Are you familiar with the Biosphere 2 experiment? They attempted to set up an enclosed self-sustaining environment...
...and ignored all the most important advice from their scientific advisors, particularly with regard to soil bacteria, instead doing what "felt right", which was directly responsible for the disastrous results.
Biosphere 2 was an experiment that asked the question, "Can humans who ignore facts and empirically established relationships between environmental factors but instead trust their intuition and feelings create a closed, stable, habitable environment."
The answer was... and I'm sure everyone here will be shocked by this... "No."
You are assuming without lack of new stimuli in the closed environment of a space craft that humans would still evolve
Right, because completely changing virtually every aspect of the environment by locking a small number of humans in a closed, artificially-maintained ecosystem for generations won't introduce any additional selective pressure of any kind whatsoever. And you're forgetting the role of sexual selection in driving evolution independently of external environmental change.
You might complain about that, but do you - or any other industrialized nation around the world - have to fill out the sort of bullshit paperwork that we Americans have to?
I have on a couple of occasions had to file US taxes, and can say without question they are vastly more complex and difficult to understand than the Canadian tax code, which was radically simplified in the '80's by the Progressive Conservatives.
Unfortunately our current Conservative government (a bunch of social radicals typical of the modern Right, who want to implement all kinds of dramatic changes for no very good reason) is rapidly increasing the complexity of the tax code again with all kinds of special cases and exceptions based on the failed and false notion that the outcomes of such tweaks will not be to simply allow people with expensive accountants to game the system.
Wars are always expensive; we don't fight them because they produce gains, we fight them so that we can stay in the same place
What a strange thing to say. "The same place" presumably involves, in your view, thousands to millions dead, cities reduced to rubble, and factories diverted from economically productive activity to dead-weight loss generation?
I bet you live in a far more homogenous society than the US. It's as wrong as the day is long, but ethnic differences strike a deep, tribalistic chord in the flawed human soul.
And you would be wrong. Dunno about the OP, but I'm a Canadian, which is comparably pluralistic to the US, and our rate of interpersonal violence is far lower than yours, our banks are more solvent, our and governments are close to rebalancing their budgets after the downturn (though I'm not hopeful about the current federal government, as right-of-centre parties have a well-known and completely uncontroversial record of poor fiscal discipline all over the world in the past thirty years). We also have universal basic health care and our public pension system is solvent, albeit stretched. All this with two official languages and 30% of our population born someplace else.
It's not like we don't have our problems, including problems with some immigrant communities, but given comparable diversity and vastly lower rates of violence we serve as a clear counter-example to your baseless claim that social problems in the US are due to your ethnic diversity.
Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
Profit motive has nothing to do with it, and it is entirely unclear why anyone would think it did.
What is required to make nuclear power at all viable is strong, independent regulatory oversight. Without that it doesn't matter if the reactor is run by socialists--as Chernobyl was--or social democrats--as Fukushima was--or corporatists--as Three Mile Island was. In every case it has been the failure of strong, independent regulatory oversight that has been the enabler of disaster.
It is simply stupid to point your finger at one particular form of social organization and claim that if only everyone let YOU (or people very much like you) be dictator of the world then everything would be OK. This is demonstrably false. We are all corruptible (I know I am).
The problem is that nuclear reactors, due to the power density of the core, are always going to be ready to do something terribly messy and expensive, although not particularly dangerous compared to coal. And regulatory oversight will always go through lax periods, although it will rarely be as lax in social or liberal democracies as it will routinely be in socialist or corporatist states. But that means with the widespread use of fission power failures like Fukushima are inevitable, and no amount of proclaiming that you are free of one particular motive for cutting corners is ever going to change that. It just muddies the waters around the serious debate we ought to be having about how to power the world without nuclear (expensive and messy) or coal (cheap and dirty) energy.
The difference is that some idiot singled out capitalism as uniquely bad in this respect, not mentioning that all the alternatives are at least as bad, and clearly implying that a socialist or communist system would be an improvement, rather than no particular change.
Regardless of the system of economic production employed in a society, without strong independent regulatory oversight disasters like this will happen, regardless whether the individuals involved happen to belong to a group called "the government" or "the party" or "a corporation".
And the difference between socialism and capitalism is that no one has ever figured out how to make socialism resistant to the corruption endemic to all human systems, whereas capitalism has both liberal democracy and social democracy to choose from as modifications that demonstrably deal with corruption.
Any system that lacks strong, explicit checks on corruption will fail badly to serve the needs of the people. Corporatism--the actual system the US has--fails badly on this for exactly the same reason socialism fails. Both assume some magical bulwark against corruption. In the case of socialism it is "the Party" or something that is supposed to do the job. In the case of corporatism it is the equally mystical "market" that magically keeps people honest.
