The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.
That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding. If they said they are concerned about someone using a nuclear weapon to take out the power grid, everyone would quickly point out that the problem is not protecting the power grid, but that someone has a nuclear weapon. By making it all fuzzy and saying there are natural causes too, they create a new dissociated threat that most people can't really understand. Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen, they can spend endless amounts 'protecting' the grid and we'll never know whether it actually works.
It's just the modern equivalent of selling magic stones that protect you from monsters. I hope these guys are just thick though, and not actually intelligent people knowingly misleading everyone so they can buy flash cars and houses.
I know a bunch of mobile game developers. They do seem to work harder than the corporate drone programmers I also know, but this seems to be the flip side of getting products out the door, as opposed to working on yet another CRM system plug-in that drags on for years with nobody being able to agree on what they want. In the end I think it just comes down to what you value. If you're on $50k at a startup that gets a hit game out, you could literally make millions from share options, or at the least become a key member of the team pulling in a big salary. On the other hand you could end up with nothing if the product flops. If you don't want to take that risk you can go get a corporate drone job, be reasonably bored, but bring home a decent amount of money and work yourself into a job for life maintaining some mission critical COBOL library that only you and an old guy who comes in a couple days a week have any idea how to manage.
I actually think it is pretty cool that developers can choose where they want to be in that spectrum.
Of course if you are a really talented developers you can get great money and conditions anywhere, and I think this annoys a lot of people. But the reality is that is true of most professions and is not exactly the fault of the talented developers.
past the life expectancy of anyone we could conceivably give a crap about.
Equivalently, "Fuck you".
Yeah, it is basically saying we'll enjoy ourselves and the next generation can deal with the mess. Pretty much sums up the boomer generation to be honest.
I think it is just because it is such a niche market. I ride a bike regularly, and did so in Auckland which is quite hilly. When I started out I thought an electric bike would be really great. Then I just got fitter and it ceased to be a problem. I think this is the experience of many people, even those who are a bit older. In a flat city I can easily get around at a speed that is scary enough so I wouldn't bother with the weight and hassle of electric.
I suspect there is still a good market for them though and as the general cycling market grows more affordable products should become available.
Absolutely agree. When I started my career in engineer I quickly discovered the folly of the manager who keeps shooting for the stars. Basically everyone who knows that the target is completely unrealistic just gives up and starts planning for how to deal with the failure rather than move the project forward. The key is to have bite sized goals that people can achieve if pushed, then leaning on them to get there.
If climate prediction are right, then we are pretty screwed anyway. I think it is time we just figured out some goals that could actually be met (such as nations agreeing to bring as much renewables online as the existing grids can manage) and chug away at those. If we start meeting a few of them, we might actually be able to get a bit of enthusiasm about doing some bigger stuff.
No, they will just get France to build them instead.
While I'm sure France has a very competent nuclear industry, you would have thought that if you were concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors, throwing the problem over the fence and having the neighbour run them is not the most logical solution.
To be honest to the marketers this is a dog of a product. It is extremely hard to sell people a product that gives them some kind of mild intermittent benefit that is not immediate and in their face all the time. The other problem is that the product self-selects penny pincher type 'economy' customers, and these are just horrible horrible people to attempt to sell anything too.
I imagine it would be easier to sell batteries wrapped in cat stickers than a product like this.
When I graduated 14 years ago with a EE bachelors degree, that was considered all the academic base you needed to have a top career in designing cars, writing avionics software, becoming a senior level executive etc. If you wanted to become a technical specialist you might go back and do a master later in your career, but otherwise nobody cared.
Now it seems every grad needs to have a masters degree from a select range of universities just to get a job making text boxes appear in a web browser. I just find this unbelievable. Having done plenty of development and having run a business myself none of that has ever required the intellectual effort it took to understand the complex exponential or maxwell's equations. In the end most software development is just not that hard and honestly, neither is most executive business stuff.
I think we have just had a complete Bozo explosion in corporate management. It makes me sick of doing engineering really. It is like you are the guy trying to make a house while everyone around you is trying to steal the house so they can have 100 for themselves, or smash it to pieces. The pointless destruction of what they do is just mind numbing. In the end the best thing to do is just be a consultant so you can go around overcharging these idiots for stuff you learnt in first year.
