Well, the agreements are between corporations, not people
They are between the leaders of these businesses who happen to be people. It would be just as much an act of collusion between people, if none of the businesses were corporations and thus, considered "people" by your viewpoint.
If we're speaking of straightforward stuff, secret negotiations to collude against workers may be wrong, but they aren't lying or stealing, perhaps not cheating either. Lying is the spreading of deliberate falsehoods. Stealing is the taking of someone's property. There's no such thing going on here. Similarly, cheating indicates the business acted unfairly or dishonestly in order to gain advantage. I can see how in some moral systems, fairness can be defined to preclude collusion, but that's only a feature of those particular moral systems.
So what makes collusion "artificial"? I imagine there are a number of people who would argue that the problem is that collusion is instead a natural consequence of free, open markets and a "market force," hence, a natural market force, yet one which must be resisted.
My use of the coy third person above is because I think the artificial/natural division is arbitrary, especially when discussing phenomena like markets which tend to be a bit of both. What's artificial in an artificial market?
I also think it's worth remember that while regulation can be helpful to making a "playing field" more level, it's far more useful for making the playing field less level. To give a IT labor example, I think the games surrounding the H1-B program in the US (and the US's abysmal immigration system as a whole) are a good example of that. Those are depressing US labor more than collusion games do IMHO.
Also, I must somewhat echo the grandparent's sentiment (though his legal interpretation is delusional). I don't see that a level playing field is actually that valuable especially if it comes at the expense of stable businesses. And given that the rules in question are readily subverted (and outright flouted), they may actually be harmful by both providing a false sense of security, by providing yet another mechanism for government to selectively enforce such regulation, and by masking market signals that more competition in a sector is viable (if the labor is cheap in a sector due to employer-side collusion then that's yet more incentive for new competitors to enter the market).
Finally, it's worth noting that the collusion fell apart on its own due to a new party (Facebook) "poaching" employees from the existing group (indeed without consequence except to significantly raise labor costs for at least one rival, Google).
Here's a hint...I'm not interested in solving those problems through a business or company, I'm interested in solving it through a government.
I get you're really interested in mashing that square peg in that round hole.
Which protects the freedom to live, by doing such things as removing the freedom to kill. Which protects the freedom to own by taking away the freedom to take.
Except when government becomes the enabler of killing and taking.
Why just look at your focus on "regulating interstate commerce" when the subject of discussion isn't on the particulars of a framework of government, but still on the principles. Not that I concur your interpretation is correct, and it's certainly not supported in the actual jurisprudence, but even if I were to believe that, I'd simply assert that the US Constitution be changed instead. It does need some reformation, it has a lot of flaws that should be fixed.
Such as allowing for property seizure in cases where the owner didn't commit a crime? Those are rationalized under that interstate commerce clause.
Ah, yes, the demands of apologies for things that didn't happen and words that weren't said. And I have yet to see any evidence of pro- or anti-nuke modding on Slashdot.
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Hmmm, I wonder what sort of remote sensors could be used in the situation? I guess if neutron and gamma ray detectors could be built with decent spatial resolution, then that might work. A nuclear plant undergoing a meltdown is no doubt a high noise environment, but you still might be able to image its interior with infrasound.
The tsunami continues to release contaminated material and water into the environment too. The debris washed into the sea wasn't all biodegradable and green. And things like lead and mercury have a much longer half life than things like tritium. The two events aren't compared fairly and this just another example of that.
So you can't articulate a reason why we should send humans to Mars (as opposed to, say bandicoots). Didn't think so.
A big part of the problem here is that you just pull facts and reality out of your ass. So I decided to answer the above.
A purpose such as diversification of humanity, doing awesome, challenging things in order to better ourselves, or stepping up that science and exploration game you know and love to new levels?
I didn't do so before, because it wasn't germane to the discussion.
You said, unequivocally, that people dying painfully of radiation sickness would make for a good TV show. Later, you called people who were keen going to Mars idiots who deserved to die for being stupid and ignorant.
I notice you don't actually have a quote for that latter assertion. As to the former, my defense is that it is true.Truth should be an adequate defense here, right?
