All they did was fuck up tracking guns that were sold to known drug runners by people whose idea of tracking gun sales is to write them on rolls of toilet paper and whose idea of background checks is to look behind the guy.
No, it's worse than that. They simply didn't track these weapons or notify Mexican authorities that they were doing this (Mexican authorities learned about Fast and Furious when the scandal became public via whistleblowers after the death of a US Border Patrol agent involving two guns from the program), and the gun sellers were in on the alleged sting and were authorized by the ATF agents involved to sell those weapons as they did.
In addition, the Sinaloa Cartel got a free ticket for at least a year to smuggle guns and who knows what else into Mexico in addition to those 2000 or so guns. Maybe it was a sting and maybe it was substantial aid for a favored cartel.
He's half right, Solyndra started the process to get the loan in 2007. Should Obama have known to cut them off halfway through? Who knows... They didn't get the money then "promptly go bankrupt" though.
Yes, he should have cut off the process. And yes, they did go promptly bankrupt since they were out of cash in about 15 months of getting the loan money and bankrupt in two years.
QM says you can't measure the magnetic moment of a single particle along two perpendicular axes at the same time. And yet, you can easily measure the magnetic moment of a bar magnet along two perpendicular axes at the same time.
The uncertainty principle says that you can't measure two properties to a greater precision than the norm of the commutator of those two properties as operators. For a single particle, that value tends to be large relative to the size of the magnetic moment components while in a bar magnet the values of the magnetic moment are much larger, being ensembles of many particles (usually 20+ orders of magnitude larger) while the commutator doesn't increase so.
So is this evidence that time reversible QM is correct?
How can a theory be more correct than an equivalent theory? It can, as apparently is the case here, be more parsimonious, but that is a different beast from correctness.
I guess you're not most individuals. Might still be worth trying that SSD first before going with a new computer. But no matter how awesome the computer is, there's always an app that can easily pummel it.
Seriously, I don't get what's supposed to be so magically hard about this system. It doesn't do that many transactions. Amazon does more, for example. It doesn't have to have a lot of connectivity since it's just linking people who want health insurance with businesses that provide health insurance. There's no reason actually for it to have or keep track of personal information for that matter.
I get that the feds once again fucked up the design and requirements and made this site much harder than it should have been. But so what?
This sounds like the opposite of a good strategy. I'd say that the purchase of conflict minerals is more likely to improve the situation than the ban will. It appears that such bans have decreased the Congo's legal export of tantalum for example by 90%.
Given the expected regulatory hassles, companies are looking for mineral supplies in more stable countries. Legal exports (as opposed to black market transactions) of the minerals from the Congo, which supplies 13 percent of the worldâ(TM)s supply of tantalum, dropped more than 90 percent in April from a month earlier, according to the latest data. âoeAlmost everything came to a standstill,â says Paul Yenga Mabolia, head of Promines, a World Bank program assisting the mining industry in Congo.
Note that a huge increase in the price of tantalum happened after supply was deliberately restricted.
Often, and this is no exception, fads come with a hefty priceâ¦literally. The price per kilogram of tantalum imports to the U.S. increased by 170% in just one year. The rise in price was mostly seen in imports by air, as shown in the graph below. The average import price of tantalum went from $110 in 2011 to nearly $300 in 2012. The craze is continuing into 2013 as well, with January numbers showing the average price at $360.
China also happens to be the primary source of imported tantalum for the US. Given that China is also alleged in my previous link to be the main destination for conflict tantalum, I wonder how much of that import is laundered tantalum from the Congo.
So here's my take on "conflict minerals". I think they don't help the people that they supposedly are intended to help and they reward those who break the law. That's an excellent combination for any policy to achieve.
Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs
Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.
There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.
I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.
Many of the same parties who are pushing new white elephants like the SLS, are profiting from the ISS. As I see it, this creates a destructive cycle where huge amounts of public funds are used to build space projects (and similar things) with poor utility and the profits from that cycle used to insure a next generation of poor space projects.
