"When the researchers swabbed and tested 50 shower heads from nine cities in seven different states in the US, including New York City and Denver, they found 30% of the devices posed a potential risk."
This still doesn't tell us what kind of showers they tested. Residential? Multi-unit or detached? Public showers at gyms?
And a "potential risk" is logically equivalent to "possibly perfectly safe", so why doesn't the article say, "they found 30% of the devices were possibly perfectly safe"? Or why not say something meaningful, like, "they found 30% of the devices tested positive for this bacteria, and the risk of infection is completely unknown but obviously very small because the vast majority of the users of these showers did not get sick."
Bacteria in showerheads is something that we'd obviously all like to avoid, but putting the health concern here as the lead element of the story is just misleading and dishonest, a clear attempt to sensationalize a decidedly unsensational fact that has been true for a long time with no significant increase in illness that can be traced back to it.
Would this help avoid getting sprayed with a build up of bacteria or is the stream of germs constant?
Maybe you could explain first why you are worried about that?
The actual empirical evidence is that there is a biofilm of this bug on 30% of showers tested (no demographic info given in TFA so no way of knowing what they were actually testing.) They did not, as I read it, actually measure any bacteria being sprayed out, and "It just makes sense to me" that that would happen is not a particularly interesting or informative statement.
This is a classic case of scientists measuring an input or source term and the press drawing wildly unsupported conclusions about the output or result, which they then carefully hedge in the last line of the article, saying there is no evidence that this source term actually causes any infections.
3. Cut everything out of insurance that is non-risk related.
So you're pretty much against health insurance as such, because very little of it is risk related. The varianace in health care payouts between individuals over their lifetime is rather small, a factor of ten or so, which is vastly less than the variance in genuine insurance products, which cover accidents, not certainties. But death, and years of declining health that precede it, are pretty much certainties in the modern world. Everyone gets sick, and everyone dies. So there is insufficient risk in health care to justify an insurance model.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable position, and is pretty much what the Canadian single-payer system supports, although we are still mired in archaic insurance-based accounting for parts of it.
It would be great if the US took the current reform opportunity to completely change the health care paradigm away from an insurance model and toward a public good model, with a private market in catastrophic illness insurance (which would run just like term life insurance does, and could be an easy extension of that market.)
But basic health care services are something that virtually everyone needs, like water and electricity, and there is a strong argument for treating it as a public good, like any other utility service.
But I don't think I've ever seen any mention of this in the mainstream US media
You have, you just don't understand the code-words. When the American media talks about "the free market" and "free market capitalism" they mean "our utterly corrupt system where corporate and Party interests have completely captured the organs of the State and use them to futher their own interests."
Americans call this system of plutocratic oligarchy a "free" market for historical reasons, although arguably "free" could also mean, "free of economic rationality, ethics and democratic oversight."
By "real" I mean things that obey the laws of non-contradiction and causality, which wavefunctions don't (which is why we see experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities.)
So I see this argument over whether or not spherical harmonics are "real" kind of beside the point: they are a mathematically useful decomposition of a conceptual artefact that is already ontologically problematic.
I mean, come on, does it really take a genius to realize that handing out huge mortgages to people who can't afford them is actually a bad idea?
But if you can then securitize those mortgages and sell-on the cash flow from them in the form of CDOs that are mis-rated as low-risk it can suddenly look like a good idea.
Give me a concrete example that demonstrates the absurdity of praxeology [wikipedia.org], if you can.
From the link: "An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought â" to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct."
Ergo, humans as they actually exist are substantially not "acting man" because they fight wars, which no being whose logical capacity was NOT dominated by some other, non-logical motivation for action would ever fight a war. So praxeology is not the study of humans as they actually exist, and it would be absurd to apply it as such. It is at best what we call in physics a "toy model" based on such radically simplified assumptions that we can use it as a way of clarifying certain issues, but would never think of mistaking it for something that we could bring into contact with the real world.
Have a look at the book "Overconfidence and War" to a summary of "The War Puzzle" in economics, which is the problem that no economically rational actor would ever fight a war, and what pass for "justifications" of warfare aways reach down into instinctual motivations, which are not economically rational at all.
The basic idea of Austrian economics is that the study of economics is an a priori discipline. In other words, you can't implement, from both a practical and ethical standpoint, experiments to study economics on a useful scale.
Which was nonsense when von Mises made it up and is utter nonsense now. Economics is an empircal science, just like any other. The anti-empirical roots go all the way back to Adam Smith, who used a lot of fantasy thought-experiments in "The Wealth of Nations."
In the hard sciences we do sometimes use such fantasies to motivate our empirical and theoretical investigations, and this is as it should be. But no one worthy of the name of "scientist" is so deluded as to think that investigation ought to STOP with such fantasies.
Austrian economics has a lot to offer, but until Austrians give up their irrational, anti-empirical, anti-science stance they will always be on the sidelines. If they want to say anything about the actual world the way it actually is they are engaging in empiricism, and to eschew it on the input side while embracing it on the output side isn't even self-consistent. One might even think it is evidence of intellectual dishonesty, although I think most of them are just sincerely deluded, like any other group of the faithful.
Here's a brief list of hard-core emprical sciences where it isn't practical (or possibly ethical) to implement large-scale experiments:
1) Geophysics--yet somehow plate tectonics has loads of empirical evidence behind it, despite no experiments in controlled plate movement. 2) Astrophysics--ever try to get a star into a lab? It can't be done. 3) Cosmology--if you think it's hard trying to get a star into the lab, wait 'til you try the whole universe! And doing statistics on experiments run on multiple universes... just not gonna happen! 4) Evolutionary Biology--we have yet to evolve a single new species in the lab, yet somehow still think it's not all a priori
The list goes on, and if you said to anyone that all of these sciences are "a priori disciplines" you'd be laughted out of court, and deservedly so.
