Who really believes that pandering to the extremely niche "science is a tool of the Devil" crowd is going to get a politician votes? If one looks at the cases where school boards were stacked with intelligent design advocates, for example, the takeover was covert and they got voted out when the next election happened.
Using diffuse gases to slow orbiting vehicles is common, it's called aerobraking.
I gather Boeing isn't patenting aerobraking, but instead a novel way to deliver those gases. They also apparently have done research on designs for delivering such gases and for the effects of delivery.
Lets say Boeing starts actually developing these gas-based systems, but finds that the gas tank nozzle is clogged because of the cryogenic temperatures causing trace gases like CO2 freezing inside the valve and blocking it.
Let's not, since that is an easy problem to overcome, by removing the trace gases in exactly the way they're alleged to cause problems (that is, by freezing them out). A serious application would no doubt have further opportunity for patents.
turns out the ipod's promise to revolutionize the way we live, only applies to its consumers.
And water is wet. I wonder why it is so mystifying that a "promise", vaguely defined as it is, made to a group of consumers, happens to apply only to that group of consumers? The previous post completely fails to understand what a promise is (even if we ignore whether such a promise actually were made). If I promise to help a friend clean their attic, I didn't just issue a blanket promise to help everyone clean their attics. It matters who the promise is made to.
Basic laws of reality? Isn't science about increasing our understanding of reality? Many theories and ideas have come and gone and been replaced by more refined ones. We would be extremely naive to think our current understanding is even remotely close to all there is to know and completely correct. There is much to learn my friend.
We already know of basic limits on any civilization, no matter how advanced. I think it is foolish to assume that things like the laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light can be overcome, no matter how advanced the civilization, because if it could, it probably would have already transformed the universe in an obvious way.
Even in such restrictions, one can see a lot of room for some pretty wild stuff. For example, imagine a universe where a kilogram of arbitrary matter is roughly as intelligent as a large university. That's possible with sufficient technological advance and a long enough time frame. It doesn't take FTL, ESP, or some other exotic discovery, but something that could be developed within today's restrictions, starting with today's techologies, and developed over a long enough time period, say a billion years.
Only if the overburden has effectively zero permeability and the pore-filling material is supporting the overburden with no remnant matrix stress.
Well, the obvious sealant to consider here is frozen CO2. If we grant your assertion that it is impossible for CO2 to move into soil as I speculated above, there's still other ways to do it. For example, if the outgassing is strong enough to create craters or crevices, then one can have an alternate means of introducing frozen CO2, Namely, have it freeze into the surface of the hole and covered later by windblown sand. Similarly, a sand dune which moves in the direction of a mostly shaded side, could bury frozen CO2.
Alternately, wind erosion might just work differently on Mars for this size or composition of pebble than anything we've experienced on Earth. Perhaps it was rounded while rolling along the surface of sand dunes at some point in the distant past. Sand effectively is acting as yet another fluid here both in the sand dune and as particles suspended in the wind.
As I see it, there's simply too much we don't know about Mars and its past to rule out exotic processes unknown or rare on Earth. My take is that we will find that CO2 and its peculiar physical characteristics will result in some bizarre geological processes that are unheard of on Earth. Rounding pebbles without the use of liquid water may be one such process.
Ok, then we just build those hundreds of power plants. It's not a true problem since the answer is already known.
It's also worth noting that a large portion of the recharging of electric cars isn't likely to coincide with peak load times. You'll have some recharging peak during and after rush hours and other high travel periods, but you'll also have a large amount of trickle charging which occurs during low demand times. That means one gets some demand flattening.
It might also allow for better use of intermittent wind power sources since charging overnight allows for some demand shaping to better fit to what's available.
Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC, and were considered to be widely domesticated by 3000 BC.
Considered by who? Googling around, I see stuff like:
Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC).
That's around a millennium after the construction of the Pyramids.
And metal horseshoes, which considerably increased the endurance and value of horses, weren't apparently invented until some time between the 2nd century BC and 500 AD.
It really doesn't make sense to claim that human slaves are cheaper than horses. And your claims about history simply don't support your argument.
Better safety regulation doesn't naturally flow from more economic opportunity
That's not based on actual history. Every place which has increased its standard of living invariably has improved safety regulations as well. It's really quite simple. When the value of a person is low, then there's not much reason to have safety regulations. When the value of a person is high, then that is something worth protecting and we see subsequent regulation to that effect.