As to the latter, if someone wants to come up with a half-baked means for dying on Mars. then go for it. I won't stand in their way and it'll be a great example to anyone else with similar plans.
my motorcycle HAS a space gear?
It has a gear. If that gear were put in space, then I'm sure we could forgive you for calling it a "space gear". But I'm not going to call a gear a "space gear" just because it's in space. That's bad 50s sci fi movies.
So, if they are rational, and choose to partake on a course that will end their lives in a fairly arbitrary and short time (say, 24 months)
And again, I see this claim that something is going to kill Mars colonists inside of two years. What is that thing? Can't be radiation because they'll get far greater exposure on the trip to Mars than two years on the surface.
The reality, of course, is that human spaceflight to Mars is a dead end.
Words like "fact" and "reality" have meaning. Use that meaning. Instead, you are arguing from ignorance. That fallacy is commonly seen in space discussions on both sides. I don't know how hard it will be to go to Mars or what dangers and risks travelers will experience. But I do know there's a bunch of people whose jobs it is to do hard, challenging stuff of that very sort and they're good at it.
Plans to settle permanently on Mars derive mostly from texts written by Zubrin, these are fundamentally flawed and collapse under even the most casual analysis.
Even the most casual analysis of Zubrin's work would note that Zubrin returns his astronauts. He never advocated one-way missions. This is a huge thing to miss.
Sure, he does advocate permanent habitation within about ten years. But by that point, almost all of your concerns would be ruled out. We would know at that point that life expectancy is much longer than 2 years. We would have a demonstrated capability to live on Mars indefinitely. And we'd have realistic expectations from the experiences of the people who already lived on Mars.
If humans make it Mars, they will do so long after robots arrived: so the notion that this is pioneering is of course laughable.
I'd call it rather common sense pioneering. This happened historically on Earth with the colonizing of the New World except that people not robots played the role of explorer. There are a number of examples of people going in blind (Columbus's second expedition, the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies, and the initial Mormon migration) and those just didn't fare well except due to luck.
But then there are examples where they did plan things out and the colony ended up relatively low drama (such as New Amsterdam (which became New York City) or Providence, Rhode Island).
Human based space travel has lost the race and lost it's purpose, evidenced clearly by the fact that advocates for this activity can no longer articulate a purpose.
A purpose such as diversification of humanity, doing awesome, challenging things in order to better ourselves, or stepping up that science and exploration game you know and love to new levels? Well, I guess you've heard of them now. I grant there's no reason for you to be impressed or swayed, but purposes have been articulated - you can check that box off now.
That would be an incapacity the inability to feel empathy (even involuntary) is an inability not an ability.
No, I got it right. Do you really think that people who serve as paramedics, nurses, fire fighters, or doctors would be able to function, if they turned gooey eyed at every injury or sickness they saw? You can set aside those emotions and that misplaced empathy enough that you can do your job to save lives.
Mars is interesting scientifically, which is why we send robots there to explore it. It is a boring place for humans to live, because owing to the fact that it is bathed in deadly radiation, humans on mars, if they ever went, would have to live underground like worms, never seeing the stars.
Earth is bathed in that same deadly radiation too. Dose makes the poison. You seem to forget the shielding effect of the Martian atmosphere which would allow people to work on the surface and see stars and such.
Also, I find it interesting how you claim they "live like worms" while ignoring that almost
OTOH, I will agree that it OFTEN works on the stock market. This is a far different statement.
And there we go. It's not a far different statement. I didn't claim the rational market model perfectly modeled the stock market.
But much of the stock market is driven by gambling fever, often played with "other people's money".
While this observation isn't entirely irrelevant, it remains that traders who come to markets to gamble, lose money to traders who don't. And it's still a lot better than many of the economic alternatives, such as having the above gamblers in control of a central planning bureau or rent seeking.
Actually it doesn't work that way. If you're not paying for it, then someone else is.
And whilst you are at it, please feel free to not use the outcomes of our scientific endeavours.
Such as?
refuse the evil, depraved workings of science like medicines, gene therapy, electricity, nutrition, the internet.