This isnt an argument against nuclear, its an argument about fining the hell out of people who poorly maintain their facilities
If we learned anything from the BP disaster, it is that ex post facto incentives do little or nothing to overcome the probability-blindness humans suffer from. In the case of BP, the people on the rig making the decisions weren't facing fines if they misjudged... they were facing death. They never-the-less made very bad judgments, in particular assigning a clearly failed test of well integrity a passing grade.
Why? Not because they didn't have rational incentives to judge well, but because they were humans, and therefore highly incentivized by their evolutionary history to behave irrationally--in a local, economic sense--by discounting the risk and consequences of failure. Our evolutionary history is dominated by mate competition, and mate competition has relatively low cost failures (not getting laid, this time) and very high pay-off successes (reproducing). As such we are highly tuned up to discount risks, and we see this behaviour all around us. Entire industries depend on their existence for this fundamental aspect of human behaviour--casino gambling comes to mind--so anyone who suggests humans are ever going to respond differently to ex post facto incentives is simply insane, akin to someone who insists we could fly to the Moon by flapping our arms. That isn't the kind of being we are.
So the "solution" of providing after-the-fact incentives and expecting it to alter human behaviour appropriately is no solution at all. The only thing that has ever worked to alleviate the effects of this kind of probability-blindness is pro-active oversight and regulation. Since corporations exist entirely as the result of government interference into the free market, this is a perfectly reasonable solution. Corporations cannot reasonably object to government interference in their operations given they wouldn't exist without government interference in other aspects of the free market.
If someone seriously and repeatedly complains that following the process kills their passion, it is due either to a failure of that analysis or them being in the wrong organization
This.
People who blame process are like people who blame XML, or C++, or any other tool.
The problem is not the tool. The problem is the stupidity of the people who insist on using it in inappropriate ways.
Process is never the problem. Stupidity is the problem, which leads to inappropriate processes, poor metrics and bad management.
People who complain that "process kills creativity" are just as stupid as people who implement inappropriate processes. Ironically, they lack the creativity to see how appropriate processes would enhance their productivity and freedom. As engineers say, "Form is liberating."
So basically what you are saying that since it's a bad idea for the US to implement this, it's a bad idea for everyone?
I think he's saying that his part of American society is based on paranoia and class warfare, and they like it that way.
Furthermore, most of American society is fundamentally evangelical: they believe everyone should be like them. Their paranoia extends not only to the "other" in their midst, but to anyone anywhere in the world who is the least bit different from them.
Not all Americans are like this, mind. I took the city bus in LA on occasion when I lived there (the only white person in the city who didn't have a car) and the ridership was 100% Hispanic/Latino. Even the ads were in Spanish. But while I got some odd looks--I think most of the regular riders had never seen a white person on the bus before--there was no hostility or evidence of the paranoia and xenophobia so prevalent in some other parts of American society.
Plus with this kind of train, there is no ground connection. So they would need two overhead electrical lines.
Why would the second wire have to be overhead? What's to stop this thing from dragging a ground-strap? It would have exactly the same friction running on a wire below as above, and if the concrete trough this thing would likely run in was even moderately conducting it wouldn't need an actual rail or wire for grounding at all.
Mostly, I'm curious about your thought process here, because this is the kind of channeled, associative thinking I see humans engage in all the time. Why did you think "This kind of train does not have a ground connection, so rather than drag a ground below they MUST put a ground wire above?" How does that kind of thinking work, exactly? What prevented you from thinking, "A ground wire below would have exactly the same frictional effect as a ground-wire above, and hey, if the 'track' is even a bit conductive you wouldn't even need a wire, just a conductor dragging along much like a conventional train."
My point is that you shouldn't blame the land owners for taking the payments
Is this really the entire ethos of modern America? "For enough money, I will do ANYTHING... lie, cheat, steal, contaminate ground-water... and I expect NOBODY to blame me because I REALLY NEEDED THE MONEY!"?
Well shit: I blame them, because they are amoral assholes, the lot of them, from the presidents of your banks to the poor farmers who'd rather poison their children than leave a failing business and move on to something sustainable and profitable.
Until you start blaming people for doing bad things for lots of money your country will continue to decline and decay.
It's a lot of money, and in most cases it's enough that these people have their water trucked in and wont have to worry about it.
Not totally clear on what you're saying here. That you get to decide what is enough money to contaminate everyone's water table? Really?
How about the neighbour of newly rich farmer A who is getting paid $SUFFICENT to polute everyone's environment? What are they getting out of the deal, exactly?
I really don't see how "But man I got paid a lot of money to dump poison into the water table!" justifies anything. Do you make the same argument for the Maffia guys who disposed of toxic waste by filling tanker trucks with it and then driving a few hundred miles in the interstate with an open valve leaking the stuff out? They got paid a BUNDLE, so what's the problem, right?
