Models aren't evidence by definition. And it's a reasonable concern to consider whether the axioms of evolution apply in the first place.
The huge obstacle is the assumption that societies have inheritable traits. There are examples of societies that adopt traits from successful past societies. And there are examples of societies that were unable to do because the previous society was far more advanced and the technology was needed to adopt many of the previous society's features (eg, the barbarian kingdoms that sprung up in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire).
That was a factory manufacturing and using large amounts of very hazardous chemicals under dangerous and slipshod conditions. There's nothing comparable in risk at the previously mentioned battery factory.
Hell, even if they quit making things entirely - CA will never be detroit, between IT, hollywood, tourism, service BS, etc.
Unless it drives those industries out as well. Current diversity of their economy doesn't matter, if no one stays. I think California is well on its way to be yet another history lesson on the parable of killing the golden goose.
The problem is, this bullshit has been repeated so much that even the people who made up these absurd lies are starting to believe them
I think the problem with US propaganda is that the dealers have been using the product for a long time. It's not a recent thing. Well, I guess that's only a problem if you're trying to believe it.
It's easier to innovate while standing on the shoulders of giants. Without the space program there wouldn't be any technology available for SpaceX to build upon.
Even if there were no government involvement at all, including military funding of ballistic missiles, you would still have the amateur rocketry groups. For example, a considerable bit of the development of hybrid motors was done by amateur groups over forty years. And those groups tended to focus on hybrids because the more popular liquid-fueled rockets were vastly dominated by government projects.
Get over your Libertarian delusions.
Complaining about blatant hypocrisy and the buying of politicians is "Libertarian"? Maybe you should be "Libertarian" as well.
I find it interesting how some people will completely ignore legitimate complaints and good ideas merely because there's a slight, even imaginary whiff of some ideology they happen to disagree with.
NASA does not build a damned thing. [...] SLS is being build by ATK while Orion is built by Lockheed Martin.
And ATK and Orion subcontract. So I guess nobody builds the SLS or Orion. I find it bizarre that people insist on this particular factoid as if it were relevant to anything or even true for that matter.
Someone always has to put in a defensive "But America does it too" whenever we discuss negative characteristics of China or its government. I notice the urge generally isn't there when we discuss the foibles of Europe and most other parts of the world. Even commentary on the various ongoing spying scandals tend to remember that the US isn't the only offender.
The point is the oil companies fit the analogy to *IAA better
Oil companies have nothing to do with this mess.
The solar power lobby and complain in articles, but they aren't getting the protections.
They sure are. The article is basically one long complaint about how a few states aren't giving these businesses the same protections they get in other states.
Nobody's holding a gun to the power companies' heads to do all that for free.
That's because it hasn't happened yet. When it does, the metaphorical gun will be held to the head.
But no, as the article is complaining about, the power companies also got government to protect them, creating rules restricting and banning the business model that solar companies use.
So what? At least with the current state of affairs, there are less rent-seekers messing things up.
By the way, people here ought to do themselves a favor and invest ten minutes googling primary sources before they start whining about the unfairness of solar-tech subsidies. If you do, you'll find that, worldwide, government subsidies of fossil-fuel industries run 20 - 25 times the amount of all subsidies worldwide of solar and wind technologies combined. And this includes the Washington Post's much-ballyhooed Chinese subsidy of panel manufacturers.
Renewable energy sources received 25 times more in taxpayer subsidies per energy unit produced than fossil fuels in 2010 | AEIdeas:
Everyone is happy to include irrelevant OPEC subsidies (which are by definition outside of the US) or imaginary environmental damage in US energy market comparisons. When you actually compare the subsidy per unit of energy consumed by each approach in the US, then renewable energy is greatly more subsidized per unit of energy produced.
Actually, the Federal government has _always_ subsidized new technologies that it perceives could provide significant benefit to the public
Or which have sufficiently politically connected cronies.
Railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, broadcast television, the automobile (yay, Eisenhower!), even the Internet (how often do you pay sales tax, again?)
