The big problem with health care spending is rising faster than inflation. In a country where over 15% of the GDP is spent on health care, that ought to concern us. It's projected to hit 17% of GDP very soon.
A simple minded projection would have us spending 1/5 of every dollar created on health care within a decade; 1/3 in about 25 years; 1/2 some time in the 2050s.
Of course that won't happen. The economy will collapse well before then, if it isn't doing so now. There are basically two options: crash and burn, or engineering some kind of soft landing. The latter option gets more expensive the longer we wait. If we'd done something the 1960s, when we spent 5% of GDP on health care, it would have been an incredible bargain by today's standards. If we could roll back the avalanche of cost increases back to 1980 when we spent half of what we do now, it would be a no-brainer. In today's terms, we're looking at a trillion dollars per decade, and in a few years that might well look at that figure as a deal we were foolish to pass up.
We have come to this point: it's not health care or X, where "X" is space or military expenditures or infrastructure or whatever. It's heath care or not-X. You might not not get that Moon base after paying to fix health care, but you definitely won't get it if you let the crisis get even larger.
There's considerable truth to what you say. However what exactly is being claimed doesn't have to be the space equivalent of real estate.
In the 1960s, a race to claim thenational prestige of doing things first drove the space race. The early goals, being relatively simpler and more closely spaced in an absolute difficulty, encouraged a leapfrog approach to competition. Going to the Moon earned the ultimate "shut your mouth" bragging rights. It was a huge jump, and the Soviets had no chance of beating us to it. All they could do is watch, knowing that sooner or later they'd have to send a message of congratulation to whoever the US president was going to be. The Soviets were forced drop their sights to Earth orbit -- more practical in countless ways, but a loss in the prestige race.
Now I happen remember the Moon landing. I was only eight, but I read the newspaper every day. Not a few folks wondered why we didn't claim the Moon. We were planting our flag there, after all, in the time honored colonial fashion, so in their simple-minded way of looking at things it ought to be ours, fair and square. What those people didn't realize was that if we'd done that, we'd have wasted all the money we spent getting there. We weren't staking a claim to the most barren land ever trod by human feet. We were staking a claim for leadership of our species. Not absolute leadership of course, but a kind of first among equals status. That was worth far more to America than ownership of lunar real estate might have been. The only way to get it was to plant our flag there in the name of all humanity.
One wonders if the course of the Cold War would have gone differently if we had turned the Apollo Program into a land grab. Even decades later, as the great technology transfer program that is the H-1B visa program got into full swing, I'd meet young foreign engineers who were delighted to be in the US, because they imagined America to be the great driver of human technological progress.
Windows Mobile is not the same as Windows CE. Windows CE is the infrastructure underneath Windows Mobile. You can't extrapolate between Windows Mobile features, devices, and most importantly *vendor support* to Windows CE.
It's important to remember that Windows CE is like J2ME, except that it is a family of operating systems instead of a family of platforms. It has various manifestations and configurations, the familiar PDA or smartphone versions are just instances of this. I have issues with Windows Mobile, which lacks certain features it ought to have given its ambition. I have more issues with the SmartPhone Edition, because MS and the manufacturers kiss carrier ass and so make the devices a PITA to use.
However, nothing I've seen indicates to me that the underlying platform, the actual Windows CE part of the products, sucks. I heard from people programming with the native SDK complain that certain aspects of the API are braindead (I dont' remember which; it might be memory management). That's probably a genuine piece of suckiness, but not one that matters any longer since you don't have to program applications in C++ against the SDK any longer.
For a NetBook type device, my concern would be the configuration limitations MS would put on it to keep from cannibalizing its own Windows product line. But of course that's the kiss of death. You have to cannibalize your own product line sooner or later.
It's much more complicated than you make it out to be.
Back in the heyday of Napster, I tried it out then suddenly found myself buying lots of CDs as a result. Why? Well there were lots of reasons, but the main one was that music was much more important to me than it had been. I spent a lot of my time seeking out and trying new music, and since I literally couldn't get enough of the stuff I liked, I took out my wallet and started buying. Spending $20 or $30 a week for CDs was a no-brainer. Of course I could download MP3s, but they weren't as good as the CDs, the metadata was often incorrect, you didn't get the tracks that weren't big hits.
Even today I still occasionally buy high bitrate classical albums from iTunes, but it isn't really as nice as having a CD for music I really care about.
The important thing about music is that the more kinds of music you listen to, the more valuable music is to you. Even assuming that you can assemble the equivalent of a CD yourself, if you don't listen to music you aren't even going to bother. If you listen to enough music you might spring $20 for music you like simply for the liner notes and to have a physical token of ownership. $20 is nothing for a hobby you're spending twenty hours a week on, even if you have pretty much the equivalent on your hard drive. It might as well be $100 if you don't listen to music.
Imagine a world in which nearly everybody is continually immersed in music, and anyone can explore new music any time they want at essentially no marginal cost. That's a world in which a great deal of value is being had "for free", but also where many many more people will be passionate about music. In such a world things that seem of insignificant value (slightly better bit rate, better metadata, even the satisfaction of a physical token of ownership) would have a greater monetary value than the core product does today.
I think the big problem P2P presented to the record companies was not a challenge to the business model of selling physical artifacts with the data encoded on it, but rather to the marketing. It could have been like the old mainframe/desktop computer transition. They're selling as many if not more mainframes as ever, but it's no longer the focus of most of the market. The music industry model is to segment the market into certain musical tastes, produce a small number of brand name bands and artists who churn out hit after hit. In a world of ubiquitous music that would be bigger than ever, but most of the market would be untidy, unpredictable and consumer led. Before Napster, I pretty much bought an occasional opera or jazz CD. During Napster, I branched out into blues, then gospel, then old time white gospel. Then I started to buy some country CDs. I started with Roy Acuff and Hank Williams and worked my way up to the 1980s. Somehow I ended up with David Allen Coe CDs sitting next to my Placido Domingo and Wynton Marsalis CDs. That doesn't fit the music industry marketing model.
After they took Napster down, I had no mechanism to find new music (forget radio), and I stopped buying CDs, except for an occasional music soundtrack the struck my fancy. When I was younger, radio stations were largely independently owned, and the radio dial reflected scores of different tastes. By the time of the Napster era, radio had been consolidated into a small number of identical formats, so after the Napster takedown I had no way of finding new music that I liked, because there was no longer any diversity on radio.
