Disruptive business plans are a real thing. It's basically the business culture of Silicon Valley: find a traditional business, kill it and feast off its corpse. The problem is that it's a lot harder to do with something like tractors than it is with services or retail.
One's behavior being understandable doesn't excuse it.
The way he started throwing cruise missiles at Syria, apparently spontaneously, with little regard for the fact that he will be stepping up the level of conflict in a region where things already very tense does not bode well.
This is explainable as lack of thought. He felt he needed to react, but like many people he didn't think the consequences through. He's a profoundly ignorant man. Obama, although not shy about using military force, in absence of Congressional authorization attempted to use diplomacy in Syria to discourage use of chemical weapons. Clinton would simply have used force to deny Syria the use of the air assets it needs to deliver chemical weapons. Trump split the difference and ended up with an approach that has the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. It's a dramatic but morally timid approach that fits well with his narcissistic personality.
It's a bit of a stretch to call him a "successful" businessman. His record is mixed, and in a way I respect that.
His father set him up in NYC real estate in the 1970s, staking him 40 million -- the equivalent of about two hundred million today. You'd have to be a fool not parlay that into a billion by 2000, because you could do that by playing it safe putting your money in conservative, diversified portfolio.
But here's the part I respect: Trump didn't play it safe. He invested in things he loved -- like golf courses and casinos. If it were me I'd have put the money into science and tech companies, because that's what I love, but either way investing for love isn't very sound financially, and Trump needed his father to bail him out at least one point.
It's clear that Trump's career motivation has been to leave his mark on the world, and because he's not a very imaginative man he set out to do that literally. And that thirst for recogntion not surprising, given the fact that in the Trump family succession, Donald was the spare. His older brother Fred Jr. was suppose to inherit the business empire, but he was a drunk.
So the need for approval and love is hardly incongruous with Trump's background. And that need is an asset for a politician; with it he can make a genuine emotional connection with crowds of strangers; without it he comes across as aloof and phony. But Trump's need for approval is altogether too malignant for comfort.
This is the book that famously coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil".
Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi SS Lt. Colonel who was in charge of "evacuating" Jews from Germany and the occupied territories to concentration camps. For five years after the war he lived under various assumed names in Germany, before emigrating to Argentina.
In 1957 Mossad was alerted to his presence in Buenos Aires, and in May of 1960 agents kidnapped Eichmann and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial.
The book an Hannah Arendt's report on Eichmann's trial, and it's a work of stunning bluntness and brutal honesty. Reportedly Eichmann in Jersusalem destroyed Arendt's long-standing friendships with many of her fellow Jews, for it did not shy away from the question of Jewish community leaders' complicity in Eichmann's activities -- although she by no means equates them. Arendt stubbornly refuses to lend the Nazis the kind of satanic majesty that pop culture attributes to them, but rather puts them on a continuum of Evil There aren't enough pure monsters to make something like the Holocaust possible; the monsters need the help of ordinary, intellectually lazy people who let groupthink override their scruples.
In an age where people are confused about the differences between real and fake news, Eichmann in Jersusalem needs to be more widely read. This is what a real attempt to come to grips with the produces: not a neat picture of pure angels an devils, but a messy one in which people who know better foolishly go along with things they shouldn't.
I imagine a lot depends on the future cost of aviation fuel. Once you have the physical capacity to build a hybrid jet (which I assume operates like a regular jet on take off when you need lots of power) it's simply a question of whether numbers work out at the expected fuel price.
It's just hard to imagine saving enough to make it worth your while at current prices. Turboprops are slow, but they're plenty fast for three or four hundred mile hops, and they're pretty fuel efficient.
These guys must have a very specific scenario in mind. They mention San Jose to LA. That's about 270 nautical miles, and a turboprop can fly that distance in about an hour and a quarter using not very much gas at all. Once you add all the time overhead, it's hard to see much room for improvement. Or San Jose to Tahoe, which is even shorter -- about 160 nm. So I'm guessing they're looking at carrying enough battery for very short hops, but maybe doing them a bit faster.
