It depends on whether you think understanding how your subjective experience arises in your brain is worth studying. That's the point of the study; it was already established that people like you exist, the question is why are you that way?
That said, this isn't necessarily an answer as to why you are that way. It's more a matter of "how" than "why".
No, he's taking the standard Stoic line on reputation.
While a Stoic philosopher wouldn't dispute that it's preferable to be respected by other than to be despised by others, that is not nearly so important as having respect for yourself. It is possible to be happy if you respect yourself while others despise you. It is impossible to be happy if you despise yourself, even if others admire you.
Thus the Stoics refer to things like reputation as neither good nor bad, but "indifferent", which is a somewhat misleading piece of jargon if you're not familiar with their ideas. "Indifferent" things are things that can be used helpfully or harmfully, and typically tend to take care of themselves if you focus on more important stuff. If you respect yourself you will act in a way that attracts genuine respect from others. If you discipline your wants you needn't worry about accumulating wealth.
So governments should use planning horizons that are significantly shorter than five years? Let's imagine a government that actually worked that way.
Right away you'd get a military that was far, far more cost effective -- over the next five years. Right off the bat pull the plug on every program that has the word "Future" in the title. Axe the F35 (1.5 trillion), the littoral combat ships (18 to be constructed at 300-700 million a piece, not counting the "mission modules" each will have which will cost 100 mil apiece), the Gerald Ford class carriers (ten at ten billion apiece -- and that's the budget which we all know starts with wishful thinking and proceeds through downright con artistry). Oh, and shut down the military academies. No sense investing four years in an officer's education for one year of service.
And even as military spending plummeted, military capabilities would increase as money and time lavished on the future were focused on immediate needs. Even in the five to ten year timeframe (which we aren't considering) we'd have significant cost savings to offset our increasing problems. But as you approach the ten year mark you're going to be regretting your lack of forethought.
Simple and obvious proposition: the easiest way to optimize short term outcomes is to focus exclusively on short term results. Somewhat less obvious proposition: the best way to optimize long-term results is to find an appropriate balance between short term returns and long term direction.
Take the F15 vs. the F35. The F15 took nine years from contract award to the first aircraft delivered to a combat unit, and it had its first air-to-air kill two years later. The F15 will remain in service until 2040 at least. The contract to develop the F35 prototype was awarded in '96 and it took nineteen years for the first variant to be declared scare-quotes "combat-ready". It is now twenty years after prototyping started we still don't know when an F35 will be ready to operate on a real mission. Even if the F35 is ultimately a successful aircraft, the program has to be viewed as a fiasco.
The difference between these programs wasn't that one planned for the future and the other didn't. The difference is one did a good job at balancing future strategic position with short-to-mid term objectives. Of course if all we ever cared about was the short term neither program would have happened.
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” -- Marcus Aurelius
(1) Of course they had numbers. They just had notation system that made arithmetic hard.
(2) Math isn't limited to arithmetic.
(3) Limitations in one area drive innovations in another. If John Napier had a four function calculator he probably wouldn't have invented the logarithm.
I have a theory for why voting machines are more popular with officials than optical tabulators. It has to do with election manipulation, but not by the mechanisms we're talking about.
With electronic voting machines, the number of functioning voting machines can be a bottleneck. That can be exploited to create delays in certain precincts, causing voters to give up and discouraging turnout in the long term. Whenever I see a news report of voters lined up for hours waiting, it always shocks me that the line isn't moving at all. How many times would that have to happen before you start sitting elections out? And the lines aren't necessary. They shouldn't form in the first place and they weren't a "normal" feature of voting until electronic voting machines became standard in many places.
Do the math: A precinct optical scanner/tabulator cost about the same as a single voting machine. That in turn costs about the same as 20 pop-up voting booths. So for the price of setting up a two voting machine precinct you can have a precinct that can handle 20 simultaneous voters. Granted you have to pay to have the paper ballots printed, but that's negligible, especially if you consider the cost of testing and prepping each voting machine after storage.
The only advantage a voting machine has over OCR with a precinct tabulator is for blind voters. But there are machines that will mark a paper OCR ballot for blind voters -- they work just like a voting machine. What's more you can mix and match that with hand-marking to provide the same level of assistance for voters who need it and scalable volume handling which benefits everyone. And you get the results just as fast.