One of the problems with costing nuclear power, IMHO, is that an adequate long term storage solution for the waste can't be had at any price.
That doesn't mean we can't muddle along, of course, but that brings up a really important point about the economics and engineering of energy sources: scale matters.
Suppose the world doesn't have any coal fired electricity plants, and you decide to estimate the cost of building and operating one. Now, consider making 1500 of them. Many costs would go down because of economies of scale, but other costs would go up. We could probably ignore the pollution from one plant, but we'd get really concerned with it at the 1500 mark.
I think the same thing applies to nuclear power. Lots of things would become cheaper as we ramped up the number of nuclear plants, but I think not having something like Yucca would leaves us with a problem that could only be handled by externalizing costs on a massive scale -- in other words making the public pay.
Getting back to the original question, I think the unit cost of the wind generators would go down dramatically in the number of generators created -- up to a point. That point is probably pretty high.
I'm not particularly satisfied with the linked article. All it does is put forth a plausible sounding argument for why a meteorite might not be hot. However that argument is not supported either by physical calculations, empirical observations or even anecdotes.
What makes it sound plausible is the idea that you might heat the meteorite so rapidly that the heat does not have time to conduct far past the surface; then we imagine a long trip at subsonic speed at which the object can cool. However there's a lot of variables in that story. Would we expect all meteorites to be almost exactly the same temperature when they hit the Earthy? If not the difference between "warm" and "extremely hot" from the standpoint of human senses isn't very much.
Also when it complains of the phrase "meteoric rise", the article sounds like the rantings of an armchair astronomer to me. Anybody who's seen a bolide pass from near the horizon to directly over head will have seen a meteor rise -- in degrees of angular altitude. It's quite remarkable sight, and generates lots of UFO reports because people who don't know what they're seeing confuse angular altitude with altitude above the Earth. The meteor is a dot of light that seems to drop, then slow to a stop. then it rises, first slowly, then shoots right over your head like a bat out of hell, sometimes with a whoosh. The whoosh was argued for years to be physically impossible because of speed of sound considerations, it was only recently explained. I don't know if the explanation is correct, but I do know I've definitely heard the whoosh.
I once witnesses a Leonid meteor shower in upstate New York, where there were a number of bolides did the drop and rise thing. Many of them split up, a few more than once. If I hadn't known they did all those weird things, I might have expected a UFO invasion.
It's not that doctors are useless. It's the medical system that's useless.
The knee problem, for instance. The word "doctor" means "teacher". In the days when doctors were essentially the servants the wealthy, that's what they did. If you were lord of the manor, you'd have a social relationship with the local doctor and unlimited access to his time. In the modern system, doctor time is factor of production, and expensive one. Profits are maximized by getting enough results that patients don't give up in droves with the minimum amount of doctor time. Alternative medicine may sometime succeed where conventional fails because it operates on a more personal level.
The panadol business is a direct result of the way drugs are developed and marketed. Pharmaceutical companies compete by finding a drug that occupies a successful market niche and copying it. So doctors have a plethora of medications that do the same thing. They go with what they know (sometimes that depends on marketing). At the same time focusing on blockbuster niches means others aren't served yet -- e.g. pediatric treatments. So doctors have to adapt and do off-label applications. These aren't scientifically supported, so you can't blame doctors who haven't tried them for not believing in them.
Well, experts make mistakes too, and they're different than tyro mistakes.
My primary care doctor is experienced and well known in the local medical community for his skills. One time I had an infection on the right side of my face; it was puffed up and rashy and I had a temperature of 103. He told me to get into his office right away; it sounded serious and he wanted to see me himself. He didn't want to leave this to some kid doing his residency at the emergency room. So he looks through my medical history, scrutinizes the rash, and in his best Sherlock Holmes manner announces that I have shingles. Shingles? Of course! I had chicken pox when I was baby, but the virus can stay dormant for decades, only to emerge as shingles.
So he sends me home with a prescription for Acyclovir ( which makes me sick to my stomach on top of having an infection), and instructions to call if anything changes at all. So I take my antivirals, and the next day I'm not any better. The day after that, my temperature goes as high as 104 and now the left side of my face is starting to swell. I call him up and as soon as he hears that he knows he was completely wrong. Shingles spreads along nerve paths; it doesn't cross the center of the body. He gives me an antibiotic prescription and by my second dose I felt great. I had a temperature of a 100, but after 104 that feels wonderful. After a full day on the antibiotic I was pretty much back to normal.
Every time I see my doctor now, he looks sheepish, because he made such a big point of not trusting my case to some kid straight out of medical school. The irony is that I'd have been better off with that kid just out of medical school. That kid wouldn't have been so certain based on his clinical experience of similar looking rashes. He'd have double checked, maybe done some kind of test, buy my doc had seen this situation before and dealt with is successfully. What I had was a staph infection, which can take on a wide variety of appearances. My rash apparently looked a bit like slightly atypical case of shingles. I must have been so satisfying when his memory dredged up my childhood chicken pox and made that connection. I'll bet that fact that it was a little atypical looking actually made the conviction more firm, because it made the deduction seem all that more clever.
I understand this, though. I've dealt with enough experts in my work to recognize that this is the kind of mistakes experts make. A conclusion that ties up all the details of a problem tidily, yet so unlikely to be arrived at by a less experienced professional is almost irresistible. You can't expect even an expert to avoid mistakes. However, you do expect him to be on the lookout for mistaks and to correct them. The fact that the kid in this article had the problem for years but they never went back to the start of the decision tree to see where they went says something bad about her doctors.
I did the math, and on paper at least it seems extremely unlikely for an FM station operating at 89.5Mhz to interfere with Ch 6 NTSC audio. There should be at least 1.5Mhz of unused buffer spectrum between them. That's fairly comparable to the NTSC audio's separation from video, which is around 2MHz or so. FM radio stations are supposed to stay within about 180Khz of bandwidth.
Or rather one of the times it changed. It switches back and forth depending which party has the White House.
I was a student at the start of the 80s, when the Reagan administration came in. My student job was student technician on a new physics lab. I was the first technician hired on a project that would eventually have a couple of dozen, and most of my work initially consisted of carpentry, tearing down surplus instruments we'd get from places like Livermore, and preparing tanks and pumps for experiments that needed high vacuum.