The whole rationale for the mission creep that has been bloating desktop environments for the past twenty years is that the desktop is supposed to be a kind of Grand Central Station for the information in your life. Well, we just passed the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, and that rationale is antiquated.
On the desktop just need something that will launch applications and allow them to share screen real estate. That's it. Everything else is bloat.
Not quite. Yes, what happened under the Obama administration involved CBP and social media, but it was significantly different.
Last July the Obama administration proposed a voluntary disclosure of social media profile information for travelers seeking a visa waiver through the ESTA system (Electronic System for Travel Authorization). It did not include password or contact information, but was controversial nonetheless. It sent into effect in December.[
The Trump administration is proposing significant changes to that program, requiring more information (passwords and contacts) and making it compulsory.
People who get demoralized by math, probably shouldn't pursue a career in a STEM field.
While I agree that not everyone has to or should pursue a STEM career, I can't agree with this particular avenue to not doing STEM.
Demoralization doesn't tell you anything certain about a person's intrinsic ability.
Math skills have to be built in sequence, and what produces failure in math for otherwise intelligent students is a failure to detect deficits in prerequisite skills before they generate a humiliating string of failures. Cramming more humiliation into the last two years of schooling is hardly a promising strategy; you have to start earlier and monitor progress at a fine-grained basis to prevent those failures in the first place, before math failure becomes part of a student's self-image.
Secondly, we need to revamp our attitude toward failure itself. If I could change just one thing about educational culture it would be to value and foster resiliency more. Failure shouldn't be a humiliating end; it should be viewed as a normal stepping stone to success.
In general people earning at the median income (roughly 56k) have not seen their incomes recover past their pre-recession levels, and people at the first and second quintile (from the bottom, roughly 33k) have not recovered to their pre-recession incomes. Fresh out of school, the average college graduate makes about $50.5K.
So what recent college grads are experiencing is representative of what at about half of the people in the country are experiencing -- namely those with average to below average income. That bio grad making $31K is roughly as far below what he'd have been making pre-recession as anyone else making that amount is.
Some of this divergence is natural, in that the wealthy tend to have more volatile incomes; those incomes are more likely to be based on the performance of asset markets. However it's striking to see such robust sustained income growth for the top 5% with stagnation for the median and below. Whatever they're putting their money into, it's not trickling down.
This is a highly selective narrative; you make it sound like Musk got out his slide rule and personally proved all the experts wrong.
In point of fact what happened was that some experts didn't think it was practical, but Musk hired other experts who disagreed with them and gave them the money to prove that it could be done.
Elitism is granting irrational preference for the opinions of an elite.
No, you appear to have just added the irrational part in.
Well, elitism defined your way is nothing to complain about.
When people use "elitism" as they have here, they mean it in a pejorative sense. They are talking about an unreasonable elitism. If you wish to admit reasonable elitism to the discussion, fine, but then we're no longer discussing the feelings people have toward Twitter's policy.
You have to start with a definition of "elitist", rather than going with what feels elitist to you.
Elitism is granting irrational preference for the opinions of an elite. It follows that the nature of the elite in question matters. It's irrational to have more interest in Matthew McConaughey's opinion on the national budget than some internet rando's opinion, but it's not irrational to have more interest in Paul Krugman's -- even if you disagree with it.
Trumpism, it seems to me, isn't so much anti-elitist so much as it is about which elite you prefer.
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
So in the event of potentially unsafe driving conditions, something with the intelligence of a 2-year-old and the strength of 1000 gorillas randomly grabs the wheel from you. I can't see anything that could possibly go wrong with this.
Well, can you see anything that could possibly go wrong by letting the human driver always have his way when milliseconds count? That's what you have to consider: the relative probability of catastrophe in the two scenarios: continued human control vs. automated intervention.
