country won, the country needed to be rich enough to survive without the support once the large benefactors lost interest. Those that weren't rich enough to begin with basically reverted and it all started over again. This implies that you can generally never expect poor countries develop into a peaceful democracy by an armed conflict as part of a larger geo-political struggle (although they might be able to make a peaceful democracy by themselves).
This is probably why there cannot be peace in the middle east. As long as it's a geopolitical war between large parties, even if one faction were to emerge victorious, if it is not naturally economically self supporting as a democracy, as soon as the benefactors lose interest, the power vacuum will be filled by forces that are largely tribal because that is where the residual economic base of the region comes from (economic power begets political power).
Penniless student protesters don't make a democracy. Monied interests make a democracy (or a cleptocracy, depending on your political view). The "peaceful-west" is an illusion, in the west there are major geopolitical conflicts that have involved the west all throughout the short history of democracy, it is simply that they have not recently touched our shores because of our economic/military might. Strength (economic and military) keeps the relative peace, democracy simply allows the tribal factions a temporary pressure outlet. Without the economic might to drown the dissent, democracy simply isn't enough of a pressure relief. You can't give a country an economy (or democracy), they need to learn to fish...
I wonder if this is where HIV hides when people who are HIV+ are on meds and the virus is undetectable. I don't really know anything, but it was my first thought.
FWIW, researcher have already discovered that HIV hides in the lymph nodes... But nice try.
0.70c on the dollar has been debunked over and over again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The thing that struck home is a survey of STEM new grads, that shows a ~0.7 disparity as well. Seems like that's the most apples to apples comparison there could be, before things like family and work home balance start to factor in.
I guess she could be lying about all of her data though.
Interesting that she did note the observed effect of "devaluation" (as more women move into the field, both the wage discrepancy *AND* the wages decrease). Presumably this is similar to the effect of right-to-work law changes on union jobs strongholds, right? Which is not really that different than the H1b discussion.
I'm not trying justifying discrimination, but just observing that apparently the laws of economics don't give a rats ass about what basis discrimination occurs. Discrimination will help some and hurts others, but if the goal is to end discrimination, then to help others, you must hurt some. The net economic result may be higher, but probably not high enough so in the end somebody has to lose... Generally, some of those won't want to lose, so expect friction. Hopefully this is obvious.
"I realized tended did much better" LOL
Fortunately, I graduated STEM, not liberal arts ;^b
One of these days there will be grammar checker as well as a spell checker on text entry boxes, but apparently I won't be the one to invent that...
I think you may have been my grad school adviser.
If I were a grad school adviser, my advice would be not to go to grad school... ;^)
I haven't read any studies on being drunk and its effect on the ability to comprehend scientific studies.
FWIW, apparently there is real thing called state dependent memory. There are actually studies you can read about this.
As a personal anecdote, in university, if I studied for an exam when drunk (which was occasionally), I realized tended did much better if I was also a bit drunk when I actually took the exam (not a hang-over, but just a bit buzzed). I was also a much better bridge player when I was drunk. I suspect that being a bit drunk allows you to be a bit more creative and think outside the box, which might be good for recall or problem solving on an exam, but perhaps the effect is not relavent for reading/comprehending the scientific discoveries of other people. But I'm not aware of any studies on the comprehension aspect, but it isn't inconceivable that it has positive aspects.
In any case, it might be better to read these studies whilst drunk, if you want to remember them whilst partaking in a drunk BS pissing match ;^)
Getting mad at Google when you've decided to use their automated tools to place your ads is kinda stupid. Place your ads intentionally instead of automatically and you won't have this problem.
AFAIK Google doesn't allow this...
YouTube's terms of service strictly prohibits burning visual ads into uploaded videos (other than title cards) and Advertisers cannot specify which videos where Ads are placed (other than by general demographics) except for high volume partnership relationships on sponsored channels.
Apparently, the only way to win is not to play the game which is what these advertisers seem to be doing now.
In fact, without the Jobs' of the world, it's highly likely that chip fabs wouldn't have been built and Woz would never have been able to build the first Apple computer.
I challenge you to name a Job-esqe person that enabled the fab for the MosTech 6502 that were in the first Apple computer...
The secret sauce of the 6502 wasn't anything about its design, but special techniques used by manufacturing group at Mos Technology used to manufacture the masks which greatly increased their chip yield resulting in a lower selling price (which convinced Woz to use the $25 6502 vs the more powerful 6800 at $175).