By destroying the ISS, I would sacrifice a small amount of science research (and yes, I have perused the list of research that the ISS has done) and perhaps other moderate benefits. But in exchange I would end a significant food source for an entire parasitic ecosystem. I think that would be worth it.
You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.
Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ever made on scientific research in the history of the world. If the "greatest scientific community" is being destroyed, then it must be by something other than mere economics.
I think Lawrence_Bird nailed the fundamental problem. Programs like the ISS aren't scientific programs but rather corrupt transfers of wealth to various elite which happen to do a minor bit of research. Too much research is not about producing something of value either for today or the distant future.
When does INL turn a profit? Los Alamos? Amundsen-Scott? Those are all major laboratories doing basic research. The ISS justifiably fits right in there with all of those facilities, and I"m glad that it is treated as such.
Indeed, the US has a great tradition of money sinks be it research or the occasional interminable war. Imagine, if you can, how bad it would be if the US were to actually use that money for something useful rather than misemploying eggheads or bombing brown people.
Regardless, the ISS is doing some tremendous work right now, and it is disingenuous to suggest that spider webs are the only thing being studied.
I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.
When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.
For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.
"Best of a bad lot", as you know, is a common phrase for a limited set of choices and not whatever stupid spin you are putting on it.
In that case, your phrase makes little sense since choice is always limited especially if you're constraining it economically.
As for your "fast" markets - I remember seeing two hybrid car prototypes in 1987. They were not the first by a long shot. It took a long time from then and a lot of work by a lot of people before they were a marketable choice and now there are a lot of them in the market.
A huge society-level funding of hybrid cars in the 80s or earlier would have been a waste since energy production hasn't changed enough in almost 30 years to justify that. If there's no reason to change fast, then why be surprised that it doesn't happen?
As I noted, when there is a reason to change, it can happen very fast as the advent of modern fracking demonstrates.
Just waiting for the magic to happen and not training engineers and scientists means missed opportunities.
I'm not a car company. I'm not missing any opportunities by "waiting for the magic". And last I looked, the production of engineers and scientists is heavily subsidized all over the world without much to say for it.
Just waiting for the magic to happen will mean that China and India will eat your lunch and leave you hungry - because they don't believe in magic just like the people who built the industry that formed your society didn't believe in the magic of things just happening when a niche appears.
That's the power of markets. It doesn't matter whether you believe in "the magic" or not. It happens just the same as a quick perusal of car manufacturing history would show.
Guess which end of the stick you are waving with your bullshit of the market providing so there is no point attempting to make improvements.
Where do I say that there's no point attempting to make improvements? My point is that large scale interference with alternative energy development wasn't an improvement in the past, but rather a huge waste of time and resources. The same sorts of rationalizations were used then as are used now.
Just because you think hybrid cars, alternative energy, or whatever are improvements over the current state doesn't mean they actually are. Markets remain an excellent way to determine that. And a lack of ready adoption in the marketplace indicates that these ideas aren't actually all that viable at this time.
The Drake equation isn't a rigorous thing. It's not a rule of thumb nor even a model. What it is is a means of separating the aspects of a complex probabilistic problem into approachable pieces. The chain of conditional probabilities are all simpler than the original problem. For example, the first four conditional probabilities are:
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
Note as we go along, the conditional probabilities get harder to estimate and probably change over time in a way that can't be modeled by this crude approach. But even so we can come up with decent estimates for the early parts of the equation in order to speculate about the rest.
Some are also just wrong. For example, he uses 4.5 km/s delta-V but that doesn't even cover the maxima for Liquid Fuel Rockets (7 to 9 km/s). If you start to approach tech like Electrostatic or Hall Effect (Ion) Thrusters you get up into numbers more like 50-100 km/s, which would probably multiply his 10 number by a bit (most of the Oort Cloud becomes available over time).
Unlike the Drake equation, this exercise can actually come up with reasonable numbers. And while the delta v threshold is evidently for a particular scenario, the model can estimate numbers of asteroids for other thresholds of delta v. That makes it versatile rather than fuzzy.
So you don't think it's relevant that you are making statements that you are unqualified to make about a papers that were written, reviewed, and published by people who are?