The United States has the largest GDP of any country. It consistently ranks dead last amongst the so-called "first world" countries in worker rights
This is a little bit of doublespeak. "Worker rights" have little to do with actual benefits to workers.
As the wealth disparity gap grew, our GDP growth year over year fell. Eventually, the middle class imploded, triggering a global economic crisis that continues to this day. We didn't chase the money away -- we let it walk out the front door to the sound of applause.
Well, it should be obvious that if the supply of labor increases, then the amounts paid for that labor will drop. That's what we've seen. The "implosion" of the middle class? That hasn't been seen, although it's interesting how much destructive political policy has been directed to making that happen.
As I see it, when labor is under threat from cheaper labor, one is extremely foolish to make that labor more expensive (and of course, even less competitive) by creating taxes and regulations (such as the alleged "worker rights") that make that labor more expensive and by driving up the costs of living (for example, the expenses of housing, health care, and education). Or by ignoring or actively harming the businesses that employ most people.
But when an employee does something illegal on the company resources, the company doesn't suffer?
What makes you think Verizon isn't suffering from the use of its resources?
I understand that guy getting something. But Cisco should be suing Verizon, not the person. Verizon would then sue their former employee.
Why? What's Verizon's part in this? I gather you are claiming that since Verizon resources were misappropriated as part of the scam, it somehow generates responsibility for the resulting crime. I can think of a simple example that illustrates the absurdity of this claim. If I rob a 7-11 (say even I was an employee who used my job to gather information for planning the crime) and use the funds I obtained to buy a gun, does the 7-11 business become partly liable for any future crimes I commit with that gun? No.
And why doesn't this work for governments as well? I'm sure that government funded transportation systems (not to mention all the other systems and regulations that enable crime, if only by defining it as a crime in the first place!) all over the world have enabled all sorts of crime sprees. When are those governments going to cough up money for their liability.
The pyramids were built by people dragging slabs up the sides using ropes and pulleys; Even though it's almost a certainty that the Egyptians knew of more advanced engineering.
What more advanced engineering? Rope and pulleys is pretty advanced for Egypt. And what does this have to do with the horse versus slave claim? The world didn't have good work horses at the time of Egypt. Those were bred later. And when good workhorses (and other beasts of burden) did appear, they replaced a lot of human labor. But slavery didn't go away, not because human slaves were somehow cheaper than horses, which frankly, they aren't, but because humans could do things that horses couldn't. Such as pick cotton.
The question has been how workers are treated, and what level of servitude a society is willing to accept for some, or all, of its members. Even by the laws of the United States, what China routinely allows with its workforce is inhumane. I say this with the full knowledge that my country has some of the worst labor laws in the first world -- the fewest number of vacation days, the spread between what the head of a company is paid and its entry-level workers the highest of any country on Earth, and a grossly underfunded federal workforce safety department.
So what? All the work we throw to China makes it a better place (and better safety regulation will follow). While all the work we chase out of our own countries with ridiculous safety regulations makes us less well off (with worse safety regulations to follow).
In the protein folding experiment it got the correct answer just 13 out of 10,000 times.
Getting the right answer once can be good enough. It depends on how the relative cost of checking if an answer is correct. I gather this would be used to figure out NP complete problems (which I might add, the protein folding experiment may not be in) where finding the answer isn't known to be doable in polynomial time, but it can be checked in polynomial time.
So, solid CO2 at (say) 20m below ground surface will have, generally, a HIGHER vapour pressure than solid CO2 at 10m below ground surface.
The location 20 meters down will also have a higher actual pressure due to the presence of 10 meters of overburden.
Wrong direction. In spring, as the Martian polar caps warm with approaching perihelion, the atmospheric pressure increases.
Warmth. That increases the vapor pressure of CO2 near the surface. As it evaporates, you have less pressure on deeper CO2.
Anyway, I've got to bugger off now to attend a planning meeting for a 20-30 million dollar budget effort to investigate some ancient streambeds somewhere in the North West Europe Hydrocarbon Province. Which, considering the approaching winter season, could be "interesting".
Why waste the effort? Just toss it on Slashdot. There's a lot of people who say that they know what they're talking about.