None of which have been furthered by your space science ambitions. I'd rather have useful science like medicines, gene therapy, electricity, nutrition, the internet, etc.
I'm merely waiting for you to explain why I should fund your hobby out of my pocket.
I've already stated that I think space development should be funded by those who want to.
Please recall that I replied in response to this statement:
Now is the time to embrace the fact that, like manufacturing, information processing, transport, medicine , the future for space travel lies not in the hands of astronauts/taikonauts/cosmonauts but in the grip of machines.
My complaint is not about funding my ambitions versus yours. It's about the above assertion that because something is heavily mechanized, then there's no place for people. Most of that stuff above needs people in order to operate and needs people in order to justify its use. Transportation of humans doesn't make sense if humans aren't actually being transported. Medical care doesn't make sense, if there's no patient to care for.
You DID explain your reasons - you wanted to see someone die on Mars on live TV. You though their sufferings and deprivations would bring you delight.
And you've expounded endlessly on your unquenchable hunger for the flesh of babies. Oh wait, that didn't happen either. If you're so bored that you're debating my arguments that I didn't make, then please, get creative not lazy.
Yeah good luck with this line of argument. Does my motorcycle have a space gear that I'm unaware of? Can you cite the relevant page in the manual? Can you cite my request for $0.5 Trillion to fund my space motorcycle travels?
So a machine on Earth is magically is different from a machine in space? A gear is a gear whether it is on Earth or in space. You ride that motorcycle or whatever you use to travel, in order to get from point A to point B. That would be any human use of space-side transportation too.
your death TV plan
I think the worst part of your whole belief system here is the idea that we'll be smart enough to take people to Mars and land them on the surface safely, but dumb enough not to wonder or plan ahead of time for what happens when they get there.
I've been told that going to Mars and landing a relatively delicate cargo like humans is very hard. It might even be a bit pricy though not your astronomical half a trillion dollars. That seems very much like a huge obstacle to any sort of half-assed plan to dump people on Mars for the giggles.
The point would be that we can play "what if?" games with unlikely and made-up hypotheticals all day long
The thing is, these are not hypotheticals, but real world problems. For example, there are a variety of pollsters who call a few thousand people in a region to answer some survey. They could call all of the several billion people who have phones and they would still encounter most of the same sample biases because they aren't calling the people who don't have phones.
Enlarging the sample size by many orders of magnitude doesn't help here because the biases are cooked into the means of sampling.
I believe the current WAG is that the earliest environments were free-fire chemical zones with molecules or perhaps groups of molecules prey on others. Anything you could throw in the way of a hostile molecule, such as a lump of protein or a sliver of calcium carbonate, improved your odds of survival. Later those obstacles became a wall of an organelle or bacterium and the interior a nice place for cooperative molecules to get to work. Some sort of arms race happened and some organelles became cells that incorporated other organelles. Then multi-celled life and photosynthesis happened and the neighborhood just went to hell.
Put a t-Rex into a forest with a pride of hungry lions. How long do you think the Rex would last?
Depends on whether there's something the Rex can eat. It probably could hunt elephants or hippos, but there's not much else out there that they can catch. Most mammals are small and fast. I imagine the Rex would become almost exclusively a well-armed scavenger. And the lions' calculation would be that something that big and that toothy is going to take a bunch of us down if we try to take it on. Let's hunt zebras instead. Odds are good that the Rexes would learn to follow lion prides around and take their kills.
The researchers themselves may not do that extrapolation, but those they convince of their finding do.
I believe the number one lesson of economics is that people including the economists themselves have a huge capacity to rationalize all sorts of things, sometimes in very elaborate ways, when their interests are at stake. This has nothing to do with the rational market model.
The "rational market theory" originated some time before 1950, and was dominant during the 1950 and later. It has recently been challenged by people doing actual reasearch that proved it an invalid model.
Except that the model hasn't been proven to be invalid. It works well for describing stock markets, for example.
IIRC it originated by an economic school that was ideologicaly comitted to the Free Market, despite the obvious fact that never throughout the course of history has there ever BEEN a free market.
At some point, there weren't public sanitation, canals, railroads, or electronic computers either. We didn't let the obvious fact that these didn't exist at the time stop us from making them and benefiting from the results.