Note the presence of politically connected cronies, particularly, the infamous railroads and automobiles. As to internet sales tax, that's not a federal level subsidy.
The idea of subsidizing solar technology is not only good for the country -- what possible downside could there be, except to entrenched industries? -- but it conforms to a policy that conforms to traditional American ideals.
Well, yes, asserting things without proof is a traditional American activity, but not one that conforms to traditional American ideals. The obvious possible downside here is the opportunity cost of paying people to mess around with solar panels when they could just not do that and either use the public funds for something else more useful, or just not tax it at all in the first place.
There's a copyright clause in the Constitution. There isn't one for oil or nuclear (or renewables for that matter, but the story is not renewables who are lobbying to keep power companies down)
I don't see the point. First, the article is still an article complaining about the lack of protection in given US states for a very particular business model involving solar power. Second, it's irrelevant whether there's an explicit clause in the US Constitution protecting this business model or not (given that there isn't, this would indicate to me weaker not stronger legal standing for the solar power side). Third, it's a state-level matter.
Unlike pirates, a competing solar business doesn't need to "steal" (copy) the IP of oil companies to offer their competing product/service. It's a lot harder to make "they made money off of our work" argument (though I wouldn't be surprised if they tried)
Why do you think it's harder to make this case? The power company has to provide the supporting infrastructure and then take on a zillion small time power producers at the same pricing as their largest power providers. That's a lot of concrete "make money off our work" going on here.
Ignoring that NASA just doesn't do and never has done that much actual research then or now, we still have that NASA is burning lots of money on the space/Earth science category now while it was burning lots of money on national prestige projects in the 60s and 70s.
The NSF and NIH spend lots of money on basic research too. It gets squandered, but the money is there.
Pharmaceutical spend more on adverts in US than on research, and their research are clinical trials not basic research.
Thank the FDA for keeping you safe and destroying yet another source of research funding.
Research at Universities is cut away. Tenured positions are evaporating quicker than water in California aquifers. The wheels are spinning, but the hamster's dead. That's the status of primary research in the US or Canada.
I find it a bit paradoxical that you can complain about science funding by pointing to elimination of one of the bigger institutional obstacles to good research, academic tenure. For example, there's a huge destructive dynamic where an excess of scientists are trained (via excessive minting of new PhDs) in order to support a few extra tenure positions. Meanwhile the people who make the poor decisions which creates this dynamic are safely insulated from the consequences of their actions by tenure. They don't, for example, have to worry about their jobs being taken by the horde of hungry graduates.
My view is that the institutions and culture are deeply poisoned against useful scientific research. There is a huge disconnect between funding for this sort of thing and outcome. I think it all boils down to lack of accountability especially while spending other peoples' money.
And this avoidance of responsibility and accountability shows up in your reasoning. for example, your emphasis on "basic" and "primary research" or "tenure" rather than the alleged benefits of those things. It also shows up in the remarkably terrible expectations people have for research (such as NASA research projects, for a glaring example already mentioned).
My view on this is that current "basic" or "primary" research is worthless research. It is inherently and deliberately restricted to research that doesn't deliver value.
There are two things to note. First, good research is valuable in a human lifetime, often immediately. You don't have to wait three hundred years to see if there are going to be benefits from the work.
Note that I'm not advocating the next quarter thinking (which seems to be the common fallacy that people reach for when they hear my argument) that everyone claims businesses do or that research should turn a monetary profit. Scientists even can evaluate with decent success the relative value of their projects and when their resources are on the line, they make those decisions.
It's foolhardy to assume that merely going through the motions of research is going to result in actual research anymore than say building fake planes out of straw will bring in real planes. The process is not the outcome.
Second, the current approach just isn't working despite astounding levels of funding by all parties involved. My view is that with public funding from any source, there is at least one order of magnitude of waste built in over a potential private project. It's by its nature inherently monumentally inefficient. But they can spend well over an order of magnitude more than private sources.