1) Fracking is safe and does not contaminate ground water. We know this, because it is True.
Actually, I think the "logic" is "we know this because fracking is profitable". And maybe also, "God told us to fill the Earth and subdue it, so fracking is a divinely ordained activity that cannot therefore be in any way harmful. Unless maybe you're some liberal pinko commie who lives on the land and gets water from a well instead of a good clean city water main."
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process... is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The cited research doesn't actually demonstrate this. It demonstrates that wells near fracking sites have much higher methane levels that wells that are more than 1 km from fracking sites.
However, there is a reason why fracking sites are where they are: it's where there is the highest concentration of gas in the ground, or where it's easier to extract, or it's where there is some aspect of the surface access situation that makes it easier to drill there, or... So there is the potential for a selection effect to come into play here: it may be that wells drilled in the vicinity of localities that are good candidates for fracking have higher levels of methane than those that do not.
Fracking is certainly the most plausible causal candidate, but there does need to be follow-up research on these less-plausible, but not insane, alternatives.
In the meantime, states should require that all wells within 1 km of proposed fracking sites be tested for methane levels on a yearly basis, and corporations engaged in fracking should be on the hook for the costs of these tests as well as supplying the homeowners with water if there is an increase in methane levels due to deep-methane leakage of the kind reported in this paper. Only by capturing the before-and-after picture will the situation become unequivocal.
Of course, this is the United States, with the most dysfunctional, inefficient and ineffective governments in the developed world (which is why so many Americans think 'government is bad'... because their governments are). So while my proposal would be sensible in any other country, in the US the state governments are almost certainly incompetent to execute such a simple plan. Americans just aren't able to do the things that other people in other countries manage all the time, without any fuss or bother.
if you have a better idea about how to minimize addict populations
Medicalization of addiction has lower costs and lower collateral damage compared to the ineffective, inefficient "war model" approach to the drug problem. Although it's early days yet on the Portuguese experiment, the results are at least not a disaster (which is what promoters of the war model predicted): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal Increased cannabis use coupled with decreased heroin use and lower death rate from overdoses is not a bad start, to say nothing of the beneficial effects of reducing the size of the uneconomic, deadweight loss prison-industrial complex.
So yeah, there are better ideas than the war model on how to minimize addict populations, and when you look beyond the raw numbers to the trends, particularly in Switzerland, the alternatives should be taken far more seriously than the war model, which has over thirty years driven a substantial rise in the use of cocaine and meth in the US, as well as a considerable increase in the potency of grass.
Addictive drug use should be treated like any other disease that is a public health threat, and yes, that does mean that easier legal access to highly addictive substances will indeed result in less harm from drug use, and no significant increase in the number of addicts. Or do you believe that the lack of growth in the addict population in places like Portugal over the past ten years is somehow not a fact?
They were right to be worried since China has developed a stealth fighter [wikipedia.org] from the technology stolen from that very plane.
What's the worry, exactly? In particular, what is the average time-to-reproduction of any "secret" tech that US military has? Nuclear weapons took a few years to leak. It's pretty rare for things to stay secret for more than five years. Stealth tech had been around for a lot longer than that in 1999, so it was well-past it's "sell-by" date, secrecy-wise.
You can't keep a secret if you deploy it on the battlefield, so if anyone was genuinely concerned about the tech getting out they would not have deployed it. As soon as they did it was inevitable that it would be discovered in a year or three, and it's silly to be worried about something that is inevitable.
We spend 1.8 trillion on the military industrial complex per year from taxes, and that isn't including DoD budgets or pentagon budgets. Damn straight we're gonna have crazy technology that people aren't aware of
Sorry, not following your "logic" here, as you haven't actually made an argument, just put a couple of assertions together. I'm guessing you're going for something of this form:
P1: We spend a huge amount of money every year on reduction of drug use P2: Things we spend a huge amount of money on every year get results C: Therefore we get results on reduction of drug use
I don't see any reason to believe that the US military has much in the way of tech capability that the civilian world is lacking. What they do have is incredibly robust implementations of similar technological capabilities, which are vastly more expensive.
No modern theory of gravity predicts anything else
Except Moffat's, of course.
And while every experimental anomaly is first dismissed as error, the fact (you remember those things, facts?) is that scientists have an excellent record of poking away at anomalies until a robust, consistent explanation is found. Sometimes the explanation is mundane--the Pioneer Anomaly, for example. Sometimes it is profound--the anomalous precession of the orbit of Mercury comes to mind, which was measured quite precisely in the 1850's, if I recall correctly, some sixty years before the underlying cause was found.