Absolutely agree. Many of the worlds problems (with both socialism and capitalism) come down to the fact that there are selfish dicks who ruin it for everyone.
Capitalism seems to do the best at harnessing these narcissistic dicks in a (sometimes) constructive way. Actually that is quite a remarkable achievement given that history is basically the story of how narcissist repeatedly oppress everyone else for their own benefit. Sadly it seems many people now believe it is the narcissist themselves, rather than the amelioration of them, that is the key to our current success. It's like we've gone from trying to rein in the dicks to now teaching our kids how to be the biggest dick so they can have a flash car and big house. Oh well, maybe we will reach peak narcissist soon where they start feeding on each other or something. One can always hope.
It appears to be nothing more than a kernel mode IO monitor that allows you to assign disk IO permissions to processes. In other words, it is basically just doing what any modern kernel does anyway. I don't get the power saving thing though - that sounded very snake oil like. I mean, if your system isn't compromised, what CPU operations is it reducing exactly?
I imagine this thing started out as a legitimate third-party kernel monitor (they refer to watchdog) and then some marketing goons got involved.
The linked article just appears to be an advert for Mercedes cars, but this is quite an interesting development. I don't know if it is more a response to a market gap given the current issues Germany is having with too many renewables on their grid, or part of a broader strategy around their electric vehicles. Either way it is pretty exciting to see how quickly electric infrastructure is developing.
As an EE who has spent a huge amount of time fixing cars (don't buy a Peugeot) I think electric cars will be a no-brainer for customers once the cost reduces further, and I think Tesla is trying to push that point forward by creating another mass market for batteries. If they can get it right, things could change very quickly, and I think companies like Mercedes can see this.
I hope that Elon Musk can make these businesses viable and sustainable. In an era where most corporations increase profits by finding new ways to screw over their customers and create artificial scarcity, it's pretty exciting to think that in 20 years time driving a car could be cheaper than it is now and potentially even sustainable. In a world where most of the smartest people are trying to find ways to make you click on an advert or manipulate financial markets, this sort of thing is sadly pretty rare.
I understand what you're saying, but I have worked with a lot of people in my career, including in an engineering company that still manufactured products locally (i.e. had factory workers). The reality is that most people are just not that smart, and when you spend all day hanging out with top programmers with degrees you really lose sight of just how big the ability gulf is.
The thing I observe is that the robots are not replacing workers, they are simply driving down the marginal cost of workers because that is the only way most of these people can compete. This is simply what happens in a market economy if the workers cannot own the means of production or up-skill themselves.
I don't know what the solution is but it is a pretty grim existence if you are not in the top 10-20% right now (which lets be honest, most people on slashdot are).
If we were starting out then maybe, but there are just so many things that can be plugged into an AC socket. It's pretty amazing that you can take anything from the last 50 years or more that has the right plug on it, shove it into a wall socket, and off it goes. The current system is a very good standard, and it will be hard to change things. Further, one of the original reasons Tesla (Nikola) won out is that the induction motor is an extremely good motor design (safe, reliable, quiet). Lots of things still have AC induction motors (heatpumps, your fridge) and these require, well AC. If you don't have that then you need a motor driver for them (or brushes I suppose) which is just a three-phase inverter anyway.
Also 20-40% power loss is crazy. More like 5-10% with modern semi-conductors and getting better/cheaper all the time.
In my experiences, leadership is simply being the type of person that people want to follow. Now whether they have any idea where to lead the people once they are following is a different question. Certainly the best leaders also have a solid sense of direction, but it is entirely possible, and rather common, for people to exude the other elements of leadership while lacking this key requirement.
Where else do you think the entire management consultant business has come from? It is basically the way that corporate leaders generate direction in their businesses due to their own inability to come up with ideas. This is why you do have to respect people like Gates, Jobs and Ellison. At least they could come up with their own corporate strategies that worked (even if you think they are evil).