Claiming that humans will go extinct just hands the denialists a convenient straw man to attack. Scientists aren't predicting anything that humans can't adapt to. But they are predicting changes that spell the end of things that many are emotionally attached to, like species endangered by changing habitats, or ways of life which are no longer possible in certain places (e.g. drought-driven failure of family farms in certain locations).
Another way of looking at climate change is purely as an economic tradeoff between present income and future expenses. We will adapt, but that adaptation will cost money.
And here's the important bit: not everyone benefits equally from widespread use of cheap abundant fossil fuels and not everyone will pay equally for the adaptations that will be required. Nearly everybody benefits from cheap fossil fuels. But not everyone benefits equally: that's why the money behind the denialist PR movement is so carefully laundered to obscure its sources. And what's more not everyone will pay for the adaptations equally.
In fact people who make their living primarily from investments will make money off both cheap oil in the short term and expensive adaptations in the long term: all they have to do is rebalance their portfolio annually and they'll largely escape the consequences of climate change -- other than the higher prices for things like coffee everyone will be paying. And there's the emergence of new diseases like Zika as ranges of disease vectors increase and habitats are disrupted by people adapting to climate change. But by in large people with large amounts of liquid assets can avoid most consequences.
The question for the rest of us is this: do you want to prepare for the coming change or just hope for the best?
Probably the most traumatic thing imaginable is the death of a child; it's hard to imagine wanting to go on. But for the most part they do go on. It doesn't make the experience less horrible and traumatic.
People adapt to whatever level of pain or comfort they experience. You can win the lottery and you'll be happy for a while, but very quickly, within a year or two your happiness level returns to what it had been. Happiness as an emotion exists to motivate us; it's not for having it's for chasing.
I'm sorry to hear about your mom; same thing happened to my mom.
That said, quick death isn't the only kind of complication you can get from smoking. Some complications, like COPD, also require long term nursing care. Quick death of course is the financially best result; after that comes catching disease early. But the worst case may be borderline cases where heroic measures are taken in an attempt to save the patient's life. That's why 30% of healthcare expenditures are spent in the last year of peoples' lives.
And just because you don't smoke doesn't mean you won't have a swift and affordable death. Hopefully that comes after you've lived a long time in good health. My mother-in-law never smoked, but passed away at age 95 from lung cancer after a healthy life. From diagnosis to death at home took two months, and she was lucid until the last day when the morphine carried her away.
The least expensive new Rolex will cost you north of $4,000. Basically, a Rolex is a terrible investment. If you're very very careful to take care of your new Rolex you'll probably do better than you would stuffing your money in your mattress, but unless you luck out you'd be better off putting your money in a savings account.
Which is not to say you shouldn't buy a Rolex; when it comes to luxury goods the important thing is how they make you feel. Same with a smartwatch; you should buy it based on the satisfaction you expect it will bring you. From a financial standpoint it's probably a wash; yes the smartwatch's value will drop like a stone, but it also costs a lot less than a true luxury watch. The difference between spending $400 on an Apple watch that is worthless after five years and $4000 on a Rolex that's worth (hypothetically) $3600 after five years is nil.
Now if you know what you're doing you can pick up a deal in the used market. There's not that very much practical difference between the Rolex Submariner 6538 worn by Sean Connery in the Bond films and the 5513 worn by George Lazenby, but you're looking at a huge difference in market value: $200,000 vs. $5,000. Likewise Omega Speedmasters that are exact matches for ones known to have been used in the US space program are far more valuable: a tiny difference in the placement of the dot next to "70" on the bezel could be worth $100,000. The thing is Rolex sold tons of Submariners to Bond fans and Omega tons of Speedmasters to space enthusiasts, but not being watch enthusiasts they didn't necessarily get exactly the "right' ones.
It's not a matter of protecting people from exposure to falsehood: that's a fool's errand. The real problems are intellectual laziness, parochialism, and moral cowardice. It's views becoming widespread because they've been seriously challenged, and then intractable because they're what "everyone" believes, and most people are conformists.
You should focus on the achievable, which is achieving the maximum justifiable certainty.
The very notion of "balance" is broken; it is profoundly wrong-headed. You can't just present an unsubstantiated or even demonstrably false opinion on an equal footing with a well-substantiated one and invite people to choose which they like best. It is evidence that must be treated equally.
So the question with a fact checker like Snopes or Politifact isn't whether they're an infallible oracle -- they're not. The issue is whether they show their evidence so you can judge for yourself. The importance of their final rating on any matter is actually much less important.