Most people think of themselves as better than average drivers. Most people *are* a better than average driver... on their good days. But it's not their good days they need to be worried about. It's the days when they're harried, distracted and sleep-deprived that the pose a threat to themselves... and others.
. . . does that work for you ? Because it works for me. No crying babies, chatty teens, or rude patrons playing with their smartphones.
Didn't experience any of that in my last trip to the cinema. But then, that was to see Florence Foster Jenkins, so maybe the problem is the movies you're going to.
Well, financially speaking bankruptcy doesn't happen because you don't make profit. It happens because you run out of cash flow to meet your current obligations.
Had Westinghouse back in the 90s gone all-in on a fuel cycle it had no practical experience with, it would be pretty much where it is today: building the first power plants of a new design, after a multi-decade hiatus in commissioning nuclear power plants. Either way it's a recipe for construction delays, which equal cost overruns without corresponding new revenue, which equals bankruptcy.
The only way to get a large-scale nuclear power plant business off the ground is to have vast quantities of cash on hand, which businesses don't like to do because keeping cash relatively idle costs money too.
Well, but then you must add the cost of storage and the beefier grid to the cost of solar/wind plants.
No, you have to add the cost of a beefier grid to everyone who wants to sell power over a long distance, including nuclear plants. A better grid would make nuclear more economical too.
5 is a lot younger than 9. In fact developmentally it's a lot younger than the 45% chronologically younger it is.
Once a medical entomologist I was working with came to me with a flow chart he'd done in Visio. "I need a program that can do this," he said. "I've looked at different modeling applications but it won't be easy in any of them. I'm pretty sure I'll need custom software."
I glanced at his flow chart, scribbled a polynomial on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. "There. Plug that into Excel and you're good to go."
He was flabbergasted. "How did you do that?"
"My job isn't writing programs," I said. "My job is transforming hard problems into easy ones. I only write actual software to prove I'm right."
Coding as an academic activity is a very narrow intellectual pursuit. Coding as a real life activity draws on a lifetime of intellectual experiences, both academic and non-academic.
Children at the age of 5 should be preparing for those experiences. If you want to know what kids that age should be doing, you should look at what public television shows like Sesame Street and Arthur targeted at them depict them doing. They go outside and play. They explore. They make real physical things. They make friends (and enemies). They express themselves by participating in art and music. They learn to deal with winning and losing by playing games.
You know the one thing that kids on those programs almost never do? Watch TV. Real kids spend way too much time in front of screens.
Now I'm all for giving 9 year-olds a taste of programming. Seymour Papert did wonderful work along those lines, including with children as young as the fifth grade -- roughly 10 years old. There isn't much difference between a 10 and a 9 year old, but there's a huge difference between a 5 and 6 year-old.
Teaching a 5 year-old about coding is just virtue signalling. It's not something you do for the kid, it's something you do for your reputation.
Without England, Scotland has nothing to offer the EU except liability.
Scotland is small,but it has a higher per capita GDP than England, or the entire UK for that matter -- if you count North Sea energy. Scotland as an independent country would be the twelfth largest economy in Europe and almost exactly in the middle of the pack for size in the EU.
Now logically speaking Scottish independence from an independent UK does not necessarily equate to EU membership. Scots could choose independence from the UK on the basis that union with a UK that is not in the EU is not as attractive as union with a UK that is in the EU.
If you think Vista was bad you're not old enough to remember NT 4.0.
I remember the sound system crashing on my Vista laptop, sending a horrible, unstoppable screeching through the speakers. Basically it was an audio snow crash. Yet everything else worked normally; I was able to save my work and shut the system down. And I remember thinking, "that was horrible, but so much less horrible than it could have been."
>The thesis of this "scientific paper" is basically like a couple of tokers sitting around in their parents' basement saying "DUUUUDE... what if the money in our savings account DOUBLED EVERY YEAR?!???
