That trapeze system looks like something used in the 50s and 60s for large missle launches off USAF jets. I think the Genie used a trapeze to launch from an F104.
I don't know if we "default" to this mode of thinking even when it is logically inappropriate to the situation (like businesses being upset at someone stealing "their" customer, or as in this case) because we learned it early in our own life or it was such a successful strategy for social behavior historically that we have evolved some extraordinary "sympathy" for it. Either way, I think the term atavistic can be applied, though technically it should be "atavistic feeling" since it is not really a method of rational analysis of this sort of modern, adult situation.
Now, now. I thought YOU were the one that didn't want any invective. What happened to that?
I think that what Gus is tryin' to say here is that wealth is not limited by limited physical resources. If I tell a story to some children that makes them happy, haven't I created wealth without using up any limited resources (except in the broadest sense of time and entropy that would be only interesting to a physicist). Or did I only create wealth if their parents pay me to do it?
Actually I think that Hernando De Soto (no, the new one) has some good theories on poverty in Africa. Let's turn that around.
Why do you think people are starving in poor countries? What is the solution? Or perhaps the appropriate question is... Why isn't everyone starving? What do you think the non-starving people do differently? Are they just stealing food from the starving? If so, then why is there less starving people now than in centuries and millenia past?
"I state what should be." How noble. But consider that maybe, just perhaps, you state what you FEEL should be.
"I had it first so it should be mine" feels right to a child, too.
Maybe businessmen should get to decide for themselves who they do business with. Maybe the person who will do the most work per unit of measure getting the job really is "what should be." Just consider it.
"The problem is not with indians getting jobs, but people who were already employed getting laid off in order to find cheaper labor outside of the country."
Ah yes. The I-was-here-first school of playground ethics. Derived from the "I call 'dibs'" axiom if I recall. I'm at a loss. Everyone knows there's no ethical rebuttal to the statement "I had it first."
"I have been overwhelmed by the quality of the people who work there" Isn't that sweet.
"Let's have argument, not invective." Frankly, I'm tired of arguing these things over and over. At some point you just have to say, "keep your delusions if you want them but don't tell me what I can and can't do, if you know what's good for you." Since you seem like a nice guy, though, I'll counter offer. Forget your argument. Let's both look for the truth.
Let's start with this: "Wealth is limited by virtue of us living on a planet of limited resource that's hard to leave. Happiness and ideas do not suffer from such limitations." First things first. Define terms and state assumptions. What do you think 'wealth' is. Seriously. Is it gold? Bits of paper with numbers? Something people will trade for or make an effort to get? Do writers produce wealth? Singers? Painters? Yoga Instructors? If I am paying a prostitute for sex every week, is the total wealth of the world the same or greater after each exchange? What if we get married and she stops charging me. Does global wealth decrease? Even if we're both happier? If wealth is not tied to human happiness, what use is it? I suspect you have bought into a zero-sum game, philosophy that I'd suggest you carefully re-examine. I suspect you'll be less enamored with wealth redistribution and more focused on wealth creation if you defined wealth in a more modern way. Maybe not. But we obviously aren't meaning the same thing when we use the word "wealth."
""Pursuit of an efficient workplace deserves punishment? Inefficiency will make society better?" At the cost of the host nation, yes. Efficiency at the expense of your friends is wrong. Or perhaps you have no friends" Aw, I thought you didn't want invective. Well, I'll let it slide. Isn't India a "host nation" too. Isn't failing to give jobs to Indians that offer a better deal in order to give preferential treatment to Europeans doing a disservice to India as a host nation? How do you pick which host nations you should screw your customers and/or business partners to give benifits too? I'm serious. Should you ask your customers to pay higher prices to avoid paying tax money and building the infrastructure of a totalitarian state? What if the choice is between two democracies, but you like the culture of one better? Personally I think India is just as good a host nation as those in Europe or N. America. What makes you prefer European ones? Is that objective?