Well whoever decides what is "authentic" or not, hopefully it would be someone who'd take the time to read the summary before agreeing or disagreeing with it.
I often wonder why people think engineers are too stupid to see obvious engineering problems. I'd assume the Tesla engineers would reckon on capacity losses and simply size the installation large enough to deliver the required performance over the planned service lifetime. It's not like they don't understand battery technology.
Li-ion batteries are not nearly so bad as you paint them to be -- although obviously you can abuse them into early failure. Tests of electric cars shows battery aging to be less of a problem than anticipated. Tesla Roadsters retain over 80% of their range after 100,000 miles, for example, and data suggests the batteries in the Model S are aging even better on average -- almost negligible after 100,000 miles.
If you're extrapolating from your experience with your phone, phones probably represent the worst case. They often have barely adequate batteries so users deep-discharge them then top them off to 100%, every single day. That's the worst thing you can do to Li-ion batteries.
Well, what really matters is economics, and what happens a century out from now is so thoroughly discounted by the time value of money that no businesses seriously consider it.
So I expect the biggest thing is the economies of scale of the Li-ion cell manufacture and Teslas expertise and ability to supply the components of the system. If you run the numbers and the net present value works out better for Li-ion then Li-ion it is, even if you have to replace it in ten years -- by which time the batteries will have become even cheaper.
It doesn't matter if NiMH is a better technology in the long run; it's what you can build now and for how much that drives your decisions. I'm totally convinced that EVs will displace gasoline cars in my lifetime, but it doesn't mean I'd buy one today.
I've been thinking about this, and I think the significance of 1% in reliability depends on how reliable you're talking about in an absolute sense.
Compare a service that is 50% reliable to one that is 51% reliable; there's very little to choose between them; failures are a regular feature of both services. But a service that is 99% reliable is bound to feel a lot less reliable than one that is 99.9% reliable, because it fails ten times as often.
Now reality is probably more complicated; reliability probably depends specifically on where you are, so the aggregate network reliability tells you very little. You pay your money and you take your chances.
Sprint gaining a lot of subscribers isn't so surprising because they've been offering and advertising aggressive discounts. The trick in business isn't getting customers, however; it's getting profit. Sprint added 2.4x the new customers as Verizon at 1/2 the gross revenue per customer. That works out to a marginal increase of gross revenue that is 1.2x higher. Since each customer costs something to service, if they are adding more, or even any profit.
Consistency counts more than accuracy. For example, it's pretty clear that fitness band calorie estimates are inaccurate. What's more even if you measure and log everything you eat, chances are those numbers are off quite a bit too.
Now suppose the numbers tell you you should be losing weight, but in fact you're gaining weight. What should you do? Well eat less and exercise more. But how do you know you're actually doing this?
There's more than one way. You can take big, hard to misconstrue steps, like intermittent fasting, or massive increases in exercise. Or you can use numbers to tweak you calorie balance downward; it doesn't really matter if the balance measurement is accurate as long as the direction you move in is accurate.
I've done both ways, and they both work. In fact I'd say they both have their own distinct value. If you've never really been hungry, voluntarily fasting can train you realize that a little hunger pang, or even the mindless impulse to eat something, is not a life-threatening emergency. I know plenty of people who have what amount to a phobia about being hungry.
In the long run what you want to do is establish sustainable better habits. The measurement approach is useful, for example in recalibrating what you perceive as "a lot of food to eat".
These two facts are not inconsistent with each other:
(1) You have to measure something to take control of it.
(2) Measurement is a waste of time for most people.
What this means is most people fail at change, because they don't hold themselves accountable to themselves. But if you want to be the exception, you'd better find ways of taking control. Of course using this particular device isn't necessary; it's just a convenience. The problem is that inconvenience isn't really most peoples' problem. Wishful thinking is.
Acutally, I would argue that many "alternative facts" don't even rise the level of lies. A lie has the pretense of representing a particular untrue scenario.
A lie needs to be part of a network of other lies that present a consistent picture. This means you can unravel the whole skein of lies. You can't unravel "alternative facts" that way, because they don't make any pretense to consistency. There is no skein to unravel. So a better word for them is "bullshit":
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
People justify their belief in bullshit because of the way it makes them feel. This isn't just a fault of education, it appears to be wired into our brains' mechanisms for social identification and reward seeking. That's why bullshit is so effective politically.