The other side of Mos Technology's business was collapsing (the fixed function calculator business), and no amount of marketing was going to save it, so save the unsung technological advancements by Mos Technologies manufacturing group, there would be no Mos Technologies fab meaning there would be no 6502 for Woz to design into the first Apple computer and it would probably have cost a lot more than $666.66 and history may have never heard of The Apple Computer Company...
Are you implying that the wheeled suitcase was invented 1000 years ago, but nobody could make one because of a 17 year patent that couldn't have existed more than 227 years ago?
In fact, it was not invented into 1970, with the patent being granted in 1972; it was available in stores before the patent was granted. Upright wheeled luggage was invented and hit the market in 1987, a full two years before the roll-flat luggage patent expired. Prior to roll-flat luggage, collapsible luggage carts were available; they were quite popular in the 1960's.
No prior patent existed which prevented the invention or sale of the 1970 roll-flat luggage, and the 1972 roll-flat patent did not prevent the 1987 invention of the upright wheeled design, nor did it delay its entry into the marketplace.
How did patents hurt us, here?
Well, maybe the patent hurt us because it obscures the history of "true" inventor of the wheeled luggage in 1958 one D. Dudly Bloom...
Just because you patented it, doesn't mean you invented it.
I don't think Ponds & Fleishman could have thought that they could get very far with a scam, especially with something so trivially demonstrable that a grade school student could disprove it in two days with ten minutes of effort. The ecat thing is another story.
I agree, E-cat doesn't really pass the smell test at all and is probably a simple con-job...
I think cold fusion, at least the original incantation was likely just bad science followed by a bad release process, ie, going to the papers first which assuming the original science was not bad would be understandable more than trying sell magic. Probably the same with the em drive. How long did it take to solve the voyager anomaly?
As an aside, one of my physics professors had a spool of platinum wire left over from an experiment and access to the nuclear engineering department's big low background radiation lead room and I spent a few nights recording Geiger counter ticks. :)
Perhaps you don't fully understand the motivation of these historical "projectors". They weren't con artists in the sense in they knew they were fooling their marks. They were generally so caught up in their "inventions" that they overlooked issues like "theory" and "repeatably" in their zealous pursuit of fame and/or fortune. I don't think this is just "bad" science. The herd mentality surrounding Millikan's oil drop experiment alluded to in Feynman's famous cargo-cult science commencement address is bad science, "projectors" is a totally different phenomena...
More importantly, if the Universe is a simulation, that -- by definition -- means that there are supernatural beings (aka "gods") out there, which would totally crush atheism.
It's quite possible that we live in a *natural* simulation. Like the allegory of the cave, reality as we understand it could merely be the "shadows" or a natural simulation of an objective reality (if there is such a thing) that we cannot understand or comprehend. It isn't required that it be setup by "beings". However as with this allegory, it might be impossible to describe this objective reality in the language of our reality, so projecting this description down to our reality, things might get lost in translation. What to one person might be atheism, to another is a god of nature (e.g., the God of Deism)...
In many ways, even our best Quantum view of the world can be considered as projecting a shadow on cave for what most people think of as objective reality. It doesn't really make total sense at all and we already know that it isn't even accurate enough to describe what we observe in enough detail.
On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
-- Richard Feynman
justify a whole bunch of metaphysical claptrap
This has been going on in Physics since at least the 70's. Tao of Physics anyone?
Well, historically Physics (aka "natural philosophy") has had a long association with crack-pot "inventors". Apparently, in the 17th century such crack-pots were called "projectors" and often touted demonstration prototypes using some basis physics, but were often elaborate ponzi-like investment schemes for unrealizable inventions. This tradition continues today with things like Mars One... Some might place things like "cold-fusion", "dwave", and "em-drive" in this category as well, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, however, on appearances, they seem no better than the "projectors" of historical yore...
Fitz: But what is a projector? I would conceive.
Eng: Why one, sir, that projects ways to enrich men or to make them great.
-- Ben Jonson "The Devil is an Ass"
However, if you are of the same ilk as a projector and lack any technical skills to make a physical prototype of your magical theory, but you are good talker, that's when you go the meta-physical route as an alternate route to riches (electric universe theory, anyone?)...