People who say things like this are simply ignorant of the history and timescales on which science actually operates. It is entirely implausible that a group of people who have collectively worked over hundreds of years to account for dozens of tiny numerical anomalies in extremely difficult precision measurements would suddenly throw up their hands and say, "OK, I guess we can ignore the data now!"
Thanks for posting this... the Tetlock book referenced in the paper sounds fascinating, and the work in the paper itself is worthwhile. It would be very interesting to see the same work repeated over several years, to see how the ideology effect works out in years when things happen to work out "conservatively". Also, it would be interesting to see an "influencer" variable added to the analysis. People like Nancy Pelosi and Hank Paulson and even Paul Krugman are more likely to influence the outcome of events than some other prognosticators, which may to some extent make their predictions self-fulfilling. This is a little different than the "advisor" variable that is accounted for.
Oh, and I have no idea what you mean by "Dark Matter is a bunch of bullshit"... Do you mean the anomalous rotation curves of galaxies and the general apparent excess of gravitational attraction on larger scales that is observed is due to bovine feces? Observations have to be caused by something, either observer (or analytical) error, or an underlying reductive cause. Given the Law of Universal Gravitation, positing excess mass that is not opitically observable is a clearly sensible move, which is what the various Dark Matter hypothesis are. There are other potentially viable hypotheses, but I suspect if any of them were favoured by phhysicists people who know nothing about the subject would be declaring them "bullshit" in favour of the "obvious" hypothesis of optically undetectable particles...
You don't have to understand the fundamentals to make use of the peculiar, but repeatable observations.
That "limb" you are going out on is called "ignorance". The components engineers "stick together" were invented by physicists based on discoveries arising from a deep understanding of quantum theory. Without quantum theory we would never have thought most of solid state electronics possible, much less been able to hit upon just the right combination of materials and dopants to create working transistor junctions.
Columbus discovered America by a combination of chance and ignorance (he had the diameter of the Earth wrong) but America is really really big and hard to miss. The quantum phenomena that solid state electronics depend on are subtle and hard to detect, much less design for.
However, if I was finishing high school and going to University for the first time now I would be doing medicine not physics. There are more jobs with more security, it's better paid with better working conditions and higher socio-economic status, and just as interesting.
I'm a male who was in more-or-less your position fifteen years ago. I was a post-doc at a top-tier school in Canada and had done time at top-tier schools in the US. There were expected to be one or maybe two tenure-track positions opening up in my field over the next few years, and half of my closest friends were better qualified for them than I was. I was good, but not the best, and with so few jobs schools could afford to select the best. I had two small kids and was struggling financially.
The dot-com boom meant that anyone with a little C++ experience could get a job, and while I was primarily an experimentalist I had done enough computing to qualify. It was an enormously difficult transition, but retrospectively one of the best things I've ever done.
The advantages of a PhD in physics are many. I have run my own business doing scientific and software consulting. I have worked on a variety of intellectually challenging projects while an employee of various companies, both contract and full-time. Because my graduate school and post-doctoral experience included a lot of electronics and low-level programming, I find myself well-positioned to ride the current wave in embedded systems development. Along the way I've found opportunities to be involved in genetics research due to my experience in pattern recognition algorithms from data analysis in particle physics... and so on.
The thing I recommend to people who are thinking of doing PhDs in physics is to learn as much about business as you can. The odds are probably better that you will wind up running your own business than working as a tenured professor at a first-rank school. You have to learn to think like a businessperson (a consultant friend commented recently, "When someone asks me if something is possible, I don't say yes or no, I ask how much money is available to do it.")
There are enormous rewards to managing your own career, but like anything else you need to take a few years to learn the ropes. I worked for other people for four years before striking out on my own (during the tail end of the dot-com melt-down, as it happened... my last two employment positions were terminated by the failure of the company.)
Sit down and ask yourself what skills you have, and what further skills you need to maximize the economic value of those skills. Make yourself a plan for gaining those extra skills, which might be everything from accounting to selling. Look for volunteer opportunities that will let you practice those skills with a low cost of failure. Plan for the long haul. Remember that no one is ever going to look out for you as carefully as you look out for yourself.
You're at the start of the road now, and there are plenty of forks yet to take, if you choose. There are lots of opportunities for physicists in medicine, for example. With a PhD in physics you can, with time and effort, go to some remarkable places, and make a good living along the way, and even have a lot of time for your kids (I did, running my consulting company as a "lifestyle" business that let me have the time with them when they were in their tweens and teens.)
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Are you familiar with the Biosphere 2 experiment? They attempted to set up an enclosed self-sustaining environment...
...and ignored all the most important advice from their scientific advisors, particularly with regard to soil bacteria, instead doing what "felt right", which was directly responsible for the disastrous results.
Biosphere 2 was an experiment that asked the question, "Can humans who ignore facts and empirically established relationships between environmental factors but instead trust their intuition and feelings create a closed, stable, habitable environment."
