The metallurgist's article is more germane to the actual question. The union article addresses a much broader topic, whether or not certain jobs should be public or private. The first article is mainly personal opinion, and as such I have no dispute with it. The second article has some points I disagree with, which I'll discuss briefly.
Some of the author's criticisms about privatization are quite correct. The problem is, the public sector isn't necessarily any better. While corporations are interested in their profits, the government is primarily interested in satisfying the political ambitions of Congress and the President (who control the bureaucracy, more or less). You know what this is traditionally called? Pork. It's why the military maintains so many bases in podunk places. Ditto with highway construction funds and research grants. Corruption in the form of handing contracts to favored companies is really no different than funneling cash to pork barrel projects, it's the just people who profit change (the politicians always profit). Moreover, the bureaucrats in the system have their own interests, both individual and as a community of bureaucrats assigned a particular task. Neither the private nor the public sector really has the interests of the public in mind, and I don't know how to create a system which does.
I love this quote: "As privatization takes off, many unionized public sector employees are in danger of replacement by lower-paid, nonunion corporate employees or anonymous profit-driven technology." (emphasis mine) That sounds like traditional union rhetoric. It especially galls me when unions (in a very short-sighted, selfish manner) impede the use of technology to increase efficiency because efficiency means fewer workers or lower salaries. The effect is similar (though less direct) in the case of artificially increasing wages. However, I would never expect anyone to act differently, because all people and organizations act in their own view of their best self-interest. What bothers me is the hypocrisy of not mentioning one's own biases.
Also, a brief commentary on government workers. Back during the era of civil service reform, when they were busily dismantling the political machines and ending the patronage system, laws were instituted which made firing government workers hard. This made sense back then, because if you didn't have such laws, politicians would have no hesitation about firing government employees and replacing them with their cronies. The problem, of course, is that if you make people hard to fire for political reasons, they also become hard to fire for incompetence. Now, another issue: government wage scales. All government pay is set to be less than the pay for members of Congress (excepting the President, who gets more, and the SCOTUS justices, who I believe are paid equivalently). Then, as you go down the bureaucratic hierarchy, each level is paid proportionately less. The problem with this system? It awards seniority and hierarchy, not competence or whether an employee's skills are salable. Congressmen currently make $141,300 a year. Of course, being politicians, they also have lots of perks they don't have to pay for and other sources of funds from favor-seekers who sneak their way through the corruption laws, so their actual compensation is much higher than that. However, the bureaucrats in the hierarchies generally don't have those fringe benefits of power, so they aren't overcompensated relative to their actual salaries. Thus, jobs which in the private sector are very well-compensated (say, sysadmin) are not usually very well paid at all in the government, because the high end of the wage scales are reserved for senior management bureaucrats. What's the result of restrictive firing practies and low compensation? Hordes of incompetent workers. Don't get me wrong, there are many fine people who work for the government. But I believe the percentage of incompetents is much higher in the government than in the private sector, because the private sector pays close-to-market wages and screens out incompetents somewhat more effectively (not that the private sector is any bastion of competence, as too many Dilbert-esque examples show).
Anyway, I think the second article is pretty much wrong-headed. I don't have solutions to the problems I cited, though, so I can point out another point of view on the issue of government employees
This is all speculation. In fact, all contemplation of time travel is more or less speculation, since (obviously) no one has done the experiments. However, it is a stronger form of speculation than many other speculations made about as-yet-unobserved phenomena, mainly because our understanding of time in this deep context is not very refined. We have time-travel solutions in general relativity (GR), but partial melds of quantum mechanics (QM) and GR indicate that these classical solutions may not be correct. In essence, we can attempt to make some educated guesses, but that's it. My personal suspicion is that there are no time travel paradoxes because the wave functions representing paradoxical solutions interfere and cancel, leaving only non-paradoxical wave functions in the real universe. But, I really don't know either.
In 1964, Bell proved what is commonly known as the "no-hidden-variables" theorem. This result is more properly understood as a proof that certain aspects of quantum mechanics are incompitable with a LOCAL hidden variables theory. This theorem is quite well-known, at least among physicists with any philosophical tendencies or historical interests, and also quite solid. A fully mathematical and rigorous proof requires graduate-level quantum mechanics, though you can make an effort which captures the essence using only ideas from an upper-division undergraduate course. However, the result is not trivial and so will require both math and quantum mechanics background, and some patience to work through.
While the proof is more difficult, the result is simply stated and relatively simply understood. Bell showed, using conservation laws and the specific indeterminacy required by quantum mechanics, that a measurement of one particle in a pair of linked particles could provide the experimenter with information about the other particle regardless of the size of the spatial separation of the particles (Bell's actual proof was both more and less specific than this, but that is the essential idea). The way this information was expressed was in the form of an inequality which could not be obeyed by local hidden variables theories. In the early 1980's, Alain Aspect et al. did an experiment on a modified version of the situation Bell examined, and found that the inequality was, in fact, violated. The original experiment had statistics which were extremely skewed in favor of the quantum mechanics interpretation (some ridiculous number of standard deviations; eight comes to mind, but I'm not sure). Since then, better experiments have been done which have increased the certainty even further. Thus, Bell's theorem is very solidly established.