Math IS consequence. That symbol manipulation is just a consequence of the starting premises of mathematics.
Math IS patterns. One could derive all possible mathematics that we can figure out by computing all possible finite computing machines (Turing machines being a symbolic computation representation of these machines) with all possible finite inputs. We don't do so because that would be a poor use of our time and generate a lot of math that we simply are uninterested in. Instead, we spend a lot of time studying particular patterns and structures that we have use for. Symbol manipulation happens to be a broad class of patterns that we've decided to focus particular attention on.
Math is relation. The whole idea of proof is to find two or more statements which are related (usually as tautologies or implications) to one another. The most powerful concepts of math such as distance, equivalence, connectedness, correlation, etc are all relations between different mathematical objects or systems.
Sorry, but I don't think I do. Card had a good book in Ender's Game. But the follow on books just aren't that interesting to me. I don't have a problem with Card earning his keep from milking the franchise, but I'd rather read something a bit more fresh.
Fame for a specialty is like that. I happened to work at HP when he was hired for a short time around 2000 (hope I'm not coming on too strong with my namedropping). Most people there didn't know or care, but the programmers with any open source experience talked about it a lot.
It wasn't that much of a twist. One doesn't burn out their chief leadership assets for practice. And the aliens played just too well to be a simulation. And of course, the narrative of the book spent way too much time on these games. I bet a lot of readers had this plot figured out.
I think it would have been more realistic a book if some of the kids had figured it out too (Bean for example) and just decided not to tell. Imagine the reveal at the end when several kids are complaining about getting fooled and one says, "Oh yea, I figured it out from the third game on. I wasn't going to be the one to tell you guys."
If it's so foreseeable...why did everyone's retirement funds lose thousands of dollars?
Because those retirement funds were in the hands of other people without a common interest in preserving the integrity of the retirement fund. It should be painfully obvious that people, businesses, and governments treat Other Peoples' Money differently than their own.
There was also widespread losses from hidden systemic risk which nailed people who knew the crash was coming.
But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a financial crises results in less access to credit. One merely needs to look at the history of financial crises to see that.
Research is -- on the scale that government or really large corporations operate -- cheap. It is a relatively small portion of the budget and yet returns value over decades and centuries.
When it returns value greater than the cost, sure. I see you mentioned NASA later on. One should remember NASA's International Space Station as a counterexample which sucks up a lot of money, but delivers very little of scientific value.
Frankly, I think there's a long term trend towards ineffective but massive, publicly funded research and an overall decline in the quality of scientific research. Similar problems occur with education, though that appears to be mostly a US thing right now.
I don't understand austerity; is the idea "sacrifice tomorrow to pay for today"?
No, it's sacrifice some today in order to have a better tomorrow. And I bet it will work, assuming one tries it.
The problem as I see it, is that Keynesian strategy, that is, spending money to generate economic activity is addictive in the sense of physical addiction. The economies of the world have somehow grown inured to it (and/or it is being spent less effectively) and it takes a higher baseline spending just to generate the normal economic activity that we take for granted. Emergency stimulus spending for recessions has to be in addition to that.
Austerity is an attempt to reset the Keynesian strategy so that one doesn't need massive amounts of Keynesian spending just to maintain the status quo. And a lot of government programs worldwide, particularly health care and pension funds, are out of control when it comes to future obligations. Some austerity now, particular cutbacks on the amount of future obligations due to such things, can help a country's economy considerably.
Are you capable of standing still? Can you do it for 5 minutes? Now, pour vegetable oil on the floor and try standing still in that same spot for 5 minutes.
You just described working in just about any restaurant where foods are fried in oil. It does increase the likelihood of slipping when moving about, but standing still for five minutes isn't noticeably harder.
Oh yes. You have to feed and maintain the environment for these organisms. Plus you still have to extract the gold when you harvest them. That adds considerable overhead.
So you're saying we should hook up the Slashdot moderation system to an electric shock collar?
Not at all. I don't see the problem with rude people on the internet. There's no particular reason why a moderate degree of rudeness isn't actually beneficial. It cuts through a lot of overhead.
We have this problem all the time - only the problem isn't usually accusations of bias. All of those little studies that show that acai berries or blueberries, etc. prevent cancer or heart disease or whatever. They almost always end up being flawed little studies that don't hold up under more rigorous conditions. Yet there's tons of stupid products that get sold to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on a BS claim.
