The practical problems of free market theory are not limited to externalities. It is quite insightful to actually read what the fathers of free market theory assumed in order to prove it had maximum efficiency.
Actually, they pretty much are limited to that. Externalities are a special case of the singular flaw with free markets, namely, that what isn't being traded on the market, such as an externality, doesn't exist to the market.
Product should have no quality difference, only price. Buyers should be perfectly informed on the product. Producers should have no fixed costs (such as taking care of work force, for instance, here the externalities comes back). Buyers and sellers should be able to deal at any time... and I forget a few others conditions.
None of these are significant factors. That's why in the real world, we speak of free markets as being markets that generally aren't regulated beyond the minimum required to have markets, heavy disincentives for fraud, and reliable trading (conditions which do impose significant constraints, but constraints which are very limited in scope).
What prevents burglaries in civilized countries is the social contract, and the fact that most people have a common moral and ethical sense that tells them it's wrong.
Imaginary social contracts, and imaginary moral/ethical sense don't stop burglaries. Consequences do.
What in the article supports your assertion? They gave a guess after they said it was only a guess. Saying they have "an idea" implies there is some proof to back up the "idea" which they do not have yet.
I think what's annoying about your question is that I completely answered it in my previous reply. The evidence I mentioned is by definition empirical proof.
And not all "pure" speculation is created equal. There is informed and uninformed speculation. Actual imagining of the crash site crosses that chasm.
Are you saying they did not do that before the original launch? I'm pretty sure they had rigorous testing before, guessing at the failure mode and then doing testing to see if your new design works to prevent your guessed failure mode is simply foolhardy.
Of course, they didn't test sufficiently! Else the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place!
I see you're just not getting it. You can't perfectly test any engineered system. But you can test to a greater degree parts of the engineered system which are likely to be causes of failure. Even when you can't determine the cause of failure, due in this case to lack of telemetry, you can always take precautionary steps for your actual deployed vehicles to both make a future failure less likely and provide better data in the cases where you are still trying to figure out a stubborn failure mode.
Almost none of which leave you without any communications whatsoever if it makes it down to the surface in one piece as the Beagle MAY have. It eliminates a whole component of the system (solar power) and a system with one whole less aspect to worry about is inherently more robust.
What makes you think that? Heat sinks and radiation sources still need to be extended just like the solar panels. And if they aren't, they're still in the way of the antenna, just like the solar panels were.
All that said I hope ExoMars does well, but I just don't think it's right to claim that it's inherantly better to use a design that we know failed rather than going forward with elements we have seen work.
We've seen solar panels work on Mars. So your argument is in error.
Being a libertarian because the state sometimes over-reaches is like refusing to drive because cars sometimes break down.
Two problems with this opinion. First, libertarians don't refuse to have a government. Sure, there are some libertarians who think we can make a state-less solution work, but that's not the opinion of the majority.
Second, the consequences of state over-reach are far more harmful than the worst of car break downs.
How about get some people brainstorming and testing some alternate options?
Yes. I gather cobalt 60 would work over the lifespan of the probe and it's almost off the shelf. As I understand it, the problem is that you need about four times the mass of RTG using cobalt 60 than you do with plutonium 238, And that makes cobalt 60 rather uncompetitive with solar panels.
systemd is modular too, if you consider it to be an OS framework
Why should you consider it to be that, when you already have Linux to fill that role? There's also the matter of what systemd will look like in the future. I see a pattern of creating unnecessary dependencies between systemd and other open source programs and components, based on the creation of unnecessary dependencies to date.
Sure, in a theoretical sense, it is modular since you have a bunch of identifiable pieces that you can separate as distinct code bases. But when a pile of those modules come in one sticky implementation bundle that you have to take or leave as an entire blob, then you lose that modularity.
To me that doesn't make any sense, since they have no idea why that design failed. They don't even know for sure it failed, perhaps the thing did hit way to hard on impact and these are the only pieces left that are together.
The article stated that they did have some idea why that design failed. They have images of the probe. In turn, this evidence indicates that the probe landed mostly intact with partial deployment of the solar panels.
Even if the craft was still whole and it was simply the petals failing to unfold, you don't know why - Dust? Cold? You'd have to guess and put in a fix based on that guess, but you wouldn't be sure.