The answer was... and I'm sure everyone here will be shocked by this... "No."
You are assuming without lack of new stimuli in the closed environment of a space craft that humans would still evolve
Right, because completely changing virtually every aspect of the environment by locking a small number of humans in a closed, artificially-maintained ecosystem for generations won't introduce any additional selective pressure of any kind whatsoever. And you're forgetting the role of sexual selection in driving evolution independently of external environmental change.
You might complain about that, but do you - or any other industrialized nation around the world - have to fill out the sort of bullshit paperwork that we Americans have to?
I have on a couple of occasions had to file US taxes, and can say without question they are vastly more complex and difficult to understand than the Canadian tax code, which was radically simplified in the '80's by the Progressive Conservatives.
Unfortunately our current Conservative government (a bunch of social radicals typical of the modern Right, who want to implement all kinds of dramatic changes for no very good reason) is rapidly increasing the complexity of the tax code again with all kinds of special cases and exceptions based on the failed and false notion that the outcomes of such tweaks will not be to simply allow people with expensive accountants to game the system.
Wars are always expensive; we don't fight them because they produce gains, we fight them so that we can stay in the same place
What a strange thing to say. "The same place" presumably involves, in your view, thousands to millions dead, cities reduced to rubble, and factories diverted from economically productive activity to dead-weight loss generation?
I bet you live in a far more homogenous society than the US. It's as wrong as the day is long, but ethnic differences strike a deep, tribalistic chord in the flawed human soul.
And you would be wrong. Dunno about the OP, but I'm a Canadian, which is comparably pluralistic to the US, and our rate of interpersonal violence is far lower than yours, our banks are more solvent, our and governments are close to rebalancing their budgets after the downturn (though I'm not hopeful about the current federal government, as right-of-centre parties have a well-known and completely uncontroversial record of poor fiscal discipline all over the world in the past thirty years). We also have universal basic health care and our public pension system is solvent, albeit stretched. All this with two official languages and 30% of our population born someplace else.
It's not like we don't have our problems, including problems with some immigrant communities, but given comparable diversity and vastly lower rates of violence we serve as a clear counter-example to your baseless claim that social problems in the US are due to your ethnic diversity.
Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
Profit motive has nothing to do with it, and it is entirely unclear why anyone would think it did.
What is required to make nuclear power at all viable is strong, independent regulatory oversight. Without that it doesn't matter if the reactor is run by socialists--as Chernobyl was--or social democrats--as Fukushima was--or corporatists--as Three Mile Island was. In every case it has been the failure of strong, independent regulatory oversight that has been the enabler of disaster.
It is simply stupid to point your finger at one particular form of social organization and claim that if only everyone let YOU (or people very much like you) be dictator of the world then everything would be OK. This is demonstrably false. We are all corruptible (I know I am).
The problem is that nuclear reactors, due to the power density of the core, are always going to be ready to do something terribly messy and expensive, although not particularly dangerous compared to coal. And regulatory oversight will always go through lax periods, although it will rarely be as lax in social or liberal democracies as it will routinely be in socialist or corporatist states. But that means with the widespread use of fission power failures like Fukushima are inevitable, and no amount of proclaiming that you are free of one particular motive for cutting corners is ever going to change that. It just muddies the waters around the serious debate we ought to be having about how to power the world without nuclear (expensive and messy) or coal (cheap and dirty) energy.
Pop-quantum physics is, alas, absolutely fucking rife with nonsense
The word that comes to mind is "incoherent"...
where's the difference?
The difference is that some idiot singled out capitalism as uniquely bad in this respect, not mentioning that all the alternatives are at least as bad, and clearly implying that a socialist or communist system would be an improvement, rather than no particular change.
Regardless of the system of economic production employed in a society, without strong independent regulatory oversight disasters like this will happen, regardless whether the individuals involved happen to belong to a group called "the government" or "the party" or "a corporation".
And the difference between socialism and capitalism is that no one has ever figured out how to make socialism resistant to the corruption endemic to all human systems, whereas capitalism has both liberal democracy and social democracy to choose from as modifications that demonstrably deal with corruption.
Any system that lacks strong, explicit checks on corruption will fail badly to serve the needs of the people. Corporatism--the actual system the US has--fails badly on this for exactly the same reason socialism fails. Both assume some magical bulwark against corruption. In the case of socialism it is "the Party" or something that is supposed to do the job. In the case of corporatism it is the equally mystical "market" that magically keeps people honest.
This isnt an argument against nuclear, its an argument about fining the hell out of people who poorly maintain their facilities
If we learned anything from the BP disaster, it is that ex post facto incentives do little or nothing to overcome the probability-blindness humans suffer from. In the case of BP, the people on the rig making the decisions weren't facing fines if they misjudged... they were facing death. They never-the-less made very bad judgments, in particular assigning a clearly failed test of well integrity a passing grade.