What does this mean? It means that local hidden variables theories are not capable of accounting for quantum effects, and so do not describe our universe. "Local" here is a technical term meaning, "no signals travel faster than the speed of light." The motivation for this is that faster than light effects, when viewed from certain reference frames: they may travel backwards in time, generating causality paradoxes and all sorts of other nonsense. "Hidden variables" means that to each quantum particle a specific, determined state is assigned at all times. So a "local hidden variables theory" posits that each particle has a specific state and that these states may not influence each other with faster than light effects. These theories are what Bell proved are not able to explain quantum mechanical effects (btw, it has since been proven that Bell-like effects cannot be used to transmit information faster than light).
It looks like this post is positing a local hidden variables theory: the quantum particles carry "seeds" which do not influence each other faster than light. This is the kind of theory which Bell and Aspect disproved, so if this is the correct interpretation, it's almost certainly wrong (to whatever number of standard deviations the latest version of Aspect's experiment has shown).
I won't speak on the notion of randomness vs. pseudorandomness, since I am not well enough versed in information theory to make rigorous distinctions.
Direction as an independent quanity doesn't make much sense; position and momentum are vector quantities, so they already include notions of "direction" as normally defined.
Here I will diverge from the generally accepted to express my own opinions. The measurement problem is an unresolved problem in quantum mechanics which is too philosophical for the tastes of many working physicists. I personally think the answer lies in careful consideration of the arrow of time and decoherence, but that's mostly just speculation on my part.
I will encrypt all my files and if someone tries to enter the wrong password, my computer will be programmed to write random data on the hard drive until someone pulls the plug. If I know I'm going to die ahead of time, I'll find a 10 T magnet, pass my hard drives through that, and then burn them.
There's a reason why these manuscripts haven't been published when the author dies: they're not finished. There may be rare exceptions, where the author is approaching a final draft and dies unexpectedly, but usually publishing these unfinished works is a disservice to the author's record. I suspect in many cases it is scumming for cash by the people who get the rights in the authors' estate.
Slashdot Mirror
The metallurgist's article is more germane to the actual question. The union article addresses a much broader topic, whether or not certain jobs should be public or private. The first article is mainly personal opinion, and as such I have no dispute with it. The second article has some points I disagree with, which I'll discuss briefly.
Some of the author's criticisms about privatization are quite correct. The problem is, the public sector isn't necessarily any better. While corporations are interested in their profits, the government is primarily interested in satisfying the political ambitions of Congress and the President (who control the bureaucracy, more or less). You know what this is traditionally called? Pork. It's why the military maintains so many bases in podunk places. Ditto with highway construction funds and research grants. Corruption in the form of handing contracts to favored companies is really no different than funneling cash to pork barrel projects, it's the just people who profit change (the politicians always profit). Moreover, the bureaucrats in the system have their own interests, both individual and as a community of bureaucrats assigned a particular task. Neither the private nor the public sector really has the interests of the public in mind, and I don't know how to create a system which does.
I love this quote: "As privatization takes off, many unionized public sector employees are in danger of replacement by lower-paid, nonunion corporate employees or anonymous profit-driven technology ." (emphasis mine) That sounds like traditional union rhetoric. It especially galls me when unions (in a very short-sighted, selfish manner) impede the use of technology to increase efficiency because efficiency means fewer workers or lower salaries. The effect is similar (though less direct) in the case of artificially increasing wages. However, I would never expect anyone to act differently, because all people and organizations act in their own view of their best self-interest. What bothers me is the hypocrisy of not mentioning one's own biases.
Also, a brief commentary on government workers. Back during the era of civil service reform, when they were busily dismantling the political machines and ending the patronage system, laws were instituted which made firing government workers hard. This made sense back then, because if you didn't have such laws, politicians would have no hesitation about firing government employees and replacing them with their cronies. The problem, of course, is that if you make people hard to fire for political reasons, they also become hard to fire for incompetence. Now, another issue: government wage scales. All government pay is set to be less than the pay for members of Congress (excepting the President, who gets more, and the SCOTUS justices, who I believe are paid equivalently). Then, as you go down the bureaucratic hierarchy, each level is paid proportionately less. The problem with this system? It awards seniority and hierarchy, not competence or whether an employee's skills are salable. Congressmen currently make $141,300 a year. Of course, being politicians, they also have lots of perks they don't have to pay for and other sources of funds from favor-seekers who sneak their way through the corruption laws, so their actual compensation is much higher than that. However, the bureaucrats in the hierarchies generally don't have those fringe benefits of power, so they aren't overcompensated relative to their actual salaries. Thus, jobs which in the private sector are very well-compensated (say, sysadmin) are not usually very well paid at all in the government, because the high end of the wage scales are reserved for senior management bureaucrats. What's the result of restrictive firing practies and low compensation? Hordes of incompetent workers. Don't get me wrong, there are many fine people who work for the government. But I believe the percentage of incompetents is much higher in the government than in the private sector, because the private sector pays close-to-market wages and screens out incompetents somewhat more effectively (not that the private sector is any bastion of competence, as too many Dilbert-esque examples show).