This bizarre insistence on the a priori nature of economics, which has no rational, empirical basis whatsoever, is one of the major stumbling blocks to getting Austrian thinking into the mainstream.
Finally, when you say:
The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment
you are making a robust (albiet false) empirical claim.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that actual humans as evolution has created us can properly or usefully be viewed as self-interested participants working for our own "betterment" by any standard of "betterment" an economist would recognize. We are social primates in which kin-selection has probabaly played a significant role, and which have certainly been tuned up by evolution to make irrational decisions with regard to certain types of risk. Amongst other things, we fight wars, which economically rational actors NEVER would.
Really finally: if Austrians think economics is the a priori imagining of the behaviour of rational actors, why do they spend so much time commenting on the irrationalities they see? Obviously those aspects of human behaviour, being manifestly irrational (trade barriers, regulation, etc) are outside the scope of economics because they are things that no Austrian-rational actor would ever do.
As much as I loathe the fact that the previous administration abused wiretapping, maybe it's a necessary evil?
Not necessary for fighting the War on Drugs, because the War on Drugs is not necessary: anyone interested in actually reducing the harm drugs do both socially and to individuals knows that legalization and harm-reduction programs are the way to go. Look what's happening today in Portugal if you disagree. Empiricism: not just for scientists any more!
Wiretapping--with warrants--IS useful for fighting terrorism, but remember that the number of people killed by terrorists in the US in the past five years is zero, whereas the number killed by cops is considerably higher than zero. Even in Canada we've had several people who to all appearances were simply murdered by police while in custody (the police investigated themselves and found themselves innocent, remarkably enough).
Police forces and police constables are not evil, and they are necessary. But giving police more than the minimum necessary power to do their job IS evil, and extremely dangerous.
It will almost certainly show that quantum mechanics can be used to accurately describe such a complex system in a superposition of states. There is a tiny chance that it will show quantum mechanics fails in this situation, which would be earth-shattering. The huge importance of that possible result justifies doing the experiment, even though the odds of that outcome are vanishingly small.
If we are ever to replace quantum theory with something else, it will be because we find places where quantum theory fails. Large systems are one extreme, where that might happen, so it is worth looking at them even though the results are almost certainly already known.
If they can reproduce "delayed choice" and "quantum eraser" type effects on a virus, then that would really be something.
Yawn. In fairness, this kind of work needs to be done, but it is the most boring kind of science imaginable because we are as certain as anything of what the outcome will be. It would be a LOT more interesting if they FAILED to reproduce any of the expected effects of quantum weirdness, but the odds of that happening are so low that these experiments always end in disappointment (that is, with the quantum predictions validated.)
All adding more particles does is exponentially decrease the decoherence time. There is no new physics added, and if we can do it with photons we can do it with atoms and if we can do it with atoms we can do it with molecules and if we can do it with molecules we can do it with (in principle) arbitrarily complex molecular assemblies, including ones that happen to be more-or-less alive. Of course, with most living things after we isolate them sufficiently to be able to observe the phenomena of interest they won't be alive anymore, but that's beside the point.
so his punishment was fair and reasonable under the circumstances.
You don't actually say anything that can be parsed as an argument, so it isn't clear what your point is other than the completely batshit insane statement I've quoted. However, assuming you have an argument, I think it would look something like:
1) What the law says is always 100% perfectly fair and reasonable 2) Everyone ought to be equal under the law 3) Alan Turing was the same as everyone ----- Ergo, Alan Turing's treatment under the law was 100% perfectly fair and reasonable.
The reason why this conclusion is batshit insane is that your first premise is anti-empirical gibberish. What the law says is only moderately fair and reasonable most of the time, even in the most aggressively democratic countries, and it is completely unfair and unreasonable much of the time even then.
Moral judgement is higher than the law when it comes to, well, judging human action, and we can clearly see today that the law under which Turing was persecuted (yes, persecuted) was neither fair nor reasonable. It was vicious, stupid, pointless, hateful and small-minded.
Whether or not a formal apology from a politician today is warranted, the fact remains that the law was wrong by any sane standard, and the people brutalized by it might perhaps be forgiven for thinking they are owed a little bit of apology today.
Your typical usable-for-electronics semiconductor has an impurity level of like one part per billion.
Rather impure substances can be used for diodes, which is all a solar cell is. Every make a crystal radio from a lump of raw germanium?
While silicon needs to be hyperpure for decent photocell manufacture, it is not necessarily the case for organic semi-conductors (I've seen reports that talk about 99.8% pure, for example.)
I agree that all of this is unlikely, but the report is so badly mangled it's impossible to tell if the kid has built something useful or not, and it is not ENTIRELY implausible that he has.
Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor. I could easily see this kid having come up with a genuine working device, but the reporter insisting on showing the fake human-hairs-tacked-to-board thingy to play up the "oh look how clever the primitive people are they found something all your big-name scientists missed" aspect of the story.
The job of a reporter is to entertain, after all, not to inform.
So while there's a lot of major-league bogus going on here, the quality of science reporting in general, and this report in particular, is so abysmally poor that there's no real way to tell if it is the kid AND the reporter or just the reporter who are the source of bogosity.
Personally, my bet is with just the reporter, as science reporters are the biggest bunch of incompetent losers to walk the Earth.
Nah, it would be much easier to just automate the suits and use the soldiers to pilot them from 10,000 miles away like we do with most of the UAV's
Will someone please mod this guy up?
Heinlein's powered armour idea was the product of a different way of looking at the role of humans in combat, when war (which Heinlein never faced except as a civilian engineer) still carried with it some idea of a moral test for the individual. That idea was waning even then, as mindless engineers had contributed so much mechanized killing power that notions of individual heroism and whatnot hardly mattered.