A few months into this, they hired an engineer. He was actually a physicist whose research funding had dried up, but he had experience with designing and building vacuum systems. He brought his life's work with him: a magnificent confection of gleaming stainless steel manifolds and flanges. In the main it consisted of a segmented stainless steel pipe about a foot and a half in diameter and about eight feet long, but with all its fiddly little doo-dads I'd reckon that once it had all been machined it'd weeks of serious effort to assemble. We were going to use it as small vacuum tank.
"What's that thing?" I asked him.
"It's a new kind of electron microscope," he said. "It gives a high resolution picture of the distribution of atomic nuclei types in the sample." I didn't know much back then other than which end of a hammer was which (the skill for which I'd been hired), but I suppose it must have been some kind of NMR device.
"So you got cut when the research money got shifted to defense?" I asked.
"Oh, that wasn't it," he said. "I was on an ONR grant. They had been interested in the principles of operation, but now they're more focused on immediately useful research."
"It looks like a death ray," I said suggestively.
"That would have worked in the old days," he said. "Not anymore. I blame ROTC. The guys you deal with aren't scientists, but they know a death ray when they see one and they think like engineers. They want to talk deaths per dollar. There's very little funding for this kind of technology research now."
Now it so happens as military research was turning toward the grim pragmatism of "deaths per dollar", the opposite swing was occurring in civilian research. Research with identifiable applications was anathema, because that was interfering with the private sector.
I had a family member who had spent years researching aquaculture techniques. Not only did he publish papers, his job required him to give free consulting to American businesses. When the new administration came in, he was no longer allowed to work on anything that had applications. Instead, he traveled around the world selling his expertise to foreign businesses, designing and building some of the largest aquaculture facilities ever built. When the Clinton administration came in, he came back to his old job, and when the Bush administration came in, it brought back the old restrictions against doing immediately useful research and he went back to consulting in places like Thailand. Under left wing administrations, the US taxpayer underwrote his development of technology too far over the economic horizon to attract private investment. Under right wing administrations they set him loose to transfer that technology to countries with low labor costs and no public technology investment.
The theory which denigrates useful applied research is self-consistent, at least if you don't try to consider any real world complexities. It states that if something is potentially useful, the private sector will do it, do it cheaper and do it better. Within moderation I have no problem with this theory. If the private sector is racing to develop a technology then the government should step out of the way. The problem I have with this ideology is that it declares that if the private sector is not working on something, that thing must be worthless. In a market pricing theory of value, that view is technically correct, but that begs the que
Remember when they used to have those parades of military hardware in Red Square? They didn't just do that to whip up domestic national pride. The parades were also an instrument of foreign policy. They reminded the West that it didn't really want a shooting war with the Soviet Union. The Soviets didn't want a shooting war with the West either. Everyone made sure everyone else knew that that was on the decision tree somewhere.
Litigation seems to be a little like that. Lawyers always prefer to settle, but first they have to put their arsenal on parade. Even that ridiculous cannon that fires marshmallows. Sometimes that sort of thing can cause more grief than you'd expect.
Well, maybe having some ambitious young hot-shot looking to make his representation defend you isn't as good as being able to buy any kind of defense you might want, but it sure beats going into a knife fight armed with a rubber chicken.
I don't think that's such a simple question. You are specifically talking about what amounts to something like research into the basic principles of weaponization, and of course I'm all for that. On the other hand, the actual technology developed thus far arguably has claimed more lives (5 in the 2001 attacks) than it has saved.
That shows that intent is not entirely a matter intent that matters. Iran may have no intention of using nuclear weapons; it intends that the threat of their use stabilize their country against outside attack. It's a very similar argument.
On balance I'd say that research is probably a good thing, but developments that would lead to a technological capability to deploy such weapons are the kinds of thing that have to be examined very carefully. Good intentions aren't enough. You also have to be responsible.
I have no idea what DRM in this case stands for when applied to the Radeon cards named, however I'd like to make a point about Digital Rights Management technology.
I think that DRM technology is morally neutral. Fundamentally nearly all technology is morally neutral. There are a few exceptions I can think of. I have a hard time envisioning ethical uses for technology to weaponize pathogens, although I cannot prove there are NO sufficient justifications for doing so that might apply in some hypothetical situation I haven't considered. In the real world, efforts to develop that technology fill me with revulsion. But revulsion is no guide to morality. There are also technologies that fill me with revulsion that I recognize as unquestionably useful and good, such as corneal surgery.
DRM is a somewhere in between, I think. It is not unquestionably beneficial in every case it is likely to be used, but it is not difficult to envision reasonable uses for it either. I think the problem is the agenda that advocates of DRM technology have. They want to force a fundamental change in how society uses information, and they're doing so under the false flag of getting artists their just compensation. It takes considerable chutzpah for many of these companies to present themselves as the champions of artists' economic interests, but we needn't bring that into this discussion to see that giving special interests greater and unhindered control over the bulk of information in society is a bad idea.
I believe that the immediate objective of DRM advocates is to monetize more uses of copyrighted information. I am neither thrilled nor appalled by that prospect. I would not oppose the creation of new mechanisms of revenue generation, but these require a considerable extension of corporate control over information. I have no problem with corporations benefiting from new technologies, but they have not addressed the possible impact on individual freedom.
Since this is an era in which technology is changing how we distribute and use information, I don't think we should welcome any one economic interest group using their influence with government (or their ability to form a private cartels) to steer that change to their exclusive benefit. I would accept legally mandated DRM provided those mandates were balanced with other measures to safeguard free expression and the public interest in a healthy, growing public domain. For example, I'd like to see:
* shortened copyright terms, * key escrow to guarantee usage rights in case of corporate failure and to ensure that DRM protected materials fall into the public domain in due course, * mandated provision for traditional fair use practices, * limitations on unreasonable license terms, and * restrictions on the use of strategic lawsuits to create new de facto "rights" for information "owners".
In exchange for that package, I'd be happy to participate in a DRM mediated digital download economy. In fact, I think this is a bona fide *conservative* position (in the Edmund Burke sense). It protects the traditional value of freedom of information, while not unduly hindering the development of new business models.
(1) NASA. Censored documents on global warming and climate change to meet his views, but at least the funding was relatively fine.
Small observation: ledgers have two sides.
Giving an agency a good sized budget is a metric meaningful only to bureaucratic empire builders. What matters is the size of the budget as compared to the ambition of your goals.