Hahaha. The executive market is already global. How else do you think they avoid paying tax? The other benefits of being a member of the 'market' is that nobody actually cares whether you just ran your last business into the ground, parachuting out of it on a cloud of shareholder capital just before it imploded, and if you really get completely useless at keeping businesses from imploding they will just give you a cushy government advisor job. Oh and the best bit is that the members of the 'market' set the salaries for each other.
I think what you probably meant is that they should open the market up to competition from those who aren't members (don't have lots of inherited wealth). Good luck with that.
The idea of a metal-air hybrid object that has a density less than water is already quite well developed. It is typically called a boat or ship. Some of them even have integrated air-cell buoyancy systems in the form of polystyrene blocks.
Indeed based on his claims, it would appear this material (apparently "one of the strongest metals for its weight ever developed") would be much more important to the aviation industry.
Actually I hope SpaceX don't get distracted by this. They are doing some incredible things, and pushing a lot of boundaries, which is not easy to do for a high profile company. At this stage they could likely bounce back from a launch failure, but lose a crew and it is all over. Best leave it to the Russians until SpaceX has got a reusable first stage sorted out. There may be more rocket explosions in that development process and at the moment the media seems to have settled down about these being ''failures''.
Stratasys was a pre-existing player in commercial 3D printing who totally missed the consumer 3D printing bandwagon and then had to buy MakerBot to get into the market. Since that acquisition they appear to have totally fluffed it. That usually means it is run by MBAs.
The logical conclusion is that they just need to wait for someone to start a MakerBot 2.0 and then they can acquire and destroy the future a second time. Maybe the MakerBot founder's non-competes are running out soon?
I was an embedded developer for many years. It is just a totally different way of thinking. Embedded guys are always writing the same thing again from scratch. They also are obsessed with knowing exactly what is going on. Before I got into high level software development, the idea of dumping someone else's library into my carefully constructed embedded code made me cringe.
The other issue is that embedded guys can think they know it all, because they normally understand how a line of code they write affects things right down to the electrons and holes in the chip's transistors. This narrow over-confidence totally sets them up to fail at something like crypto, where you can write the safest, neatest to-spec code in the world, and then someone just walks right around the problem. A good example was the whole BMW connected drive thing where the researchers just spoofed a 'trusted' cell station.
The other thing to keep in mind is that 'security' has become a consultant fest since Y2K (possibly before that). There are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there who will talk endless BS, charging you $500/hr to do so, and then leave you with a half finished piece of bug-ridden rubbish. I don't blame many companies for just trusting the internal dev who at least has delivered on other projects before, rather than a suit wearing chatter monkey.
The concept of private property appears to be something quite important to human society. I went to a lecture many years ago (will try to find the guy's name) by a person who was implementing market based irrigation solutions in Africa. Basically he had visited a bunch of World Vision type projects where they would fly in and dig a water bore and setup a community pump. He said everyone would celebrate and think they were doing a wonderful thing, but in a year or two they would go back to the village and find the pump broken. When they inquired as to why nobody had bothered to fix it, each person would say it wasn't their responsibility, or blame someone else for breaking it.
What he had come up with is the idea of selling small irrigation pumps to individual small block farmers. He had calculated that the pumps would increase the crop yields in a way that the cost of the pump would be paid back quite quickly, and still be affordable to an African farmer. This he thought was much more successful with people understanding the value of the property and taking care of it better.
Personally I don't think capitalism is evil. On the contrary, I think it allows the most freedom of expression of human nature. And there-in lies the problem - people are inherently a bit nasty, and capitalism does little to prevent the expression of that. In a way communism is similar (i.e. it could work if humans were nice) but I seriously doubt Marx was right that it would form naturally, and Lenin's idea of forcing it upon people just ended in the same sort of power hungry dictatorships you get from most other suppression based political systems. In other words, I don't think capitalism has lots of problems because of the system, I think it has lots of problems because of the nature of people. Now whether it is better to modify the system to attempt to suppress the worst parts of people's nature, or whether we should instead appeal to people's morality and sense of community, I haven't figure out yet. I would favour the latter, but I don't know if that is even possible any more in our highly individualistic western societies.