So that's a different problem and hence, not an example of your claim. It's like claiming we have a problem with drug use because there are a lot of jaywalkers out there. Presence of a different problem which share a few characteristics (such as being science-related), doesn't imply existence of the problem in question.
Publishing preliminary information just pushes this even farther into the wacky realm. Of course, this isn't a problem with peer review or the scientific process, it is more of a problem with the press coverage of science and the lack of understanding of the scientific process among the public. Whether it is some interesting preliminary data or a finding in a small study, the scientific response is "that's interesting, let's do some followup studies to confirm the results". Unfortunately, the public response is "OMG! Diapers cause brain clouds! We have to ban diapers!!!" Perhaps equally unfortunately, scientific journals don't like to publish followup studies that confirm (or contradict) initial studies.
Believe it or not, I disagree. I think the whackiness is saturated. That is, no matter how many more medical studies you throw out, you won't get a lot more crazy ideas. The reason is because the people generating the crazy ideas are already doing that. More pseudo-scientific studies won't expedite the generation of craziness nor create more crazy people.
We saw an excellent example of how to publish preliminary results this summer from CERN. They had very good data, but they were quite circumspect in their publications, pointing out the possibility of being wrong and wanting to gather more data to confirm to a much greater degree of certainty. If only other areas of scientific inquiry would adopt the same rigorous statistical analysis that the harder sciences try to adhere to...
Other areas of scientific inquiry are subject to significant limitations that simply cannot be waved away with "adoption". For example, you're not going to get several trillion cases of a rare cancer with which to test treatment strategies. Having sample sizes which can be ten or more orders of magnitude smaller eliminates a lot of the rigorous statistical analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Who really believes that pandering to the extremely niche "science is a tool of the Devil" crowd is going to get a politician votes? If one looks at the cases where school boards were stacked with intelligent design advocates, for example, the takeover was covert and they got voted out when the next election happened.
Using diffuse gases to slow orbiting vehicles is common, it's called aerobraking.
I gather Boeing isn't patenting aerobraking, but instead a novel way to deliver those gases. They also apparently have done research on designs for delivering such gases and for the effects of delivery.
Lets say Boeing starts actually developing these gas-based systems, but finds that the gas tank nozzle is clogged because of the cryogenic temperatures causing trace gases like CO2 freezing inside the valve and blocking it.
Let's not, since that is an easy problem to overcome, by removing the trace gases in exactly the way they're alleged to cause problems (that is, by freezing them out). A serious application would no doubt have further opportunity for patents.
Or we could recognize that Detroit would still be a burnt out shell even with protectionist laws in place.
turns out the ipod's promise to revolutionize the way we live, only applies to its consumers.
And water is wet. I wonder why it is so mystifying that a "promise", vaguely defined as it is, made to a group of consumers, happens to apply only to that group of consumers? The previous post completely fails to understand what a promise is (even if we ignore whether such a promise actually were made). If I promise to help a friend clean their attic, I didn't just issue a blanket promise to help everyone clean their attics. It matters who the promise is made to.
Taxes are what we use to buy civilization.
It doesn't take a lot of taxes to make a sanitation system that works. It does take a lot of taxes to get my cronies a piece of the action.
Basic laws of reality? Isn't science about increasing our understanding of reality? Many theories and ideas have come and gone and been replaced by more refined ones. We would be extremely naive to think our current understanding is even remotely close to all there is to know and completely correct. There is much to learn my friend.
We already know of basic limits on any civilization, no matter how advanced. I think it is foolish to assume that things like the laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light can be overcome, no matter how advanced the civilization, because if it could, it probably would have already transformed the universe in an obvious way.
Even in such restrictions, one can see a lot of room for some pretty wild stuff. For example, imagine a universe where a kilogram of arbitrary matter is roughly as intelligent as a large university. That's possible with sufficient technological advance and a long enough time frame. It doesn't take FTL, ESP, or some other exotic discovery, but something that could be developed within today's restrictions, starting with today's techologies, and developed over a long enough time period, say a billion years.
Dyson assumed that all alien civilizations are stupid enough to believe in infinite growth, much like humanity.
I don't believe this. I think the most advanced aliens have probably realized that there isn't much point of growth after a certain threshold.