I'll speak here on the matter of "qualification". This is just another example of the fallacy of argument from authority. Qualification as you use it here is just an arbitrary label without meaning since there is no actual qualification process nor would such a process be useful to determining the degree of truth of statements made.
And by stating my opinion whether in error or not, I demonstrate sufficient qualification to speak on this matter.
That Watts remains "unconvinced" tells us nothing about the paper except that it does not support his preconceptions.
But the author does more than just say that he is unconvinced. He gives reasons.
First, let's be clear. We're not having a discussion, we're having a "Did not! Did too!" toddler argument. I apologize for my role in creating this state of affairs.
Yes, I was blatantly wrong earlier in this thread. The reason I said that was immaterial is because the underlying problem remains. Once again, claims about AGW are being made which can't be supported by the actual science that has been done.
I don't need to fully understand the research and have access to what has been done to notice warning signs such as claiming too much precision from observations or searching for "missing heat" (and finding it where there are no observations to contradict the hunt) while ignoring other obvious hypotheses, like error or systematic bias.
Nuclear tipped MIRV ICBMs and cruise missiles are the obvious rebuttal to your assumption. Just because a weapon is relatively destructive doesn't mean that it can't be made even more effective by better delivery and targeting - which a robotics system can help deliver.
but unfortunately we really only have 200-300 years of easy energy
With the inclusion of solar power, that goes up to around a billion years of easy energy. Another problem solved by Slashdot before it even became a problem.
No. In practice we don't see real world markets acting fast enough and instead the real world markets have months or a year or two to make a choice from what is already available if not necessarily mainstream.
Which is much faster than necessary for deciding about energy technologies. I really don't see your point at all. The real world just doesn't change that fast where a couple of decades isn't sufficient to adapt.
The market cannot decide to chose something that is not already there when there isn't a choice already provided by the work and time of those who had the foresight to move before the market decided.
Those choices already exist. The whole point of choice is that something gets chosen and something does not. The market already provides incentive for people who have that foresight.
The best of a bad lot becomes the default instead.
That's your subjective opinion that these choices are "bad". The other choices simply aren't embraced for whatever reasons, usually economic or user preference. That doesn't make them bad choices.
It's about transistor density. Integrated circuits with higher transistor densities happen to be useful when you're designing integrated circuits with higher transistor densities. Speed of computation is one reason why.
The choices available when market forces drive action depend on what is known about.
You only know by trying things out. This takes time. Market forces do not leave much time.
Simple enough?
And in practice, we observe real world markets acting fast enough. That's my point.
Moore's Law is a model, not an error. And it worked out quite well for more than fifty years (including some period of time before it became more or less official). That deflates most of your argument.
Part of what made the Moore's "Law" meme so sticky is how it was used, usually in a simple line graph, by "futurists" who barely can check their own email to pen mellodramatic, overhyped predictions about *when* we would have 'AI'.
AI hype is tied to computer performance, and Moore's "Law" was something air-head journalists could easily source, complete with a nice graph from a tech "expert"
I know my view of AI as a fiction is in the minority, but IMHO we need to grow up, stop with the reductive notion that computing is progressing towards some kind of 'AI' singularity and focus on making things that help people do work or play.
Moore's law is a demonstration that these ideas aren't completely fiction. Merely having faster, higher density computing did greatly improve the ability to design future faster, higher density computing machines.
It strikes me that what you're really talking here is not that "the Singularity" or similar iterative development scenarios are fiction but rather that any such process which builds on itself can be naively directed into an extreme, not particularly useful direction by obsessive focus on a few metrics.
And that could have nasty repercussions for us, if we develop something that is obsessively focused on and quite capable of increasing those few metrics at the expense of everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
All they did was fuck up tracking guns that were sold to known drug runners by people whose idea of tracking gun sales is to write them on rolls of toilet paper and whose idea of background checks is to look behind the guy.
No, it's worse than that. They simply didn't track these weapons or notify Mexican authorities that they were doing this (Mexican authorities learned about Fast and Furious when the scandal became public via whistleblowers after the death of a US Border Patrol agent involving two guns from the program), and the gun sellers were in on the alleged sting and were authorized by the ATF agents involved to sell those weapons as they did.