Knowledge is imperfect. So what? There is more than enough here to repeatedly test landing and deployment. Even if the failure can't be exactly duplicated, they probably can figure out what systems were probably behind the failure.
Way better as others are saying to switch to a design (nuclear battery) without something that failed in some unknown way existing at all.
That introduces its own drawbacks and failure modes. And the reasons why they didn't choose that other system (such as not having access to plutonium 238) still apply.
See also: Xorg, Libreoffice, The GIMP, and of course the kernel itself.
Two of those projects aren't Linux and hence aren't an aspect of a Linux system. And I think we can say the philosophy is being applied to Xorg and the kernel since those two components are separate and pretty modular in their own right.
This provides more evidence supporting ground-based probes shoud be using nuclear power sources.
Nuclear power sources will need to be unfurled as well. They have to be some distance away from the more delicate electronics and sensors (especially anything trying to detect the sort of particles that the power source is generating!).
Spirit, Opportunity, Philae... when will we drop the nonsensical arguments about sending nuclear power sources to space?
How about the sensible arguments for not sending nuclear power sources? Like not having access to Plutonium 238? Solar power works as has been demonstrated multiple times on the surface of Mars with a fair number of successful projects.
Perhaps the placement of the antenna was a design flaw? Placement of the antenna that did not depend on success of unfurling is a lesson learned.
What will the point of that lesson be, if they don't build more space probes based on that design? And suppose they already knew ahead of time that this was a design flaw? Then the best you can say is that this accident confirmed that the design flaw was indeed a design flaw.
My point behind this observation is that there is an even more important lesson present here which continues to be ignored. There are considerable economies of scale to making multiple copies of a probe design. And here is one of those economies, you can actually take a "lesson learned" and use it to improve future implementation of the space probe design.
If they were to now reuse the Beagle 2 design, they would know to study and fix the solar cell unfurling mechanism in order to prevent a now proven failure mode. They would also know that the landing mechanisms mostly work (though they might have contributed in some way to the final failure mode).
Isn't it funny how people only really have problems with monolithic cultures when they don't like the monolith?
Sounds like a pretty mundane truism. I think rather the problem is that monolithic projects don't match a diverse user base well. You will have a lot of discontent because the monolithic project doesn't do everything people want it to do well.
Here, I think there's some mendacity as well on the part of Red Hat. Systemd absorbed several RedHat-run open source projects that should be stand alone (D-Bus and udev, for example) and not require a dependency on systemd. That's classic Microsoft-style "embrace and extend" behavior.
Ok, so it violates Unix philosophy as indicated, but because you can come up with a couple of other examples of software doing that, then the violation is "irrelevant"? Maybe we should get someone else's opinion instead.
The internet must be a very confusing place for you.
Why would you think that? For example, way back when, I looked up the Wikipedia page for Kim Kardassian and found out her primary career was "socialite". That was enough information for me to operate on the internet without confusion.
Do you know what a dictionary is? Hint: they describe the meaning of words as they are used in general language. In other words they give the common meanings of words in the language in question - and hence reflect he successful propaganda mentioned.
There is the complaint.
What has been observed in the real world is irrelevant. Communism is a theory, that is has been proven bunk doesn't change the details of the theory.
To the contrary, it is quite relevant. Because why should we use the viewpoint of a "bunk" theory to establish a definition rather than commonly-held real world experience? In the real world, every nation-level attempt at communism has ended up with government control of property (well, more accurately, non-personal property, you sometimes were allowed to own the clothes on your back). This includes the effort by Lenin who you quoted as one of the people with an opinion on what Communism was supposed to be.
There is another thing to keep in mind here. As a dogmatic ideology, Communism like a lot of its fellows, groups terms into good and bad connotation. Defining Communism as a wonderful stateless nirvana is IMHO a propaganda ploy to excuse the built in failure of the scheme. If the eventual outcome turns out terrible, then it's not "Communism" in the Marxist sense, by definition. You can't do anything with such impractical definitions except con people.
Neither Lenin or Engels is a economics reference. And since you complained of propaganda, why use the worst propaganda of the lot?