BTW, I have friends. But business is business. Whenever my friends do business, we are very careful to spell out specifically what the terms are. We don't want a disagreement over to either hurt the friendship, or force one of us to suffer economic losses out of a sense of loyalty. I wouldn't want my friends to buy a product from me at a higher price; I would want my friends to get a good deal. IBM doesn't have friends; it is a company. But the investors and the customers of IBM do. Do you expect one of both of them to suffer economic losses out of a sense of friendship to the people who work in the European IBM facilities? If so, are the European IBM workers really friends, or are they just manipulative jerks playing the "friends" card for their own benifit? Isn't that cronyism? What if IBM's customers and/or investors have friends all over the world? Why shouldn't they. Do you think EUians are the only ones who deserve friends? Personally, I think that it is dangerous to confuse business with friendship or relations. I'm not saying don't do business with friends, btw. I'm saying don't expect cronyism or nepotism, and spell out everyone's obligations and payments very carefully. Do you still think this is a matter of IBM investors and/or customers taking unfair advantage of their friends?
While we're on definitions and assumptions: What do you mean by "nation." Do you mean society? Or do you mean government? Do you think something that the words "ethical" and "legal" are equivalent? Do
I think an easy fix for this would be to just treat unions as what they are: corporations. Their "product" is negotiated labor. If anti-trust laws were applied to them, then unions would have to fight for who provides the best benifit to the worker at the low end and for which union gets factory contracts at the high end. It would force them to be efficient or lose market share to competing unions.
"workers, meanwhile, have given the best of themselves to a company" I suspect that if that were true, IBM wouldn't be able to afford to lay them off. Maybe you've never seen a large group of real human workers. Show me where I can get 10,000 workers that give the best of themselves to a company instead of stealing office supplies and using the photocopier for personal copies and I'll relocate.
"Wealth is a limited resource" Uh... what? That's like saying 'happiness is a limited resource', or 'ideas are a limited resource'.
"individuals and groups, a.k.a. parasites" So now individuals are parasites on nations?
"if this is just plain old cost cutting then IBM deserves to suffer as a result" Pursuit of an efficient workplace deserves punishment? Inefficiency will make society better?
None of this makes sense. Who believes such things?
"this is a class issue"
Oh, yes. Those people. Sell your poison somewhere else, comrade.
Thank God people have an incentive to produce content that is important to other people. Otherwise the internet would degenerate to people posting pictures of their cats doing cute things.
The most important cost to get down is the amortized development cost, followed by hardware costs, risk, and operations. (Being basically reusable the hardware cost problem for SpaceShip 1 might not be a problem depending on how many flights the airframe can take.) Fuel cost is the last thing to worry about.
People have been claiming that we are running out of oil since the 19th century. I am in the oil business, and I don't see evidence of it happening anytime soon. I suspect that most of the predictions of depleting oil reserves are based on economically recoverable reserves. As oil prices rise there are a lot of previously unprofitable oil reserves that suddenly become economically attractive. The exploitation of previously unprofitable oil reserves will prevent the price of oil from rising too rapidly. Furthermore, the advance of technology means that we can exploit more oil reserves profitably which will tend to drive prices down. I believe Alberta alone has over 100 billion barrels of oil that are currently out of our ability to exploit profitably. With a rise in oil prices and improving technology, that oil will come into use.
To be honest, knowing what it takes to get oil (and then gasoline), I am amazed that we can deliver it to the customer for less than they pay for soft drinks (unless your local gov't taxes it at some insane level). The capital equipment needed to get at this stuff isn't cheap: http://www.cleddau.com/oilrigphotogallery.html
I'm not saying there is an unlimted supply of oil. I am saying that I'd closely examine the assumptions of anyone who said that we were headed for an oil crash anytime soon. Eventually someone will say it and be right. Until then, there will probably be a lot more people who say it and are wrong.
There are alternatives to oil, it just doesn't make sense to use them with oil so cheap and readily available right now. When oil does start to become scarce the price rise should be slow enough that the the invisible hand of market forces will have time for those alternatives to be smoothly integrated into our economy. When should we panic over oil running out? Probably never, anymore than toolmakers worry about a flint shortage.
The problem I have with the metric system is that all the conversions are based on 10.
If I have a calculation that looks like it is an order of magnitude off, then it is probably a convesion factor... but which one? In English, I'd check inches to feet first. Where do you start in metric. They are all the same. Metric makes it too hard to catch mistakes.
Despite the claimed mathematical advanatges of metric conversions, my HP calculator seems to be able to multiply by 12 just as fast as it can by 10. I am, however, a lot less likely to get in a hurry and enter 52800 instead of 5280 than I am to mistakenly enter 10000 instead of 1000.
You don't need chickens to heat an atomic device. The decay in the "physics package" will heat the rest of the components. All they needed to do was insulate it well enough; which would surely be easier than stuffing it full of chickens.
