My experience in business is that business people love change in theory but hate it in practice. They like to view themselves as innovators and market disrupters but what they really want is for their job to be easy and predictable.
Case in point: the SUV. In the 90s car makers responded to tightening emissions standards on cars by selling consumers trucks which had to meet lower standards. This is the kind innovation that US automakers love: all style and no substance. These "new" vehicles were shockingly primitive under the skin, built on ancient body-on-frame pickup truck platforms that didn't meet modern passenger car safety standards either. They were dangerous in a crash, prone to flipping over, and their crude suspensions, tuned to eliminate they "truck" like ride, also eliminated any kind of road feel. I once crossed the Sierras in a snowstorm driving a Ford Explorer and it was terrifying. I had years of experience driving in the snow, but the total lack of road feel was unnerving.
You could pay for it by transferring all the space defense programs in the Navy, Air Force and Army to the new force. That'd be the revenue-neutral way; it wouldn't save any money and probably wouldn't work as well, but there you have it.
Or you could take the 85 billion increase in annual defense spending the administration has proposed and earmark it for the new force. But then the force doesn't have anything useful to do.
That's because US defense doesn't actually need a separate space force.
From its inception, the US space program has discreetly served US defense needs, along with its higher profile exploration and scientific missions. In addition, the Army, Navy and Air Force have quietly developed space commands and technologies, without creating the public perception that we're militarizing space.
There may be things that the US military services want from space that they don't have yet, but creating a separate space force doesn't get them those things. It's only value is political; it's just posturing for domestic consumption. And that posturing will have international consequences we won't like.
As soon as we create the perception that we're militarizing space, we'll start an open arms race with China. Russia too, but it's China we'll have to worry about. Russia will be making a killing transferring technology to countries that want to gain a military foothold in space for reasons of national prestige, and that'll spread ballistic missile technology all over the place too.
Space is a place where the status quo works in our favor; it's not indefinitely sustainable, but shaking up the status quo in space is about the dumbest thing we could do.
For that matter the Army has its own aviation service, it's just statutorily limited to rotary aircraft.
Does it really make sense to tell the Army, "You can fly, but only using certain technologies."? Wouldn't it make sense to allow them to fly ground attack aircraft, just like the Marines do?
I seem to remembver reading it in WorldWatch Institute related to a sub-500 km flight. That's 270 nautical miles, which exceeds the flight distance between any of Norways three largest cities.
Yes, that certainly poses a logistical problem, but there are solutions for that in the pipeline, largely driven by road EV adoption. For example some are now claiming that supercapacitors will surpass Li-ion batteries for weight energy density within the decade; they already surpass battery technology for power density.
If they're contemplating commercial flights in seven years, they must believe the answer to all these questions is "yes" -- for the routes they have in mind.
For example Oslo and Bergen are the largest cities in Norway. Because of the rugged topography it takes (according to Google) seven hours to drive or take the train between them, even though they are only 160 nautical miles apart. That's like flying from LA to Fresno, except the road distance for that trip is only half of Oslo-Bergen.
I think they can probably predict with reasonable confidence whether in ten years they have the technical capacity to fly passengers and personal items between Oslo and Bergen or Oslo and Trondheim, taking the normal safety margins into account. But it's never, ever safe to make predictions about prices that far in the future.
Well, you seem to agree with my point, which is that it actually *is* cost that matters. If the engineers can get the cost per kg for a flight (including carbon credits) to the same as with aviation fuel, the technology is viable.
I agree it doesn't sound like something that is likely to happen in the near future. But people working on the technology would know better than I.
On a flight of less than 500 km, a quarter of the energy is used in the takeoff, so some kind of ground to aircraft power transfer is something you might actually consider for the very start of a flight. Maybe not a cable, but possibly an electric catapult, or supercapacitor "drop tanks".
Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
Norway is a country about the size of Montana, with relatively cheap electricity which is more than 99% from hydropower- and wind-generated, and a domestic carbon emissions trading system. Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable carbon credits.
So if electric flights are physically and economically feasible anywhere, Norway is the place.
I remember back in the 80s criticism of the software-as-agent philosophy from people who came from a software-as-tool background. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches, but it's hard to do both at the same time.