In addition, the Sinaloa Cartel got a free ticket for at least a year to smuggle guns and who knows what else into Mexico in addition to those 2000 or so guns. Maybe it was a sting and maybe it was substantial aid for a favored cartel.
He's half right, Solyndra started the process to get the loan in 2007. Should Obama have known to cut them off halfway through? Who knows... They didn't get the money then "promptly go bankrupt" though.
Yes, he should have cut off the process. And yes, they did go promptly bankrupt since they were out of cash in about 15 months of getting the loan money and bankrupt in two years.
QM says you can't measure the magnetic moment of a single particle along two perpendicular axes at the same time. And yet, you can easily measure the magnetic moment of a bar magnet along two perpendicular axes at the same time.
The uncertainty principle says that you can't measure two properties to a greater precision than the norm of the commutator of those two properties as operators. For a single particle, that value tends to be large relative to the size of the magnetic moment components while in a bar magnet the values of the magnetic moment are much larger, being ensembles of many particles (usually 20+ orders of magnitude larger) while the commutator doesn't increase so.
So is this evidence that time reversible QM is correct?
How can a theory be more correct than an equivalent theory? It can, as apparently is the case here, be more parsimonious, but that is a different beast from correctness.
I guess you're not most individuals. Might still be worth trying that SSD first before going with a new computer. But no matter how awesome the computer is, there's always an app that can easily pummel it.
It is simply a "commercial web portal"
Really?
Seriously, I don't get what's supposed to be so magically hard about this system. It doesn't do that many transactions. Amazon does more, for example. It doesn't have to have a lot of connectivity since it's just linking people who want health insurance with businesses that provide health insurance. There's no reason actually for it to have or keep track of personal information for that matter.
I get that the feds once again fucked up the design and requirements and made this site much harder than it should have been. But so what?
Of course there would be other implementation challenges but nothing like what we are seeing here.
You bet. They are failing hard in ways completely different from the ways the insurance-based system fails hard.
But for a business failing that hard, it works pretty well! Hey, why does everything look pink?
If employees want fashionable urban housing, try to fit into the existing city.
They are. The people who aren't fitting are the anti-gentrification people.
Given the expected regulatory hassles, companies are looking for mineral supplies in more stable countries. Legal exports (as opposed to black market transactions) of the minerals from the Congo, which supplies 13 percent of the worldâ(TM)s supply of tantalum, dropped more than 90 percent in April from a month earlier, according to the latest data. âoeAlmost everything came to a standstill,â says Paul Yenga Mabolia, head of Promines, a World Bank program assisting the mining industry in Congo.
Note that a huge increase in the price of tantalum happened after supply was deliberately restricted.
Often, and this is no exception, fads come with a hefty priceâ¦literally. The price per kilogram of tantalum imports to the U.S. increased by 170% in just one year. The rise in price was mostly seen in imports by air, as shown in the graph below. The average import price of tantalum went from $110 in 2011 to nearly $300 in 2012. The craze is continuing into 2013 as well, with January numbers showing the average price at $360.
China also happens to be the primary source of imported tantalum for the US. Given that China is also alleged in my previous link to be the main destination for conflict tantalum, I wonder how much of that import is laundered tantalum from the Congo.
So here's my take on "conflict minerals". I think they don't help the people that they supposedly are intended to help and they reward those who break the law. That's an excellent combination for any policy to achieve.
Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs
Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.
There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.
I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.
Many of the same parties who are pushing new white elephants like the SLS, are profiting from the ISS. As I see it, this creates a destructive cycle where huge amounts of public funds are used to build space projects (and similar things) with poor utility and the profits from that cycle used to insure a next generation of poor space projects.
By destroying the ISS, I would sacrifice a small amount of science research (and yes, I have perused the list of research that the ISS has done) and perhaps other moderate benefits. But in exchange I would end a significant food source for an entire parasitic ecosystem. I think that would be worth it.
We can believe you, who have been shown to be talking out of your ass, or the scientific literature.