Since we have actually developed near free markets and they do work. Sometimes they are somewhat inappropriate, such as when the market in question generates substantial externalities (and none of the market participants have any incentive to price in those externalities). Then external regulation needs to be brought to bear.
Further, that "economic school" you refer to is the Austrian School, which is philosophy than science (for example, they had "self-evident" axioms and eschewed empirical methods). But you might find it interesting that they never assumed that participants of a market were rational in the usual sense. Or rather they didn't distinguish between rational and irrational.
For example, from one of the more famous members of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises ("Human Action") we have this:
Human action is necessarily always rational. The term "rational action" is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic.
Anyway moving on, it's not surprising that a non-empirical school of philosophy ends up getting losing some ground to actual empirical studies. Their models still are valid and work for a number of important cases in the world today.
Those markets, however, fail the normal definition because the purchaser doesn't really know what he's buying.
The normal definition is an asymptotic ideal. No one ever has perfect knowledge aside from certain contrived games. But we can still consider what characteristics and to what degree other markets share with that ideal. And guess what? Markets that are pretty close behave similarly to that particular ideal.
What people frequently don't get is that despite the irrationality of markets, they behave more rationally than their participants. It's a case where mobs act smarter than most of the participants. Markets aren't entirely rational, but they are more rational than most of the alternatives for group organization or resource allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the agreements are between corporations, not people
They are between the leaders of these businesses who happen to be people. It would be just as much an act of collusion between people, if none of the businesses were corporations and thus, considered "people" by your viewpoint.
I was thinking that as well. I really wish roman_mir would get his community of detractors to stop downmodding my posts.
If we're speaking of straightforward stuff, secret negotiations to collude against workers may be wrong, but they aren't lying or stealing, perhaps not cheating either. Lying is the spreading of deliberate falsehoods. Stealing is the taking of someone's property. There's no such thing going on here. Similarly, cheating indicates the business acted unfairly or dishonestly in order to gain advantage. I can see how in some moral systems, fairness can be defined to preclude collusion, but that's only a feature of those particular moral systems.
So what makes collusion "artificial"? I imagine there are a number of people who would argue that the problem is that collusion is instead a natural consequence of free, open markets and a "market force," hence, a natural market force, yet one which must be resisted.
My use of the coy third person above is because I think the artificial/natural division is arbitrary, especially when discussing phenomena like markets which tend to be a bit of both. What's artificial in an artificial market?
I also think it's worth remember that while regulation can be helpful to making a "playing field" more level, it's far more useful for making the playing field less level. To give a IT labor example, I think the games surrounding the H1-B program in the US (and the US's abysmal immigration system as a whole) are a good example of that. Those are depressing US labor more than collusion games do IMHO.
Also, I must somewhat echo the grandparent's sentiment (though his legal interpretation is delusional). I don't see that a level playing field is actually that valuable especially if it comes at the expense of stable businesses. And given that the rules in question are readily subverted (and outright flouted), they may actually be harmful by both providing a false sense of security, by providing yet another mechanism for government to selectively enforce such regulation, and by masking market signals that more competition in a sector is viable (if the labor is cheap in a sector due to employer-side collusion then that's yet more incentive for new competitors to enter the market).
Finally, it's worth noting that the collusion fell apart on its own due to a new party (Facebook) "poaching" employees from the existing group (indeed without consequence except to significantly raise labor costs for at least one rival, Google).
Here's a hint...I'm not interested in solving those problems through a business or company, I'm interested in solving it through a government.
I get you're really interested in mashing that square peg in that round hole.
Which protects the freedom to live, by doing such things as removing the freedom to kill. Which protects the freedom to own by taking away the freedom to take.
Except when government becomes the enabler of killing and taking.
Why just look at your focus on "regulating interstate commerce" when the subject of discussion isn't on the particulars of a framework of government, but still on the principles. Not that I concur your interpretation is correct, and it's certainly not supported in the actual jurisprudence, but even if I were to believe that, I'd simply assert that the US Constitution be changed instead. It does need some reformation, it has a lot of flaws that should be fixed.