Putting your initials on a blueprint makes you responsible for it. A good engineer should rather lose his job than sign off on an usafe (or unknown) design. Of course everything can't be checked on every design; but it is the engineer who makes the call about what assumptions to make.
Can bad engineering kill?
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Also consider a copy of "Dress for Success" and/or "Live for Success" by John T. Molloy. Not necessarily for how to dress better, after all the advice is intended for businessmen not school kids and will likely be years out of date, but for the explanations of how the author arrived at the conclusions he did. He takes a very geeky approach to figuring out how to interact with people and why it is important. It does a good job of presenting "learning social skills" as an intellectual exercise.
Better make sure he understands that regardless of what the book says, wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase at school would be a bad idea.
It is not news that politicians play politics. But everyone else around here is talking about it as if it were NOT politics.
There are pros and cons to going to the Moon again prior to Mars. We had a big debate about it at the last World Space Congress; and the Lunatics won out over the Zubrinites. There are still people out there who prefer Mars direct, but only the most rabid Martians would claim that there aren't also good reasons for going back to the moon 1st.
So why does Glenn now say that the new plan to go to the Moon again before Mars will "pull the rug out from under our scientists?" Is Glenn a rabid Mars Direct fan? Probably not, or else he would have said something right after Bush's speech. But now it is election season, and as a loyal Democrat he is doing his part for the party. Because he is a former biological test specimen for the space program, he seems to have more credibility than just an average ex-Senator would. I'm not suggesting it is some great insight; but a lot of other people here don't seem to make the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask them which would be cheaper:
Letting you keep your 2nd monitor and be productive.
Or training a new employee to do your job because you left for a better company that knows the importance of happy, productive workers.
Just the amount they'd spend drug testing the new hire would probably justify the cost of letting you keep an extra old monitor on your desk.
That trapeze system looks like something used in the 50s and 60s for large missle launches off USAF jets. I think the Genie used a trapeze to launch from an F104.
You are an idiot.
Exactly!
I don't know if we "default" to this mode of thinking even when it is logically inappropriate to the situation (like businesses being upset at someone stealing "their" customer, or as in this case) because we learned it early in our own life or it was such a successful strategy for social behavior historically that we have evolved some extraordinary "sympathy" for it. Either way, I think the term atavistic can be applied, though technically it should be "atavistic feeling" since it is not really a method of rational analysis of this sort of modern, adult situation.
"Somebody has to work!"
I'm not clear. Are you stating that as "what is" or are you stating it as "what should be?"
Now, now. I thought YOU were the one that didn't want any invective. What happened to that?
I think that what Gus is tryin' to say here is that wealth is not limited by limited physical resources. If I tell a story to some children that makes them happy, haven't I created wealth without using up any limited resources (except in the broadest sense of time and entropy that would be only interesting to a physicist). Or did I only create wealth if their parents pay me to do it?
Actually I think that Hernando De Soto (no, the new one) has some good theories on poverty in Africa. Let's turn that around.
Why do you think people are starving in poor countries? What is the solution? Or perhaps the appropriate question is... Why isn't everyone starving? What do you think the non-starving people do differently? Are they just stealing food from the starving? If so, then why is there less starving people now than in centuries and millenia past?
"I state what should be."
How noble. But consider that maybe, just perhaps, you state what you FEEL should be.
"I had it first so it should be mine" feels right to a child, too.
Maybe businessmen should get to decide for themselves who they do business with. Maybe the person who will do the most work per unit of measure getting the job really is "what should be." Just consider it.
"The problem is not with indians getting jobs, but people who were already employed getting laid off in order to find cheaper labor outside of the country."
Ah yes. The I-was-here-first school of playground ethics. Derived from the "I call 'dibs'" axiom if I recall. I'm at a loss. Everyone knows there's no ethical rebuttal to the statement "I had it first."
"I have been overwhelmed by the quality of the people who work there" Isn't that sweet.
"Let's have argument, not invective."
Frankly, I'm tired of arguing these things over and over. At some point you just have to say, "keep your delusions if you want them but don't tell me what I can and can't do, if you know what's good for you." Since you seem like a nice guy, though, I'll counter offer. Forget your argument. Let's both look for the truth.