I quoted scientific literature even if you choose not to recognize it as such.
You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.
Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ever made on scientific research in the history of the world. If the "greatest scientific community" is being destroyed, then it must be by something other than mere economics.
I think Lawrence_Bird nailed the fundamental problem. Programs like the ISS aren't scientific programs but rather corrupt transfers of wealth to various elite which happen to do a minor bit of research. Too much research is not about producing something of value either for today or the distant future.
None of this stuff I've mentioned would be possible without the ISS.
I don't know about whether this stuff would be possible, but it'd certainly be cheaper without the ISS, when it were done.
When does INL turn a profit? Los Alamos? Amundsen-Scott? Those are all major laboratories doing basic research. The ISS justifiably fits right in there with all of those facilities, and I"m glad that it is treated as such.
Indeed, the US has a great tradition of money sinks be it research or the occasional interminable war. Imagine, if you can, how bad it would be if the US were to actually use that money for something useful rather than misemploying eggheads or bombing brown people.
Regardless, the ISS is doing some tremendous work right now, and it is disingenuous to suggest that spider webs are the only thing being studied.
I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.
When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.
For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.
"Best of a bad lot", as you know, is a common phrase for a limited set of choices and not whatever stupid spin you are putting on it.
In that case, your phrase makes little sense since choice is always limited especially if you're constraining it economically.
As for your "fast" markets - I remember seeing two hybrid car prototypes in 1987. They were not the first by a long shot. It took a long time from then and a lot of work by a lot of people before they were a marketable choice and now there are a lot of them in the market.
A huge society-level funding of hybrid cars in the 80s or earlier would have been a waste since energy production hasn't changed enough in almost 30 years to justify that. If there's no reason to change fast, then why be surprised that it doesn't happen?
As I noted, when there is a reason to change, it can happen very fast as the advent of modern fracking demonstrates.
Just waiting for the magic to happen and not training engineers and scientists means missed opportunities.
I'm not a car company. I'm not missing any opportunities by "waiting for the magic". And last I looked, the production of engineers and scientists is heavily subsidized all over the world without much to say for it.
Just waiting for the magic to happen will mean that China and India will eat your lunch and leave you hungry - because they don't believe in magic just like the people who built the industry that formed your society didn't believe in the magic of things just happening when a niche appears.
That's the power of markets. It doesn't matter whether you believe in "the magic" or not. It happens just the same as a quick perusal of car manufacturing history would show.
Guess which end of the stick you are waving with your bullshit of the market providing so there is no point attempting to make improvements.
Where do I say that there's no point attempting to make improvements? My point is that large scale interference with alternative energy development wasn't an improvement in the past, but rather a huge waste of time and resources. The same sorts of rationalizations were used then as are used now.
Just because you think hybrid cars, alternative energy, or whatever are improvements over the current state doesn't mean they actually are. Markets remain an excellent way to determine that. And a lack of ready adoption in the marketplace indicates that these ideas aren't actually all that viable at this time.
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
Note as we go along, the conditional probabilities get harder to estimate and probably change over time in a way that can't be modeled by this crude approach. But even so we can come up with decent estimates for the early parts of the equation in order to speculate about the rest.
Some are also just wrong. For example, he uses 4.5 km/s delta-V but that doesn't even cover the maxima for Liquid Fuel Rockets (7 to 9 km/s). If you start to approach tech like Electrostatic or Hall Effect (Ion) Thrusters you get up into numbers more like 50-100 km/s, which would probably multiply his 10 number by a bit (most of the Oort Cloud becomes available over time).
Unlike the Drake equation, this exercise can actually come up with reasonable numbers. And while the delta v threshold is evidently for a particular scenario, the model can estimate numbers of asteroids for other thresholds of delta v. That makes it versatile rather than fuzzy.
So you don't think it's relevant that you are making statements that you are unqualified to make about a papers that were written, reviewed, and published by people who are?
I'll speak here on the matter of "qualification". This is just another example of the fallacy of argument from authority. Qualification as you use it here is just an arbitrary label without meaning since there is no actual qualification process nor would such a process be useful to determining the degree of truth of statements made.