Such as allowing for property seizure in cases where the owner didn't commit a crime? Those are rationalized under that interstate commerce clause.
You have tried to equate rising wages to labor cost to anti-business.
You're the only one doing the equating. Let's look at what roman_mir actually wrote:
and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
Notice the complete absence of any mention of wages anywhere in the original post.
Let's nevermind the horrendous losses Amazon suffered around the millenium, it was only a hobby.
So Amazon has no intent to ever make a profit? Losing money now to make more money later is not an alien concept.
I wouldn't mind having what's left over from "very nearly" a billion dollars.
Earth/Luna is a binary planet by the criteria.
It's not. The center of gravity is under Earth's surface.
Most significantly, Luna's orbit is never convex with respect to the Sun.
The Moon's orbit is convex.
The debate comes in that those arbitrary labels can be changed to other arbitrary labels.
China isn't in Africa hence their currency, their power, and of course, their side of African deals have plenty of pricing power.
Africa combined is smaller in terms of population then India. And it's incredibly balkanized.
That's still over a billion people. And "incredibly balkanized" means lots of opportunities. Nobody over there has pricing power.
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Why don't you set a good example for us?
Hmmm, I wonder what sort of remote sensors could be used in the situation? I guess if neutron and gamma ray detectors could be built with decent spatial resolution, then that might work. A nuclear plant undergoing a meltdown is no doubt a high noise environment, but you still might be able to image its interior with infrasound.
The tsunami continues to release contaminated material and water into the environment too. The debris washed into the sea wasn't all biodegradable and green. And things like lead and mercury have a much longer half life than things like tritium. The two events aren't compared fairly and this just another example of that.
So you can't articulate a reason why we should send humans to Mars (as opposed to, say bandicoots). Didn't think so.
A big part of the problem here is that you just pull facts and reality out of your ass. So I decided to answer the above.
A purpose such as diversification of humanity, doing awesome, challenging things in order to better ourselves, or stepping up that science and exploration game you know and love to new levels?
I didn't do so before, because it wasn't germane to the discussion.
You said, unequivocally, that people dying painfully of radiation sickness would make for a good TV show. Later, you called people who were keen going to Mars idiots who deserved to die for being stupid and ignorant.
I notice you don't actually have a quote for that latter assertion. As to the former, my defense is that it is true.Truth should be an adequate defense here, right?
As to the latter, if someone wants to come up with a half-baked means for dying on Mars. then go for it. I won't stand in their way and it'll be a great example to anyone else with similar plans.
my motorcycle HAS a space gear?
It has a gear. If that gear were put in space, then I'm sure we could forgive you for calling it a "space gear". But I'm not going to call a gear a "space gear" just because it's in space. That's bad 50s sci fi movies.
So, if they are rational, and choose to partake on a course that will end their lives in a fairly arbitrary and short time (say, 24 months)
And again, I see this claim that something is going to kill Mars colonists inside of two years. What is that thing? Can't be radiation because they'll get far greater exposure on the trip to Mars than two years on the surface.
The reality, of course, is that human spaceflight to Mars is a dead end.
Words like "fact" and "reality" have meaning. Use that meaning. Instead, you are arguing from ignorance. That fallacy is commonly seen in space discussions on both sides. I don't know how hard it will be to go to Mars or what dangers and risks travelers will experience. But I do know there's a bunch of people whose jobs it is to do hard, challenging stuff of that very sort and they're good at it.
Plans to settle permanently on Mars derive mostly from texts written by Zubrin, these are fundamentally flawed and collapse under even the most casual analysis.
Even the most casual analysis of Zubrin's work would note that Zubrin returns his astronauts. He never advocated one-way missions. This is a huge thing to miss.
Sure, he does advocate permanent habitation within about ten years. But by that point, almost all of your concerns would be ruled out. We would know at that point that life expectancy is much longer than 2 years. We would have a demonstrated capability to live on Mars indefinitely. And we'd have realistic expectations from the experiences of the people who already lived on Mars.
If humans make it Mars, they will do so long after robots arrived: so the notion that this is pioneering is of course laughable.