Why? Not because they didn't have rational incentives to judge well, but because they were humans, and therefore highly incentivized by their evolutionary history to behave irrationally--in a local, economic sense--by discounting the risk and consequences of failure. Our evolutionary history is dominated by mate competition, and mate competition has relatively low cost failures (not getting laid, this time) and very high pay-off successes (reproducing). As such we are highly tuned up to discount risks, and we see this behaviour all around us. Entire industries depend on their existence for this fundamental aspect of human behaviour--casino gambling comes to mind--so anyone who suggests humans are ever going to respond differently to ex post facto incentives is simply insane, akin to someone who insists we could fly to the Moon by flapping our arms. That isn't the kind of being we are.
So the "solution" of providing after-the-fact incentives and expecting it to alter human behaviour appropriately is no solution at all. The only thing that has ever worked to alleviate the effects of this kind of probability-blindness is pro-active oversight and regulation. Since corporations exist entirely as the result of government interference into the free market, this is a perfectly reasonable solution. Corporations cannot reasonably object to government interference in their operations given they wouldn't exist without government interference in other aspects of the free market.
If someone seriously and repeatedly complains that following the process kills their passion, it is due either to a failure of that analysis or them being in the wrong organization
This.
People who blame process are like people who blame XML, or C++, or any other tool.
The problem is not the tool. The problem is the stupidity of the people who insist on using it in inappropriate ways.
Process is never the problem. Stupidity is the problem, which leads to inappropriate processes, poor metrics and bad management.
People who complain that "process kills creativity" are just as stupid as people who implement inappropriate processes. Ironically, they lack the creativity to see how appropriate processes would enhance their productivity and freedom. As engineers say, "Form is liberating."
So basically what you are saying that since it's a bad idea for the US to implement this, it's a bad idea for everyone?
I think he's saying that his part of American society is based on paranoia and class warfare, and they like it that way.
Furthermore, most of American society is fundamentally evangelical: they believe everyone should be like them. Their paranoia extends not only to the "other" in their midst, but to anyone anywhere in the world who is the least bit different from them.
Not all Americans are like this, mind. I took the city bus in LA on occasion when I lived there (the only white person in the city who didn't have a car) and the ridership was 100% Hispanic/Latino. Even the ads were in Spanish. But while I got some odd looks--I think most of the regular riders had never seen a white person on the bus before--there was no hostility or evidence of the paranoia and xenophobia so prevalent in some other parts of American society.
Plus with this kind of train, there is no ground connection. So they would need two overhead electrical lines.
Why would the second wire have to be overhead? What's to stop this thing from dragging a ground-strap? It would have exactly the same friction running on a wire below as above, and if the concrete trough this thing would likely run in was even moderately conducting it wouldn't need an actual rail or wire for grounding at all.
Mostly, I'm curious about your thought process here, because this is the kind of channeled, associative thinking I see humans engage in all the time. Why did you think "This kind of train does not have a ground connection, so rather than drag a ground below they MUST put a ground wire above?" How does that kind of thinking work, exactly? What prevented you from thinking, "A ground wire below would have exactly the same frictional effect as a ground-wire above, and hey, if the 'track' is even a bit conductive you wouldn't even need a wire, just a conductor dragging along much like a conventional train."
My point is that you shouldn't blame the land owners for taking the payments
Is this really the entire ethos of modern America? "For enough money, I will do ANYTHING... lie, cheat, steal, contaminate ground-water... and I expect NOBODY to blame me because I REALLY NEEDED THE MONEY!"?
Well shit: I blame them, because they are amoral assholes, the lot of them, from the presidents of your banks to the poor farmers who'd rather poison their children than leave a failing business and move on to something sustainable and profitable.
Until you start blaming people for doing bad things for lots of money your country will continue to decline and decay.
It's a lot of money, and in most cases it's enough that these people have their water trucked in and wont have to worry about it.
Not totally clear on what you're saying here. That you get to decide what is enough money to contaminate everyone's water table? Really?
How about the neighbour of newly rich farmer A who is getting paid $SUFFICENT to polute everyone's environment? What are they getting out of the deal, exactly?
I really don't see how "But man I got paid a lot of money to dump poison into the water table!" justifies anything. Do you make the same argument for the Maffia guys who disposed of toxic waste by filling tanker trucks with it and then driving a few hundred miles in the interstate with an open valve leaking the stuff out? They got paid a BUNDLE, so what's the problem, right?
Right?
1) Fracking is safe and does not contaminate ground water. We know this, because it is True.