Probably the purest piece of political bullshit in living memory is the President's assertion that we should have "taken" Iraq's oil, and his suggestion that he might try to do it. I trust I don't have to explain why a country's oil reserves can't simply be looted, like an art treasure. That particularly bullshit hits both the reward and social identification notes, the exact way that anti-Semitic rants about "Jewish Bankers" did in 1930s Germany: the promise of easy riches from looting a hated alien. Hitler claimed that Jews were greedy bankers who promoted Bolshevism. Chew on that for a moment. The sheer idiocy of believing those things together didn't stop some very smart people from buying it. Even the people manufacturing the bullshit believe it, and that's very different from lies.
So consider the standard response whenever a piece of ominous environmental news comes out: this is the work of the alarmists. Consider the implicit reasoning here: this cannot be true because if it were it would be scary. The word for this kind of thinking is "denial".
Now this doesn't mean there isn't climate alarmism, but what the alarmists are predicting is something very few scientists would agree with: the imminent extinction of the human race. What the evidence points to something in between the denialist and alarmist scenarios: one in which we are forced to confront and deal with unpleasant facts. Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
People also started noodling around with the idea of maglev about a hundred years ago, but the difference is the first operational maglev train was built 38 years ago, and since then there have been numerous modest but operational systems. There is no shortage of brainstorming going on on how to make maglev cheaper so you can't really present this as a simpler alternative.
This competition (along with some other specific hyperloop proposals) *is* maglev.
Clearly you haven't even bothered to read about the competition before offering your opinion.
We're all at the center of our own world. If you don't realize that, it means you're so egocentric you think your vantage point is special.
That said, attracting death threats for expressing your opinion is pretty objective evidence that other people find you notable. In fact you may not realize it, but your need to express your hatred of her lends her stature.
If you want someone to feel insignificant you should ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he's paying attention.
And the world needs another comment from someone who hasn't bothered to read the article summary? OPNsense is a BSD based firewall.
It depends on whether you think understanding how your subjective experience arises in your brain is worth studying. That's the point of the study; it was already established that people like you exist, the question is why are you that way?
That said, this isn't necessarily an answer as to why you are that way. It's more a matter of "how" than "why".
No, he's taking the standard Stoic line on reputation.
While a Stoic philosopher wouldn't dispute that it's preferable to be respected by other than to be despised by others, that is not nearly so important as having respect for yourself. It is possible to be happy if you respect yourself while others despise you. It is impossible to be happy if you despise yourself, even if others admire you.
Thus the Stoics refer to things like reputation as neither good nor bad, but "indifferent", which is a somewhat misleading piece of jargon if you're not familiar with their ideas. "Indifferent" things are things that can be used helpfully or harmfully, and typically tend to take care of themselves if you focus on more important stuff. If you respect yourself you will act in a way that attracts genuine respect from others. If you discipline your wants you needn't worry about accumulating wealth.
So governments should use planning horizons that are significantly shorter than five years? Let's imagine a government that actually worked that way.
Right away you'd get a military that was far, far more cost effective -- over the next five years. Right off the bat pull the plug on every program that has the word "Future" in the title. Axe the F35 (1.5 trillion), the littoral combat ships (18 to be constructed at 300-700 million a piece, not counting the "mission modules" each will have which will cost 100 mil apiece), the Gerald Ford class carriers (ten at ten billion apiece -- and that's the budget which we all know starts with wishful thinking and proceeds through downright con artistry). Oh, and shut down the military academies. No sense investing four years in an officer's education for one year of service.
And even as military spending plummeted, military capabilities would increase as money and time lavished on the future were focused on immediate needs. Even in the five to ten year timeframe (which we aren't considering) we'd have significant cost savings to offset our increasing problems. But as you approach the ten year mark you're going to be regretting your lack of forethought.
Simple and obvious proposition: the easiest way to optimize short term outcomes is to focus exclusively on short term results. Somewhat less obvious proposition: the best way to optimize long-term results is to find an appropriate balance between short term returns and long term direction.
Take the F15 vs. the F35. The F15 took nine years from contract award to the first aircraft delivered to a combat unit, and it had its first air-to-air kill two years later. The F15 will remain in service until 2040 at least. The contract to develop the F35 prototype was awarded in '96 and it took nineteen years for the first variant to be declared scare-quotes "combat-ready". It is now twenty years after prototyping started we still don't know when an F35 will be ready to operate on a real mission. Even if the F35 is ultimately a successful aircraft, the program has to be viewed as a fiasco.