I'd call it rather common sense pioneering. This happened historically on Earth with the colonizing of the New World except that people not robots played the role of explorer. There are a number of examples of people going in blind (Columbus's second expedition, the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies, and the initial Mormon migration) and those just didn't fare well except due to luck.
But then there are examples where they did plan things out and the colony ended up relatively low drama (such as New Amsterdam (which became New York City) or Providence, Rhode Island).
Human based space travel has lost the race and lost it's purpose, evidenced clearly by the fact that advocates for this activity can no longer articulate a purpose.
A purpose such as diversification of humanity, doing awesome, challenging things in order to better ourselves, or stepping up that science and exploration game you know and love to new levels? Well, I guess you've heard of them now. I grant there's no reason for you to be impressed or swayed, but purposes have been articulated - you can check that box off now.
That would be an incapacity the inability to feel empathy (even involuntary) is an inability not an ability.
No, I got it right. Do you really think that people who serve as paramedics, nurses, fire fighters, or doctors would be able to function, if they turned gooey eyed at every injury or sickness they saw? You can set aside those emotions and that misplaced empathy enough that you can do your job to save lives.
Mars is interesting scientifically, which is why we send robots there to explore it. It is a boring place for humans to live, because owing to the fact that it is bathed in deadly radiation, humans on mars, if they ever went, would have to live underground like worms, never seeing the stars.
Earth is bathed in that same deadly radiation too. Dose makes the poison. You seem to forget the shielding effect of the Martian atmosphere which would allow people to work on the surface and see stars and such.
Also, I find it interesting how you claim they "live like worms" while ignoring that almost
OTOH, I will agree that it OFTEN works on the stock market. This is a far different statement.
And there we go. It's not a far different statement. I didn't claim the rational market model perfectly modeled the stock market.
But much of the stock market is driven by gambling fever, often played with "other people's money".
While this observation isn't entirely irrelevant, it remains that traders who come to markets to gamble, lose money to traders who don't. And it's still a lot better than many of the economic alternatives, such as having the above gamblers in control of a central planning bureau or rent seeking.
the cost is the same. why would you buy 40 year old aircraft (f-16) for the same price as 20 year old aircraft (F-22/35)?
So we agree that the F-16 is a lower margin plane than the F-22/35 planes? That pretty much rules out any incentive to hype the F-16.
So who are these alleged F-16 shills shilling for?
If I'm not paying for it, then neither are you
Actually it doesn't work that way. If you're not paying for it, then someone else is.
And whilst you are at it, please feel free to not use the outcomes of our scientific endeavours.
Such as?
refuse the evil, depraved workings of science like medicines, gene therapy, electricity, nutrition, the internet.
None of which have been furthered by your space science ambitions. I'd rather have useful science like medicines, gene therapy, electricity, nutrition, the internet, etc.
I'm merely waiting for you to explain why I should fund your hobby out of my pocket.
I've already stated that I think space development should be funded by those who want to.
Please recall that I replied in response to this statement:
Now is the time to embrace the fact that, like manufacturing, information processing, transport, medicine , the future for space travel lies not in the hands of astronauts/taikonauts/cosmonauts but in the grip of machines.
My complaint is not about funding my ambitions versus yours. It's about the above assertion that because something is heavily mechanized, then there's no place for people. Most of that stuff above needs people in order to operate and needs people in order to justify its use. Transportation of humans doesn't make sense if humans aren't actually being transported. Medical care doesn't make sense, if there's no patient to care for.
You DID explain your reasons - you wanted to see someone die on Mars on live TV. You though their sufferings and deprivations would bring you delight.
And you've expounded endlessly on your unquenchable hunger for the flesh of babies. Oh wait, that didn't happen either. If you're so bored that you're debating my arguments that I didn't make, then please, get creative not lazy.
Yeah good luck with this line of argument. Does my motorcycle have a space gear that I'm unaware of? Can you cite the relevant page in the manual? Can you cite my request for $0.5 Trillion to fund my space motorcycle travels?
