This is the kind of shit that could allow exploration of the oceans and eventually space, prosthetic help for sick people, cheaper and more efficient mass production etc. Plus, it would probably generate some interesting by-products, like advanced algorithms, maybe a new programming language or new processor types.
This is the kind of shit we'd use the past tense for.
And since we're on the subject of the past, this sort of massive spending on vague AI/robotics goals has been tried before by the Japanese with a similar level of funding. I predict we'll see a similar level of failure.
It worked pretty well as long as there were still "new products" that could be sold, and the people building that products (cars, washing machines, TVs) where essentially roughly the same segment of the population that actually bought them in the end. Then every increase in productivity meant an increase in wealth.
This is a fundamentally broken view of economics. I doubt the people making cars buy more than 1 in 100 cars. Same for those people making those other things.
And it ignores things like construction and manufacture of large durable goods. The employee isn't the one buying high rise buildings or industrial pumps.
Back then the economic motor was "build more stuff that people actually want to buy".
Stretch it to "make stuff or do stuff that people actually want to buy". Services do contribute to the economy.
The trip that most "make money" companies these days are on (produce in low-wage countries, sell in high-wage countries) will someday come to an end when the former high-wage countries collapse. It's just a matter of time and a matter of how big a bang they create when they go down.
I think this is a good example of the problem with your viewpoint. When those former high-wage countries "collapse", then the low-wage countries, which had become high-wage countries, take over. Those companies just sell to a different market. Wealth creation is just moving to a different place, it's not going away altogether.
Having said all that, I wholly agree with your comment that "creating jobs" and "make more money" isn't important while creating wealth is. I think the most annoying thing about the "creating jobs" myth is that there's no actual reason to expect such economic activity to create jobs. All that money squandered on the white elephant du jour takes away from more productive economic activity. It's just another place of ignorance where people consider only the benefits, not the costs.
My view is that there isn't anything magical about high-wage or low-wage countries. Every country that is high-wage now used to be low-wage - and could become low-wage once again in a human lifetime. The key problem is that people treat economics like it was optional and that their opinion is the only one that matters.
But an economy is the core of a society. If you can't get the things you want and need, like food or shelter, then you're not part of a society. The economy is all about how you get that stuff without having to do everything yourself from scratch.
So when people "create jobs", throw another burden on productive people, or pointlessly regulate what you can do, buy, or work, they're attacking the core of their societies. The economy is a big thing so little attacks like banning large soft drinks or increasing taxes on the moderately wealthy don't have a huge, negative effect, but it adds up. I don't know how things will go down, but I know who will get the blame. Those rich people keep holding us back.
It is interesting how the language of economic blame evolves. We have terms like "carbon footprint", "fairness", and "least common denominator" to describe societies and businesses that are winning at our expense. What is left unsaid is that "we screwed up our societies and businesses with shitty regulation, policy, and taxation, but we don't want to change. So we'll try to screw up all the other societies too and bring them down to our level." I don't think the rest of the world is that dumb especially after a significant portion of the developed world becomes a living example of that sort of failure.
I think it's not productive to view the providing of such services as "gouging" because it isn't. This is what the customer wants and they demonstrate it by paying that premium for the product.
The Apollo program was a project, not an organization.
It was a thing which was done and which didn't lead to follow-on things. The Russians were and continue to be much better at developing stuff which is still used decades later.
Nasa is still very much in operation.
But it doesn't have the experience and most of the infrastructure of the Apollo and Space Shuttle eras.
unless you are the company that also made the printer,
Like Tesla Motors is the company that makes the car?
I worked at Hewlett Packard back around 2000. At that time, a large part of their overall profits came from ink cartridge sales. That was even though there were plenty of third party cartridges available. People will pay a substantial premium for brand-name replacement parts.
The difference between ink cartridges and car batteries is that ink cartridges are not (designed to be) rechargeable
It's less of a difference than you think. I think of them like other car parts which are a traditional high margin business for auto manufacturers despite being for the most part, intended to last as long as possible.