The difference between these programs wasn't that one planned for the future and the other didn't. The difference is one did a good job at balancing future strategic position with short-to-mid term objectives. Of course if all we ever cared about was the short term neither program would have happened.
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” -- Marcus Aurelius
(1) Of course they had numbers. They just had notation system that made arithmetic hard.
(2) Math isn't limited to arithmetic.
(3) Limitations in one area drive innovations in another. If John Napier had a four function calculator he probably wouldn't have invented the logarithm.
I have a theory for why voting machines are more popular with officials than optical tabulators. It has to do with election manipulation, but not by the mechanisms we're talking about.
With electronic voting machines, the number of functioning voting machines can be a bottleneck. That can be exploited to create delays in certain precincts, causing voters to give up and discouraging turnout in the long term. Whenever I see a news report of voters lined up for hours waiting, it always shocks me that the line isn't moving at all. How many times would that have to happen before you start sitting elections out? And the lines aren't necessary. They shouldn't form in the first place and they weren't a "normal" feature of voting until electronic voting machines became standard in many places.
Do the math: A precinct optical scanner/tabulator cost about the same as a single voting machine. That in turn costs about the same as 20 pop-up voting booths. So for the price of setting up a two voting machine precinct you can have a precinct that can handle 20 simultaneous voters. Granted you have to pay to have the paper ballots printed, but that's negligible, especially if you consider the cost of testing and prepping each voting machine after storage.
The only advantage a voting machine has over OCR with a precinct tabulator is for blind voters. But there are machines that will mark a paper OCR ballot for blind voters -- they work just like a voting machine. What's more you can mix and match that with hand-marking to provide the same level of assistance for voters who need it and scalable volume handling which benefits everyone. And you get the results just as fast.
Claiming that humans will go extinct just hands the denialists a convenient straw man to attack. Scientists aren't predicting anything that humans can't adapt to. But they are predicting changes that spell the end of things that many are emotionally attached to, like species endangered by changing habitats, or ways of life which are no longer possible in certain places (e.g. drought-driven failure of family farms in certain locations).
Another way of looking at climate change is purely as an economic tradeoff between present income and future expenses. We will adapt, but that adaptation will cost money.
And here's the important bit: not everyone benefits equally from widespread use of cheap abundant fossil fuels and not everyone will pay equally for the adaptations that will be required. Nearly everybody benefits from cheap fossil fuels. But not everyone benefits equally: that's why the money behind the denialist PR movement is so carefully laundered to obscure its sources. And what's more not everyone will pay for the adaptations equally.
In fact people who make their living primarily from investments will make money off both cheap oil in the short term and expensive adaptations in the long term: all they have to do is rebalance their portfolio annually and they'll largely escape the consequences of climate change -- other than the higher prices for things like coffee everyone will be paying. And there's the emergence of new diseases like Zika as ranges of disease vectors increase and habitats are disrupted by people adapting to climate change. But by in large people with large amounts of liquid assets can avoid most consequences.
The question for the rest of us is this: do you want to prepare for the coming change or just hope for the best?
I don't get why it should be self-flying. Why not teach the robots to fly the taxi? And why do robots need taxis to begin with?
People underestimate their ability to adapt.
Probably the most traumatic thing imaginable is the death of a child; it's hard to imagine wanting to go on. But for the most part they do go on. It doesn't make the experience less horrible and traumatic.
People adapt to whatever level of pain or comfort they experience. You can win the lottery and you'll be happy for a while, but very quickly, within a year or two your happiness level returns to what it had been. Happiness as an emotion exists to motivate us; it's not for having it's for chasing.
I'm sorry to hear about your mom; same thing happened to my mom.
That said, quick death isn't the only kind of complication you can get from smoking. Some complications, like COPD, also require long term nursing care. Quick death of course is the financially best result; after that comes catching disease early. But the worst case may be borderline cases where heroic measures are taken in an attempt to save the patient's life. That's why 30% of healthcare expenditures are spent in the last year of peoples' lives.
And just because you don't smoke doesn't mean you won't have a swift and affordable death. Hopefully that comes after you've lived a long time in good health. My mother-in-law never smoked, but passed away at age 95 from lung cancer after a healthy life. From diagnosis to death at home took two months, and she was lucid until the last day when the morphine carried her away.