It's even possible for a budget cut to further an agency's mission, although without reading the budget I can't say whether that is true in this case. If I gave your agency a fifty billion dollar annual budget, is that a lot of money? Well, what if I said your agency's mission was to produce a workable fusion power plant in ten years? There's a tiny chance you might catch a lucky break, but *most* likely what's going to happen is that you have the freedom to try more ways of failing. Furthermore dreaming up new ways to fail and dealing with the..er.. fallout would consume a great deal of your time. A billion dollars and a goal feasible for that amount is far better.
I've even seen government groups doing pretty good work on a shoestring get messed up by becoming a political priority and having tons of cash dropped on them they've got to spend right away. These guys had a budget that wasn't quite enough, and they knew damn well how to put, say, 5% or 10% more to good use. A huge windfall means they're dealing with amounts of money they've never thought about using before. The problem of getting it out of their pockets before it burns a hole there consumes creativity and energy that should be spent on the problem.
The whole Mars thing was balloon juice. I'm not saying that a manned mission is necessarily worthless; that's a proving-a-negative kind of assertion. But a program that consumes large amounts of money but doesn't have any real critical path milestones in the next four years is fiscal cancer.
One of the ways they do this is by insisting they be in control of the user experience. That's not generally the case for smartphones, which are designed to the whims of the carriers. The imperative for the carriers is to steer the user to buying more network services. Apple has its own imperatives too, like steering users towards the iTunes store. However the iTunes store is pretty close to as good as such things get, whereas I have no interest at all in things like the carrier's picture mail services, and if I have TCP/IP I certainly am not going to waste my money on the carrier's text messaging.
In a way this argument reminds me of Bill Gates about ten years ago talking about how some day people would have wall that could display art work from the great masters. Now, I think that's the good thing, but it's not the same as having an actual Picasso on your wall. Would you feel different about owning a baseball used by and signed by Jackie Robinson, or one that had his signature printed on it? Would you feel the same about touching an Apollo specification moon boot and touching the actual one used by Neil Armstrong?
Once in a college class I got to handle a human brain. It was, to me at least, an awe inspiring experience. The thing was pickled and pre-dissected so it came apart like a puzzle block. So far was we knew, the information that was once in it was gone forever. Yet somehow I had the feeling I was holding an entire universe in my hand, even though now it was only a thing.
That's the crux. We feel that things, authentic things connected to an event or person somehow connect us.
It's not a rational feeling.
But then again, it's not really an irrational feeling either. It's arational. It needs no justification other than it exists. It's a fact of life, a facet of human experience, one of the things that makes life worth living.
Where we run into trouble is when we have to put this human value into the scales with other kinds of values. Is a Jackie Robinson baseball worth a human life? Of course not. Is the Apollo 11 site worth sacrificing future human technological process? No.
But that's not what we have here.
We have a proposal to send a rover to one of the historic landing sites. Why? Because they're cool. The value in this proposal is predicated on the connection value of the place. But the ethical question is this: in exploiting that value, how much of it do they destroy? How much of it do they leave for the rest of the human race?
I think if scientific value is our touchstone, the rovers should go where no observers have gone before.
the Ingenic JZ4740 on which this device is based seems to be the beating heart of a nontrivial percentage of the wacky pacific rim media gizmos currently on the market.
Ah.
I see the future has arrived. It appears to speak a language derived from recycled Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts. Who'dve thunk it?
Well, it's one of those things you take for granted if you grew up with it. But it really is remarkable how weird GUIs are. They're a kind of visual language, and like with regular language a heck of a lot of what we take for granted is just tradition.
Imagine everyone you ever heard of spoke different Germanic languages; you might think that there's a huge difference between Dutch and English, but there's no intrinsic reason that we couldn't be speaking some Sino-Tibetan language instead. That's kind of what the difference between something like Gnome and Windows GUIs are like. They share vastly more than they differ by, and all the common bits work (more or less) but I often wonder how much of those bits are, well, a bit arbitrary.
Any really fundamental improvement in UI conventions will almost certainly be something that takes a lot of unconvincing words to describe, but somehow makes sense when you use it. Gestural input is an example with potential. I just haven't seen the application that makes it really, really important to put into the common UI lexicon. Nothing as compelling as, say, the checkbox/radio button dichotomy. But it might exists, and if it does you'll have to use it to understand.
I remember going to the Harvard Coop the week that the Macintosh was introduced, and seeing people jammed around them, trying out something that was unlike anything most of us had ever seen before.
It was MacPaint.
What made it different is we'd never seen that combination of abstraction and direct manipulation before. Some of us knew what a light pen was, and had some vague idea you could do things like manipulate a model of something, but the thing about this app was that it presented analogies you could manipulate. They weren't literal models (like Microsoft's amazingly misbegotten "Bob"). They were things boiled down to the essence off what might be usable for the task: palettes that weren't palette shaped; "windows" that contained scrolling surfaces that were somewhat like a sheet of paper. And there were other things that were, well, new, but somehow logically fit with these idealized analogies: drop down menus, and scrollbars for example. They were easy to grasp (both literally and figuratively) because they were a kind of meta-analogy; they were simple mechanisms you could figure out because they somehow worked on the same principles of the things that were analogies. They were like analogies that didn't refer to anything we knew, but we kind of grasped they style of the thing.
I don't know whether "their values and culture are weighted toward totalitarianism." I'm not sure how you would devise a reasonable test of such a statement, and in any case you'd have to say that was true of just about every society that ever freed itself from tyranny.
I find that the more you look into a culture, the more you see that cultures have conflicting potentials. I look at Shiism in Iran for example, and see the seeds of democracy alongside the seeds of authoritarianism. The one thing that seems to be a cultural aberration in Iranian society is theocracy; Iranian Shiism views government authority as suspect, until the hidden imam returns. But that only proves my point -- you can never tell. Democracy could break out in any natural society, just as totalitarianism isn't so far out of the bounds of possibility for a place like America.
What I think is interesting about China is that surveillance and legal ambiguity may be creating a new kind of state power, one that can reach down into people's cultural identity in a way that has never been done before.
I won't disagree with the financial aspect of the collapse. I'm just pointing out that Soviets were well aware of how screwed up their government was, and that when things started to fall apart, it was remarkable how all the ideas the government spent decades suppressing turned out to be alive and well and in the wild.
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The big problem with health care spending is rising faster than inflation. In a country where over 15% of the GDP is spent on health care, that ought to concern us. It's projected to hit 17% of GDP very soon.