This poisons the well for private research. Why should the private world build a $100 million particle accelerator when the governments of the world can slap a billion dollar one toget
But government being the reflection of hte people, the representation of hte people's collective will is the ONLY counter-weight to corporate power.
Except when government doesn't do that and isn't the reflection of the people. Which are some of the times being complained about right now.
Time and again, throughout history, it is proven repeatedly that individuals on their own cannot stand against corporations.
Yea, they get friends and allies to support them. Then it's one group against another. It's basic tactics. Also, there are examples of individuals who do stand against corporations and succeed. Keep in mind that corporations need rules in order to exist and one can with patience and diligence use those rules against the business that causes you grief.
It strikes me a lot like the RIAA/MIAA games. Powerful lobbying groups attempt to get society and state governments to fund their business models. So why should Florida and these other states support this?
Yet at the same time, the US spends considerably more on research than it did then. I think here the explanation is that public funding crowded out private for basic research.
It makes little sense to fund your own research in the cases where some government would fund it for you. Similarly, if you're a researcher, public funding is high quality and less demanding than private funding. Sure, you have to fill out a ton of paperwork. But they don't have the anything like the expectations that most private funders would have.
Nonsense, if that were the case, then we'd still be living in caves. Instead, competition with modest constraints (such as not killing a lot of people in order to remove a competitor or further a competitive advantage) is IMHO the best form of cooperation.
if you give every competitor the same advantage, it benefits none of them.
That's a non sequitur on a number of different levels. First, not every competitor will use those advantages equally effectively or in the same way. The engineer and the poets aren't plugin replacements for each other.
Second, those advantages aren't the same in this case. All educations aren't equal. In particular, you're making the overly broad assumption here that education is an advantage. I've seen cases where it's harmed instead of helped someone by filling their minds with a bunch of ideological tripe.
Third, if you don't have that advantage (because the premise isn't true), then you aren't operating on the same level. An education, particularly a credentialed one, requires considerable work. You will not magically just get it.
Fourth, the advantage can have benefits outside of the competition angle. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of competition is to provide benefit to the rest of society by increased innovation and pricing pressure on the goods and services provided by the competitors.
Fifth, your assertion has nothing to do with whether competition is zero sum or not. It all depends on what the competition is doing as a whole to the whole.
This is all ignoring the fact that the way things are going, if you work for a living you've already lost in life, and things will only continue to get worse as wealth flows to the top.
This is a typical provincial, first world viewpoint. It's not shared by the rest of the world. The actual trend is towards a vast improvement of the living conditions of the majority of the world.
could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago?
Yes, for small problem sets.
We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue.
And yes, in practice we did use pen and paper (or blackboards, etc) to do just that. Most of the algorithms are easily within the grasp of mathematicians of the past 3000 years (once you get them to accept basic math concepts like real numbers and set theory.
Note that computers didn't make these algorithms possible, they merely created the need for them.
believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy...
Where am I going to find pens and paper in a jungle? The existence of both, particularly of pens with extruded plastics, chemically sophisticated inks, or machined parts, implies already a considerable amount of civilization.
And it's worth remembering here that dark energy was formulated with whatever Einstein was using at the time, which was near equivalent to pen and paper. He didn't have the internet either.
Basically dark energy doesn't seem to exist in the dimensions we can observe
Unless it's curvature or a cosmological constant and not energy at all. Then it can manifest quite easily at our scales and observed dimensions. "Dark energy" is one of the more terrible scientific labels out there IMHO because it encourages us to think about this phenomenon in a way that may be totally misleading.
At the moment it's more likely that advancements in AI and understanding of theory of mind will be able to deliver such solution, thru the code and not just pen and paper.
It could be that it actually already happened it will just take many years to understand it.
The problem with this is that stuff which is intractable to pen and paper (which is a vast amount of stuff) tends to be intractable to everything else as well. Increase in complexity tends not to be gradual, but more like a cliff.