"Intelligent" software doesn't really understand users as much as the designers think it does. When it guesses right it might be OK, but when it guesses wrong it forces the user to struggle. Software that tries to be intelligent also tends to be abusive of user focus, trying to grab attention when it thinks the user should do something. People may like the idea of software that relieves their mental burden by thinking for them, but when confronted with what software can actually do they're invariably less pleased.
The reason vendors keep flogging this idea of "smart" interfaces is that most software is not designed for the user's benefit. If a system is smart, it can have its own preferences and agenda. This is most clear today in the design of things like iTunes or Netflix, which don't look at all like what you'd do if you simply wanted to make the system responsive the user's desires. These interfaces are designed to steer the user towards content the vendor favors.
It doesn't matter how badly people initially react to a "smart" interface; if you can stick it out they'll come to accept it, and that gives you the opportunity to shape their behavior.
When you think about things like deaths an industry causes, you have to think about them not in absolute terms, but relative to the alternatives.
The thing about electricity is that it doesn't matter in the least to my light bulb whether it is powered by nuclear or wind. It makes a big difference to my travel plans whether I go by air travel, rail, or bus.
There have been doubts about the validity of the Stanford Prison Experiment since the very beginning, and the weight has probably been on the side of the doubters for years now. The same for the famous MIlgram experiment. Those early experiments are famous because everybody learns about them in Psych 101, but they are so far from meeting modern standards of research quality anyone citing them today, except to question the results, would face serious peer review backlash.
I once saw a tape of Zimbardo telling an anecdote of one of his colleagues dropping by the experiment. Zimbardo showed him around and told him what was going on, but the colleague seemed confused. "What is your null hypothesis?" the colleague asked. The crowd Zimbardo was regaling laughed at that as if it were a silly, obtuse question. Actually it was a very good question, and it points to the reason that the Stanford Prison Experiment will likely never be replicated in its original form. Without a null hypothesis, you have no basis for systematically eliminating experimenter bias.
In a modern experiment -- presuming you could get ethical clearance -- your null hypothesis would be that guards do *not* spontaneously exhibit cruel and dehumanizing behavior; you would then carefully remove any hint of encouragement for them to do so. By just throwing them into a situation and seeing what happens, you don't know whether or not what you are seeing is a result of something you unconsciously made them do.
I'm not sure what the complaint here is. Holmes was indicted after a two year-long investigation of Theranos; it so happens the first hard information showing Theranos was fraudulent came out a little more than two years ago, so the investigation started pretty much as soon as it came to the attention of the prosecutor's office.
Shkreli's company MSMB Capital Management was revealed to be Ponzi scheme in 2011, when it couldn't cover a naked short sale it fraudulently claimed it could, and it took four years to indict him for that, and it was at least two years before the US Atty even opened an investigation. During that time Shkreli started a second Ponzi scheme hoping to pay off the first, and that collapsed too.
The only reason justice for Shkreli seemed swift was that he was in the public eye just before the indictment hammer fell for his dick-ish pharma moves, but that's not what they got him on. Holmes was indicted roughly twice as fast as Shkreli.
And if you follow the link to the 2017 study, what becomes clear is that the poor and rich people were eating different versions of the "Mediterranean Diet". They all ate mainly foods from the list, but the proportions and variety varied between groups.
In business, "commodity" is a dirty word. Nobody wants to be in a commodity business, because it's really, really hard to compete in a commodity business because there's only one number that matters to the consumer: price. If your customers see the commodity you're selling for a penny less, they're not your customers anymore.
Telecommunication bandwith is a commodity. Access to a MB/s is the same (except for perhaps minor differences in latency), so it should be the easiest thing in the world for consumers to buy. Consequently telecom vendors want to make pricing as confusing as possible. This is coming to ISP service too, with the end of net neutrality. Comcast and Verizon will make it impossible to tell whether Xfinity or Fios is a better deal.
My jaw dropped when I read that in the OIG executive summary.
But in a way this seems consistent with Comey's various misjudgments. He made some really naive errors.
Comey may be a case of the Peter Principle, a man who has "risen to the level of his incompetence". For him that level was where he had to handle matters with political implications. Comey made a complete hash of those when all he had to do was do things the usual way.
I hate how many otherwise intelligent people completely misunderstand global warming.
Same here. In particular I'm shocked at how little obviously intelligent people understand the nature of the impact of anthropogenic global warming in particular.
Humans are the most adaptable animal species that the planet has ever produced. There's no question we could be happy and prosperous in a world that's eight or ten degrees warmer. The difficulty is all in how quickly we get there: the rate at which we are forced to adapt.