The problem is that car batteries aren't at the present time rechargeable indefinitely. They degrade over time and large numbers of chargings. And when they do need to be replaced, Tesla will have the supply locked up.
This is funny to me because even though the Russians beat you in most the early space milestones, the USA finally put a man on the Moon... by making one giant government-backed project...
While the Russian approach was to set up various competing design bureaus.
While if we look at today, those design bureaus are still designing and launching rockets while outside of a few pieces of ancient infrastructure and some litter on the Moon, no trace of the Apollo program remains.
The Apollo program put twelve people on the Moon and a space station (Skylab) in orbit, but it hasn't done anything of consequence since. And the design organizations that built Apollo lost their experience after the Space Shuttle.
Why are you badmouthing this company? Their gyroscopes would have failed sooner or later. They did so later and the spacecraft exceeded by a little its original design lifetime. The mission lasted just over four years till the second gyro failure as compared to its design lifetime of 3.5 years.
It's worth noting here that the mirror was of exceptional quality just ground to a very precise, wrong shape. By putting in a corrective lens, they were able to recover to close to its original specifications.
Also, NASA was involved in the screw up as well, and that involvement definitely was not profit-driven.
The bizarre thing is that the obvious better solution here is to spin off the battery manufacture business.
Personally, I think the best approach here is to keep the battery manufacture in house for now (since it provides a powerful advantage over competitors) and build up electric car market share to the point where you're triggering anti-trust. Then use the spin off of the battery business as a playing chip to keep the rest of the business together.
Finally, if Musk wishes to exit this job at some point, that would be a good time to do so. He could appoint a competent successor and gradually divest himself from the business.
And you leap from speculating that the document might be forged to assuming it was. Nice one.
I've already stated that I believe that particular document was forged.
Meanwhile (as noted) we have Watt's own admission that he took money from The Heartland Institute.
From a donor that the Heartland Institute knew. Further, he states a plausible reason other than lying for why he's getting that money.
I suspect that someone could easily parody the writings of a denialist blogger for months at a time and none of the gullible readers would recognise the difference.
Funny how someone who doesn't wholly agree with you morphs into a "denialist".
Reference this one - which is about someone's hurt feelings and decision to resign from sham organisation set up to try and smear a layer of apparent respectability over the ridiculous, self contradictory clutter of assertions that is climate denial.
What did you think was happening here? If I were in this man's position, my feelings would be hurt as well. As would my career and possibly my life. And sure, I'd be mocked by pieces of shit like yourself. Somehow that doesn't make your argument particularly convincing to me. We didn't make modern society by respecting bullies.
Dr Judith openly admits she takes money from big oil for expressing her views.
This is false. The actual statement in question is:
"I do receive some funding from the fossil fuel industry. My company... does [short-term] hurricane forecasting... for an oil company, since 2007. During this period I have been both a strong advocate for the IPCC, and more recently a critic of the IPCC, there is no correlation of this funding with my public statements."
She is providing a concrete service for payment. That isn't magically getting paid for lying.
The only question I have is whether you deliberately lied or merely failed to read your own link. If I were using your own pathetic standard, I would have already concluded you had lied here. Please enlighten us and explain why you said what you said.
I have to say here, you once again libel, in the legal sense, someone without even considering the supposed evidence you have. I doubt Watts or Curry will bother to sue you in a million years, but you may well run into someone who will go through that effort. Next time, please stop being so much of an idiot and do a little fact checking, ok?
There are two other contributing factors I can think of, the density of air is lower at 30,000 feet (it's roughly 2.5 times less dense) and the aircraft is moving through that fluid at a far greater speed than a sub moves through water, meaning there is a much greater volume of air to absorb heat.
The problem with your analysis is that over 90% of the heat from global warming is going into the oceans
Unless, of course, it's not. Do I need to keep reminding people that asserting things without evidence leaves an automatic, huge gaping hole in their argument? Last I heard, they haven't been measuring ocean temperatures for more than a few decades (and deep ocean for more than about a decade). Where's the pre-industrial civilization temperature baseline for the ocean against which you are making this comparison?