Nonsense. A Dyson sphere is an efficient use of what you have, namely a star, not some futile chase after infinity.
Only if the overburden has effectively zero permeability and the pore-filling material is supporting the overburden with no remnant matrix stress.
Well, the obvious sealant to consider here is frozen CO2. If we grant your assertion that it is impossible for CO2 to move into soil as I speculated above, there's still other ways to do it. For example, if the outgassing is strong enough to create craters or crevices, then one can have an alternate means of introducing frozen CO2, Namely, have it freeze into the surface of the hole and covered later by windblown sand. Similarly, a sand dune which moves in the direction of a mostly shaded side, could bury frozen CO2.
Alternately, wind erosion might just work differently on Mars for this size or composition of pebble than anything we've experienced on Earth. Perhaps it was rounded while rolling along the surface of sand dunes at some point in the distant past. Sand effectively is acting as yet another fluid here both in the sand dune and as particles suspended in the wind.
As I see it, there's simply too much we don't know about Mars and its past to rule out exotic processes unknown or rare on Earth. My take is that we will find that CO2 and its peculiar physical characteristics will result in some bizarre geological processes that are unheard of on Earth. Rounding pebbles without the use of liquid water may be one such process.
The capacity of any electric grid is finite.
Ok, then we just build those hundreds of power plants. It's not a true problem since the answer is already known.
It's also worth noting that a large portion of the recharging of electric cars isn't likely to coincide with peak load times. You'll have some recharging peak during and after rush hours and other high travel periods, but you'll also have a large amount of trickle charging which occurs during low demand times. That means one gets some demand flattening.
It might also allow for better use of intermittent wind power sources since charging overnight allows for some demand shaping to better fit to what's available.
Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC, and were considered to be widely domesticated by 3000 BC.
Considered by who? Googling around, I see stuff like:
Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC).
That's around a millennium after the construction of the Pyramids.
And metal horseshoes, which considerably increased the endurance and value of horses, weren't apparently invented until some time between the 2nd century BC and 500 AD.
It really doesn't make sense to claim that human slaves are cheaper than horses. And your claims about history simply don't support your argument.
Better safety regulation doesn't naturally flow from more economic opportunity
That's not based on actual history. Every place which has increased its standard of living invariably has improved safety regulations as well. It's really quite simple. When the value of a person is low, then there's not much reason to have safety regulations. When the value of a person is high, then that is something worth protecting and we see subsequent regulation to that effect.
The United States has the largest GDP of any country. It consistently ranks dead last amongst the so-called "first world" countries in worker rights
This is a little bit of doublespeak. "Worker rights" have little to do with actual benefits to workers.
As the wealth disparity gap grew, our GDP growth year over year fell. Eventually, the middle class imploded, triggering a global economic crisis that continues to this day. We didn't chase the money away -- we let it walk out the front door to the sound of applause.
Well, it should be obvious that if the supply of labor increases, then the amounts paid for that labor will drop. That's what we've seen. The "implosion" of the middle class? That hasn't been seen, although it's interesting how much destructive political policy has been directed to making that happen.
As I see it, when labor is under threat from cheaper labor, one is extremely foolish to make that labor more expensive (and of course, even less competitive) by creating taxes and regulations (such as the alleged "worker rights") that make that labor more expensive and by driving up the costs of living (for example, the expenses of housing, health care, and education). Or by ignoring or actively harming the businesses that employ most people.
But when an employee does something illegal on the company resources, the company doesn't suffer?
What makes you think Verizon isn't suffering from the use of its resources?
I understand that guy getting something. But Cisco should be suing Verizon, not the person. Verizon would then sue their former employee.
Why? What's Verizon's part in this? I gather you are claiming that since Verizon resources were misappropriated as part of the scam, it somehow generates responsibility for the resulting crime. I can think of a simple example that illustrates the absurdity of this claim. If I rob a 7-11 (say even I was an employee who used my job to gather information for planning the crime) and use the funds I obtained to buy a gun, does the 7-11 business become partly liable for any future crimes I commit with that gun? No.
And why doesn't this work for governments as well? I'm sure that government funded transportation systems (not to mention all the other systems and regulations that enable crime, if only by defining it as a crime in the first place!) all over the world have enabled all sorts of crime sprees. When are those governments going to cough up money for their liability.