Let's start with this: "Wealth is limited by virtue of us living on a planet of limited resource that's hard to leave. Happiness and ideas do not suffer from such limitations." First things first. Define terms and state assumptions. What do you think 'wealth' is. Seriously. Is it gold? Bits of paper with numbers? Something people will trade for or make an effort to get? Do writers produce wealth? Singers? Painters? Yoga Instructors? If I am paying a prostitute for sex every week, is the total wealth of the world the same or greater after each exchange? What if we get married and she stops charging me. Does global wealth decrease? Even if we're both happier? If wealth is not tied to human happiness, what use is it? I suspect you have bought into a zero-sum game, philosophy that I'd suggest you carefully re-examine. I suspect you'll be less enamored with wealth redistribution and more focused on wealth creation if you defined wealth in a more modern way. Maybe not. But we obviously aren't meaning the same thing when we use the word "wealth."
""Pursuit of an efficient workplace deserves punishment? Inefficiency will make society better?" At the cost of the host nation, yes. Efficiency at the expense of your friends is wrong. Or perhaps you have no friends"
Aw, I thought you didn't want invective. Well, I'll let it slide. Isn't India a "host nation" too. Isn't failing to give jobs to Indians that offer a better deal in order to give preferential treatment to Europeans doing a disservice to India as a host nation? How do you pick which host nations you should screw your customers and/or business partners to give benifits too? I'm serious. Should you ask your customers to pay higher prices to avoid paying tax money and building the infrastructure of a totalitarian state? What if the choice is between two democracies, but you like the culture of one better? Personally I think India is just as good a host nation as those in Europe or N. America. What makes you prefer European ones? Is that objective?
BTW, I have friends. But business is business. Whenever my friends do business, we are very careful to spell out specifically what the terms are. We don't want a disagreement over to either hurt the friendship, or force one of us to suffer economic losses out of a sense of loyalty. I wouldn't want my friends to buy a product from me at a higher price; I would want my friends to get a good deal. IBM doesn't have friends; it is a company. But the investors and the customers of IBM do. Do you expect one of both of them to suffer economic losses out of a sense of friendship to the people who work in the European IBM facilities? If so, are the European IBM workers really friends, or are they just manipulative jerks playing the "friends" card for their own benifit? Isn't that cronyism? What if IBM's customers and/or investors have friends all over the world? Why shouldn't they. Do you think EUians are the only ones who deserve friends? Personally, I think that it is dangerous to confuse business with friendship or relations. I'm not saying don't do business with friends, btw. I'm saying don't expect cronyism or nepotism, and spell out everyone's obligations and payments very carefully. Do you still think this is a matter of IBM investors and/or customers taking unfair advantage of their friends?
While we're on definitions and assumptions:
What do you mean by "nation." Do you mean society? Or do you mean government?
Do you think something that the words "ethical" and "legal" are equivalent? Do
I think an easy fix for this would be to just treat unions as what they are: corporations. Their "product" is negotiated labor. If anti-trust laws were applied to them, then unions would have to fight for who provides the best benifit to the worker at the low end and for which union gets factory contracts at the high end. It would force them to be efficient or lose market share to competing unions.
"workers, meanwhile, have given the best of themselves to a company"
I suspect that if that were true, IBM wouldn't be able to afford to lay them off. Maybe you've never seen a large group of real human workers. Show me where I can get 10,000 workers that give the best of themselves to a company instead of stealing office supplies and using the photocopier for personal copies and I'll relocate.
"Wealth is a limited resource"
Uh... what? That's like saying 'happiness is a limited resource', or 'ideas are a limited resource'.
"individuals and groups, a.k.a. parasites"
So now individuals are parasites on nations?
"if this is just plain old cost cutting then IBM deserves to suffer as a result"
Pursuit of an efficient workplace deserves punishment? Inefficiency will make society better?
None of this makes sense. Who believes such things?
"this is a class issue"
Oh, yes. Those people.
Sell your poison somewhere else, comrade.
I'm not sure this would be considered "sad" by either IBM stockholders or Indians.
Do you expect them to pay more for the same work just to get people with the "right" nationality or ethnicity?
Thank God people have an incentive to produce content that is important to other people. Otherwise the internet would degenerate to people posting pictures of their cats doing cute things.
The cost of fuel is insignificant compared to the other costs associated with space flight.
_ 04 _talk.ppt
http://www.jupiter-measurement.com/research/jpc
The most important cost to get down is the amortized development cost, followed by hardware costs, risk, and operations. (Being basically reusable the hardware cost problem for SpaceShip 1 might not be a problem depending on how many flights the airframe can take.) Fuel cost is the last thing to worry about.