For example, a naive approach to computing Standard Model physics of subatomic particle interactions would be via certain "perturbative" methods. Namely, take the simplest Feynman diagram (an abstract diagram detailing a scenario of particle interactions) of the input and outcome state possible, and then add possible internal interactions, summing over all possible interactions of N things before moving on to the N+1 things.
This approach explodes rapidly in computational complexity as you add more interactions (the number of computations grows faster as a function of the number of internal interactions than the factorial function). By hand, you probably can do a single additional interaction (or at least a sloppy approximation). A desktop computer can do another two or three interactions. A Solar System scale computer using all of the power of the Sun solely for this computation, could go a few more levels deep - at least during a human lifetime.
But a substantially more efficient algorithm is probably amenable to pen and paper. Such is the nature of complexity.
Education isn't about getting jobs or any other such nonsense; it's about furthering people's understanding of the universe.
Part of that universe, the most important part, is learning how to deal with that society and that competition. If you don't come out as a result of your education better able to compete with your fellow man, then that education failed you.
If the school is a hell-hole, then the students would probably be better off working in a sweatshop full time. At least, they'd be getting paid.
If it's a nice place with a solid education near the degree of progress of a good college or vocational school, then year round would work out, I think. I would miss summer vacation though in that situation.
Much of the "green revolution" is due to the use of nitrate fertilizers, and the source material is finite
Methane gas actually is the finite resource in question for nitrate fertilizer, used as a hydrogen source for the Bosch-Haber process. Guano is valuable as a source of phosphorus. Once that runs out, it's time for crushing phosphorus-bearing rocks.
If this process is as efficient as the abstract suggests and can be industrialized, it would be *huge*. It would give us an essentially infinite source of nitrogen-based fertilizer and reduce the worldwide consumption of energy by a couple of percent.
I agree though there is a trade-off between solar powered-nitrogen fixing and agriculture. They can't both use the same sunlight. But keep in mind that there already is such an "infinite" source in the form of legumes and their nitrogen fixing bacteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Models aren't evidence by definition. And it's a reasonable concern to consider whether the axioms of evolution apply in the first place.
The huge obstacle is the assumption that societies have inheritable traits. There are examples of societies that adopt traits from successful past societies. And there are examples of societies that were unable to do because the previous society was far more advanced and the technology was needed to adopt many of the previous society's features (eg, the barbarian kingdoms that sprung up in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire).
The only purpose of technological advance is to reduce the time people need to spend working.
Surprise, people have other priorities than merely working less.
That was a factory manufacturing and using large amounts of very hazardous chemicals under dangerous and slipshod conditions. There's nothing comparable in risk at the previously mentioned battery factory.
Unless it drives those industries out as well. Current diversity of their economy doesn't matter, if no one stays. I think California is well on its way to be yet another history lesson on the parable of killing the golden goose.
I think the problem with US propaganda is that the dealers have been using the product for a long time. It's not a recent thing. Well, I guess that's only a problem if you're trying to believe it.
It's easier to innovate while standing on the shoulders of giants. Without the space program there wouldn't be any technology available for SpaceX to build upon.
Even if there were no government involvement at all, including military funding of ballistic missiles, you would still have the amateur rocketry groups. For example, a considerable bit of the development of hybrid motors was done by amateur groups over forty years. And those groups tended to focus on hybrids because the more popular liquid-fueled rockets were vastly dominated by government projects.
Get over your Libertarian delusions.
Complaining about blatant hypocrisy and the buying of politicians is "Libertarian"? Maybe you should be "Libertarian" as well.
I find it interesting how some people will completely ignore legitimate complaints and good ideas merely because there's a slight, even imaginary whiff of some ideology they happen to disagree with.
NASA does not build a damned thing. [...] SLS is being build by ATK while Orion is built by Lockheed Martin.
And ATK and Orion subcontract. So I guess nobody builds the SLS or Orion. I find it bizarre that people insist on this particular factoid as if it were relevant to anything or even true for that matter.