Anyway, I think the second article is pretty much wrong-headed. I don't have solutions to the problems I cited, though, so I can point out another point of view on the issue of government employees
This is all speculation. In fact, all contemplation of time travel is more or less speculation, since (obviously) no one has done the experiments. However, it is a stronger form of speculation than many other speculations made about as-yet-unobserved phenomena, mainly because our understanding of time in this deep context is not very refined. We have time-travel solutions in general relativity (GR), but partial melds of quantum mechanics (QM) and GR indicate that these classical solutions may not be correct. In essence, we can attempt to make some educated guesses, but that's it. My personal suspicion is that there are no time travel paradoxes because the wave functions representing paradoxical solutions interfere and cancel, leaving only non-paradoxical wave functions in the real universe. But, I really don't know either.
In 1964, Bell proved what is commonly known as the "no-hidden-variables" theorem. This result is more properly understood as a proof that certain aspects of quantum mechanics are incompitable with a LOCAL hidden variables theory. This theorem is quite well-known, at least among physicists with any philosophical tendencies or historical interests, and also quite solid. A fully mathematical and rigorous proof requires graduate-level quantum mechanics, though you can make an effort which captures the essence using only ideas from an upper-division undergraduate course. However, the result is not trivial and so will require both math and quantum mechanics background, and some patience to work through.
While the proof is more difficult, the result is simply stated and relatively simply understood. Bell showed, using conservation laws and the specific indeterminacy required by quantum mechanics, that a measurement of one particle in a pair of linked particles could provide the experimenter with information about the other particle regardless of the size of the spatial separation of the particles (Bell's actual proof was both more and less specific than this, but that is the essential idea). The way this information was expressed was in the form of an inequality which could not be obeyed by local hidden variables theories. In the early 1980's, Alain Aspect et al. did an experiment on a modified version of the situation Bell examined, and found that the inequality was, in fact, violated. The original experiment had statistics which were extremely skewed in favor of the quantum mechanics interpretation (some ridiculous number of standard deviations; eight comes to mind, but I'm not sure). Since then, better experiments have been done which have increased the certainty even further. Thus, Bell's theorem is very solidly established.
What does this mean? It means that local hidden variables theories are not capable of accounting for quantum effects, and so do not describe our universe. "Local" here is a technical term meaning, "no signals travel faster than the speed of light." The motivation for this is that faster than light effects, when viewed from certain reference frames: they may travel backwards in time, generating causality paradoxes and all sorts of other nonsense. "Hidden variables" means that to each quantum particle a specific, determined state is assigned at all times. So a "local hidden variables theory" posits that each particle has a specific state and that these states may not influence each other with faster than light effects. These theories are what Bell proved are not able to explain quantum mechanical effects (btw, it has since been proven that Bell-like effects cannot be used to transmit information faster than light).
It looks like this post is positing a local hidden variables theory: the quantum particles carry "seeds" which do not influence each other faster than light. This is the kind of theory which Bell and Aspect disproved, so if this is the correct interpretation, it's almost certainly wrong (to whatever number of standard deviations the latest version of Aspect's experiment has shown).
I won't speak on the notion of randomness vs. pseudorandomness, since I am not well enough versed in information theory to make rigorous distinctions.
Direction as an independent quanity doesn't make much sense; position and momentum are vector quantities, so they already include notions of "direction" as normally defined.
Here I will diverge from the generally accepted to express my own opinions. The measurement problem is an unresolved problem in quantum mechanics which is too philosophical for the tastes of many working physicists. I personally think the answer lies in careful consideration of the arrow of time and decoherence, but that's mostly just speculation on my part.
I will encrypt all my files and if someone tries to enter the wrong password, my computer will be programmed to write random data on the hard drive until someone pulls the plug. If I know I'm going to die ahead of time, I'll find a 10 T magnet, pass my hard drives through that, and then burn them.
There's a reason why these manuscripts haven't been published when the author dies: they're not finished. There may be rare exceptions, where the author is approaching a final draft and dies unexpectedly, but usually publishing these unfinished works is a disservice to the author's record. I suspect in many cases it is scumming for cash by the people who get the rights in the authors' estate.