Four degrees over ten thousand years is easy. Four degrees over a hundred years is catastrophic -- for social structures and economies.
And petroleum extraction, refinery and conversion into plastic doesn't use trucks, heavy machinery, or toxic chemicals?
Evaluating the environmental impacts of two alternative products is not so simple. In theory an plastic bag could be more sustainable than paper, because the molecules in it can be recycled indefinitely. So at one extreme you have a hypothetical world where everyone was scrupulous about recycling every last scrap of plastic; in such a world plastic would have less impact. At the other extreme you have a world in which there is no recycling at all. In that world paper is likely more sustainable, because they molecules are are recycled by decomposition over the course of months rather than decades.
In the world we actually live in, switching from one to the other is a matter of shifting environmental damage from one place to another. So the best choice might well depend on your locality and the problems you -- although plastic has a smaller carbon footprint.
Of course paper vs. plastic doesn't exhaust the possibilities. There's also disposable vs. reusable. In that, a sturdy polyethylene fiber (e.g., "Tyvek") bag may well be the winner.
I would think the most likely reason someone would use to alter a child's appearance would be in the case of IVF with donated eggs or sperm. But even so, even if we had the technology to edit zygote genomes, you wouldn't be able to specify an appearance to the degree of specificity you're imagining.
When the human genome was sequenced it turned out to be far, far smaller than anyone had expected. This is because genes and traits don't have a one-to-one correspondence; traits are the result of the interaction of many genes, and of course the environment.
Freckles is one of the few genetic traits that is controlled by a single, known gene. Skin and hair color, hair texture, ear lobe attachment, hairline, are all polygenic traits whose precise basis is not characterized. We are beginning to understand the genes behind nose shape, but those also affect ear and chin shape as well, so even if you could specify a nose shape it may have other consequences. Given the the complex interaction of genes it takes to form the genetic basis of most traits, that's bound to be the norm: choices have consequences you might not want.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience in business is that business people love change in theory but hate it in practice. They like to view themselves as innovators and market disrupters but what they really want is for their job to be easy and predictable.
Case in point: the SUV. In the 90s car makers responded to tightening emissions standards on cars by selling consumers trucks which had to meet lower standards. This is the kind innovation that US automakers love: all style and no substance. These "new" vehicles were shockingly primitive under the skin, built on ancient body-on-frame pickup truck platforms that didn't meet modern passenger car safety standards either. They were dangerous in a crash, prone to flipping over, and their crude suspensions, tuned to eliminate they "truck" like ride, also eliminated any kind of road feel. I once crossed the Sierras in a snowstorm driving a Ford Explorer and it was terrifying. I had years of experience driving in the snow, but the total lack of road feel was unnerving.
I, too see potential instability in China. Instability in an enemy is not a good thing.
Well, now we know why they took out "Don't be evil" from the employee code of conduct.
You could pay for it by transferring all the space defense programs in the Navy, Air Force and Army to the new force. That'd be the revenue-neutral way; it wouldn't save any money and probably wouldn't work as well, but there you have it.
Or you could take the 85 billion increase in annual defense spending the administration has proposed and earmark it for the new force. But then the force doesn't have anything useful to do.
That's because US defense doesn't actually need a separate space force.
From its inception, the US space program has discreetly served US defense needs, along with its higher profile exploration and scientific missions. In addition, the Army, Navy and Air Force have quietly developed space commands and technologies, without creating the public perception that we're militarizing space.
There may be things that the US military services want from space that they don't have yet, but creating a separate space force doesn't get them those things. It's only value is political; it's just posturing for domestic consumption. And that posturing will have international consequences we won't like.
As soon as we create the perception that we're militarizing space, we'll start an open arms race with China. Russia too, but it's China we'll have to worry about. Russia will be making a killing transferring technology to countries that want to gain a military foothold in space for reasons of national prestige, and that'll spread ballistic missile technology all over the place too.
Space is a place where the status quo works in our favor; it's not indefinitely sustainable, but shaking up the status quo in space is about the dumbest thing we could do.
For that matter the Army has its own aviation service, it's just statutorily limited to rotary aircraft.
Does it really make sense to tell the Army, "You can fly, but only using certain technologies."? Wouldn't it make sense to allow them to fly ground attack aircraft, just like the Marines do?