Again this is not a critique of the paper, it is a critique of tokers sitting around in their parent's basement. There is no substance in your criticism to address, it really is just an expression of your feelings toward the paper's author. Aside from the fact that you're just name-calling, the numerical basis you've used for comparison is just wrong.
Now it so happens I have you at a disadvantage: I've actually read the paper. It's closer the tokers sitting around saying, "How can we achieve a 7% annual compound interest rate sustained over ten years with our portfolio," which is roughly what doubling your money in ten years takes. The authors are talking about what it would take to half carbon emissions which would be a 6.6% reduction each year, and they discuss methods for reducing them, which they break down into near term no-brainer, near-term difficult, and long term speculative. As is usual the further out you go the less concrete and certain you can be. This is normal in economic projections that go twenty or more years out.
Now you may disagree with the specific means proposed, some of which are quite drastic (e.g. attempting to recover external costs through inheritance taxes). But there is nothing inherently irrational about starting with a goal -- zero carbon emissions by 2050 -- then asking what it would take to achieve that. Nor is there anything inherently ridiculous with coming up with the answer that it'll take a mix of things, some of which looking twenty or more years into the future we can't predict yet.
Oh, I think the percentage bit is significant. It shouldn't be news that they've acknowledged reality; but it's remarkable that their responses is so meaningless.
It makes me wonder whether this is just marketing BS or whether they're really that incoherent about strategy.
Many proprietary software companies have prospered in an era of open source acceptance -- even when very good free software alternatives for their products exists (Microsoft, Oracle). But although we don't tend to think of them that way, they tend to be value-priced. You get a lot of (not necessarily great) software engineering for your $199 Windows license fee.
But the play this game you need scale to amortize development costs over many users. If you have more of a niche product competing against a solid open source competitor is going to be really, really hard. As in SAS charges almost $9000 for a single seat license, and that's good for only a year; thereafter you'll have to fork over thousands of dollars every year. That kind of cash pays for a lot of R training.
Slashdot Mirror
Disruptive business plans are a real thing. It's basically the business culture of Silicon Valley: find a traditional business, kill it and feast off its corpse. The problem is that it's a lot harder to do with something like tractors than it is with services or retail.
One's behavior being understandable doesn't excuse it.
This is explainable as lack of thought. He felt he needed to react, but like many people he didn't think the consequences through. He's a profoundly ignorant man. Obama, although not shy about using military force, in absence of Congressional authorization attempted to use diplomacy in Syria to discourage use of chemical weapons. Clinton would simply have used force to deny Syria the use of the air assets it needs to deliver chemical weapons. Trump split the difference and ended up with an approach that has the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. It's a dramatic but morally timid approach that fits well with his narcissistic personality.
It's a bit of a stretch to call him a "successful" businessman. His record is mixed, and in a way I respect that.
His father set him up in NYC real estate in the 1970s, staking him 40 million -- the equivalent of about two hundred million today. You'd have to be a fool not parlay that into a billion by 2000, because you could do that by playing it safe putting your money in conservative, diversified portfolio.
But here's the part I respect: Trump didn't play it safe. He invested in things he loved -- like golf courses and casinos. If it were me I'd have put the money into science and tech companies, because that's what I love, but either way investing for love isn't very sound financially, and Trump needed his father to bail him out at least one point.
It's clear that Trump's career motivation has been to leave his mark on the world, and because he's not a very imaginative man he set out to do that literally. And that thirst for recogntion not surprising, given the fact that in the Trump family succession, Donald was the spare. His older brother Fred Jr. was suppose to inherit the business empire, but he was a drunk.
So the need for approval and love is hardly incongruous with Trump's background. And that need is an asset for a politician; with it he can make a genuine emotional connection with crowds of strangers; without it he comes across as aloof and phony. But Trump's need for approval is altogether too malignant for comfort.
This is the book that famously coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil".
Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi SS Lt. Colonel who was in charge of "evacuating" Jews from Germany and the occupied territories to concentration camps. For five years after the war he lived under various assumed names in Germany, before emigrating to Argentina.