I grant that at some point, we actually will have enough observations made over a long enough time at a detailed enough resolution to make scientifically valid claims like the above. I even grant that you may well be right in your assertion. What I don't grant is your false certainty.
That energy consumption is zero. No energy is required in order for the Earth to intercept energy from the Sun. Many things including human civilization have evolved to use that intercepted energy, but that's a different situation - just like figuring out what to do with the 40% (or more!) of the Sun's output that you captured is a different problem than inveigling to intercept that power in the first place.
Getting the first useful bits of the dyson sphere up and in operation--hitting the break-even point--would bankrupt the global economy.
And as I already noted, it has already happened. The Earth already is that billionth piece of the Dyson sphere.
Actually having a functional Dyson sphere would provide effectively infinite energy and material of all kinds, since we can create any material using arbitrary mass and a fusor.
No, it wouldn't since the energy and mass involved are quite finite. For example, one really obvious and open-ended use of that mass and energy is exponential population growth.
Yes, not paying your employees for the time they work certainly does help out a business.
A problem/feature which has nothing to do with the original poster's complaint. The overhead of employing people in California is worse than it is in Texas and California keeps digging that hole deeper. I give California a couple of decades to become the next Detroit.
I tend to steer away from "assertions as proof" and look at actual evidence as being required in either case.
We already see that you don't. The Watts example was based solely on what looks to me to be a forged document. We have no evidence that forgeries always state the truth and plenty of evidence that instead they are almost universally intended to commit some variation of fraud.
It's true - there might be another explanation - that she is mentally incompetent.
She posts with regular frequency on her blog. If the above were true, we would have noticed.
On balance though, I'd suggest it's more likely she is just corrupt - corrupted by the bales of money she gets to preach the word of denialism to the ignorant.
My point is that nobody will be spared from the ill affects
This is often a side effect of large scale bad ideas. I suppose my point is that the instigators and supporters of these bad ideas should receive a share of the pain they cause.
No, it's actually very hard. The disaster scenario market is highly competitive. Your scenario has to compete with other disaster scenarios for people's attention (read: money)
Well, those other disaster scenarios would have to account for the presence of an additional ten feet of sea level rise. I somehow doubt, no doubt due to my incorrigible nature, that a BitCoin disaster would have that aspect.
A completely enclosing dyson sphere at any distance experiences over 13,000 TRILLION times the energy consumption of the earth.
There is no set energy consumption for a Dyson sphere. The original concept by Dyson himself was an orbiting cloud or "Dyson swarm" of objects which intercept all energy from a star. That doesn't inherently need any energy consumption in order to exist. In practice, energy will be needed to be consumed in order to maintain the Dyson swarm's integrity (such as maneuver to avoid collisions, the clearing of debris, and replacement of swarm components). But that would probably be remarkably insignificant compared to the energy intercepted by the swarm.
And as I already noted, the Earth intercepts roughly a billionth (more accurately one in two billion parts) of the Sun's energy.
Building a dyson sphere--even a partial one--requires space mining; a dyson sphere provides the energy for space mining. Terrestrial energy sources can't manage it.
That is not terribly important. Anything which intercepts solar radiation and uses it for productive uses would become part of the growing Dyson swarm, even if it is based on a planet or other body. And Earth-based solar power (and other sources of power) is more than adequate to begin the process of building extraterrestrial solar power.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the kind of shit that could allow exploration of the oceans and eventually space, prosthetic help for sick people, cheaper and more efficient mass production etc. Plus, it would probably generate some interesting by-products, like advanced algorithms, maybe a new programming language or new processor types.
This is the kind of shit we'd use the past tense for.
And since we're on the subject of the past, this sort of massive spending on vague AI/robotics goals has been tried before by the Japanese with a similar level of funding. I predict we'll see a similar level of failure.