Today, we very nearly have the opportunity to remove all but a very small number of humans from the front lines. Teleoperated humanoid waldos (a Heinlein idea that has stood up well) will be a big deal in the next century. Humanoid for two reasons: one is that they can go anywhere a human can go, and two is that they will be able to activate a million years of custom neural circuitry for the purposes of intimidating people. We just don't have any genes for being scared of wheeled boxes. Things that look like men, though... we've got lots of genes specially made for being scared of them.
As always, the thoughtless engineers who work on this stuff will fail to consider the consequences of putting new technology in the hands of politicians and generals. For one, consider how mechanized soldier-surrogates might be used in ways to enhance deniabiliy. They can be made essentially untracable, so you could field a few platoons of them, smash and grab, and no one would have any way of ever telling who did it. The propaganda possibilities are enormous, and that's just the first thing off the top of my head.
War in the recent past has been characterized by common soldiers not knowing why they are fighting. War in the future could plausibly involve common soldiers (and there will still be such, in the poorer nations like Iraq and Afghanistan) not knowing WHO they are fighting.
I've heard from a physicist, that we have only so much easily refinable uranium/plutonium to last until 2050 or so.
I'm not clear on why you'd ask a physicist about this. Would you ask a biologist about the economics of industrial farming? I'd rather ask someone who can reasonably expected to have professional knowledge of the field, in this case a geologist engaged in mineral exploration.
As it happens, I am a nuclear physicist, and am part of the lost generation of nuclear engineers who ended up doing other things (in my case happily and profitably) rather than pursue the pipe dream of nuclear power in the '80's and '90's. I used to believe the short-term estimates of uranium availability. Then I asked a geologist friend who makes his living prospecting (for gemstones, mostly, in his case, but he's got his ear to the ground for other opportunities, including uranium) and his opinion was that the quality of uranium mapping data was poor, and that new reserves would be found if anyone bothered to look. So he was taking the 50 - 100 years number with a large grain of salt.
Since then, I've seen reports that scientists in Japan have extracted macroscopic quantities of yellowcake from sea water in a scalable process. This means we have uranium for a hundred million years or so, if the price is right, even if land-based reserves turn out to be a bit thin.
Fission power is worth pursuing, but not to the exclusion of other renewables like wind and solar (practical extraction of uranium from sea water makes nuclear power a renewable.) Issues of toxicity, proliferation and economics continue to make nuclear power significantly less desirable than solar and wind.
Waste disposal is no big deal, but the absolutely certain and inevitable release of waste products into the environment is a matter of (slight) concern, and the rabid assurances from some pro-nuclear forces that such absolutely certain releases cannot occur does not engender trust. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. On the other hand, we now know from the badly misnamed "dead zone" around Chernobyl that the worst civil nuclear accident in history is somewhat less bad for the wildlife than simply having human beings living in the vicinity.
Proliferation is a big deal, and the fact remains that of the nations with major investments in nuclear power generation, Canada and Iran are the only ones not to pursue weapons technology (if you believe the propaganda coming out of Canada on the issue, anyway.)
Finally, the high energy density in the core and the radiation hazard to repair workers means that relatively small errors will result in a few billion dollars of sagging, somewhat radioactive metal being where your core used to be. Even pebbled bed reactors have this sort of problem. These sorts of incident are no danger to the public, but are an economic problem with nuclear power. Even relatively minor design issues that don't show up for decades can result in billions of dollars in unanticipated repair costs, as was the case with a number of CANDU units in Ontario in the '90's.
So while it's good to see nuclear taking its proper place in the overall power mix, I don't expect the fundamental problems--particularly proliferation and large repair costs from very small glitches--to go away. Unfortunately.
On a serious note, you also forgot to mention that Placebo(tm) has likely cured more ailments and saved more lives than anything that pharmacology has developed, except for antibiotics.
This is actually true: it's easy to forget that almost all of Big Pharma's money comes from stuff that is a tiny footnote to the major drugs of the 20th century. Compared to anti-biotics and vaccination, all this "blockbuster" stuff is in the statistical noise, and you could simply shut it off without materially affecting quality of life.
Americans are the most over-medicated people on the planet, and that may be one reason why they don't live as long as people in most developed countries. Iatrogenic (treatment-caused) disease due to unneeded medications may be killing Americans early. Replacing these high-priced drugs with side-effect-free placebos could actually improve American's health.
Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
This is an excellent example of the so-called "Second Best Theorem" in economics, which is a proof that the Frist Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics is completely useless as a policy tool, because an arbitrarily small deviation from ideal premises can result in an arbitrarily large deviation from ideal (Pareto optimal) outcomes.
This means that the claim in the above-liked Wikipedia article that, "The theorem supports a case for non-intervention in ideal conditions: let the markets do the work and the outcome will be Pareto efficient" is utterly irrelevant to the real-world of policy, because ideal conditions are never realized, and ANY deviation from them can produce arbitrarily perverse outcomes (and not on a good way.)
Well-designed markets with entry conditions and regulations designed to deal with empirically known issues with an unregulated market in the same goods are the appropriate tool for achieving something that is as close as possible to Pareto optimal RESULTS. Instead, free-market ideologues, anti-empiricist to the last, insist on looking only at CONDITIONS, and attacking any attempt to examine RESULTS. This lets them game the non-idealities while claiming the purity of theory, whereas in fact they are just a bunch of dishonest, ignorant sociopaths.
Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory, but it all comes down to profit margins, and general corporate laziness.
And with particular regard to the GP's point that there is stuff available at Best Buy in the US that isn't in Canada, this has mostly to do with a combination of the US having a larger population and a wider income distribution. That means that low-end items that would have a substantial market in the US simply wouldn't get picked up frequently enough in Canada to make it worth going through the added cost of importing them here.
Covering a tank with 99.99% reflective precision mirrors would get awfully expensive, and any bit of dust or grease on them would ruin the whole deal.