A simple minded projection would have us spending 1/5 of every dollar created on health care within a decade; 1/3 in about 25 years; 1/2 some time in the 2050s.
Of course that won't happen. The economy will collapse well before then, if it isn't doing so now. There are basically two options: crash and burn, or engineering some kind of soft landing. The latter option gets more expensive the longer we wait. If we'd done something the 1960s, when we spent 5% of GDP on health care, it would have been an incredible bargain by today's standards. If we could roll back the avalanche of cost increases back to 1980 when we spent half of what we do now, it would be a no-brainer. In today's terms, we're looking at a trillion dollars per decade, and in a few years that might well look at that figure as a deal we were foolish to pass up.
We have come to this point: it's not health care or X, where "X" is space or military expenditures or infrastructure or whatever. It's heath care or not-X. You might not not get that Moon base after paying to fix health care, but you definitely won't get it if you let the crisis get even larger.
There's considerable truth to what you say. However what exactly is being claimed doesn't have to be the space equivalent of real estate.
In the 1960s, a race to claim thenational prestige of doing things first drove the space race. The early goals, being relatively simpler and more closely spaced in an absolute difficulty, encouraged a leapfrog approach to competition. Going to the Moon earned the ultimate "shut your mouth" bragging rights. It was a huge jump, and the Soviets had no chance of beating us to it. All they could do is watch, knowing that sooner or later they'd have to send a message of congratulation to whoever the US president was going to be. The Soviets were forced drop their sights to Earth orbit -- more practical in countless ways, but a loss in the prestige race.
Now I happen remember the Moon landing. I was only eight, but I read the newspaper every day. Not a few folks wondered why we didn't claim the Moon. We were planting our flag there, after all, in the time honored colonial fashion, so in their simple-minded way of looking at things it ought to be ours, fair and square. What those people didn't realize was that if we'd done that, we'd have wasted all the money we spent getting there. We weren't staking a claim to the most barren land ever trod by human feet. We were staking a claim for leadership of our species. Not absolute leadership of course, but a kind of first among equals status. That was worth far more to America than ownership of lunar real estate might have been. The only way to get it was to plant our flag there in the name of all humanity.
One wonders if the course of the Cold War would have gone differently if we had turned the Apollo Program into a land grab. Even decades later, as the great technology transfer program that is the H-1B visa program got into full swing, I'd meet young foreign engineers who were delighted to be in the US, because they imagined America to be the great driver of human technological progress.
Windows Mobile is not the same as Windows CE. Windows CE is the infrastructure underneath Windows Mobile. You can't extrapolate between Windows Mobile features, devices, and most importantly *vendor support* to Windows CE.
I'm not sure that Windows CE does suck.
It's important to remember that Windows CE is like J2ME, except that it is a family of operating systems instead of a family of platforms. It has various manifestations and configurations, the familiar PDA or smartphone versions are just instances of this. I have issues with Windows Mobile, which lacks certain features it ought to have given its ambition. I have more issues with the SmartPhone Edition, because MS and the manufacturers kiss carrier ass and so make the devices a PITA to use.
However, nothing I've seen indicates to me that the underlying platform, the actual Windows CE part of the products, sucks. I heard from people programming with the native SDK complain that certain aspects of the API are braindead (I dont' remember which; it might be memory management). That's probably a genuine piece of suckiness, but not one that matters any longer since you don't have to program applications in C++ against the SDK any longer.
For a NetBook type device, my concern would be the configuration limitations MS would put on it to keep from cannibalizing its own Windows product line. But of course that's the kiss of death. You have to cannibalize your own product line sooner or later.
It's much more complicated than you make it out to be.
Back in the heyday of Napster, I tried it out then suddenly found myself buying lots of CDs as a result. Why? Well there were lots of reasons, but the main one was that music was much more important to me than it had been. I spent a lot of my time seeking out and trying new music, and since I literally couldn't get enough of the stuff I liked, I took out my wallet and started buying. Spending $20 or $30 a week for CDs was a no-brainer. Of course I could download MP3s, but they weren't as good as the CDs, the metadata was often incorrect, you didn't get the tracks that weren't big hits.
Even today I still occasionally buy high bitrate classical albums from iTunes, but it isn't really as nice as having a CD for music I really care about.
The important thing about music is that the more kinds of music you listen to, the more valuable music is to you. Even assuming that you can assemble the equivalent of a CD yourself, if you don't listen to music you aren't even going to bother. If you listen to enough music you might spring $20 for music you like simply for the liner notes and to have a physical token of ownership. $20 is nothing for a hobby you're spending twenty hours a week on, even if you have pretty much the equivalent on your hard drive. It might as well be $100 if you don't listen to music.
Imagine a world in which nearly everybody is continually immersed in music, and anyone can explore new music any time they want at essentially no marginal cost. That's a world in which a great deal of value is being had "for free", but also where many many more people will be passionate about music. In such a world things that seem of insignificant value (slightly better bit rate, better metadata, even the satisfaction of a physical token of ownership) would have a greater monetary value than the core product does today.
I think the big problem P2P presented to the record companies was not a challenge to the business model of selling physical artifacts with the data encoded on it, but rather to the marketing. It could have been like the old mainframe/desktop computer transition. They're selling as many if not more mainframes as ever, but it's no longer the focus of most of the market. The music industry model is to segment the market into certain musical tastes, produce a small number of brand name bands and artists who churn out hit after hit. In a world of ubiquitous music that would be bigger than ever, but most of the market would be untidy, unpredictable and consumer led. Before Napster, I pretty much bought an occasional opera or jazz CD. During Napster, I branched out into blues, then gospel, then old time white gospel. Then I started to buy some country CDs. I started with Roy Acuff and Hank Williams and worked my way up to the 1980s. Somehow I ended up with David Allen Coe CDs sitting next to my Placido Domingo and Wynton Marsalis CDs. That doesn't fit the music industry marketing model.
After they took Napster down, I had no mechanism to find new music (forget radio), and I stopped buying CDs, except for an occasional music soundtrack the struck my fancy. When I was younger, radio stations were largely independently owned, and the radio dial reflected scores of different tastes. By the time of the Napster era, radio had been consolidated into a small number of identical formats, so after the Napster takedown I had no way of finding new music that I liked, because there was no longer any diversity on radio.
One of the problems with costing nuclear power, IMHO, is that an adequate long term storage solution for the waste can't be had at any price.
That doesn't mean we can't muddle along, of course, but that brings up a really important point about the economics and engineering of energy sources: scale matters.