In 1957 Mossad was alerted to his presence in Buenos Aires, and in May of 1960 agents kidnapped Eichmann and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial.
The book an Hannah Arendt's report on Eichmann's trial, and it's a work of stunning bluntness and brutal honesty. Reportedly Eichmann in Jersusalem destroyed Arendt's long-standing friendships with many of her fellow Jews, for it did not shy away from the question of Jewish community leaders' complicity in Eichmann's activities -- although she by no means equates them. Arendt stubbornly refuses to lend the Nazis the kind of satanic majesty that pop culture attributes to them, but rather puts them on a continuum of Evil There aren't enough pure monsters to make something like the Holocaust possible; the monsters need the help of ordinary, intellectually lazy people who let groupthink override their scruples.
In an age where people are confused about the differences between real and fake news, Eichmann in Jersusalem needs to be more widely read. This is what a real attempt to come to grips with the produces: not a neat picture of pure angels an devils, but a messy one in which people who know better foolishly go along with things they shouldn't.
I imagine a lot depends on the future cost of aviation fuel. Once you have the physical capacity to build a hybrid jet (which I assume operates like a regular jet on take off when you need lots of power) it's simply a question of whether numbers work out at the expected fuel price.
It's just hard to imagine saving enough to make it worth your while at current prices. Turboprops are slow, but they're plenty fast for three or four hundred mile hops, and they're pretty fuel efficient.
These guys must have a very specific scenario in mind. They mention San Jose to LA. That's about 270 nautical miles, and a turboprop can fly that distance in about an hour and a quarter using not very much gas at all. Once you add all the time overhead, it's hard to see much room for improvement. Or San Jose to Tahoe, which is even shorter -- about 160 nm. So I'm guessing they're looking at carrying enough battery for very short hops, but maybe doing them a bit faster.
If you want wonderful, try i3.
The whole rationale for the mission creep that has been bloating desktop environments for the past twenty years is that the desktop is supposed to be a kind of Grand Central Station for the information in your life. Well, we just passed the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, and that rationale is antiquated.
On the desktop just need something that will launch applications and allow them to share screen real estate. That's it. Everything else is bloat.
Not quite. Yes, what happened under the Obama administration involved CBP and social media, but it was significantly different.
Last July the Obama administration proposed a voluntary disclosure of social media profile information for travelers seeking a visa waiver through the ESTA system (Electronic System for Travel Authorization). It did not include password or contact information, but was controversial nonetheless. It sent into effect in December.[
The Trump administration is proposing significant changes to that program, requiring more information (passwords and contacts) and making it compulsory.
People who get demoralized by math, probably shouldn't pursue a career in a STEM field.
While I agree that not everyone has to or should pursue a STEM career, I can't agree with this particular avenue to not doing STEM.
Demoralization doesn't tell you anything certain about a person's intrinsic ability.
Math skills have to be built in sequence, and what produces failure in math for otherwise intelligent students is a failure to detect deficits in prerequisite skills before they generate a humiliating string of failures. Cramming more humiliation into the last two years of schooling is hardly a promising strategy; you have to start earlier and monitor progress at a fine-grained basis to prevent those failures in the first place, before math failure becomes part of a student's self-image.
Secondly, we need to revamp our attitude toward failure itself. If I could change just one thing about educational culture it would be to value and foster resiliency more. Failure shouldn't be a humiliating end; it should be viewed as a normal stepping stone to success.
In general people earning at the median income (roughly 56k) have not seen their incomes recover past their pre-recession levels, and people at the first and second quintile (from the bottom, roughly 33k) have not recovered to their pre-recession incomes. Fresh out of school, the average college graduate makes about $50.5K.
So what recent college grads are experiencing is representative of what at about half of the people in the country are experiencing -- namely those with average to below average income. That bio grad making $31K is roughly as far below what he'd have been making pre-recession as anyone else making that amount is.