The least expensive new Rolex will cost you north of $4,000. Basically, a Rolex is a terrible investment. If you're very very careful to take care of your new Rolex you'll probably do better than you would stuffing your money in your mattress, but unless you luck out you'd be better off putting your money in a savings account.
Which is not to say you shouldn't buy a Rolex; when it comes to luxury goods the important thing is how they make you feel. Same with a smartwatch; you should buy it based on the satisfaction you expect it will bring you. From a financial standpoint it's probably a wash; yes the smartwatch's value will drop like a stone, but it also costs a lot less than a true luxury watch. The difference between spending $400 on an Apple watch that is worthless after five years and $4000 on a Rolex that's worth (hypothetically) $3600 after five years is nil.
Now if you know what you're doing you can pick up a deal in the used market. There's not that very much practical difference between the Rolex Submariner 6538 worn by Sean Connery in the Bond films and the 5513 worn by George Lazenby, but you're looking at a huge difference in market value: $200,000 vs. $5,000. Likewise Omega Speedmasters that are exact matches for ones known to have been used in the US space program are far more valuable: a tiny difference in the placement of the dot next to "70" on the bezel could be worth $100,000. The thing is Rolex sold tons of Submariners to Bond fans and Omega tons of Speedmasters to space enthusiasts, but not being watch enthusiasts they didn't necessarily get exactly the "right' ones.
It's not a matter of protecting people from exposure to falsehood: that's a fool's errand. The real problems are intellectual laziness, parochialism, and moral cowardice. It's views becoming widespread because they've been seriously challenged, and then intractable because they're what "everyone" believes, and most people are conformists.
You should focus on the achievable, which is achieving the maximum justifiable certainty.
The very notion of "balance" is broken; it is profoundly wrong-headed. You can't just present an unsubstantiated or even demonstrably false opinion on an equal footing with a well-substantiated one and invite people to choose which they like best. It is evidence that must be treated equally.
So the question with a fact checker like Snopes or Politifact isn't whether they're an infallible oracle -- they're not. The issue is whether they show their evidence so you can judge for yourself. The importance of their final rating on any matter is actually much less important.
Well whoever decides what is "authentic" or not, hopefully it would be someone who'd take the time to read the summary before agreeing or disagreeing with it.
I'd keep my day job if I were you...
I think you might have meant "Couture". But will it be bespoke or prêt-à-porter?
I often wonder why people think engineers are too stupid to see obvious engineering problems. I'd assume the Tesla engineers would reckon on capacity losses and simply size the installation large enough to deliver the required performance over the planned service lifetime. It's not like they don't understand battery technology.
Li-ion batteries are not nearly so bad as you paint them to be -- although obviously you can abuse them into early failure. Tests of electric cars shows battery aging to be less of a problem than anticipated. Tesla Roadsters retain over 80% of their range after 100,000 miles, for example, and data suggests the batteries in the Model S are aging even better on average -- almost negligible after 100,000 miles.
If you're extrapolating from your experience with your phone, phones probably represent the worst case. They often have barely adequate batteries so users deep-discharge them then top them off to 100%, every single day. That's the worst thing you can do to Li-ion batteries.
Well, what really matters is economics, and what happens a century out from now is so thoroughly discounted by the time value of money that no businesses seriously consider it.
So I expect the biggest thing is the economies of scale of the Li-ion cell manufacture and Teslas expertise and ability to supply the components of the system. If you run the numbers and the net present value works out better for Li-ion then Li-ion it is, even if you have to replace it in ten years -- by which time the batteries will have become even cheaper.
It doesn't matter if NiMH is a better technology in the long run; it's what you can build now and for how much that drives your decisions. I'm totally convinced that EVs will displace gasoline cars in my lifetime, but it doesn't mean I'd buy one today.
I've been thinking about this, and I think the significance of 1% in reliability depends on how reliable you're talking about in an absolute sense.
Compare a service that is 50% reliable to one that is 51% reliable; there's very little to choose between them; failures are a regular feature of both services. But a service that is 99% reliable is bound to feel a lot less reliable than one that is 99.9% reliable, because it fails ten times as often.
Now reality is probably more complicated; reliability probably depends specifically on where you are, so the aggregate network reliability tells you very little. You pay your money and you take your chances.