Someone always has to put in a defensive "But America does it too" whenever we discuss negative characteristics of China or its government. I notice the urge generally isn't there when we discuss the foibles of Europe and most other parts of the world. Even commentary on the various ongoing spying scandals tend to remember that the US isn't the only offender.
China has been an Orwellian society for about 65 years (some regions a bit longer than others).
The point is the oil companies fit the analogy to *IAA better
Oil companies have nothing to do with this mess.
The solar power lobby and complain in articles, but they aren't getting the protections.
They sure are. The article is basically one long complaint about how a few states aren't giving these businesses the same protections they get in other states.
Nobody's holding a gun to the power companies' heads to do all that for free.
That's because it hasn't happened yet. When it does, the metaphorical gun will be held to the head.
But no, as the article is complaining about, the power companies also got government to protect them, creating rules restricting and banning the business model that solar companies use.
So what? At least with the current state of affairs, there are less rent-seekers messing things up.
By the way, people here ought to do themselves a favor and invest ten minutes googling primary sources before they start whining about the unfairness of solar-tech subsidies. If you do, you'll find that, worldwide, government subsidies of fossil-fuel industries run 20 - 25 times the amount of all subsidies worldwide of solar and wind technologies combined. And this includes the Washington Post's much-ballyhooed Chinese subsidy of panel manufacturers.
Such as:
Renewable energy sources received 25 times more in taxpayer subsidies per energy unit produced than fossil fuels in 2010 | AEIdeas:
Everyone is happy to include irrelevant OPEC subsidies (which are by definition outside of the US) or imaginary environmental damage in US energy market comparisons. When you actually compare the subsidy per unit of energy consumed by each approach in the US, then renewable energy is greatly more subsidized per unit of energy produced.
Actually, the Federal government has _always_ subsidized new technologies that it perceives could provide significant benefit to the public
Or which have sufficiently politically connected cronies.
Railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, broadcast television, the automobile (yay, Eisenhower!), even the Internet (how often do you pay sales tax, again?)
Note the presence of politically connected cronies, particularly, the infamous railroads and automobiles. As to internet sales tax, that's not a federal level subsidy.
The idea of subsidizing solar technology is not only good for the country -- what possible downside could there be, except to entrenched industries? -- but it conforms to a policy that conforms to traditional American ideals.
Well, yes, asserting things without proof is a traditional American activity, but not one that conforms to traditional American ideals. The obvious possible downside here is the opportunity cost of paying people to mess around with solar panels when they could just not do that and either use the public funds for something else more useful, or just not tax it at all in the first place.
There's a copyright clause in the Constitution. There isn't one for oil or nuclear (or renewables for that matter, but the story is not renewables who are lobbying to keep power companies down)
I don't see the point. First, the article is still an article complaining about the lack of protection in given US states for a very particular business model involving solar power. Second, it's irrelevant whether there's an explicit clause in the US Constitution protecting this business model or not (given that there isn't, this would indicate to me weaker not stronger legal standing for the solar power side). Third, it's a state-level matter.
Unlike pirates, a competing solar business doesn't need to "steal" (copy) the IP of oil companies to offer their competing product/service. It's a lot harder to make "they made money off of our work" argument (though I wouldn't be surprised if they tried)
Why do you think it's harder to make this case? The power company has to provide the supporting infrastructure and then take on a zillion small time power producers at the same pricing as their largest power providers. That's a lot of concrete "make money off our work" going on here.
It's just another group that wants their life style sheltered at public expense.
The NASA budget would disagree on that point.
Ignoring that NASA just doesn't do and never has done that much actual research then or now, we still have that NASA is burning lots of money on the space/Earth science category now while it was burning lots of money on national prestige projects in the 60s and 70s.
The NSF and NIH spend lots of money on basic research too. It gets squandered, but the money is there.
Pharmaceutical spend more on adverts in US than on research, and their research are clinical trials not basic research.
Thank the FDA for keeping you safe and destroying yet another source of research funding.