Communism was really described as a process, the inevitable result of the industrial revolution and capitalism.
In the real world, it was not by definition.
The end of which was a society without a State.
Whithering of the state has never been observed in the real world. Lenin didn't even try when he had the chance. To assume it happens as part of your definition just makes your definition deeply flawed.
a way of organizing a society in which the government owns the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) and there is no privately owned property
Sorry, but thermodynamics is not about how many states there are in any arbitrary system.
That's right. Instead it is Entropy which is about how many states there are in a particular system. This is the traditional interpretation of entropy in a statistical mechanical system.
There's countless states in which you can win money in a casino and only a few (such as paying for chips or inserting money into a slot machine) that they take yours - does this mean that the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that you're going to beat the house?
Every one of the "countless" states in which you win, involves you expending money, just as every one of the states in which you lose.
Is winning at the casino an increase in entropy?
Any action involves an increase in entropy.
The second law of thermodynamics cannot simply be taken out of context and shoved into whatever other context you want and then claimed to be proof that something is going to happen.
What makes you think thermodynamics is being taken out of context?
In what way does it not? With insurance someone else is paying the bill even when you fuck up. You will feel some additional pain but most of it is offloaded.
Because it's a voluntary transaction. An externality is an involuntary cost or benefit imposed by a transaction or activity.
Hospital industry is a good example of what happens when you allow externalities to run rampant. Huge increases in overall share of GDP for little measurable improvement in outcomes.
Note that you aren't actually speaking of insurance here. There are other factors inflating the cost of us health care.
I worry about the motivations of rich people because selfishness isn't automatically good: It just tends to work out over time and in aggregate. But if significant funds are allocated to fools errands because the individuals controlling these funds are acting out their psychological problems, then that's bad for all of us.
How is that worse than if they spend a lot of money to buy a fancy house or boat?
Slashdot Mirror
The practical problems of free market theory are not limited to externalities. It is quite insightful to actually read what the fathers of free market theory assumed in order to prove it had maximum efficiency.
Actually, they pretty much are limited to that. Externalities are a special case of the singular flaw with free markets, namely, that what isn't being traded on the market, such as an externality, doesn't exist to the market.
Product should have no quality difference, only price. Buyers should be perfectly informed on the product. Producers should have no fixed costs (such as taking care of work force, for instance, here the externalities comes back). Buyers and sellers should be able to deal at any time... and I forget a few others conditions.
None of these are significant factors. That's why in the real world, we speak of free markets as being markets that generally aren't regulated beyond the minimum required to have markets, heavy disincentives for fraud, and reliable trading (conditions which do impose significant constraints, but constraints which are very limited in scope).
What prevents burglaries in civilized countries is the social contract, and the fact that most people have a common moral and ethical sense that tells them it's wrong.
Imaginary social contracts, and imaginary moral/ethical sense don't stop burglaries. Consequences do.
What in the article supports your assertion? They gave a guess after they said it was only a guess. Saying they have "an idea" implies there is some proof to back up the "idea" which they do not have yet.
I think what's annoying about your question is that I completely answered it in my previous reply. The evidence I mentioned is by definition empirical proof.
And not all "pure" speculation is created equal. There is informed and uninformed speculation. Actual imagining of the crash site crosses that chasm.
Are you saying they did not do that before the original launch? I'm pretty sure they had rigorous testing before, guessing at the failure mode and then doing testing to see if your new design works to prevent your guessed failure mode is simply foolhardy.
Of course, they didn't test sufficiently! Else the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place!
I see you're just not getting it. You can't perfectly test any engineered system. But you can test to a greater degree parts of the engineered system which are likely to be causes of failure. Even when you can't determine the cause of failure, due in this case to lack of telemetry, you can always take precautionary steps for your actual deployed vehicles to both make a future failure less likely and provide better data in the cases where you are still trying to figure out a stubborn failure mode.
Almost none of which leave you without any communications whatsoever if it makes it down to the surface in one piece as the Beagle MAY have. It eliminates a whole component of the system (solar power) and a system with one whole less aspect to worry about is inherently more robust.
What makes you think that? Heat sinks and radiation sources still need to be extended just like the solar panels. And if they aren't, they're still in the way of the antenna, just like the solar panels were.