It's just because the world is not dominated by engineers/scientists anymore. History has shown that if you sit down and try to constructively solve a problem rather than argue about it, you can achieve some pretty incredible things. But the world has never been dominated by problem solvers. It is generally dominated by bullies who realise it is easier to steal someone else's lunch than figure out how to make more sandwiches. The world wars showed the folly of this sort of destructive, zero-sums thinking, and for a while after people worked on solving problems and creating new stuff. Now we are just quickly heading back to our old (and normal) ways.
This is why companies like Tesla are so interesting. I really hope that Musk can prove that a market led solution can bring about positive technological change. If he fails then it pretty much means we should all go re-train as lawyers. It isn't anywhere near as hard as you might think, you just have to lose hope in humanity first.
The main problem with freight logistics is not getting all your parcels into a central city depot (this is largely done at night anyway). It is getting the small parcels from the depot to all the various houses and businesses spread throughout the urban area during business hours. Unfortunately the only real solution to that second issue is to have a whole bunch of people hand delivering the packages who can ring door bells, climb stairs etc. But what these mole people have done is ignored this hard bit and said 'hey people can just walk down to the depot and their package will get whizzed away using magnets!'. But I don't want to spend 30 mins walking to and from the depot. I want someone to deliver the package to my door so I can keep working.
Personally I think the most likely solution will be autonomous milk cart type things that drive around to your house and message you so you can go out and retrieve your parcel from them. They don't need to be fast if they can be smaller and there can be more of them. Drones have a lot of issues in urban areas (where are they going to leave your package?) but could be a great solution for rural situations.
I think this is quite obvious to most engineers that have worked on safety critical systems. This whole issue is just about creating fear so some security consulting firms can make extra money. It is a tried and true method.
Every time there is an energy crisis I see a new guy on TV who has 'invented' a water powered car and just needs some money to commercialise it. Every time. They all do the same thing, have some technobabble, accept a challenge to be black-box tested by a professor at a reputable university, who writes an overly technical report explaining why it is rubbish, and then they add 'tested by the University of XXX' to their prospective to elicit even more money. It is the same formula and it works every time.
Slashdot Mirror
The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.
That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding. If they said they are concerned about someone using a nuclear weapon to take out the power grid, everyone would quickly point out that the problem is not protecting the power grid, but that someone has a nuclear weapon. By making it all fuzzy and saying there are natural causes too, they create a new dissociated threat that most people can't really understand. Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen, they can spend endless amounts 'protecting' the grid and we'll never know whether it actually works.
It's just the modern equivalent of selling magic stones that protect you from monsters. I hope these guys are just thick though, and not actually intelligent people knowingly misleading everyone so they can buy flash cars and houses.
I know a bunch of mobile game developers. They do seem to work harder than the corporate drone programmers I also know, but this seems to be the flip side of getting products out the door, as opposed to working on yet another CRM system plug-in that drags on for years with nobody being able to agree on what they want. In the end I think it just comes down to what you value. If you're on $50k at a startup that gets a hit game out, you could literally make millions from share options, or at the least become a key member of the team pulling in a big salary. On the other hand you could end up with nothing if the product flops. If you don't want to take that risk you can go get a corporate drone job, be reasonably bored, but bring home a decent amount of money and work yourself into a job for life maintaining some mission critical COBOL library that only you and an old guy who comes in a couple days a week have any idea how to manage.
I actually think it is pretty cool that developers can choose where they want to be in that spectrum.
Of course if you are a really talented developers you can get great money and conditions anywhere, and I think this annoys a lot of people. But the reality is that is true of most professions and is not exactly the fault of the talented developers.
One of them resigned to avoid being disbarred. Looks better on his CV I guess.
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/...
past the life expectancy of anyone we could conceivably give a crap about.
Equivalently, "Fuck you".
Yeah, it is basically saying we'll enjoy ourselves and the next generation can deal with the mess. Pretty much sums up the boomer generation to be honest.
I think it is just because it is such a niche market. I ride a bike regularly, and did so in Auckland which is quite hilly. When I started out I thought an electric bike would be really great. Then I just got fitter and it ceased to be a problem. I think this is the experience of many people, even those who are a bit older. In a flat city I can easily get around at a speed that is scary enough so I wouldn't bother with the weight and hassle of electric.