Which is why you would use ablative armour instead. Something with a wicked-high heat of vapourization. There's probably another group somewhere being funded by the American Department of "Defence Through Invading and Blowing Things Up" that's working on it as we speak.
Things like this laser aren't being developed for any rational reasons, because war is never the rational solution to any problem--just ask an economist if you disagree. They are being developed because people are monkeys and need this sort of thing to show how alpha they are.
The pity is that nominally rational engineers get so worked up by their idiot inner monkey that they are willing to waste their time on this sort of nonsense rather than building things that are economically useful.
Just think what would happen if they gave a weapons development program and nobody came (and if your answer is "We'd all be speaking German/Russian/Japanese/Arabic" you're thinking like a monkey, blinded by destructive weapons as the only option for dealing with conflict, not a rational being who can consider a far wider range of options that "blow stuff up" and "do nothing".)
I'm pretty sure that if you beam someone straight from 1969 to 2009, he would probably not believe his eyes. Cell phones, internet, memory cards the size of a fingernail storing gigabytes of data, ATM's, high speed trains, I doubt if he would be able to cope with all that (and more).
Now compare that to someone beaming from 1880 to 1920: automobiles have replaced horses, "radio waves" transmit sounds across the ether (which scientists say no longer exists, according to some guy named Einstein), petroleum-powered flying mahines can carry passengers in minutes over distances that used to take hours, and most homes now have something called "electricity" that powers "appliances", including machines that have replaced iceboxes. Oh, yeah: and WOMEN CAN VOTE!
The world of 1920 would be utterly mysterious to the vistor from 1880. Just giving an explanation would be long and convoluted because so many commonplace 1920 concepts would be unavailable to the person from 1880, even a technologically sophistocated one who understood how the high tech of 1880 (which just barely included electric light) worked.
Whereas the concepts of 1969 are easily stretched to cover the technology of 2009: cell phones are radiophones hooked into the phone network via local radio relay stations called "cells". The Internet is way of connecting computers together so that programs running on one computer can request data present on other computers. Memory cards use something like REALLY SMALL magnetic cores. ATMs are just like remote terminals into a central computer. High speed trains are trains that go fast.
but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer
Lifespan is one measure.
Ability of the average person to do stuff is another.
In the realm of personal communciations we've seen a big jump in the past 20 years. In everything else, we've not seen much change. Whereas from 1850 to 1950, say, the average person went from being not able to travel significantly to there being a world-wide tourist industry; power usage went from the being a home coal or wood stove to being a flick of a switch; entertainment went from reading aloud to watching a movie or TV or listening to the radio...
Medicine went from dying of bacterial or viral infection to antibiotics and vaccines.
So by that measure, which is the one you implicity invoke in your examples, the pace of change has indeed slowed radically, simply by counting the number of areas of life that have seen dramatic changes in the average person's ability to do stuff in the past 50 years as opposed to the preceding century.
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. She was born into "a world lit only by fire" for all practical purposes (the first Edison plant was a few years old).
I was born in 1962, when commerical nuclear power plants already existed and human beings had (just) orbited the Earth.
For the first half of her life medicine was mostly a matter of not getting sick. For the second half, antibiotics and vaccinces cut disease rates by orders of magnitude. This has not changed in my lifetime.
When she was born, horse, rail and ship were the only practical modes of long-distance transport. When I was born, cars and planes--which didn't even exist when she was born, had taken over, and have not changed much since.
When she was born, telegraphs were the only means of fast long-distance communciations and mass media did not exist. When I was born we had telephones, radio and TV, and the only change since has been the Internet and cell phones. This is the ONLY area of revolutionary technological change in my lifetime.
When she was born, people burned wood and coal at home. When I was born people used electricity from central generating stations that burned coal or oil, used nuclear power, or hydroelectric power.
The list of entire industries that did not exist when she was born that did when I was born would be long. The list of industries that did not exist when I was born that exist now would be short: biotech, software development (which existed in 1962 but wasn't yet an industry) and the Web. The semi-conductor industry existed, and many of the same companies back then are still around today: HP, TI, Sony, etc.
You have to understand what this argument is saying: it is not that there has been no change in the past 50 years, but that the pace of change by any measure has been much smaller than in the preceding 50 years.
While people may not agree with trademarks they are legitimate and a company has a right to protect their trademark - especially when it makes money for them.
The big open question in this case seems to me that they are not in fact protecting a sound, but rather any sound that happens to be made in a particular way: by tour guides or tourists using duck call devices (while on one of their tours.)
This is radically different than anything protected under trademark law in the US, which covers actual symbols, not generic techniques of producing something that might in context be considered one of an infinite group of vaguely similar things.
That is, suppose my company has a splatter of paint on a board as symbol, like a Jackson Pollock painting. I could trademark THAT SPATTER, but I could not under any currently known legal doctrine trademark all splatter paintings made by my clients, even if making splatter paintings happened to be part of the schtick I used to market my business.
I use this example because our eyes have greater acuity than our ears, and it is more obvious, perhaps, that every splatter painting made by every one of my hypothetical clients will be completely different from every other, so there is no possible way they can constitute "A symbol" within the meaning of the Act (at least as I understand it--IANAL etc.)
Every duck sound made by ever tour guide and tourist is completely unlike every other in duration and modulation, and only vaguely similar in pitch. The only thing they have in common is the device used to produce them, and the circumstances under which they are produced. As with my hypothetical splatter paintings, they are not therefore "A symbol" within the meaning of the Act as I understand it.
The general breakdown of abstract thinking in the United States would seem to be moving on apace, if this is really someone claiming that an infinite class of concrete sounds could constitute "A symbol."
Slashdot Mirror
"When the researchers swabbed and tested 50 shower heads from nine cities in seven different states in the US, including New York City and Denver, they found 30% of the devices posed a potential risk."