It's absolutely amazing with the firepower of the gunmen that the only deaths were the two gunmen and no-one else.
Sounds like a really poor example. Where is this "need" for better weapons?
It worked pretty well as long as there were still "new products" that could be sold, and the people building that products (cars, washing machines, TVs) where essentially roughly the same segment of the population that actually bought them in the end. Then every increase in productivity meant an increase in wealth.
This is a fundamentally broken view of economics. I doubt the people making cars buy more than 1 in 100 cars. Same for those people making those other things.
And it ignores things like construction and manufacture of large durable goods. The employee isn't the one buying high rise buildings or industrial pumps.
Back then the economic motor was "build more stuff that people actually want to buy".
Stretch it to "make stuff or do stuff that people actually want to buy". Services do contribute to the economy.
The trip that most "make money" companies these days are on (produce in low-wage countries, sell in high-wage countries) will someday come to an end when the former high-wage countries collapse. It's just a matter of time and a matter of how big a bang they create when they go down.
I think this is a good example of the problem with your viewpoint. When those former high-wage countries "collapse", then the low-wage countries, which had become high-wage countries, take over. Those companies just sell to a different market. Wealth creation is just moving to a different place, it's not going away altogether.
Having said all that, I wholly agree with your comment that "creating jobs" and "make more money" isn't important while creating wealth is. I think the most annoying thing about the "creating jobs" myth is that there's no actual reason to expect such economic activity to create jobs. All that money squandered on the white elephant du jour takes away from more productive economic activity. It's just another place of ignorance where people consider only the benefits, not the costs.
My view is that there isn't anything magical about high-wage or low-wage countries. Every country that is high-wage now used to be low-wage - and could become low-wage once again in a human lifetime. The key problem is that people treat economics like it was optional and that their opinion is the only one that matters.
But an economy is the core of a society. If you can't get the things you want and need, like food or shelter, then you're not part of a society. The economy is all about how you get that stuff without having to do everything yourself from scratch.
So when people "create jobs", throw another burden on productive people, or pointlessly regulate what you can do, buy, or work, they're attacking the core of their societies. The economy is a big thing so little attacks like banning large soft drinks or increasing taxes on the moderately wealthy don't have a huge, negative effect, but it adds up. I don't know how things will go down, but I know who will get the blame. Those rich people keep holding us back.
It is interesting how the language of economic blame evolves. We have terms like "carbon footprint", "fairness", and "least common denominator" to describe societies and businesses that are winning at our expense. What is left unsaid is that "we screwed up our societies and businesses with shitty regulation, policy, and taxation, but we don't want to change. So we'll try to screw up all the other societies too and bring them down to our level." I don't think the rest of the world is that dumb especially after a significant portion of the developed world becomes a living example of that sort of failure.
I think it's not productive to view the providing of such services as "gouging" because it isn't. This is what the customer wants and they demonstrate it by paying that premium for the product.
because making electric car batters is a business-to-business deal, and making ink cartridges is a business-to-consumer one
When Tesla makes batteries for their cars as opposed to other manufacturers, it is a business-to-consumer deal.
The Apollo program was a project, not an organization.
It was a thing which was done and which didn't lead to follow-on things. The Russians were and continue to be much better at developing stuff which is still used decades later.
Nasa is still very much in operation.
But it doesn't have the experience and most of the infrastructure of the Apollo and Space Shuttle eras.
unless you are the company that also made the printer,
Like Tesla Motors is the company that makes the car?
I worked at Hewlett Packard back around 2000. At that time, a large part of their overall profits came from ink cartridge sales. That was even though there were plenty of third party cartridges available. People will pay a substantial premium for brand-name replacement parts.
The difference between ink cartridges and car batteries is that ink cartridges are not (designed to be) rechargeable
It's less of a difference than you think. I think of them like other car parts which are a traditional high margin business for auto manufacturers despite being for the most part, intended to last as long as possible.