I suspect there is still a good market for them though and as the general cycling market grows more affordable products should become available.
Absolutely agree. When I started my career in engineer I quickly discovered the folly of the manager who keeps shooting for the stars. Basically everyone who knows that the target is completely unrealistic just gives up and starts planning for how to deal with the failure rather than move the project forward. The key is to have bite sized goals that people can achieve if pushed, then leaning on them to get there.
If climate prediction are right, then we are pretty screwed anyway. I think it is time we just figured out some goals that could actually be met (such as nations agreeing to bring as much renewables online as the existing grids can manage) and chug away at those. If we start meeting a few of them, we might actually be able to get a bit of enthusiasm about doing some bigger stuff.
No, they will just get France to build them instead.
While I'm sure France has a very competent nuclear industry, you would have thought that if you were concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors, throwing the problem over the fence and having the neighbour run them is not the most logical solution.
To be honest to the marketers this is a dog of a product. It is extremely hard to sell people a product that gives them some kind of mild intermittent benefit that is not immediate and in their face all the time. The other problem is that the product self-selects penny pincher type 'economy' customers, and these are just horrible horrible people to attempt to sell anything too.
I imagine it would be easier to sell batteries wrapped in cat stickers than a product like this.
When I graduated 14 years ago with a EE bachelors degree, that was considered all the academic base you needed to have a top career in designing cars, writing avionics software, becoming a senior level executive etc. If you wanted to become a technical specialist you might go back and do a master later in your career, but otherwise nobody cared.
Now it seems every grad needs to have a masters degree from a select range of universities just to get a job making text boxes appear in a web browser. I just find this unbelievable. Having done plenty of development and having run a business myself none of that has ever required the intellectual effort it took to understand the complex exponential or maxwell's equations. In the end most software development is just not that hard and honestly, neither is most executive business stuff.
I think we have just had a complete Bozo explosion in corporate management. It makes me sick of doing engineering really. It is like you are the guy trying to make a house while everyone around you is trying to steal the house so they can have 100 for themselves, or smash it to pieces. The pointless destruction of what they do is just mind numbing. In the end the best thing to do is just be a consultant so you can go around overcharging these idiots for stuff you learnt in first year.
Absolutely agree. Many of the worlds problems (with both socialism and capitalism) come down to the fact that there are selfish dicks who ruin it for everyone.
Capitalism seems to do the best at harnessing these narcissistic dicks in a (sometimes) constructive way. Actually that is quite a remarkable achievement given that history is basically the story of how narcissist repeatedly oppress everyone else for their own benefit. Sadly it seems many people now believe it is the narcissist themselves, rather than the amelioration of them, that is the key to our current success. It's like we've gone from trying to rein in the dicks to now teaching our kids how to be the biggest dick so they can have a flash car and big house. Oh well, maybe we will reach peak narcissist soon where they start feeding on each other or something. One can always hope.
It appears to be nothing more than a kernel mode IO monitor that allows you to assign disk IO permissions to processes. In other words, it is basically just doing what any modern kernel does anyway. I don't get the power saving thing though - that sounded very snake oil like. I mean, if your system isn't compromised, what CPU operations is it reducing exactly?
I imagine this thing started out as a legitimate third-party kernel monitor (they refer to watchdog) and then some marketing goons got involved.
The linked article just appears to be an advert for Mercedes cars, but this is quite an interesting development. I don't know if it is more a response to a market gap given the current issues Germany is having with too many renewables on their grid, or part of a broader strategy around their electric vehicles. Either way it is pretty exciting to see how quickly electric infrastructure is developing.
As an EE who has spent a huge amount of time fixing cars (don't buy a Peugeot) I think electric cars will be a no-brainer for customers once the cost reduces further, and I think Tesla is trying to push that point forward by creating another mass market for batteries. If they can get it right, things could change very quickly, and I think companies like Mercedes can see this.
I hope that Elon Musk can make these businesses viable and sustainable. In an era where most corporations increase profits by finding new ways to screw over their customers and create artificial scarcity, it's pretty exciting to think that in 20 years time driving a car could be cheaper than it is now and potentially even sustainable. In a world where most of the smartest people are trying to find ways to make you click on an advert or manipulate financial markets, this sort of thing is sadly pretty rare.