Suppose the world doesn't have any coal fired electricity plants, and you decide to estimate the cost of building and operating one. Now, consider making 1500 of them. Many costs would go down because of economies of scale, but other costs would go up. We could probably ignore the pollution from one plant, but we'd get really concerned with it at the 1500 mark.
I think the same thing applies to nuclear power. Lots of things would become cheaper as we ramped up the number of nuclear plants, but I think not having something like Yucca would leaves us with a problem that could only be handled by externalizing costs on a massive scale -- in other words making the public pay.
Getting back to the original question, I think the unit cost of the wind generators would go down dramatically in the number of generators created -- up to a point. That point is probably pretty high.
I'm not particularly satisfied with the linked article. All it does is put forth a plausible sounding argument for why a meteorite might not be hot. However that argument is not supported either by physical calculations, empirical observations or even anecdotes.
What makes it sound plausible is the idea that you might heat the meteorite so rapidly that the heat does not have time to conduct far past the surface; then we imagine a long trip at subsonic speed at which the object can cool. However there's a lot of variables in that story. Would we expect all meteorites to be almost exactly the same temperature when they hit the Earthy? If not the difference between "warm" and "extremely hot" from the standpoint of human senses isn't very much.
Also when it complains of the phrase "meteoric rise", the article sounds like the rantings of an armchair astronomer to me. Anybody who's seen a bolide pass from near the horizon to directly over head will have seen a meteor rise -- in degrees of angular altitude. It's quite remarkable sight, and generates lots of UFO reports because people who don't know what they're seeing confuse angular altitude with altitude above the Earth. The meteor is a dot of light that seems to drop, then slow to a stop. then it rises, first slowly, then shoots right over your head like a bat out of hell, sometimes with a whoosh. The whoosh was argued for years to be physically impossible because of speed of sound considerations, it was only recently explained. I don't know if the explanation is correct, but I do know I've definitely heard the whoosh.
I once witnesses a Leonid meteor shower in upstate New York, where there were a number of bolides did the drop and rise thing. Many of them split up, a few more than once. If I hadn't known they did all those weird things, I might have expected a UFO invasion.
It's not that doctors are useless. It's the medical system that's useless.
The knee problem, for instance. The word "doctor" means "teacher". In the days when doctors were essentially the servants the wealthy, that's what they did. If you were lord of the manor, you'd have a social relationship with the local doctor and unlimited access to his time. In the modern system, doctor time is factor of production, and expensive one. Profits are maximized by getting enough results that patients don't give up in droves with the minimum amount of doctor time. Alternative medicine may sometime succeed where conventional fails because it operates on a more personal level.
The panadol business is a direct result of the way drugs are developed and marketed. Pharmaceutical companies compete by finding a drug that occupies a successful market niche and copying it. So doctors have a plethora of medications that do the same thing. They go with what they know (sometimes that depends on marketing). At the same time focusing on blockbuster niches means others aren't served yet -- e.g. pediatric treatments. So doctors have to adapt and do off-label applications. These aren't scientifically supported, so you can't blame doctors who haven't tried them for not believing in them.
Well, experts make mistakes too, and they're different than tyro mistakes.
My primary care doctor is experienced and well known in the local medical community for his skills. One time I had an infection on the right side of my face; it was puffed up and rashy and I had a temperature of 103. He told me to get into his office right away; it sounded serious and he wanted to see me himself. He didn't want to leave this to some kid doing his residency at the emergency room. So he looks through my medical history, scrutinizes the rash, and in his best Sherlock Holmes manner announces that I have shingles. Shingles? Of course! I had chicken pox when I was baby, but the virus can stay dormant for decades, only to emerge as shingles.
So he sends me home with a prescription for Acyclovir ( which makes me sick to my stomach on top of having an infection), and instructions to call if anything changes at all. So I take my antivirals, and the next day I'm not any better. The day after that, my temperature goes as high as 104 and now the left side of my face is starting to swell. I call him up and as soon as he hears that he knows he was completely wrong. Shingles spreads along nerve paths; it doesn't cross the center of the body. He gives me an antibiotic prescription and by my second dose I felt great. I had a temperature of a 100, but after 104 that feels wonderful. After a full day on the antibiotic I was pretty much back to normal.
Every time I see my doctor now, he looks sheepish, because he made such a big point of not trusting my case to some kid straight out of medical school. The irony is that I'd have been better off with that kid just out of medical school. That kid wouldn't have been so certain based on his clinical experience of similar looking rashes. He'd have double checked, maybe done some kind of test, buy my doc had seen this situation before and dealt with is successfully. What I had was a staph infection, which can take on a wide variety of appearances. My rash apparently looked a bit like slightly atypical case of shingles. I must have been so satisfying when his memory dredged up my childhood chicken pox and made that connection. I'll bet that fact that it was a little atypical looking actually made the conviction more firm, because it made the deduction seem all that more clever.
I understand this, though. I've dealt with enough experts in my work to recognize that this is the kind of mistakes experts make. A conclusion that ties up all the details of a problem tidily, yet so unlikely to be arrived at by a less experienced professional is almost irresistible. You can't expect even an expert to avoid mistakes. However, you do expect him to be on the lookout for mistaks and to correct them. The fact that the kid in this article had the problem for years but they never went back to the start of the decision tree to see where they went says something bad about her doctors.
Hmmm.
I did the math, and on paper at least it seems extremely unlikely for an FM station operating at 89.5Mhz to interfere with Ch 6 NTSC audio. There should be at least 1.5Mhz of unused buffer spectrum between them. That's fairly comparable to the NTSC audio's separation from video, which is around 2MHz or so. FM radio stations are supposed to stay within about 180Khz of bandwidth.
Welcome back to 1955 St. Louis!
Lucky bastards. That means you'll be getting The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.
Or rather one of the times it changed. It switches back and forth depending which party has the White House.
I was a student at the start of the 80s, when the Reagan administration came in. My student job was student technician on a new physics lab. I was the first technician hired on a project that would eventually have a couple of dozen, and most of my work initially consisted of carpentry, tearing down surplus instruments we'd get from places like Livermore, and preparing tanks and pumps for experiments that needed high vacuum.