The problem is that car batteries aren't at the present time rechargeable indefinitely. They degrade over time and large numbers of chargings. And when they do need to be replaced, Tesla will have the supply locked up.
This is funny to me because even though the Russians beat you in most the early space milestones, the USA finally put a man on the Moon ... by making one giant government-backed project...
While the Russian approach was to set up various competing design bureaus.
While if we look at today, those design bureaus are still designing and launching rockets while outside of a few pieces of ancient infrastructure and some litter on the Moon, no trace of the Apollo program remains.
The Apollo program put twelve people on the Moon and a space station (Skylab) in orbit, but it hasn't done anything of consequence since. And the design organizations that built Apollo lost their experience after the Space Shuttle.
Why are you badmouthing this company? Their gyroscopes would have failed sooner or later. They did so later and the spacecraft exceeded by a little its original design lifetime. The mission lasted just over four years till the second gyro failure as compared to its design lifetime of 3.5 years.
It's worth noting here that the mirror was of exceptional quality just ground to a very precise, wrong shape. By putting in a corrective lens, they were able to recover to close to its original specifications.
Also, NASA was involved in the screw up as well, and that involvement definitely was not profit-driven.
I bet they could sell a "Terminator" or "Cylon" shaver for a bit of a premium. This sucker will fly.
Manufacturing auto batteries should be a low-margin business.
Just like ink cartridges should be a low-margin business? I think you need to reexamine that statement.
The bizarre thing is that the obvious better solution here is to spin off the battery manufacture business.
Personally, I think the best approach here is to keep the battery manufacture in house for now (since it provides a powerful advantage over competitors) and build up electric car market share to the point where you're triggering anti-trust. Then use the spin off of the battery business as a playing chip to keep the rest of the business together.
Finally, if Musk wishes to exit this job at some point, that would be a good time to do so. He could appoint a competent successor and gradually divest himself from the business.
And you leap from speculating that the document might be forged to assuming it was. Nice one.
I've already stated that I believe that particular document was forged.
Meanwhile (as noted) we have Watt's own admission that he took money from The Heartland Institute.
From a donor that the Heartland Institute knew. Further, he states a plausible reason other than lying for why he's getting that money.
I suspect that someone could easily parody the writings of a denialist blogger for months at a time and none of the gullible readers would recognise the difference.
Funny how someone who doesn't wholly agree with you morphs into a "denialist".
Reference this one - which is about someone's hurt feelings and decision to resign from sham organisation set up to try and smear a layer of apparent respectability over the ridiculous, self contradictory clutter of assertions that is climate denial.
What did you think was happening here? If I were in this man's position, my feelings would be hurt as well. As would my career and possibly my life. And sure, I'd be mocked by pieces of shit like yourself. Somehow that doesn't make your argument particularly convincing to me. We didn't make modern society by respecting bullies.
Dr Judith openly admits she takes money from big oil for expressing her views.
This is false. The actual statement in question is:
"I do receive some funding from the fossil fuel industry. My company... does [short-term] hurricane forecasting... for an oil company, since 2007. During this period I have been both a strong advocate for the IPCC, and more recently a critic of the IPCC, there is no correlation of this funding with my public statements."
She is providing a concrete service for payment. That isn't magically getting paid for lying.
The only question I have is whether you deliberately lied or merely failed to read your own link. If I were using your own pathetic standard, I would have already concluded you had lied here. Please enlighten us and explain why you said what you said.
I have to say here, you once again libel, in the legal sense, someone without even considering the supposed evidence you have. I doubt Watts or Curry will bother to sue you in a million years, but you may well run into someone who will go through that effort. Next time, please stop being so much of an idiot and do a little fact checking, ok?
There are two other contributing factors I can think of, the density of air is lower at 30,000 feet (it's roughly 2.5 times less dense) and the aircraft is moving through that fluid at a far greater speed than a sub moves through water, meaning there is a much greater volume of air to absorb heat.
A lot of people don't know about the bleeding obvious.