I understand what you're saying, but I have worked with a lot of people in my career, including in an engineering company that still manufactured products locally (i.e. had factory workers). The reality is that most people are just not that smart, and when you spend all day hanging out with top programmers with degrees you really lose sight of just how big the ability gulf is.
The thing I observe is that the robots are not replacing workers, they are simply driving down the marginal cost of workers because that is the only way most of these people can compete. This is simply what happens in a market economy if the workers cannot own the means of production or up-skill themselves.
I don't know what the solution is but it is a pretty grim existence if you are not in the top 10-20% right now (which lets be honest, most people on slashdot are).
If we were starting out then maybe, but there are just so many things that can be plugged into an AC socket. It's pretty amazing that you can take anything from the last 50 years or more that has the right plug on it, shove it into a wall socket, and off it goes. The current system is a very good standard, and it will be hard to change things. Further, one of the original reasons Tesla (Nikola) won out is that the induction motor is an extremely good motor design (safe, reliable, quiet). Lots of things still have AC induction motors (heatpumps, your fridge) and these require, well AC. If you don't have that then you need a motor driver for them (or brushes I suppose) which is just a three-phase inverter anyway.
Also 20-40% power loss is crazy. More like 5-10% with modern semi-conductors and getting better/cheaper all the time.
In my experiences, leadership is simply being the type of person that people want to follow. Now whether they have any idea where to lead the people once they are following is a different question. Certainly the best leaders also have a solid sense of direction, but it is entirely possible, and rather common, for people to exude the other elements of leadership while lacking this key requirement.
Where else do you think the entire management consultant business has come from? It is basically the way that corporate leaders generate direction in their businesses due to their own inability to come up with ideas. This is why you do have to respect people like Gates, Jobs and Ellison. At least they could come up with their own corporate strategies that worked (even if you think they are evil).
Hahaha. The executive market is already global. How else do you think they avoid paying tax? The other benefits of being a member of the 'market' is that nobody actually cares whether you just ran your last business into the ground, parachuting out of it on a cloud of shareholder capital just before it imploded, and if you really get completely useless at keeping businesses from imploding they will just give you a cushy government advisor job. Oh and the best bit is that the members of the 'market' set the salaries for each other.
I think what you probably meant is that they should open the market up to competition from those who aren't members (don't have lots of inherited wealth). Good luck with that.
The idea of a metal-air hybrid object that has a density less than water is already quite well developed. It is typically called a boat or ship. Some of them even have integrated air-cell buoyancy systems in the form of polystyrene blocks.
Indeed based on his claims, it would appear this material (apparently "one of the strongest metals for its weight ever developed") would be much more important to the aviation industry.
Actually I hope SpaceX don't get distracted by this. They are doing some incredible things, and pushing a lot of boundaries, which is not easy to do for a high profile company. At this stage they could likely bounce back from a launch failure, but lose a crew and it is all over. Best leave it to the Russians until SpaceX has got a reusable first stage sorted out. There may be more rocket explosions in that development process and at the moment the media seems to have settled down about these being ''failures''.
Stratasys was a pre-existing player in commercial 3D printing who totally missed the consumer 3D printing bandwagon and then had to buy MakerBot to get into the market. Since that acquisition they appear to have totally fluffed it. That usually means it is run by MBAs.
The logical conclusion is that they just need to wait for someone to start a MakerBot 2.0 and then they can acquire and destroy the future a second time. Maybe the MakerBot founder's non-competes are running out soon?
I was an embedded developer for many years. It is just a totally different way of thinking. Embedded guys are always writing the same thing again from scratch. They also are obsessed with knowing exactly what is going on. Before I got into high level software development, the idea of dumping someone else's library into my carefully constructed embedded code made me cringe.
The other issue is that embedded guys can think they know it all, because they normally understand how a line of code they write affects things right down to the electrons and holes in the chip's transistors. This narrow over-confidence totally sets them up to fail at something like crypto, where you can write the safest, neatest to-spec code in the world, and then someone just walks right around the problem. A good example was the whole BMW connected drive thing where the researchers just spoofed a 'trusted' cell station.