Actually, I think the "logic" is "we know this because fracking is profitable". And maybe also, "God told us to fill the Earth and subdue it, so fracking is a divinely ordained activity that cannot therefore be in any way harmful. Unless maybe you're some liberal pinko commie who lives on the land and gets water from a well instead of a good clean city water main."
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process... is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The cited research doesn't actually demonstrate this. It demonstrates that wells near fracking sites have much higher methane levels that wells that are more than 1 km from fracking sites.
However, there is a reason why fracking sites are where they are: it's where there is the highest concentration of gas in the ground, or where it's easier to extract, or it's where there is some aspect of the surface access situation that makes it easier to drill there, or... So there is the potential for a selection effect to come into play here: it may be that wells drilled in the vicinity of localities that are good candidates for fracking have higher levels of methane than those that do not.
Fracking is certainly the most plausible causal candidate, but there does need to be follow-up research on these less-plausible, but not insane, alternatives.
In the meantime, states should require that all wells within 1 km of proposed fracking sites be tested for methane levels on a yearly basis, and corporations engaged in fracking should be on the hook for the costs of these tests as well as supplying the homeowners with water if there is an increase in methane levels due to deep-methane leakage of the kind reported in this paper. Only by capturing the before-and-after picture will the situation become unequivocal.
Of course, this is the United States, with the most dysfunctional, inefficient and ineffective governments in the developed world (which is why so many Americans think 'government is bad'... because their governments are). So while my proposal would be sensible in any other country, in the US the state governments are almost certainly incompetent to execute such a simple plan. Americans just aren't able to do the things that other people in other countries manage all the time, without any fuss or bother.
if you have a better idea about how to minimize addict populations
Medicalization of addiction has lower costs and lower collateral damage compared to the ineffective, inefficient "war model" approach to the drug problem. Although it's early days yet on the Portuguese experiment, the results are at least not a disaster (which is what promoters of the war model predicted): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal Increased cannabis use coupled with decreased heroin use and lower death rate from overdoses is not a bad start, to say nothing of the beneficial effects of reducing the size of the uneconomic, deadweight loss prison-industrial complex.
Even people in the US are thinking that maybe a rational, scientific, public-health based approach to drugs is better than the irrational, punitive, moralistic, war-model approach: http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/2011/01/02/eu-fea-failed-drug-war/
So yeah, there are better ideas than the war model on how to minimize addict populations, and when you look beyond the raw numbers to the trends, particularly in Switzerland, the alternatives should be taken far more seriously than the war model, which has over thirty years driven a substantial rise in the use of cocaine and meth in the US, as well as a considerable increase in the potency of grass.
Addictive drug use should be treated like any other disease that is a public health threat, and yes, that does mean that easier legal access to highly addictive substances will indeed result in less harm from drug use, and no significant increase in the number of addicts. Or do you believe that the lack of growth in the addict population in places like Portugal over the past ten years is somehow not a fact?
anonymity leading to unrestricted expression is a new invention of the internet?
Guess the kid has never heard of samizdat, or the Federalist, or any of the early Protestant pamphleteers, or, well, pretty much anything.
When the sub is in drydock the screw is kept covered with a tarp at all times, lest somebody just see the shape of it and glean anti-cavitation tech
Right, because no one can do half-decent CFD on the desktop in or the cloud yet... oh wait!
They were right to be worried since China has developed a stealth fighter [wikipedia.org] from the technology stolen from that very plane.
What's the worry, exactly? In particular, what is the average time-to-reproduction of any "secret" tech that US military has? Nuclear weapons took a few years to leak. It's pretty rare for things to stay secret for more than five years. Stealth tech had been around for a lot longer than that in 1999, so it was well-past it's "sell-by" date, secrecy-wise.
You can't keep a secret if you deploy it on the battlefield, so if anyone was genuinely concerned about the tech getting out they would not have deployed it. As soon as they did it was inevitable that it would be discovered in a year or three, and it's silly to be worried about something that is inevitable.
We spend 1.8 trillion on the military industrial complex per year from taxes, and that isn't including DoD budgets or pentagon budgets. Damn straight we're gonna have crazy technology that people aren't aware of
Sorry, not following your "logic" here, as you haven't actually made an argument, just put a couple of assertions together. I'm guessing you're going for something of this form:
P1: We spend a huge amount of money every year on reduction of drug use
P2: Things we spend a huge amount of money on every year get results
C: Therefore we get results on reduction of drug use
I don't see any reason to believe that the US military has much in the way of tech capability that the civilian world is lacking. What they do have is incredibly robust implementations of similar technological capabilities, which are vastly more expensive.
No modern theory of gravity predicts anything else
Except Moffat's, of course.