All that said I hope ExoMars does well, but I just don't think it's right to claim that it's inherantly better to use a design that we know failed rather than going forward with elements we have seen work.
We've seen solar panels work on Mars. So your argument is in error.
Being a libertarian because the state sometimes over-reaches is like refusing to drive because cars sometimes break down.
Two problems with this opinion. First, libertarians don't refuse to have a government. Sure, there are some libertarians who think we can make a state-less solution work, but that's not the opinion of the majority. Second, the consequences of state over-reach are far more harmful than the worst of car break downs.
How about get some people brainstorming and testing some alternate options?
Yes. I gather cobalt 60 would work over the lifespan of the probe and it's almost off the shelf. As I understand it, the problem is that you need about four times the mass of RTG using cobalt 60 than you do with plutonium 238, And that makes cobalt 60 rather uncompetitive with solar panels.
systemd is modular too, if you consider it to be an OS framework
Why should you consider it to be that, when you already have Linux to fill that role? There's also the matter of what systemd will look like in the future. I see a pattern of creating unnecessary dependencies between systemd and other open source programs and components, based on the creation of unnecessary dependencies to date.
Sure, in a theoretical sense, it is modular since you have a bunch of identifiable pieces that you can separate as distinct code bases. But when a pile of those modules come in one sticky implementation bundle that you have to take or leave as an entire blob, then you lose that modularity.
To me that doesn't make any sense, since they have no idea why that design failed. They don't even know for sure it failed, perhaps the thing did hit way to hard on impact and these are the only pieces left that are together.
The article stated that they did have some idea why that design failed. They have images of the probe. In turn, this evidence indicates that the probe landed mostly intact with partial deployment of the solar panels.
Even if the craft was still whole and it was simply the petals failing to unfold, you don't know why - Dust? Cold? You'd have to guess and put in a fix based on that guess, but you wouldn't be sure.
Knowledge is imperfect. So what? There is more than enough here to repeatedly test landing and deployment. Even if the failure can't be exactly duplicated, they probably can figure out what systems were probably behind the failure.
Way better as others are saying to switch to a design (nuclear battery) without something that failed in some unknown way existing at all.
That introduces its own drawbacks and failure modes. And the reasons why they didn't choose that other system (such as not having access to plutonium 238) still apply.
See also: Xorg, Libreoffice, The GIMP, and of course the kernel itself.
Two of those projects aren't Linux and hence aren't an aspect of a Linux system. And I think we can say the philosophy is being applied to Xorg and the kernel since those two components are separate and pretty modular in their own right.
This provides more evidence supporting ground-based probes shoud be using nuclear power sources.
Nuclear power sources will need to be unfurled as well. They have to be some distance away from the more delicate electronics and sensors (especially anything trying to detect the sort of particles that the power source is generating!).
Spirit, Opportunity, Philae... when will we drop the nonsensical arguments about sending nuclear power sources to space?
How about the sensible arguments for not sending nuclear power sources? Like not having access to Plutonium 238? Solar power works as has been demonstrated multiple times on the surface of Mars with a fair number of successful projects.
Perhaps the placement of the antenna was a design flaw? Placement of the antenna that did not depend on success of unfurling is a lesson learned.
What will the point of that lesson be, if they don't build more space probes based on that design? And suppose they already knew ahead of time that this was a design flaw? Then the best you can say is that this accident confirmed that the design flaw was indeed a design flaw.
My point behind this observation is that there is an even more important lesson present here which continues to be ignored. There are considerable economies of scale to making multiple copies of a probe design. And here is one of those economies, you can actually take a "lesson learned" and use it to improve future implementation of the space probe design.
If they were to now reuse the Beagle 2 design, they would know to study and fix the solar cell unfurling mechanism in order to prevent a now proven failure mode. They would also know that the landing mechanisms mostly work (though they might have contributed in some way to the final failure mode).
Isn't it funny how people only really have problems with monolithic cultures when they don't like the monolith?
Sounds like a pretty mundane truism. I think rather the problem is that monolithic projects don't match a diverse user base well. You will have a lot of discontent because the monolithic project doesn't do everything people want it to do well.