And by stating my opinion whether in error or not, I demonstrate sufficient qualification to speak on this matter.
That Watts remains "unconvinced" tells us nothing about the paper except that it does not support his preconceptions.
But the author does more than just say that he is unconvinced. He gives reasons.
Your error is the discussion.
First, let's be clear. We're not having a discussion, we're having a "Did not! Did too!" toddler argument. I apologize for my role in creating this state of affairs.
Yes, I was blatantly wrong earlier in this thread. The reason I said that was immaterial is because the underlying problem remains. Once again, claims about AGW are being made which can't be supported by the actual science that has been done.
I don't need to fully understand the research and have access to what has been done to notice warning signs such as claiming too much precision from observations or searching for "missing heat" (and finding it where there are no observations to contradict the hunt) while ignoring other obvious hypotheses, like error or systematic bias.
Nuclear tipped MIRV ICBMs and cruise missiles are the obvious rebuttal to your assumption. Just because a weapon is relatively destructive doesn't mean that it can't be made even more effective by better delivery and targeting - which a robotics system can help deliver.
but unfortunately we really only have 200-300 years of easy energy
With the inclusion of solar power, that goes up to around a billion years of easy energy. Another problem solved by Slashdot before it even became a problem.
Why, do you think it's based on something else?
Monopoly of force.
Is it that he is a sociopath who feels some sort of need to force others to not "ignore" him?
I wasn't aware that whistle blowing was supposed to be a popularity contest for sociopaths.
NOT that anybody who claims to be one gets to have a bunch of "effective" changes made to placate them. That would be highly anti-democratic.
So whistle blowing is also anti-democratic? What I think is anti-democratic is secrecy. Whistle blowing hinders that anti-democratic tendency.
I want to elect leaders, not have some game of whistle-merit where your favorite whistle-blower gets to choose the laws.
So did you vote to have the NSA spy on your personal communications?
No. In practice we don't see real world markets acting fast enough and instead the real world markets have months or a year or two to make a choice from what is already available if not necessarily mainstream.
Which is much faster than necessary for deciding about energy technologies. I really don't see your point at all. The real world just doesn't change that fast where a couple of decades isn't sufficient to adapt.
The market cannot decide to chose something that is not already there when there isn't a choice already provided by the work and time of those who had the foresight to move before the market decided.
Those choices already exist. The whole point of choice is that something gets chosen and something does not. The market already provides incentive for people who have that foresight.
The best of a bad lot becomes the default instead.
That's your subjective opinion that these choices are "bad". The other choices simply aren't embraced for whatever reasons, usually economic or user preference. That doesn't make them bad choices.
Moorels law isn't about speed.
It's about transistor density. Integrated circuits with higher transistor densities happen to be useful when you're designing integrated circuits with higher transistor densities. Speed of computation is one reason why.
The choices available when market forces drive action depend on what is known about. You only know by trying things out. This takes time. Market forces do not leave much time. Simple enough?
And in practice, we observe real world markets acting fast enough. That's my point.
Part of what made the Moore's "Law" meme so sticky is how it was used, usually in a simple line graph, by "futurists" who barely can check their own email to pen mellodramatic, overhyped predictions about *when* we would have 'AI'.
AI hype is tied to computer performance, and Moore's "Law" was something air-head journalists could easily source, complete with a nice graph from a tech "expert"
I know my view of AI as a fiction is in the minority, but IMHO we need to grow up, stop with the reductive notion that computing is progressing towards some kind of 'AI' singularity and focus on making things that help people do work or play.
Moore's law is a demonstration that these ideas aren't completely fiction. Merely having faster, higher density computing did greatly improve the ability to design future faster, higher density computing machines.
It strikes me that what you're really talking here is not that "the Singularity" or similar iterative development scenarios are fiction but rather that any such process which builds on itself can be naively directed into an extreme, not particularly useful direction by obsessive focus on a few metrics.
And that could have nasty repercussions for us, if we develop something that is obsessively focused on and quite capable of increasing those few metrics at the expense of everything else.