This still doesn't tell us what kind of showers they tested. Residential? Multi-unit or detached? Public showers at gyms?
And a "potential risk" is logically equivalent to "possibly perfectly safe", so why doesn't the article say, "they found 30% of the devices were possibly perfectly safe"? Or why not say something meaningful, like, "they found 30% of the devices tested positive for this bacteria, and the risk of infection is completely unknown but obviously very small because the vast majority of the users of these showers did not get sick."
Bacteria in showerheads is something that we'd obviously all like to avoid, but putting the health concern here as the lead element of the story is just misleading and dishonest, a clear attempt to sensationalize a decidedly unsensational fact that has been true for a long time with no significant increase in illness that can be traced back to it.
Would this help avoid getting sprayed with a build up of bacteria or is the stream of germs constant?
Maybe you could explain first why you are worried about that?
The actual empirical evidence is that there is a biofilm of this bug on 30% of showers tested (no demographic info given in TFA so no way of knowing what they were actually testing.) They did not, as I read it, actually measure any bacteria being sprayed out, and "It just makes sense to me" that that would happen is not a particularly interesting or informative statement.
This is a classic case of scientists measuring an input or source term and the press drawing wildly unsupported conclusions about the output or result, which they then carefully hedge in the last line of the article, saying there is no evidence that this source term actually causes any infections.
3. Cut everything out of insurance that is non-risk related.
So you're pretty much against health insurance as such, because very little of it is risk related. The varianace in health care payouts between individuals over their lifetime is rather small, a factor of ten or so, which is vastly less than the variance in genuine insurance products, which cover accidents, not certainties. But death, and years of declining health that precede it, are pretty much certainties in the modern world. Everyone gets sick, and everyone dies. So there is insufficient risk in health care to justify an insurance model.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable position, and is pretty much what the Canadian single-payer system supports, although we are still mired in archaic insurance-based accounting for parts of it.
It would be great if the US took the current reform opportunity to completely change the health care paradigm away from an insurance model and toward a public good model, with a private market in catastrophic illness insurance (which would run just like term life insurance does, and could be an easy extension of that market.)
But basic health care services are something that virtually everyone needs, like water and electricity, and there is a strong argument for treating it as a public good, like any other utility service.
But I don't think I've ever seen any mention of this in the mainstream US media
You have, you just don't understand the code-words. When the American media talks about "the free market" and "free market capitalism" they mean "our utterly corrupt system where corporate and Party interests have completely captured the organs of the State and use them to futher their own interests."
Americans call this system of plutocratic oligarchy a "free" market for historical reasons, although arguably "free" could also mean, "free of economic rationality, ethics and democratic oversight."
Depends what you mean by real
By "real" I mean things that obey the laws of non-contradiction and causality, which wavefunctions don't (which is why we see experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities.)
So I see this argument over whether or not spherical harmonics are "real" kind of beside the point: they are a mathematically useful decomposition of a conceptual artefact that is already ontologically problematic.
I mean, come on, does it really take a genius to realize that handing out huge mortgages to people who can't afford them is actually a bad idea?
But if you can then securitize those mortgages and sell-on the cash flow from them in the form of CDOs that are mis-rated as low-risk it can suddenly look like a good idea.
Give me a concrete example that demonstrates the absurdity of praxeology [wikipedia.org], if you can.
From the link: "An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought â" to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct."
Ergo, humans as they actually exist are substantially not "acting man" because they fight wars, which no being whose logical capacity was NOT dominated by some other, non-logical motivation for action would ever fight a war. So praxeology is not the study of humans as they actually exist, and it would be absurd to apply it as such. It is at best what we call in physics a "toy model" based on such radically simplified assumptions that we can use it as a way of clarifying certain issues, but would never think of mistaking it for something that we could bring into contact with the real world.
Have a look at the book "Overconfidence and War" to a summary of "The War Puzzle" in economics, which is the problem that no economically rational actor would ever fight a war, and what pass for "justifications" of warfare aways reach down into instinctual motivations, which are not economically rational at all.
The basic idea of Austrian economics is that the study of economics is an a priori discipline. In other words, you can't implement, from both a practical and ethical standpoint, experiments to study economics on a useful scale.
Which was nonsense when von Mises made it up and is utter nonsense now. Economics is an empircal science, just like any other. The anti-empirical roots go all the way back to Adam Smith, who used a lot of fantasy thought-experiments in "The Wealth of Nations."
In the hard sciences we do sometimes use such fantasies to motivate our empirical and theoretical investigations, and this is as it should be. But no one worthy of the name of "scientist" is so deluded as to think that investigation ought to STOP with such fantasies.
Austrian economics has a lot to offer, but until Austrians give up their irrational, anti-empirical, anti-science stance they will always be on the sidelines. If they want to say anything about the actual world the way it actually is they are engaging in empiricism, and to eschew it on the input side while embracing it on the output side isn't even self-consistent. One might even think it is evidence of intellectual dishonesty, although I think most of them are just sincerely deluded, like any other group of the faithful.
Here's a brief list of hard-core emprical sciences where it isn't practical (or possibly ethical) to implement large-scale experiments:
1) Geophysics--yet somehow plate tectonics has loads of empirical evidence behind it, despite no experiments in controlled plate movement.
2) Astrophysics--ever try to get a star into a lab? It can't be done.
3) Cosmology--if you think it's hard trying to get a star into the lab, wait 'til you try the whole universe! And doing statistics on experiments run on multiple universes... just not gonna happen!
4) Evolutionary Biology--we have yet to evolve a single new species in the lab, yet somehow still think it's not all a priori
The list goes on, and if you said to anyone that all of these sciences are "a priori disciplines" you'd be laughted out of court, and deservedly so.