So a machine on Earth is magically is different from a machine in space? A gear is a gear whether it is on Earth or in space. You ride that motorcycle or whatever you use to travel, in order to get from point A to point B. That would be any human use of space-side transportation too.
your death TV plan
I think the worst part of your whole belief system here is the idea that we'll be smart enough to take people to Mars and land them on the surface safely, but dumb enough not to wonder or plan ahead of time for what happens when they get there.
I've been told that going to Mars and landing a relatively delicate cargo like humans is very hard. It might even be a bit pricy though not your astronomical half a trillion dollars. That seems very much like a huge obstacle to any sort of half-assed plan to dump people on Mars for the giggles.
The point would be that we can play "what if?" games with unlikely and made-up hypotheticals all day long
The thing is, these are not hypotheticals, but real world problems. For example, there are a variety of pollsters who call a few thousand people in a region to answer some survey. They could call all of the several billion people who have phones and they would still encounter most of the same sample biases because they aren't calling the people who don't have phones.
Enlarging the sample size by many orders of magnitude doesn't help here because the biases are cooked into the means of sampling.
For uranium, it is about 0.7%.
Uranium is also 100% via breeder reactors.
I believe the current WAG is that the earliest environments were free-fire chemical zones with molecules or perhaps groups of molecules prey on others. Anything you could throw in the way of a hostile molecule, such as a lump of protein or a sliver of calcium carbonate, improved your odds of survival. Later those obstacles became a wall of an organelle or bacterium and the interior a nice place for cooperative molecules to get to work. Some sort of arms race happened and some organelles became cells that incorporated other organelles. Then multi-celled life and photosynthesis happened and the neighborhood just went to hell.
Put a t-Rex into a forest with a pride of hungry lions. How long do you think the Rex would last?
Depends on whether there's something the Rex can eat. It probably could hunt elephants or hippos, but there's not much else out there that they can catch. Most mammals are small and fast. I imagine the Rex would become almost exclusively a well-armed scavenger. And the lions' calculation would be that something that big and that toothy is going to take a bunch of us down if we try to take it on. Let's hunt zebras instead. Odds are good that the Rexes would learn to follow lion prides around and take their kills.
The researchers themselves may not do that extrapolation, but those they convince of their finding do.
I believe the number one lesson of economics is that people including the economists themselves have a huge capacity to rationalize all sorts of things, sometimes in very elaborate ways, when their interests are at stake. This has nothing to do with the rational market model.
The "rational market theory" originated some time before 1950, and was dominant during the 1950 and later. It has recently been challenged by people doing actual reasearch that proved it an invalid model.
Except that the model hasn't been proven to be invalid. It works well for describing stock markets, for example.
IIRC it originated by an economic school that was ideologicaly comitted to the Free Market, despite the obvious fact that never throughout the course of history has there ever BEEN a free market.
At some point, there weren't public sanitation, canals, railroads, or electronic computers either. We didn't let the obvious fact that these didn't exist at the time stop us from making them and benefiting from the results.
Since we have actually developed near free markets and they do work. Sometimes they are somewhat inappropriate, such as when the market in question generates substantial externalities (and none of the market participants have any incentive to price in those externalities). Then external regulation needs to be brought to bear.
Further, that "economic school" you refer to is the Austrian School, which is philosophy than science (for example, they had "self-evident" axioms and eschewed empirical methods). But you might find it interesting that they never assumed that participants of a market were rational in the usual sense. Or rather they didn't distinguish between rational and irrational.
For example, from one of the more famous members of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises ("Human Action") we have this:
Human action is necessarily always rational. The term "rational action" is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic.
Anyway moving on, it's not surprising that a non-empirical school of philosophy ends up getting losing some ground to actual empirical studies. Their models still are valid and work for a number of important cases in the world today.
Those markets, however, fail the normal definition because the purchaser doesn't really know what he's buying.
The normal definition is an asymptotic ideal. No one ever has perfect knowledge aside from certain contrived games. But we can still consider what characteristics and to what degree other markets share with that ideal. And guess what? Markets that are pretty close behave similarly to that particular ideal.
What people frequently don't get is that despite the irrationality of markets, they behave more rationally than their participants. It's a case where mobs act smarter than most of the participants. Markets aren't entirely rational, but they are more rational than most of the alternatives for group organization or resource allocation.