Research at Universities is cut away. Tenured positions are evaporating quicker than water in California aquifers. The wheels are spinning, but the hamster's dead. That's the status of primary research in the US or Canada.
I find it a bit paradoxical that you can complain about science funding by pointing to elimination of one of the bigger institutional obstacles to good research, academic tenure. For example, there's a huge destructive dynamic where an excess of scientists are trained (via excessive minting of new PhDs) in order to support a few extra tenure positions. Meanwhile the people who make the poor decisions which creates this dynamic are safely insulated from the consequences of their actions by tenure. They don't, for example, have to worry about their jobs being taken by the horde of hungry graduates.
My view is that the institutions and culture are deeply poisoned against useful scientific research. There is a huge disconnect between funding for this sort of thing and outcome. I think it all boils down to lack of accountability especially while spending other peoples' money.
And this avoidance of responsibility and accountability shows up in your reasoning. for example, your emphasis on "basic" and "primary research" or "tenure" rather than the alleged benefits of those things. It also shows up in the remarkably terrible expectations people have for research (such as NASA research projects, for a glaring example already mentioned).
My view on this is that current "basic" or "primary" research is worthless research. It is inherently and deliberately restricted to research that doesn't deliver value.
There are two things to note. First, good research is valuable in a human lifetime, often immediately. You don't have to wait three hundred years to see if there are going to be benefits from the work.
Note that I'm not advocating the next quarter thinking (which seems to be the common fallacy that people reach for when they hear my argument) that everyone claims businesses do or that research should turn a monetary profit. Scientists even can evaluate with decent success the relative value of their projects and when their resources are on the line, they make those decisions.
It's foolhardy to assume that merely going through the motions of research is going to result in actual research anymore than say building fake planes out of straw will bring in real planes. The process is not the outcome.
Second, the current approach just isn't working despite astounding levels of funding by all parties involved. My view is that with public funding from any source, there is at least one order of magnitude of waste built in over a potential private project. It's by its nature inherently monumentally inefficient. But they can spend well over an order of magnitude more than private sources.
This poisons the well for private research. Why should the private world build a $100 million particle accelerator when the governments of the world can slap a billion dollar one toget
But government being the reflection of hte people, the representation of hte people's collective will is the ONLY counter-weight to corporate power.
Except when government doesn't do that and isn't the reflection of the people. Which are some of the times being complained about right now.
Time and again, throughout history, it is proven repeatedly that individuals on their own cannot stand against corporations.
Yea, they get friends and allies to support them. Then it's one group against another. It's basic tactics. Also, there are examples of individuals who do stand against corporations and succeed. Keep in mind that corporations need rules in order to exist and one can with patience and diligence use those rules against the business that causes you grief.
It strikes me a lot like the RIAA/MIAA games. Powerful lobbying groups attempt to get society and state governments to fund their business models. So why should Florida and these other states support this?
Yet at the same time, the US spends considerably more on research than it did then. I think here the explanation is that public funding crowded out private for basic research.
It makes little sense to fund your own research in the cases where some government would fund it for you. Similarly, if you're a researcher, public funding is high quality and less demanding than private funding. Sure, you have to fill out a ton of paperwork. But they don't have the anything like the expectations that most private funders would have.
Do nothing and monitor the situation for a few generations.
Competition is zero-sum
Nonsense, if that were the case, then we'd still be living in caves. Instead, competition with modest constraints (such as not killing a lot of people in order to remove a competitor or further a competitive advantage) is IMHO the best form of cooperation.
if you give every competitor the same advantage, it benefits none of them.
That's a non sequitur on a number of different levels. First, not every competitor will use those advantages equally effectively or in the same way. The engineer and the poets aren't plugin replacements for each other.
Second, those advantages aren't the same in this case. All educations aren't equal. In particular, you're making the overly broad assumption here that education is an advantage. I've seen cases where it's harmed instead of helped someone by filling their minds with a bunch of ideological tripe.