This bizarre insistence on the a priori nature of economics, which has no rational, empirical basis whatsoever, is one of the major stumbling blocks to getting Austrian thinking into the mainstream.
Finally, when you say:
The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment
you are making a robust (albiet false) empirical claim.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that actual humans as evolution has created us can properly or usefully be viewed as self-interested participants working for our own "betterment" by any standard of "betterment" an economist would recognize. We are social primates in which kin-selection has probabaly played a significant role, and which have certainly been tuned up by evolution to make irrational decisions with regard to certain types of risk. Amongst other things, we fight wars, which economically rational actors NEVER would.
Really finally: if Austrians think economics is the a priori imagining of the behaviour of rational actors, why do they spend so much time commenting on the irrationalities they see? Obviously those aspects of human behaviour, being manifestly irrational (trade barriers, regulation, etc) are outside the scope of economics because they are things that no Austrian-rational actor would ever do.
As much as I loathe the fact that the previous administration abused wiretapping, maybe it's a necessary evil?
Not necessary for fighting the War on Drugs, because the War on Drugs is not necessary: anyone interested in actually reducing the harm drugs do both socially and to individuals knows that legalization and harm-reduction programs are the way to go. Look what's happening today in Portugal if you disagree. Empiricism: not just for scientists any more!
Wiretapping--with warrants--IS useful for fighting terrorism, but remember that the number of people killed by terrorists in the US in the past five years is zero, whereas the number killed by cops is considerably higher than zero. Even in Canada we've had several people who to all appearances were simply murdered by police while in custody (the police investigated themselves and found themselves innocent, remarkably enough).
Police forces and police constables are not evil, and they are necessary. But giving police more than the minimum necessary power to do their job IS evil, and extremely dangerous.
But what will doing this show?
It will almost certainly show that quantum mechanics can be used to accurately describe such a complex system in a superposition of states. There is a tiny chance that it will show quantum mechanics fails in this situation, which would be earth-shattering. The huge importance of that possible result justifies doing the experiment, even though the odds of that outcome are vanishingly small.
If we are ever to replace quantum theory with something else, it will be because we find places where quantum theory fails. Large systems are one extreme, where that might happen, so it is worth looking at them even though the results are almost certainly already known.
If they can reproduce "delayed choice" and "quantum eraser" type effects on a virus, then that would really be something.
Yawn. In fairness, this kind of work needs to be done, but it is the most boring kind of science imaginable because we are as certain as anything of what the outcome will be. It would be a LOT more interesting if they FAILED to reproduce any of the expected effects of quantum weirdness, but the odds of that happening are so low that these experiments always end in disappointment (that is, with the quantum predictions validated.)
All adding more particles does is exponentially decrease the decoherence time. There is no new physics added, and if we can do it with photons we can do it with atoms and if we can do it with atoms we can do it with molecules and if we can do it with molecules we can do it with (in principle) arbitrarily complex molecular assemblies, including ones that happen to be more-or-less alive. Of course, with most living things after we isolate them sufficiently to be able to observe the phenomena of interest they won't be alive anymore, but that's beside the point.
so his punishment was fair and reasonable under the circumstances.
You don't actually say anything that can be parsed as an argument, so it isn't clear what your point is other than the completely batshit insane statement I've quoted. However, assuming you have an argument, I think it would look something like:
1) What the law says is always 100% perfectly fair and reasonable
2) Everyone ought to be equal under the law
3) Alan Turing was the same as everyone
-----
Ergo, Alan Turing's treatment under the law was 100% perfectly fair and reasonable.
The reason why this conclusion is batshit insane is that your first premise is anti-empirical gibberish. What the law says is only moderately fair and reasonable most of the time, even in the most aggressively democratic countries, and it is completely unfair and unreasonable much of the time even then.
Moral judgement is higher than the law when it comes to, well, judging human action, and we can clearly see today that the law under which Turing was persecuted (yes, persecuted) was neither fair nor reasonable. It was vicious, stupid, pointless, hateful and small-minded.
Whether or not a formal apology from a politician today is warranted, the fact remains that the law was wrong by any sane standard, and the people brutalized by it might perhaps be forgiven for thinking they are owed a little bit of apology today.
Your typical usable-for-electronics semiconductor has an impurity level of like one part per billion.
Rather impure substances can be used for diodes, which is all a solar cell is. Every make a crystal radio from a lump of raw germanium?
While silicon needs to be hyperpure for decent photocell manufacture, it is not necessarily the case for organic semi-conductors (I've seen reports that talk about 99.8% pure, for example.)
I agree that all of this is unlikely, but the report is so badly mangled it's impossible to tell if the kid has built something useful or not, and it is not ENTIRELY implausible that he has.
Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor. I could easily see this kid having come up with a genuine working device, but the reporter insisting on showing the fake human-hairs-tacked-to-board thingy to play up the "oh look how clever the primitive people are they found something all your big-name scientists missed" aspect of the story.
The job of a reporter is to entertain, after all, not to inform.
So while there's a lot of major-league bogus going on here, the quality of science reporting in general, and this report in particular, is so abysmally poor that there's no real way to tell if it is the kid AND the reporter or just the reporter who are the source of bogosity.
Personally, my bet is with just the reporter, as science reporters are the biggest bunch of incompetent losers to walk the Earth.
Nah, it would be much easier to just automate the suits and use the soldiers to pilot them from 10,000 miles away like we do with most of the UAV's
Will someone please mod this guy up?
Heinlein's powered armour idea was the product of a different way of looking at the role of humans in combat, when war (which Heinlein never faced except as a civilian engineer) still carried with it some idea of a moral test for the individual. That idea was waning even then, as mindless engineers had contributed so much mechanized killing power that notions of individual heroism and whatnot hardly mattered.