Here, I think there's some mendacity as well on the part of Red Hat. Systemd absorbed several RedHat-run open source projects that should be stand alone (D-Bus and udev, for example) and not require a dependency on systemd. That's classic Microsoft-style "embrace and extend" behavior.
Ok, so it violates Unix philosophy as indicated, but because you can come up with a couple of other examples of software doing that, then the violation is "irrelevant"? Maybe we should get someone else's opinion instead.
Also AI will still have a power switch.
Unless, of course, AI doesn't have a power switch. After all, humans don't have power switches either.
Most activities don't come with massive externalities. Free market works quite well on those.
The internet must be a very confusing place for you.
Why would you think that? For example, way back when, I looked up the Wikipedia page for Kim Kardassian and found out her primary career was "socialite". That was enough information for me to operate on the internet without confusion.
Except as noted, several definitions that say common ownership also say there is "no state".
Given that there is a state in real world cases, I don't see the point to the definitions other than to delude and con people.
I didn't "complain" of propaganda.
You wrote earlier:
Do you know what a dictionary is? Hint: they describe the meaning of words as they are used in general language. In other words they give the common meanings of words in the language in question - and hence reflect he successful propaganda mentioned.
There is the complaint.
What has been observed in the real world is irrelevant. Communism is a theory, that is has been proven bunk doesn't change the details of the theory.
To the contrary, it is quite relevant. Because why should we use the viewpoint of a "bunk" theory to establish a definition rather than commonly-held real world experience? In the real world, every nation-level attempt at communism has ended up with government control of property (well, more accurately, non-personal property, you sometimes were allowed to own the clothes on your back). This includes the effort by Lenin who you quoted as one of the people with an opinion on what Communism was supposed to be.
There is another thing to keep in mind here. As a dogmatic ideology, Communism like a lot of its fellows, groups terms into good and bad connotation. Defining Communism as a wonderful stateless nirvana is IMHO a propaganda ploy to excuse the built in failure of the scheme. If the eventual outcome turns out terrible, then it's not "Communism" in the Marxist sense, by definition. You can't do anything with such impractical definitions except con people.
"Common ownership" means government ownership at the country-level.
Communism was really described as a process, the inevitable result of the industrial revolution and capitalism.
In the real world, it was not by definition.
The end of which was a society without a State.
Whithering of the state has never been observed in the real world. Lenin didn't even try when he had the chance. To assume it happens as part of your definition just makes your definition deeply flawed.
God I hate the banality of modern pop culture
I found that my problems with modern pop culture went away when I stopped interacting with it.
by definition communism does not have a government.
By definition:
a way of organizing a society in which the government owns the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) and there is no privately owned property
So no.
Cancer is only a "broken" state because it's not preferable to you.
And my viewpoint is the one that counts for determining "broken".
Sorry, but thermodynamics is not about how many states there are in any arbitrary system.
That's right. Instead it is Entropy which is about how many states there are in a particular system. This is the traditional interpretation of entropy in a statistical mechanical system.
There's countless states in which you can win money in a casino and only a few (such as paying for chips or inserting money into a slot machine) that they take yours - does this mean that the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that you're going to beat the house?
Every one of the "countless" states in which you win, involves you expending money, just as every one of the states in which you lose.
Is winning at the casino an increase in entropy?
Any action involves an increase in entropy.
The second law of thermodynamics cannot simply be taken out of context and shoved into whatever other context you want and then claimed to be proof that something is going to happen.
What makes you think thermodynamics is being taken out of context?
In what way does it not? With insurance someone else is paying the bill even when you fuck up. You will feel some additional pain but most of it is offloaded.
Because it's a voluntary transaction. An externality is an involuntary cost or benefit imposed by a transaction or activity.
Hospital industry is a good example of what happens when you allow externalities to run rampant. Huge increases in overall share of GDP for little measurable improvement in outcomes.
Note that you aren't actually speaking of insurance here. There are other factors inflating the cost of us health care.
I worry about the motivations of rich people because selfishness isn't automatically good: It just tends to work out over time and in aggregate. But if significant funds are allocated to fools errands because the individuals controlling these funds are acting out their psychological problems, then that's bad for all of us.
How is that worse than if they spend a lot of money to buy a fancy house or boat?