The pyramids were built by people dragging slabs up the sides using ropes and pulleys; Even though it's almost a certainty that the Egyptians knew of more advanced engineering.
What more advanced engineering? Rope and pulleys is pretty advanced for Egypt. And what does this have to do with the horse versus slave claim? The world didn't have good work horses at the time of Egypt. Those were bred later. And when good workhorses (and other beasts of burden) did appear, they replaced a lot of human labor. But slavery didn't go away, not because human slaves were somehow cheaper than horses, which frankly, they aren't, but because humans could do things that horses couldn't. Such as pick cotton.
The question has been how workers are treated, and what level of servitude a society is willing to accept for some, or all, of its members. Even by the laws of the United States, what China routinely allows with its workforce is inhumane. I say this with the full knowledge that my country has some of the worst labor laws in the first world -- the fewest number of vacation days, the spread between what the head of a company is paid and its entry-level workers the highest of any country on Earth, and a grossly underfunded federal workforce safety department.
So what? All the work we throw to China makes it a better place (and better safety regulation will follow). While all the work we chase out of our own countries with ridiculous safety regulations makes us less well off (with worse safety regulations to follow).
In the protein folding experiment it got the correct answer just 13 out of 10,000 times.
Getting the right answer once can be good enough. It depends on how the relative cost of checking if an answer is correct. I gather this would be used to figure out NP complete problems (which I might add, the protein folding experiment may not be in) where finding the answer isn't known to be doable in polynomial time, but it can be checked in polynomial time.
So, solid CO2 at (say) 20m below ground surface will have, generally, a HIGHER vapour pressure than solid CO2 at 10m below ground surface.
The location 20 meters down will also have a higher actual pressure due to the presence of 10 meters of overburden.
Wrong direction. In spring, as the Martian polar caps warm with approaching perihelion, the atmospheric pressure increases.
Warmth. That increases the vapor pressure of CO2 near the surface. As it evaporates, you have less pressure on deeper CO2.
Anyway, I've got to bugger off now to attend a planning meeting for a 20-30 million dollar budget effort to investigate some ancient streambeds somewhere in the North West Europe Hydrocarbon Province. Which, considering the approaching winter season, could be "interesting".
Why waste the effort? Just toss it on Slashdot. There's a lot of people who say that they know what they're talking about.
Math IS symbol *manipulation*
Math IS consequence. That symbol manipulation is just a consequence of the starting premises of mathematics.
Math IS patterns. One could derive all possible mathematics that we can figure out by computing all possible finite computing machines (Turing machines being a symbolic computation representation of these machines) with all possible finite inputs. We don't do so because that would be a poor use of our time and generate a lot of math that we simply are uninterested in. Instead, we spend a lot of time studying particular patterns and structures that we have use for. Symbol manipulation happens to be a broad class of patterns that we've decided to focus particular attention on.
Math is relation. The whole idea of proof is to find two or more statements which are related (usually as tautologies or implications) to one another. The most powerful concepts of math such as distance, equivalence, connectedness, correlation, etc are all relations between different mathematical objects or systems.
Sorry, but I don't think I do. Card had a good book in Ender's Game. But the follow on books just aren't that interesting to me. I don't have a problem with Card earning his keep from milking the franchise, but I'd rather read something a bit more fresh.
Fame for a specialty is like that. I happened to work at HP when he was hired for a short time around 2000 (hope I'm not coming on too strong with my namedropping). Most people there didn't know or care, but the programmers with any open source experience talked about it a lot.
But the whole twist is the ending.
It wasn't that much of a twist. One doesn't burn out their chief leadership assets for practice. And the aliens played just too well to be a simulation. And of course, the narrative of the book spent way too much time on these games. I bet a lot of readers had this plot figured out.
I think it would have been more realistic a book if some of the kids had figured it out too (Bean for example) and just decided not to tell. Imagine the reveal at the end when several kids are complaining about getting fooled and one says, "Oh yea, I figured it out from the third game on. I wasn't going to be the one to tell you guys."
If it's so foreseeable...why did everyone's retirement funds lose thousands of dollars?
Because those retirement funds were in the hands of other people without a common interest in preserving the integrity of the retirement fund. It should be painfully obvious that people, businesses, and governments treat Other Peoples' Money differently than their own.