I seem to remembver reading it in WorldWatch Institute related to a sub-500 km flight. That's 270 nautical miles, which exceeds the flight distance between any of Norways three largest cities.
Yes, that certainly poses a logistical problem, but there are solutions for that in the pipeline, largely driven by road EV adoption. For example some are now claiming that supercapacitors will surpass Li-ion batteries for weight energy density within the decade; they already surpass battery technology for power density.
If they're contemplating commercial flights in seven years, they must believe the answer to all these questions is "yes" -- for the routes they have in mind.
For example Oslo and Bergen are the largest cities in Norway. Because of the rugged topography it takes (according to Google) seven hours to drive or take the train between them, even though they are only 160 nautical miles apart. That's like flying from LA to Fresno, except the road distance for that trip is only half of Oslo-Bergen.
I think they can probably predict with reasonable confidence whether in ten years they have the technical capacity to fly passengers and personal items between Oslo and Bergen or Oslo and Trondheim, taking the normal safety margins into account. But it's never, ever safe to make predictions about prices that far in the future.
Well, you seem to agree with my point, which is that it actually *is* cost that matters. If the engineers can get the cost per kg for a flight (including carbon credits) to the same as with aviation fuel, the technology is viable.
I agree it doesn't sound like something that is likely to happen in the near future. But people working on the technology would know better than I.
On a flight of less than 500 km, a quarter of the energy is used in the takeoff, so some kind of ground to aircraft power transfer is something you might actually consider for the very start of a flight. Maybe not a cable, but possibly an electric catapult, or supercapacitor "drop tanks".
Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
Norway is a country about the size of Montana, with relatively cheap electricity which is more than 99% from hydropower- and wind-generated, and a domestic carbon emissions trading system. Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable carbon credits.
So if electric flights are physically and economically feasible anywhere, Norway is the place.
I remember back in the 80s criticism of the software-as-agent philosophy from people who came from a software-as-tool background. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches, but it's hard to do both at the same time.
"Intelligent" software doesn't really understand users as much as the designers think it does. When it guesses right it might be OK, but when it guesses wrong it forces the user to struggle. Software that tries to be intelligent also tends to be abusive of user focus, trying to grab attention when it thinks the user should do something. People may like the idea of software that relieves their mental burden by thinking for them, but when confronted with what software can actually do they're invariably less pleased.
The reason vendors keep flogging this idea of "smart" interfaces is that most software is not designed for the user's benefit. If a system is smart, it can have its own preferences and agenda. This is most clear today in the design of things like iTunes or Netflix, which don't look at all like what you'd do if you simply wanted to make the system responsive the user's desires. These interfaces are designed to steer the user towards content the vendor favors.
It doesn't matter how badly people initially react to a "smart" interface; if you can stick it out they'll come to accept it, and that gives you the opportunity to shape their behavior.
When you think about things like deaths an industry causes, you have to think about them not in absolute terms, but relative to the alternatives.
The thing about electricity is that it doesn't matter in the least to my light bulb whether it is powered by nuclear or wind. It makes a big difference to my travel plans whether I go by air travel, rail, or bus.
There have been doubts about the validity of the Stanford Prison Experiment since the very beginning, and the weight has probably been on the side of the doubters for years now. The same for the famous MIlgram experiment. Those early experiments are famous because everybody learns about them in Psych 101, but they are so far from meeting modern standards of research quality anyone citing them today, except to question the results, would face serious peer review backlash.
I once saw a tape of Zimbardo telling an anecdote of one of his colleagues dropping by the experiment. Zimbardo showed him around and told him what was going on, but the colleague seemed confused. "What is your null hypothesis?" the colleague asked. The crowd Zimbardo was regaling laughed at that as if it were a silly, obtuse question. Actually it was a very good question, and it points to the reason that the Stanford Prison Experiment will likely never be replicated in its original form. Without a null hypothesis, you have no basis for systematically eliminating experimenter bias.
In a modern experiment -- presuming you could get ethical clearance -- your null hypothesis would be that guards do *not* spontaneously exhibit cruel and dehumanizing behavior; you would then carefully remove any hint of encouragement for them to do so. By just throwing them into a situation and seeing what happens, you don't know whether or not what you are seeing is a result of something you unconsciously made them do.