Some of this divergence is natural, in that the wealthy tend to have more volatile incomes; those incomes are more likely to be based on the performance of asset markets. However it's striking to see such robust sustained income growth for the top 5% with stagnation for the median and below. Whatever they're putting their money into, it's not trickling down.
This is a highly selective narrative; you make it sound like Musk got out his slide rule and personally proved all the experts wrong.
In point of fact what happened was that some experts didn't think it was practical, but Musk hired other experts who disagreed with them and gave them the money to prove that it could be done.
No, you appear to have just added the irrational part in.
Well, elitism defined your way is nothing to complain about.
When people use "elitism" as they have here, they mean it in a pejorative sense. They are talking about an unreasonable elitism. If you wish to admit reasonable elitism to the discussion, fine, but then we're no longer discussing the feelings people have toward Twitter's policy.
I know that. My point is that it's based on a wish-fulfillment fantasy. There's a word for people who apply that kind of thinking in real life.
You have to start with a definition of "elitist", rather than going with what feels elitist to you.
Elitism is granting irrational preference for the opinions of an elite. It follows that the nature of the elite in question matters. It's irrational to have more interest in Matthew McConaughey's opinion on the national budget than some internet rando's opinion, but it's not irrational to have more interest in Paul Krugman's -- even if you disagree with it.
Trumpism, it seems to me, isn't so much anti-elitist so much as it is about which elite you prefer.
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
So in the event of potentially unsafe driving conditions, something with the intelligence of a 2-year-old and the strength of 1000 gorillas randomly grabs the wheel from you. I can't see anything that could possibly go wrong with this.
Well, can you see anything that could possibly go wrong by letting the human driver always have his way when milliseconds count? That's what you have to consider: the relative probability of catastrophe in the two scenarios: continued human control vs. automated intervention.
Most people think of themselves as better than average drivers. Most people *are* a better than average driver... on their good days. But it's not their good days they need to be worried about. It's the days when they're harried, distracted and sleep-deprived that the pose a threat to themselves... and others.
. . . does that work for you ? Because it works for me. No crying babies, chatty teens, or rude patrons playing with their smartphones.
Didn't experience any of that in my last trip to the cinema. But then, that was to see Florence Foster Jenkins, so maybe the problem is the movies you're going to.
Well, financially speaking bankruptcy doesn't happen because you don't make profit. It happens because you run out of cash flow to meet your current obligations.
Had Westinghouse back in the 90s gone all-in on a fuel cycle it had no practical experience with, it would be pretty much where it is today: building the first power plants of a new design, after a multi-decade hiatus in commissioning nuclear power plants. Either way it's a recipe for construction delays, which equal cost overruns without corresponding new revenue, which equals bankruptcy.
The only way to get a large-scale nuclear power plant business off the ground is to have vast quantities of cash on hand, which businesses don't like to do because keeping cash relatively idle costs money too.
Well, but then you must add the cost of storage and the beefier grid to the cost of solar/wind plants.
No, you have to add the cost of a beefier grid to everyone who wants to sell power over a long distance, including nuclear plants. A better grid would make nuclear more economical too.
5 is a lot younger than 9. In fact developmentally it's a lot younger than the 45% chronologically younger it is.
Once a medical entomologist I was working with came to me with a flow chart he'd done in Visio. "I need a program that can do this," he said. "I've looked at different modeling applications but it won't be easy in any of them. I'm pretty sure I'll need custom software."
I glanced at his flow chart, scribbled a polynomial on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. "There. Plug that into Excel and you're good to go."
He was flabbergasted. "How did you do that?"
"My job isn't writing programs," I said. "My job is transforming hard problems into easy ones. I only write actual software to prove I'm right."
Coding as an academic activity is a very narrow intellectual pursuit. Coding as a real life activity draws on a lifetime of intellectual experiences, both academic and non-academic.