Today, we very nearly have the opportunity to remove all but a very small number of humans from the front lines. Teleoperated humanoid waldos (a Heinlein idea that has stood up well) will be a big deal in the next century. Humanoid for two reasons: one is that they can go anywhere a human can go, and two is that they will be able to activate a million years of custom neural circuitry for the purposes of intimidating people. We just don't have any genes for being scared of wheeled boxes. Things that look like men, though... we've got lots of genes specially made for being scared of them.
As always, the thoughtless engineers who work on this stuff will fail to consider the consequences of putting new technology in the hands of politicians and generals. For one, consider how mechanized soldier-surrogates might be used in ways to enhance deniabiliy. They can be made essentially untracable, so you could field a few platoons of them, smash and grab, and no one would have any way of ever telling who did it. The propaganda possibilities are enormous, and that's just the first thing off the top of my head.
War in the recent past has been characterized by common soldiers not knowing why they are fighting. War in the future could plausibly involve common soldiers (and there will still be such, in the poorer nations like Iraq and Afghanistan) not knowing WHO they are fighting.
I've heard from a physicist, that we have only so much easily refinable uranium/plutonium to last until 2050 or so.
I'm not clear on why you'd ask a physicist about this. Would you ask a biologist about the economics of industrial farming? I'd rather ask someone who can reasonably expected to have professional knowledge of the field, in this case a geologist engaged in mineral exploration.
As it happens, I am a nuclear physicist, and am part of the lost generation of nuclear engineers who ended up doing other things (in my case happily and profitably) rather than pursue the pipe dream of nuclear power in the '80's and '90's. I used to believe the short-term estimates of uranium availability. Then I asked a geologist friend who makes his living prospecting (for gemstones, mostly, in his case, but he's got his ear to the ground for other opportunities, including uranium) and his opinion was that the quality of uranium mapping data was poor, and that new reserves would be found if anyone bothered to look. So he was taking the 50 - 100 years number with a large grain of salt.
Since then, I've seen reports that scientists in Japan have extracted macroscopic quantities of yellowcake from sea water in a scalable process. This means we have uranium for a hundred million years or so, if the price is right, even if land-based reserves turn out to be a bit thin.
Fission power is worth pursuing, but not to the exclusion of other renewables like wind and solar (practical extraction of uranium from sea water makes nuclear power a renewable.) Issues of toxicity, proliferation and economics continue to make nuclear power significantly less desirable than solar and wind.
Waste disposal is no big deal, but the absolutely certain and inevitable release of waste products into the environment is a matter of (slight) concern, and the rabid assurances from some pro-nuclear forces that such absolutely certain releases cannot occur does not engender trust. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. On the other hand, we now know from the badly misnamed "dead zone" around Chernobyl that the worst civil nuclear accident in history is somewhat less bad for the wildlife than simply having human beings living in the vicinity.
Proliferation is a big deal, and the fact remains that of the nations with major investments in nuclear power generation, Canada and Iran are the only ones not to pursue weapons technology (if you believe the propaganda coming out of Canada on the issue, anyway.)
Finally, the high energy density in the core and the radiation hazard to repair workers means that relatively small errors will result in a few billion dollars of sagging, somewhat radioactive metal being where your core used to be. Even pebbled bed reactors have this sort of problem. These sorts of incident are no danger to the public, but are an economic problem with nuclear power. Even relatively minor design issues that don't show up for decades can result in billions of dollars in unanticipated repair costs, as was the case with a number of CANDU units in Ontario in the '90's.
So while it's good to see nuclear taking its proper place in the overall power mix, I don't expect the fundamental problems--particularly proliferation and large repair costs from very small glitches--to go away. Unfortunately.
On a serious note, you also forgot to mention that Placebo(tm) has likely cured more ailments and saved more lives than anything that pharmacology has developed, except for antibiotics.
This is actually true: it's easy to forget that almost all of Big Pharma's money comes from stuff that is a tiny footnote to the major drugs of the 20th century. Compared to anti-biotics and vaccination, all this "blockbuster" stuff is in the statistical noise, and you could simply shut it off without materially affecting quality of life.
Americans are the most over-medicated people on the planet, and that may be one reason why they don't live as long as people in most developed countries. Iatrogenic (treatment-caused) disease due to unneeded medications may be killing Americans early. Replacing these high-priced drugs with side-effect-free placebos could actually improve American's health.
Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
This is an excellent example of the so-called "Second Best Theorem" in economics, which is a proof that the Frist Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics is completely useless as a policy tool, because an arbitrarily small deviation from ideal premises can result in an arbitrarily large deviation from ideal (Pareto optimal) outcomes.
This means that the claim in the above-liked Wikipedia article that, "The theorem supports a case for non-intervention in ideal conditions: let the markets do the work and the outcome will be Pareto efficient" is utterly irrelevant to the real-world of policy, because ideal conditions are never realized, and ANY deviation from them can produce arbitrarily perverse outcomes (and not on a good way.)
Well-designed markets with entry conditions and regulations designed to deal with empirically known issues with an unregulated market in the same goods are the appropriate tool for achieving something that is as close as possible to Pareto optimal RESULTS. Instead, free-market ideologues, anti-empiricist to the last, insist on looking only at CONDITIONS, and attacking any attempt to examine RESULTS. This lets them game the non-idealities while claiming the purity of theory, whereas in fact they are just a bunch of dishonest, ignorant sociopaths.
Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory, but it all comes down to profit margins, and general corporate laziness.
And with particular regard to the GP's point that there is stuff available at Best Buy in the US that isn't in Canada, this has mostly to do with a combination of the US having a larger population and a wider income distribution. That means that low-end items that would have a substantial market in the US simply wouldn't get picked up frequently enough in Canada to make it worth going through the added cost of importing them here.
Covering a tank with 99.99% reflective precision mirrors would get awfully expensive, and any bit of dust or grease on them would ruin the whole deal.