There was also widespread losses from hidden systemic risk which nailed people who knew the crash was coming.
But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a financial crises results in less access to credit. One merely needs to look at the history of financial crises to see that.
Research is -- on the scale that government or really large corporations operate -- cheap. It is a relatively small portion of the budget and yet returns value over decades and centuries.
When it returns value greater than the cost, sure. I see you mentioned NASA later on. One should remember NASA's International Space Station as a counterexample which sucks up a lot of money, but delivers very little of scientific value.
Frankly, I think there's a long term trend towards ineffective but massive, publicly funded research and an overall decline in the quality of scientific research. Similar problems occur with education, though that appears to be mostly a US thing right now.
I don't understand austerity; is the idea "sacrifice tomorrow to pay for today"?
No, it's sacrifice some today in order to have a better tomorrow. And I bet it will work, assuming one tries it.
The problem as I see it, is that Keynesian strategy, that is, spending money to generate economic activity is addictive in the sense of physical addiction. The economies of the world have somehow grown inured to it (and/or it is being spent less effectively) and it takes a higher baseline spending just to generate the normal economic activity that we take for granted. Emergency stimulus spending for recessions has to be in addition to that.
Austerity is an attempt to reset the Keynesian strategy so that one doesn't need massive amounts of Keynesian spending just to maintain the status quo. And a lot of government programs worldwide, particularly health care and pension funds, are out of control when it comes to future obligations. Some austerity now, particular cutbacks on the amount of future obligations due to such things, can help a country's economy considerably.
Are you capable of standing still? Can you do it for 5 minutes? Now, pour vegetable oil on the floor and try standing still in that same spot for 5 minutes.
You just described working in just about any restaurant where foods are fried in oil. It does increase the likelihood of slipping when moving about, but standing still for five minutes isn't noticeably harder.
Man, can you imagine if those funds had been put into researching and building actual fusion centers?
It's throwing good money after bad no matter which sort of fusion center sponges the funding up.
Faster certainly, more effective maybe, cheaper?
Oh yes. You have to feed and maintain the environment for these organisms. Plus you still have to extract the gold when you harvest them. That adds considerable overhead.
So you're saying we should hook up the Slashdot moderation system to an electric shock collar?
Not at all. I don't see the problem with rude people on the internet. There's no particular reason why a moderate degree of rudeness isn't actually beneficial. It cuts through a lot of overhead.
We have this problem all the time - only the problem isn't usually accusations of bias. All of those little studies that show that acai berries or blueberries, etc. prevent cancer or heart disease or whatever. They almost always end up being flawed little studies that don't hold up under more rigorous conditions. Yet there's tons of stupid products that get sold to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on a BS claim.
So that's a different problem and hence, not an example of your claim. It's like claiming we have a problem with drug use because there are a lot of jaywalkers out there. Presence of a different problem which share a few characteristics (such as being science-related), doesn't imply existence of the problem in question.
Publishing preliminary information just pushes this even farther into the wacky realm. Of course, this isn't a problem with peer review or the scientific process, it is more of a problem with the press coverage of science and the lack of understanding of the scientific process among the public. Whether it is some interesting preliminary data or a finding in a small study, the scientific response is "that's interesting, let's do some followup studies to confirm the results". Unfortunately, the public response is "OMG! Diapers cause brain clouds! We have to ban diapers!!!" Perhaps equally unfortunately, scientific journals don't like to publish followup studies that confirm (or contradict) initial studies.
Believe it or not, I disagree. I think the whackiness is saturated. That is, no matter how many more medical studies you throw out, you won't get a lot more crazy ideas. The reason is because the people generating the crazy ideas are already doing that. More pseudo-scientific studies won't expedite the generation of craziness nor create more crazy people.
We saw an excellent example of how to publish preliminary results this summer from CERN. They had very good data, but they were quite circumspect in their publications, pointing out the possibility of being wrong and wanting to gather more data to confirm to a much greater degree of certainty. If only other areas of scientific inquiry would adopt the same rigorous statistical analysis that the harder sciences try to adhere to...
Other areas of scientific inquiry are subject to significant limitations that simply cannot be waved away with "adoption". For example, you're not going to get several trillion cases of a rare cancer with which to test treatment strategies. Having sample sizes which can be ten or more orders of magnitude smaller eliminates a lot of the rigorous statistical analysis.