I'm not sure what the complaint here is. Holmes was indicted after a two year-long investigation of Theranos; it so happens the first hard information showing Theranos was fraudulent came out a little more than two years ago, so the investigation started pretty much as soon as it came to the attention of the prosecutor's office.
Shkreli's company MSMB Capital Management was revealed to be Ponzi scheme in 2011, when it couldn't cover a naked short sale it fraudulently claimed it could, and it took four years to indict him for that, and it was at least two years before the US Atty even opened an investigation. During that time Shkreli started a second Ponzi scheme hoping to pay off the first, and that collapsed too.
The only reason justice for Shkreli seemed swift was that he was in the public eye just before the indictment hammer fell for his dick-ish pharma moves, but that's not what they got him on. Holmes was indicted roughly twice as fast as Shkreli.
And if you follow the link to the 2017 study, what becomes clear is that the poor and rich people were eating different versions of the "Mediterranean Diet". They all ate mainly foods from the list, but the proportions and variety varied between groups.
People didn't stream isochronous data in 2004.
This is America. Rich people don't go to prison unless they piss off other rich people.
Without net neutrality you'll be buying packages of content and bandwith -- it'll be just like the old cable TV industry.
In business, "commodity" is a dirty word. Nobody wants to be in a commodity business, because it's really, really hard to compete in a commodity business because there's only one number that matters to the consumer: price. If your customers see the commodity you're selling for a penny less, they're not your customers anymore.
Telecommunication bandwith is a commodity. Access to a MB/s is the same (except for perhaps minor differences in latency), so it should be the easiest thing in the world for consumers to buy. Consequently telecom vendors want to make pricing as confusing as possible. This is coming to ISP service too, with the end of net neutrality. Comcast and Verizon will make it impossible to tell whether Xfinity or Fios is a better deal.
My jaw dropped when I read that in the OIG executive summary.
But in a way this seems consistent with Comey's various misjudgments. He made some really naive errors.
Comey may be a case of the Peter Principle, a man who has "risen to the level of his incompetence". For him that level was where he had to handle matters with political implications. Comey made a complete hash of those when all he had to do was do things the usual way.
I hate how many otherwise intelligent people completely misunderstand global warming.
Same here. In particular I'm shocked at how little obviously intelligent people understand the nature of the impact of anthropogenic global warming in particular.
Humans are the most adaptable animal species that the planet has ever produced. There's no question we could be happy and prosperous in a world that's eight or ten degrees warmer. The difficulty is all in how quickly we get there: the rate at which we are forced to adapt.
Four degrees over ten thousand years is easy. Four degrees over a hundred years is catastrophic -- for social structures and economies.
And petroleum extraction, refinery and conversion into plastic doesn't use trucks, heavy machinery, or toxic chemicals?
Evaluating the environmental impacts of two alternative products is not so simple. In theory an plastic bag could be more sustainable than paper, because the molecules in it can be recycled indefinitely. So at one extreme you have a hypothetical world where everyone was scrupulous about recycling every last scrap of plastic; in such a world plastic would have less impact. At the other extreme you have a world in which there is no recycling at all. In that world paper is likely more sustainable, because they molecules are are recycled by decomposition over the course of months rather than decades.
In the world we actually live in, switching from one to the other is a matter of shifting environmental damage from one place to another. So the best choice might well depend on your locality and the problems you -- although plastic has a smaller carbon footprint.
Of course paper vs. plastic doesn't exhaust the possibilities. There's also disposable vs. reusable. In that, a sturdy polyethylene fiber (e.g., "Tyvek") bag may well be the winner.
I would think the most likely reason someone would use to alter a child's appearance would be in the case of IVF with donated eggs or sperm. But even so, even if we had the technology to edit zygote genomes, you wouldn't be able to specify an appearance to the degree of specificity you're imagining.
When the human genome was sequenced it turned out to be far, far smaller than anyone had expected. This is because genes and traits don't have a one-to-one correspondence; traits are the result of the interaction of many genes, and of course the environment.
Freckles is one of the few genetic traits that is controlled by a single, known gene. Skin and hair color, hair texture, ear lobe attachment, hairline, are all polygenic traits whose precise basis is not characterized. We are beginning to understand the genes behind nose shape, but those also affect ear and chin shape as well, so even if you could specify a nose shape it may have other consequences. Given the the complex interaction of genes it takes to form the genetic basis of most traits, that's bound to be the norm: choices have consequences you might not want.