Which is why you would use ablative armour instead. Something with a wicked-high heat of vapourization. There's probably another group somewhere being funded by the American Department of "Defence Through Invading and Blowing Things Up" that's working on it as we speak.
Things like this laser aren't being developed for any rational reasons, because war is never the rational solution to any problem--just ask an economist if you disagree. They are being developed because people are monkeys and need this sort of thing to show how alpha they are.
The pity is that nominally rational engineers get so worked up by their idiot inner monkey that they are willing to waste their time on this sort of nonsense rather than building things that are economically useful.
Just think what would happen if they gave a weapons development program and nobody came (and if your answer is "We'd all be speaking German/Russian/Japanese/Arabic" you're thinking like a monkey, blinded by destructive weapons as the only option for dealing with conflict, not a rational being who can consider a far wider range of options that "blow stuff up" and "do nothing".)
And by balls I mean completely arbitrary.
So in essence you are saying that progress has not slowed, but progress has no meaning?
I think I detect a hint of logical inconsistency...
I'm pretty sure that if you beam someone straight from 1969 to 2009, he would probably not believe his eyes. Cell phones, internet, memory cards the size of a fingernail storing gigabytes of data, ATM's, high speed trains, I doubt if he would be able to cope with all that (and more).
Now compare that to someone beaming from 1880 to 1920: automobiles have replaced horses, "radio waves" transmit sounds across the ether (which scientists say no longer exists, according to some guy named Einstein), petroleum-powered flying mahines can carry passengers in minutes over distances that used to take hours, and most homes now have something called "electricity" that powers "appliances", including machines that have replaced iceboxes. Oh, yeah: and WOMEN CAN VOTE!
The world of 1920 would be utterly mysterious to the vistor from 1880. Just giving an explanation would be long and convoluted because so many commonplace 1920 concepts would be unavailable to the person from 1880, even a technologically sophistocated one who understood how the high tech of 1880 (which just barely included electric light) worked.
Whereas the concepts of 1969 are easily stretched to cover the technology of 2009: cell phones are radiophones hooked into the phone network via local radio relay stations called "cells". The Internet is way of connecting computers together so that programs running on one computer can request data present on other computers. Memory cards use something like REALLY SMALL magnetic cores. ATMs are just like remote terminals into a central computer. High speed trains are trains that go fast.
but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer
Lifespan is one measure.
Ability of the average person to do stuff is another.
In the realm of personal communciations we've seen a big jump in the past 20 years. In everything else, we've not seen much change. Whereas from 1850 to 1950, say, the average person went from being not able to travel significantly to there being a world-wide tourist industry; power usage went from the being a home coal or wood stove to being a flick of a switch; entertainment went from reading aloud to watching a movie or TV or listening to the radio...
Medicine went from dying of bacterial or viral infection to antibiotics and vaccines.
So by that measure, which is the one you implicity invoke in your examples, the pace of change has indeed slowed radically, simply by counting the number of areas of life that have seen dramatic changes in the average person's ability to do stuff in the past 50 years as opposed to the preceding century.
Each of these things fundamentally changed life.
My grandmother was born in 1884 and died in 1980. She was born into "a world lit only by fire" for all practical purposes (the first Edison plant was a few years old).
I was born in 1962, when commerical nuclear power plants already existed and human beings had (just) orbited the Earth.
For the first half of her life medicine was mostly a matter of not getting sick. For the second half, antibiotics and vaccinces cut disease rates by orders of magnitude. This has not changed in my lifetime.
When she was born, horse, rail and ship were the only practical modes of long-distance transport. When I was born, cars and planes--which didn't even exist when she was born, had taken over, and have not changed much since.
When she was born, telegraphs were the only means of fast long-distance communciations and mass media did not exist. When I was born we had telephones, radio and TV, and the only change since has been the Internet and cell phones. This is the ONLY area of revolutionary technological change in my lifetime.
When she was born, people burned wood and coal at home. When I was born people used electricity from central generating stations that burned coal or oil, used nuclear power, or hydroelectric power.
The list of entire industries that did not exist when she was born that did when I was born would be long. The list of industries that did not exist when I was born that exist now would be short: biotech, software development (which existed in 1962 but wasn't yet an industry) and the Web. The semi-conductor industry existed, and many of the same companies back then are still around today: HP, TI, Sony, etc.
You have to understand what this argument is saying: it is not that there has been no change in the past 50 years, but that the pace of change by any measure has been much smaller than in the preceding 50 years.
While people may not agree with trademarks they are legitimate and a company has a right to protect their trademark - especially when it makes money for them.
The big open question in this case seems to me that they are not in fact protecting a sound, but rather any sound that happens to be made in a particular way: by tour guides or tourists using duck call devices (while on one of their tours.)
This is radically different than anything protected under trademark law in the US, which covers actual symbols, not generic techniques of producing something that might in context be considered one of an infinite group of vaguely similar things.
That is, suppose my company has a splatter of paint on a board as symbol, like a Jackson Pollock painting. I could trademark THAT SPATTER, but I could not under any currently known legal doctrine trademark all splatter paintings made by my clients, even if making splatter paintings happened to be part of the schtick I used to market my business.
I use this example because our eyes have greater acuity than our ears, and it is more obvious, perhaps, that every splatter painting made by every one of my hypothetical clients will be completely different from every other, so there is no possible way they can constitute "A symbol" within the meaning of the Act (at least as I understand it--IANAL etc.)
Every duck sound made by ever tour guide and tourist is completely unlike every other in duration and modulation, and only vaguely similar in pitch. The only thing they have in common is the device used to produce them, and the circumstances under which they are produced. As with my hypothetical splatter paintings, they are not therefore "A symbol" within the meaning of the Act as I understand it.
The general breakdown of abstract thinking in the United States would seem to be moving on apace, if this is really someone claiming that an infinite class of concrete sounds could constitute "A symbol."