The other thing to keep in mind is that 'security' has become a consultant fest since Y2K (possibly before that). There are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there who will talk endless BS, charging you $500/hr to do so, and then leave you with a half finished piece of bug-ridden rubbish. I don't blame many companies for just trusting the internal dev who at least has delivered on other projects before, rather than a suit wearing chatter monkey.
The concept of private property appears to be something quite important to human society. I went to a lecture many years ago (will try to find the guy's name) by a person who was implementing market based irrigation solutions in Africa. Basically he had visited a bunch of World Vision type projects where they would fly in and dig a water bore and setup a community pump. He said everyone would celebrate and think they were doing a wonderful thing, but in a year or two they would go back to the village and find the pump broken. When they inquired as to why nobody had bothered to fix it, each person would say it wasn't their responsibility, or blame someone else for breaking it.
What he had come up with is the idea of selling small irrigation pumps to individual small block farmers. He had calculated that the pumps would increase the crop yields in a way that the cost of the pump would be paid back quite quickly, and still be affordable to an African farmer. This he thought was much more successful with people understanding the value of the property and taking care of it better.
Personally I don't think capitalism is evil. On the contrary, I think it allows the most freedom of expression of human nature. And there-in lies the problem - people are inherently a bit nasty, and capitalism does little to prevent the expression of that. In a way communism is similar (i.e. it could work if humans were nice) but I seriously doubt Marx was right that it would form naturally, and Lenin's idea of forcing it upon people just ended in the same sort of power hungry dictatorships you get from most other suppression based political systems. In other words, I don't think capitalism has lots of problems because of the system, I think it has lots of problems because of the nature of people. Now whether it is better to modify the system to attempt to suppress the worst parts of people's nature, or whether we should instead appeal to people's morality and sense of community, I haven't figure out yet. I would favour the latter, but I don't know if that is even possible any more in our highly individualistic western societies.
It's just because the world is not dominated by engineers/scientists anymore. History has shown that if you sit down and try to constructively solve a problem rather than argue about it, you can achieve some pretty incredible things. But the world has never been dominated by problem solvers. It is generally dominated by bullies who realise it is easier to steal someone else's lunch than figure out how to make more sandwiches. The world wars showed the folly of this sort of destructive, zero-sums thinking, and for a while after people worked on solving problems and creating new stuff. Now we are just quickly heading back to our old (and normal) ways.
This is why companies like Tesla are so interesting. I really hope that Musk can prove that a market led solution can bring about positive technological change. If he fails then it pretty much means we should all go re-train as lawyers. It isn't anywhere near as hard as you might think, you just have to lose hope in humanity first.
...and trying to put aside years of bad blood and bruised egos.
Wow, who would have thought there was so much glory in being the 'origins of dog' guy.
The main problem with freight logistics is not getting all your parcels into a central city depot (this is largely done at night anyway). It is getting the small parcels from the depot to all the various houses and businesses spread throughout the urban area during business hours. Unfortunately the only real solution to that second issue is to have a whole bunch of people hand delivering the packages who can ring door bells, climb stairs etc. But what these mole people have done is ignored this hard bit and said 'hey people can just walk down to the depot and their package will get whizzed away using magnets!'. But I don't want to spend 30 mins walking to and from the depot. I want someone to deliver the package to my door so I can keep working.
Personally I think the most likely solution will be autonomous milk cart type things that drive around to your house and message you so you can go out and retrieve your parcel from them. They don't need to be fast if they can be smaller and there can be more of them. Drones have a lot of issues in urban areas (where are they going to leave your package?) but could be a great solution for rural situations.
I think this is quite obvious to most engineers that have worked on safety critical systems. This whole issue is just about creating fear so some security consulting firms can make extra money. It is a tried and true method.
Every time there is an energy crisis I see a new guy on TV who has 'invented' a water powered car and just needs some money to commercialise it. Every time. They all do the same thing, have some technobabble, accept a challenge to be black-box tested by a professor at a reputable university, who writes an overly technical report explaining why it is rubbish, and then they add 'tested by the University of XXX' to their prospective to elicit even more money. It is the same formula and it works every time.