Sprint gaining a lot of subscribers isn't so surprising because they've been offering and advertising aggressive discounts. The trick in business isn't getting customers, however; it's getting profit. Sprint added 2.4x the new customers as Verizon at 1/2 the gross revenue per customer. That works out to a marginal increase of gross revenue that is 1.2x higher. Since each customer costs something to service, if they are adding more, or even any profit.
Consistency counts more than accuracy. For example, it's pretty clear that fitness band calorie estimates are inaccurate. What's more even if you measure and log everything you eat, chances are those numbers are off quite a bit too.
Now suppose the numbers tell you you should be losing weight, but in fact you're gaining weight. What should you do? Well eat less and exercise more. But how do you know you're actually doing this?
There's more than one way. You can take big, hard to misconstrue steps, like intermittent fasting, or massive increases in exercise. Or you can use numbers to tweak you calorie balance downward; it doesn't really matter if the balance measurement is accurate as long as the direction you move in is accurate.
I've done both ways, and they both work. In fact I'd say they both have their own distinct value. If you've never really been hungry, voluntarily fasting can train you realize that a little hunger pang, or even the mindless impulse to eat something, is not a life-threatening emergency. I know plenty of people who have what amount to a phobia about being hungry.
In the long run what you want to do is establish sustainable better habits. The measurement approach is useful, for example in recalibrating what you perceive as "a lot of food to eat".
These two facts are not inconsistent with each other:
(1) You have to measure something to take control of it.
(2) Measurement is a waste of time for most people.
What this means is most people fail at change, because they don't hold themselves accountable to themselves. But if you want to be the exception, you'd better find ways of taking control. Of course using this particular device isn't necessary; it's just a convenience. The problem is that inconvenience isn't really most peoples' problem. Wishful thinking is.
Acutally, I would argue that many "alternative facts" don't even rise the level of lies. A lie has the pretense of representing a particular untrue scenario.
A lie needs to be part of a network of other lies that present a consistent picture. This means you can unravel the whole skein of lies. You can't unravel "alternative facts" that way, because they don't make any pretense to consistency. There is no skein to unravel. So a better word for them is "bullshit":
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
People justify their belief in bullshit because of the way it makes them feel. This isn't just a fault of education, it appears to be wired into our brains' mechanisms for social identification and reward seeking. That's why bullshit is so effective politically.
Probably the purest piece of political bullshit in living memory is the President's assertion that we should have "taken" Iraq's oil, and his suggestion that he might try to do it. I trust I don't have to explain why a country's oil reserves can't simply be looted, like an art treasure. That particularly bullshit hits both the reward and social identification notes, the exact way that anti-Semitic rants about "Jewish Bankers" did in 1930s Germany: the promise of easy riches from looting a hated alien. Hitler claimed that Jews were greedy bankers who promoted Bolshevism. Chew on that for a moment. The sheer idiocy of believing those things together didn't stop some very smart people from buying it. Even the people manufacturing the bullshit believe it, and that's very different from lies.
So consider the standard response whenever a piece of ominous environmental news comes out: this is the work of the alarmists. Consider the implicit reasoning here: this cannot be true because if it were it would be scary. The word for this kind of thinking is "denial".
Now this doesn't mean there isn't climate alarmism, but what the alarmists are predicting is something very few scientists would agree with: the imminent extinction of the human race. What the evidence points to something in between the denialist and alarmist scenarios: one in which we are forced to confront and deal with unpleasant facts. Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
I did read your post, I just don't find your reasoning as convincing as you do. Appearing in science fiction doesn't really count as "thinking" from an engineering standpoint. I'm only counting actual engineering work.
People also started noodling around with the idea of maglev about a hundred years ago, but the difference is the first operational maglev train was built 38 years ago, and since then there have been numerous modest but operational systems. There is no shortage of brainstorming going on on how to make maglev cheaper so you can't really present this as a simpler alternative.
This competition (along with some other specific hyperloop proposals) *is* maglev.
Clearly you haven't even bothered to read about the competition before offering your opinion.
We're all at the center of our own world. If you don't realize that, it means you're so egocentric you think your vantage point is special.
That said, attracting death threats for expressing your opinion is pretty objective evidence that other people find you notable. In fact you may not realize it, but your need to express your hatred of her lends her stature.
If you want someone to feel insignificant you should ignore them.