A few months into this, they hired an engineer. He was actually a physicist whose research funding had dried up, but he had experience with designing and building vacuum systems. He brought his life's work with him: a magnificent confection of gleaming stainless steel manifolds and flanges. In the main it consisted of a segmented stainless steel pipe about a foot and a half in diameter and about eight feet long, but with all its fiddly little doo-dads I'd reckon that once it had all been machined it'd weeks of serious effort to assemble. We were going to use it as small vacuum tank.
"What's that thing?" I asked him.
"It's a new kind of electron microscope," he said. "It gives a high resolution picture of the distribution of atomic nuclei types in the sample." I didn't know much back then other than which end of a hammer was which (the skill for which I'd been hired), but I suppose it must have been some kind of NMR device.
"So you got cut when the research money got shifted to defense?" I asked.
"Oh, that wasn't it," he said. "I was on an ONR grant. They had been interested in the principles of operation, but now they're more focused on immediately useful research."
"It looks like a death ray," I said suggestively.
"That would have worked in the old days," he said. "Not anymore. I blame ROTC. The guys you deal with aren't scientists, but they know a death ray when they see one and they think like engineers. They want to talk deaths per dollar. There's very little funding for this kind of technology research now."
Now it so happens as military research was turning toward the grim pragmatism of "deaths per dollar", the opposite swing was occurring in civilian research. Research with identifiable applications was anathema, because that was interfering with the private sector.
I had a family member who had spent years researching aquaculture techniques. Not only did he publish papers, his job required him to give free consulting to American businesses. When the new administration came in, he was no longer allowed to work on anything that had applications. Instead, he traveled around the world selling his expertise to foreign businesses, designing and building some of the largest aquaculture facilities ever built. When the Clinton administration came in, he came back to his old job, and when the Bush administration came in, it brought back the old restrictions against doing immediately useful research and he went back to consulting in places like Thailand. Under left wing administrations, the US taxpayer underwrote his development of technology too far over the economic horizon to attract private investment. Under right wing administrations they set him loose to transfer that technology to countries with low labor costs and no public technology investment.
The theory which denigrates useful applied research is self-consistent, at least if you don't try to consider any real world complexities. It states that if something is potentially useful, the private sector will do it, do it cheaper and do it better. Within moderation I have no problem with this theory. If the private sector is racing to develop a technology then the government should step out of the way. The problem I have with this ideology is that it declares that if the private sector is not working on something, that thing must be worthless. In a market pricing theory of value, that view is technically correct, but that begs the que
Remember when they used to have those parades of military hardware in Red Square? They didn't just do that to whip up domestic national pride. The parades were also an instrument of foreign policy. They reminded the West that it didn't really want a shooting war with the Soviet Union. The Soviets didn't want a shooting war with the West either. Everyone made sure everyone else knew that that was on the decision tree somewhere.
Litigation seems to be a little like that. Lawyers always prefer to settle, but first they have to put their arsenal on parade. Even that ridiculous cannon that fires marshmallows. Sometimes that sort of thing can cause more grief than you'd expect.
Well, maybe having some ambitious young hot-shot looking to make his representation defend you isn't as good as being able to buy any kind of defense you might want, but it sure beats going into a knife fight armed with a rubber chicken.
I don't think that's such a simple question. You are specifically talking about what amounts to something like research into the basic principles of weaponization, and of course I'm all for that. On the other hand, the actual technology developed thus far arguably has claimed more lives (5 in the 2001 attacks) than it has saved.
That shows that intent is not entirely a matter intent that matters. Iran may have no intention of using nuclear weapons; it intends that the threat of their use stabilize their country against outside attack. It's a very similar argument.
On balance I'd say that research is probably a good thing, but developments that would lead to a technological capability to deploy such weapons are the kinds of thing that have to be examined very carefully. Good intentions aren't enough. You also have to be responsible.
I have no idea what DRM in this case stands for when applied to the Radeon cards named, however I'd like to make a point about Digital Rights Management technology.
I think that DRM technology is morally neutral. Fundamentally nearly all technology is morally neutral. There are a few exceptions I can think of. I have a hard time envisioning ethical uses for technology to weaponize pathogens, although I cannot prove there are NO sufficient justifications for doing so that might apply in some hypothetical situation I haven't considered. In the real world, efforts to develop that technology fill me with revulsion. But revulsion is no guide to morality. There are also technologies that fill me with revulsion that I recognize as unquestionably useful and good, such as corneal surgery.
DRM is a somewhere in between, I think. It is not unquestionably beneficial in every case it is likely to be used, but it is not difficult to envision reasonable uses for it either. I think the problem is the agenda that advocates of DRM technology have. They want to force a fundamental change in how society uses information, and they're doing so under the false flag of getting artists their just compensation. It takes considerable chutzpah for many of these companies to present themselves as the champions of artists' economic interests, but we needn't bring that into this discussion to see that giving special interests greater and unhindered control over the bulk of information in society is a bad idea.
I believe that the immediate objective of DRM advocates is to monetize more uses of copyrighted information. I am neither thrilled nor appalled by that prospect. I would not oppose the creation of new mechanisms of revenue generation, but these require a considerable extension of corporate control over information. I have no problem with corporations benefiting from new technologies, but they have not addressed the possible impact on individual freedom.
Since this is an era in which technology is changing how we distribute and use information, I don't think we should welcome any one economic interest group using their influence with government (or their ability to form a private cartels) to steer that change to their exclusive benefit. I would accept legally mandated DRM provided those mandates were balanced with other measures to safeguard free expression and the public interest in a healthy, growing public domain. For example, I'd like to see:
* shortened copyright terms,
* key escrow to guarantee usage rights in case of corporate failure and to ensure that DRM protected materials fall into the public domain in due course,
* mandated provision for traditional fair use practices,
* limitations on unreasonable license terms, and
* restrictions on the use of strategic lawsuits to create new de facto "rights" for information "owners".
In exchange for that package, I'd be happy to participate in a DRM mediated digital download economy. In fact, I think this is a bona fide *conservative* position (in the Edmund Burke sense). It protects the traditional value of freedom of information, while not unduly hindering the development of new business models.
(1) NASA. Censored documents on global warming and climate change to meet his views, but at least the funding was relatively fine.
Small observation: ledgers have two sides.
Giving an agency a good sized budget is a metric meaningful only to bureaucratic empire builders. What matters is the size of the budget as compared to the ambition of your goals.