Children at the age of 5 should be preparing for those experiences. If you want to know what kids that age should be doing, you should look at what public television shows like Sesame Street and Arthur targeted at them depict them doing. They go outside and play. They explore. They make real physical things. They make friends (and enemies). They express themselves by participating in art and music. They learn to deal with winning and losing by playing games.
You know the one thing that kids on those programs almost never do? Watch TV. Real kids spend way too much time in front of screens.
Now I'm all for giving 9 year-olds a taste of programming. Seymour Papert did wonderful work along those lines, including with children as young as the fifth grade -- roughly 10 years old. There isn't much difference between a 10 and a 9 year old, but there's a huge difference between a 5 and 6 year-old.
Teaching a 5 year-old about coding is just virtue signalling. It's not something you do for the kid, it's something you do for your reputation.
Without England, Scotland has nothing to offer the EU except liability.
Scotland is small ,but it has a higher per capita GDP than England, or the entire UK for that matter -- if you count North Sea energy. Scotland as an independent country would be the twelfth largest economy in Europe and almost exactly in the middle of the pack for size in the EU.
Now logically speaking Scottish independence from an independent UK does not necessarily equate to EU membership. Scots could choose independence from the UK on the basis that union with a UK that is not in the EU is not as attractive as union with a UK that is in the EU.
If you think Vista was bad you're not old enough to remember NT 4.0.
I remember the sound system crashing on my Vista laptop, sending a horrible, unstoppable screeching through the speakers. Basically it was an audio snow crash. Yet everything else worked normally; I was able to save my work and shut the system down. And I remember thinking, "that was horrible, but so much less horrible than it could have been."
>The thesis of this "scientific paper" is basically like a couple of tokers sitting around in their parents' basement saying "DUUUUDE... what if the money in our savings account DOUBLED EVERY YEAR?!???
Again this is not a critique of the paper, it is a critique of tokers sitting around in their parent's basement. There is no substance in your criticism to address, it really is just an expression of your feelings toward the paper's author. Aside from the fact that you're just name-calling, the numerical basis you've used for comparison is just wrong.
Now it so happens I have you at a disadvantage: I've actually read the paper. It's closer the tokers sitting around saying, "How can we achieve a 7% annual compound interest rate sustained over ten years with our portfolio," which is roughly what doubling your money in ten years takes. The authors are talking about what it would take to half carbon emissions which would be a 6.6% reduction each year, and they discuss methods for reducing them, which they break down into near term no-brainer, near-term difficult, and long term speculative. As is usual the further out you go the less concrete and certain you can be. This is normal in economic projections that go twenty or more years out.
Now you may disagree with the specific means proposed, some of which are quite drastic (e.g. attempting to recover external costs through inheritance taxes). But there is nothing inherently irrational about starting with a goal -- zero carbon emissions by 2050 -- then asking what it would take to achieve that. Nor is there anything inherently ridiculous with coming up with the answer that it'll take a mix of things, some of which looking twenty or more years into the future we can't predict yet.
Oh, I think the percentage bit is significant. It shouldn't be news that they've acknowledged reality; but it's remarkable that their responses is so meaningless.
It makes me wonder whether this is just marketing BS or whether they're really that incoherent about strategy.
Many proprietary software companies have prospered in an era of open source acceptance -- even when very good free software alternatives for their products exists (Microsoft, Oracle). But although we don't tend to think of them that way, they tend to be value-priced. You get a lot of (not necessarily great) software engineering for your $199 Windows license fee.
But the play this game you need scale to amortize development costs over many users. If you have more of a niche product competing against a solid open source competitor is going to be really, really hard. As in SAS charges almost $9000 for a single seat license, and that's good for only a year; thereafter you'll have to fork over thousands of dollars every year. That kind of cash pays for a lot of R training.
Paranoia may be inevitable, but until we have the facts you have no basis for assuming that that paranoia was wrong in this case.
It's hilarious (in a sad sort of way
More of the same BS. This is not an argument, it's posturing.