And while every experimental anomaly is first dismissed as error, the fact (you remember those things, facts?) is that scientists have an excellent record of poking away at anomalies until a robust, consistent explanation is found. Sometimes the explanation is mundane--the Pioneer Anomaly, for example. Sometimes it is profound--the anomalous precession of the orbit of Mercury comes to mind, which was measured quite precisely in the 1850's, if I recall correctly, some sixty years before the underlying cause was found.
People who say things like this are simply ignorant of the history and timescales on which science actually operates. It is entirely implausible that a group of people who have collectively worked over hundreds of years to account for dozens of tiny numerical anomalies in extremely difficult precision measurements would suddenly throw up their hands and say, "OK, I guess we can ignore the data now!"
Thanks for posting this... the Tetlock book referenced in the paper sounds fascinating, and the work in the paper itself is worthwhile. It would be very interesting to see the same work repeated over several years, to see how the ideology effect works out in years when things happen to work out "conservatively". Also, it would be interesting to see an "influencer" variable added to the analysis. People like Nancy Pelosi and Hank Paulson and even Paul Krugman are more likely to influence the outcome of events than some other prognosticators, which may to some extent make their predictions self-fulfilling. This is a little different than the "advisor" variable that is accounted for.
Oh, and I have no idea what you mean by "Dark Matter is a bunch of bullshit"... Do you mean the anomalous rotation curves of galaxies and the general apparent excess of gravitational attraction on larger scales that is observed is due to bovine feces? Observations have to be caused by something, either observer (or analytical) error, or an underlying reductive cause. Given the Law of Universal Gravitation, positing excess mass that is not opitically observable is a clearly sensible move, which is what the various Dark Matter hypothesis are. There are other potentially viable hypotheses, but I suspect if any of them were favoured by phhysicists people who know nothing about the subject would be declaring them "bullshit" in favour of the "obvious" hypothesis of optically undetectable particles...
You don't have to understand the fundamentals to make use of the peculiar, but repeatable observations.
That "limb" you are going out on is called "ignorance". The components engineers "stick together" were invented by physicists based on discoveries arising from a deep understanding of quantum theory. Without quantum theory we would never have thought most of solid state electronics possible, much less been able to hit upon just the right combination of materials and dopants to create working transistor junctions.
Columbus discovered America by a combination of chance and ignorance (he had the diameter of the Earth wrong) but America is really really big and hard to miss. The quantum phenomena that solid state electronics depend on are subtle and hard to detect, much less design for.
However, if I was finishing high school and going to University for the first time now I would be doing medicine not physics. There are more jobs with more security, it's better paid with better working conditions and higher socio-economic status, and just as interesting.
I'm a male who was in more-or-less your position fifteen years ago. I was a post-doc at a top-tier school in Canada and had done time at top-tier schools in the US. There were expected to be one or maybe two tenure-track positions opening up in my field over the next few years, and half of my closest friends were better qualified for them than I was. I was good, but not the best, and with so few jobs schools could afford to select the best. I had two small kids and was struggling financially.
The dot-com boom meant that anyone with a little C++ experience could get a job, and while I was primarily an experimentalist I had done enough computing to qualify. It was an enormously difficult transition, but retrospectively one of the best things I've ever done.
The advantages of a PhD in physics are many. I have run my own business doing scientific and software consulting. I have worked on a variety of intellectually challenging projects while an employee of various companies, both contract and full-time. Because my graduate school and post-doctoral experience included a lot of electronics and low-level programming, I find myself well-positioned to ride the current wave in embedded systems development. Along the way I've found opportunities to be involved in genetics research due to my experience in pattern recognition algorithms from data analysis in particle physics... and so on.
The thing I recommend to people who are thinking of doing PhDs in physics is to learn as much about business as you can. The odds are probably better that you will wind up running your own business than working as a tenured professor at a first-rank school. You have to learn to think like a businessperson (a consultant friend commented recently, "When someone asks me if something is possible, I don't say yes or no, I ask how much money is available to do it.")
There are enormous rewards to managing your own career, but like anything else you need to take a few years to learn the ropes. I worked for other people for four years before striking out on my own (during the tail end of the dot-com melt-down, as it happened... my last two employment positions were terminated by the failure of the company.)
Sit down and ask yourself what skills you have, and what further skills you need to maximize the economic value of those skills. Make yourself a plan for gaining those extra skills, which might be everything from accounting to selling. Look for volunteer opportunities that will let you practice those skills with a low cost of failure. Plan for the long haul. Remember that no one is ever going to look out for you as carefully as you look out for yourself.
You're at the start of the road now, and there are plenty of forks yet to take, if you choose. There are lots of opportunities for physicists in medicine, for example. With a PhD in physics you can, with time and effort, go to some remarkable places, and make a good living along the way, and even have a lot of time for your kids (I did, running my consulting company as a "lifestyle" business that let me have the time with them when they were in their tweens and teens.)