It's even possible for a budget cut to further an agency's mission, although without reading the budget I can't say whether that is true in this case. If I gave your agency a fifty billion dollar annual budget, is that a lot of money? Well, what if I said your agency's mission was to produce a workable fusion power plant in ten years? There's a tiny chance you might catch a lucky break, but *most* likely what's going to happen is that you have the freedom to try more ways of failing. Furthermore dreaming up new ways to fail and dealing with the ..er.. fallout would consume a great deal of your time. A billion dollars and a goal feasible for that amount is far better.
I've even seen government groups doing pretty good work on a shoestring get messed up by becoming a political priority and having tons of cash dropped on them they've got to spend right away. These guys had a budget that wasn't quite enough, and they knew damn well how to put, say, 5% or 10% more to good use. A huge windfall means they're dealing with amounts of money they've never thought about using before. The problem of getting it out of their pockets before it burns a hole there consumes creativity and energy that should be spent on the problem.
The whole Mars thing was balloon juice. I'm not saying that a manned mission is necessarily worthless; that's a proving-a-negative kind of assertion. But a program that consumes large amounts of money but doesn't have any real critical path milestones in the next four years is fiscal cancer.
there's also "not overcomplicating".
One of the ways they do this is by insisting they be in control of the user experience. That's not generally the case for smartphones, which are designed to the whims of the carriers. The imperative for the carriers is to steer the user to buying more network services. Apple has its own imperatives too, like steering users towards the iTunes store. However the iTunes store is pretty close to as good as such things get, whereas I have no interest at all in things like the carrier's picture mail services, and if I have TCP/IP I certainly am not going to waste my money on the carrier's text messaging.
In a way this argument reminds me of Bill Gates about ten years ago talking about how some day people would have wall that could display art work from the great masters. Now, I think that's the good thing, but it's not the same as having an actual Picasso on your wall. Would you feel different about owning a baseball used by and signed by Jackie Robinson, or one that had his signature printed on it? Would you feel the same about touching an Apollo specification moon boot and touching the actual one used by Neil Armstrong?
Once in a college class I got to handle a human brain. It was, to me at least, an awe inspiring experience. The thing was pickled and pre-dissected so it came apart like a puzzle block. So far was we knew, the information that was once in it was gone forever. Yet somehow I had the feeling I was holding an entire universe in my hand, even though now it was only a thing.
That's the crux. We feel that things, authentic things connected to an event or person somehow connect us.
It's not a rational feeling.
But then again, it's not really an irrational feeling either. It's arational. It needs no justification other than it exists. It's a fact of life, a facet of human experience, one of the things that makes life worth living.
Where we run into trouble is when we have to put this human value into the scales with other kinds of values. Is a Jackie Robinson baseball worth a human life? Of course not. Is the Apollo 11 site worth sacrificing future human technological process? No.
But that's not what we have here.
We have a proposal to send a rover to one of the historic landing sites. Why? Because they're cool. The value in this proposal is predicated on the connection value of the place. But the ethical question is this: in exploiting that value, how much of it do they destroy? How much of it do they leave for the rest of the human race?
I think if scientific value is our touchstone, the rovers should go where no observers have gone before.
I mean I doubt anyone knows much more about Shenzhen Dingoo Digital Co., Ltd.
Well, there's this: their name sounds like the punch-line to a joke about a traveling salesman and the Zhejiang rice farmer's daughter....
the Ingenic JZ4740 on which this device is based seems to be the beating heart of a nontrivial percentage of the wacky pacific rim media gizmos currently on the market.
Ah.
I see the future has arrived. It appears to speak a language derived from recycled Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts. Who'dve thunk it?
Well, it's one of those things you take for granted if you grew up with it. But it really is remarkable how weird GUIs are. They're a kind of visual language, and like with regular language a heck of a lot of what we take for granted is just tradition.
Imagine everyone you ever heard of spoke different Germanic languages; you might think that there's a huge difference between Dutch and English, but there's no intrinsic reason that we couldn't be speaking some Sino-Tibetan language instead. That's kind of what the difference between something like Gnome and Windows GUIs are like. They share vastly more than they differ by, and all the common bits work (more or less) but I often wonder how much of those bits are, well, a bit arbitrary.
Any really fundamental improvement in UI conventions will almost certainly be something that takes a lot of unconvincing words to describe, but somehow makes sense when you use it. Gestural input is an example with potential. I just haven't seen the application that makes it really, really important to put into the common UI lexicon. Nothing as compelling as, say, the checkbox/radio button dichotomy. But it might exists, and if it does you'll have to use it to understand.
I remember going to the Harvard Coop the week that the Macintosh was introduced, and seeing people jammed around them, trying out something that was unlike anything most of us had ever seen before.
It was MacPaint.
What made it different is we'd never seen that combination of abstraction and direct manipulation before. Some of us knew what a light pen was, and had some vague idea you could do things like manipulate a model of something, but the thing about this app was that it presented analogies you could manipulate. They weren't literal models (like Microsoft's amazingly misbegotten "Bob"). They were things boiled down to the essence off what might be usable for the task: palettes that weren't palette shaped; "windows" that contained scrolling surfaces that were somewhat like a sheet of paper. And there were other things that were, well, new, but somehow logically fit with these idealized analogies: drop down menus, and scrollbars for example. They were easy to grasp (both literally and figuratively) because they were a kind of meta-analogy; they were simple mechanisms you could figure out because they somehow worked on the same principles of the things that were analogies. They were like analogies that didn't refer to anything we knew, but we kind of grasped they style of the thing.
Fair enough.
I don't know whether "their values and culture are weighted toward totalitarianism." I'm not sure how you would devise a reasonable test of such a statement, and in any case you'd have to say that was true of just about every society that ever freed itself from tyranny.
I find that the more you look into a culture, the more you see that cultures have conflicting potentials. I look at Shiism in Iran for example, and see the seeds of democracy alongside the seeds of authoritarianism. The one thing that seems to be a cultural aberration in Iranian society is theocracy; Iranian Shiism views government authority as suspect, until the hidden imam returns. But that only proves my point -- you can never tell. Democracy could break out in any natural society, just as totalitarianism isn't so far out of the bounds of possibility for a place like America.
What I think is interesting about China is that surveillance and legal ambiguity may be creating a new kind of state power, one that can reach down into people's cultural identity in a way that has never been done before.
I won't disagree with the financial aspect of the collapse. I'm just pointing out that Soviets were well aware of how screwed up their government was, and that when things started to fall apart, it was remarkable how all the ideas the government spent decades suppressing turned out to be alive and well and in the wild.