Third, if you don't have that advantage (because the premise isn't true), then you aren't operating on the same level. An education, particularly a credentialed one, requires considerable work. You will not magically just get it.
Fourth, the advantage can have benefits outside of the competition angle. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of competition is to provide benefit to the rest of society by increased innovation and pricing pressure on the goods and services provided by the competitors.
Fifth, your assertion has nothing to do with whether competition is zero sum or not. It all depends on what the competition is doing as a whole to the whole.
This is all ignoring the fact that the way things are going, if you work for a living you've already lost in life, and things will only continue to get worse as wealth flows to the top.
This is a typical provincial, first world viewpoint. It's not shared by the rest of the world. The actual trend is towards a vast improvement of the living conditions of the majority of the world.
could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago?
Yes, for small problem sets.
We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue.
And yes, in practice we did use pen and paper (or blackboards, etc) to do just that. Most of the algorithms are easily within the grasp of mathematicians of the past 3000 years (once you get them to accept basic math concepts like real numbers and set theory.
Note that computers didn't make these algorithms possible, they merely created the need for them.
believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy...
Where am I going to find pens and paper in a jungle? The existence of both, particularly of pens with extruded plastics, chemically sophisticated inks, or machined parts, implies already a considerable amount of civilization.
And it's worth remembering here that dark energy was formulated with whatever Einstein was using at the time, which was near equivalent to pen and paper. He didn't have the internet either.
Unless it's curvature or a cosmological constant and not energy at all. Then it can manifest quite easily at our scales and observed dimensions. "Dark energy" is one of the more terrible scientific labels out there IMHO because it encourages us to think about this phenomenon in a way that may be totally misleading.
At the moment it's more likely that advancements in AI and understanding of theory of mind will be able to deliver such solution, thru the code and not just pen and paper. It could be that it actually already happened it will just take many years to understand it.
The problem with this is that stuff which is intractable to pen and paper (which is a vast amount of stuff) tends to be intractable to everything else as well. Increase in complexity tends not to be gradual, but more like a cliff.
For example, a naive approach to computing Standard Model physics of subatomic particle interactions would be via certain "perturbative" methods. Namely, take the simplest Feynman diagram (an abstract diagram detailing a scenario of particle interactions) of the input and outcome state possible, and then add possible internal interactions, summing over all possible interactions of N things before moving on to the N+1 things.
This approach explodes rapidly in computational complexity as you add more interactions (the number of computations grows faster as a function of the number of internal interactions than the factorial function). By hand, you probably can do a single additional interaction (or at least a sloppy approximation). A desktop computer can do another two or three interactions. A Solar System scale computer using all of the power of the Sun solely for this computation, could go a few more levels deep - at least during a human lifetime.
But a substantially more efficient algorithm is probably amenable to pen and paper. Such is the nature of complexity.
Education isn't about getting jobs or any other such nonsense; it's about furthering people's understanding of the universe.
Part of that universe, the most important part, is learning how to deal with that society and that competition. If you don't come out as a result of your education better able to compete with your fellow man, then that education failed you.
If the school is a hell-hole, then the students would probably be better off working in a sweatshop full time. At least, they'd be getting paid.
If it's a nice place with a solid education near the degree of progress of a good college or vocational school, then year round would work out, I think. I would miss summer vacation though in that situation.
The trade offs aren't that severe. There's a lot more corn and such grown than seafood production lost.
Methane gas actually is the finite resource in question for nitrate fertilizer, used as a hydrogen source for the Bosch-Haber process. Guano is valuable as a source of phosphorus. Once that runs out, it's time for crushing phosphorus-bearing rocks.
If this process is as efficient as the abstract suggests and can be industrialized, it would be *huge*. It would give us an essentially infinite source of nitrogen-based fertilizer and reduce the worldwide consumption of energy by a couple of percent.
I agree though there is a trade-off between solar powered-nitrogen fixing and agriculture. They can't both use the same sunlight. But keep in mind that there already is such an "infinite" source in the form of legumes and their nitrogen fixing bacteria.