The problem with your analysis is that over 90% of the heat from global warming is going into the oceans
Unless, of course, it's not. Do I need to keep reminding people that asserting things without evidence leaves an automatic, huge gaping hole in their argument? Last I heard, they haven't been measuring ocean temperatures for more than a few decades (and deep ocean for more than about a decade). Where's the pre-industrial civilization temperature baseline for the ocean against which you are making this comparison?
I grant that at some point, we actually will have enough observations made over a long enough time at a detailed enough resolution to make scientifically valid claims like the above. I even grant that you may well be right in your assertion. What I don't grant is your false certainty.
If you're not using 100% of the flow, have no plans to use 100% of the flow, and have no real way to use 100% of the flow, it's effectively infinite.
And when you do have plans for all of it, it is effectively finite.
The energy consumption of the earth is known.
That energy consumption is zero. No energy is required in order for the Earth to intercept energy from the Sun. Many things including human civilization have evolved to use that intercepted energy, but that's a different situation - just like figuring out what to do with the 40% (or more!) of the Sun's output that you captured is a different problem than inveigling to intercept that power in the first place.
Getting the first useful bits of the dyson sphere up and in operation--hitting the break-even point--would bankrupt the global economy.
And as I already noted, it has already happened. The Earth already is that billionth piece of the Dyson sphere.
Actually having a functional Dyson sphere would provide effectively infinite energy and material of all kinds, since we can create any material using arbitrary mass and a fusor.
No, it wouldn't since the energy and mass involved are quite finite. For example, one really obvious and open-ended use of that mass and energy is exponential population growth.
Yes, not paying your employees for the time they work certainly does help out a business.
A problem/feature which has nothing to do with the original poster's complaint. The overhead of employing people in California is worse than it is in Texas and California keeps digging that hole deeper. I give California a couple of decades to become the next Detroit.
I tend to steer away from "assertions as proof" and look at actual evidence as being required in either case.
We already see that you don't. The Watts example was based solely on what looks to me to be a forged document. We have no evidence that forgeries always state the truth and plenty of evidence that instead they are almost universally intended to commit some variation of fraud.
It's true - there might be another explanation - that she is mentally incompetent.
She posts with regular frequency on her blog. If the above were true, we would have noticed.
On balance though, I'd suggest it's more likely she is just corrupt - corrupted by the bales of money she gets to preach the word of denialism to the ignorant.
Ok, show me these bales.
My point is that nobody will be spared from the ill affects
This is often a side effect of large scale bad ideas. I suppose my point is that the instigators and supporters of these bad ideas should receive a share of the pain they cause.
No, it's actually very hard. The disaster scenario market is highly competitive. Your scenario has to compete with other disaster scenarios for people's attention (read: money)
Well, those other disaster scenarios would have to account for the presence of an additional ten feet of sea level rise. I somehow doubt, no doubt due to my incorrigible nature, that a BitCoin disaster would have that aspect.
A completely enclosing dyson sphere at any distance experiences over 13,000 TRILLION times the energy consumption of the earth.
There is no set energy consumption for a Dyson sphere. The original concept by Dyson himself was an orbiting cloud or "Dyson swarm" of objects which intercept all energy from a star. That doesn't inherently need any energy consumption in order to exist. In practice, energy will be needed to be consumed in order to maintain the Dyson swarm's integrity (such as maneuver to avoid collisions, the clearing of debris, and replacement of swarm components). But that would probably be remarkably insignificant compared to the energy intercepted by the swarm.
And as I already noted, the Earth intercepts roughly a billionth (more accurately one in two billion parts) of the Sun's energy.
Building a dyson sphere--even a partial one--requires space mining; a dyson sphere provides the energy for space mining. Terrestrial energy sources can't manage it.
That is not terribly important. Anything which intercepts solar radiation and uses it for productive uses would become part of the growing Dyson swarm, even if it is based on a planet or other body. And Earth-based solar power (and other sources of power) is more than adequate to begin the process of building extraterrestrial solar power.