Amen, brother.
www.jupiter-measurement.com
"We're more than just a big ball of hydrogen."
Different Century.
People have been claiming that we are running out of oil since the 19th century. I am in the oil business, and I don't see evidence of it happening anytime soon. I suspect that most of the predictions of depleting oil reserves are based on economically recoverable reserves. As oil prices rise there are a lot of previously unprofitable oil reserves that suddenly become economically attractive. The exploitation of previously unprofitable oil reserves will prevent the price of oil from rising too rapidly. Furthermore, the advance of technology means that we can exploit more oil reserves profitably which will tend to drive prices down. I believe Alberta alone has over 100 billion barrels of oil that are currently out of our ability to exploit profitably. With a rise in oil prices and improving technology, that oil will come into use.
To be honest, knowing what it takes to get oil (and then gasoline), I am amazed that we can deliver it to the customer for less than they pay for soft drinks (unless your local gov't taxes it at some insane level). The capital equipment needed to get at this stuff isn't cheap: http://www.cleddau.com/oilrigphotogallery.html
I'm not saying there is an unlimted supply of oil. I am saying that I'd closely examine the assumptions of anyone who said that we were headed for an oil crash anytime soon. Eventually someone will say it and be right. Until then, there will probably be a lot more people who say it and are wrong.
There are alternatives to oil, it just doesn't make sense to use them with oil so cheap and readily available right now. When oil does start to become scarce the price rise should be slow enough that the the invisible hand of market forces will have time for those alternatives to be smoothly integrated into our economy. When should we panic over oil running out? Probably never, anymore than toolmakers worry about a flint shortage.
If you want fewer keystrokes, why are you using a TI?
(I'll take "I'm still in high school and my teacher makes me use it" as an acceptable excuse for having a TI over an HP)
The problem I have with the metric system is that all the conversions are based on 10.
If I have a calculation that looks like it is an order of magnitude off, then it is probably a convesion factor... but which one? In English, I'd check inches to feet first. Where do you start in metric. They are all the same. Metric makes it too hard to catch mistakes.
Despite the claimed mathematical advanatges of metric conversions, my HP calculator seems to be able to multiply by 12 just as fast as it can by 10. I am, however, a lot less likely to get in a hurry and enter 52800 instead of 5280 than I am to mistakenly enter 10000 instead of 1000.
You don't need chickens to heat an atomic device. The decay in the "physics package" will heat the rest of the components. All they needed to do was insulate it well enough; which would surely be easier than stuffing it full of chickens.
www.usda.gov/rus/regs/info/100-1/title_i.htm
www.rurdev.usda.gov/rd/newsroom/1999/63rea.htm
It reminds me of something from half a century before THAT.
http://www.flyingmoose.org/truthfic/edison.htm
The engineer.
Putting your initials on a blueprint makes you responsible for it. A good engineer should rather lose his job than sign off on an usafe (or unknown) design. Of course everything can't be checked on every design; but it is the engineer who makes the call about what assumptions to make.
Isn't that the same question?
Also consider a copy of "Dress for Success" and/or "Live for Success" by John T. Molloy. Not necessarily for how to dress better, after all the advice is intended for businessmen not school kids and will likely be years out of date, but for the explanations of how the author arrived at the conclusions he did. He takes a very geeky approach to figuring out how to interact with people and why it is important. It does a good job of presenting "learning social skills" as an intellectual exercise.
Better make sure he understands that regardless of what the book says, wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase at school would be a bad idea.
It is not news that politicians play politics. But everyone else around here is talking about it as if it were NOT politics.
There are pros and cons to going to the Moon again prior to Mars. We had a big debate about it at the last World Space Congress; and the Lunatics won out over the Zubrinites. There are still people out there who prefer Mars direct, but only the most rabid Martians would claim that there aren't also good reasons for going back to the moon 1st.
So why does Glenn now say that the new plan to go to the Moon again before Mars will "pull the rug out from under our scientists?" Is Glenn a rabid Mars Direct fan? Probably not, or else he would have said something right after Bush's speech. But now it is election season, and as a loyal Democrat he is doing his part for the party. Because he is a former biological test specimen for the space program, he seems to have more credibility than just an average ex-Senator would. I'm not suggesting it is some great insight; but a lot of other people here don't seem to make the connection.