... as with practically ANY discussion of making money from space. People latch on to this stuff because it sounds cool, and pay no attention to the fact that it's an utter cost-effectiveness fail. The next time someone talks about mining $RESOURCE from the moon, or Mars, or my personal favorite, the asteroid belt, you'll see all the same kinds of arguments. "But there's He3 on the moon!" So? "But there's enough iron on Mars to last us the whole lifetime of the universe!" Yeah, and even if Mars was made of solid platinum, you couldn't economically recover it. "But the asteroid belt is full of valuable minerals!" Yes, and they're spread out over a quadrillion cubic miles of space, most of which is filled with 1) vacuum, 2) silica, or 3) iron/nickel, and we have plenty of all that on earth, thanks. How would you even prospect for the stuff, much less get it back to earth and make money?
People's common sense goes out the window when you talk about this stuff.
Ok, I haven't read the book. But the protectionism stuff laid out in the summary is yet another dumb argument - it doesn't account for a number of things: 1) people aren't perfectly free to switch from line of business to another at the drop of a hat, 2) changing businesses is risky, and people like to avoid risk, so much so that they'll pay for it, but his accounting doesn't include the cost of this risk. 3) etc, etc.
Without having read the book it's hard to say for sure, but from the examples cited it seems pretty obvious that the author just wrote down his libertarian principles and then arranged his logic to support them, which makes the whole thing hard to take seriously.
It's question-begging.
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
He wants to prove that everything is essentially deterministic (waving his hands a bit, possibly justifiably, at the QM stuff), and claims that free will is a sort of emergent property. And does that by assuming that everything is deterministic. Um, ok.
I haven't read the book, but from the summary it seems as if it's part of a genre of books popular in recent years, in which experts in some field try to apply what they know to some other field that they don't know anything about... with sort of dubious results. The original Freakonomics, and even more so Superfreakonomics was like this. SF, in particularly, was done with a certain intellectual dishonesty, mischaracterizing the views of some of the climate scientists quoted in the climate change section, and using some fairly dubious assumptions in the section about whether to walk or drive after you've had a few too many. There was another book recently in the same vein - unfortunately, I can remember neither the author nor the title, so I can't link to it - but it was a statistician who tried to analyze climate data. He came to the conclusion that "global warming" was bunk - and was promptly (intellectually speaking) torn limb-from-limb by actual climate scientists. It turns out that blindly apply statistics to a problem you don't really understand is not necessarily the path to enlightenment.
Something to keep in mind when reading this sort of thing: books that study a problem and conclude that the intuitively obvious answer/conventional wisdom is correct... don't sell. If you want to move your book, it needs to be controversial, so there's a built-in incentive to say incendiary stuff. This particular book sounds interesting enough that I might check it out of the library, but I doubt I'd spend any money on it.
... since space colonies are utter pie-in-the-sky (so to speak). There is not the slightest chance we're going to be establishing colonies on other bodies in the solar system any time soon. 1) We don't have the technology. The few efforts we've made at establishing truly self-contained ecosystems on the surface of the earth have been failures - read up on Biosphere II, which experienced massive disturbances in its ecology, and had to "import" atmosphere from the outside world... an option that's not going to be available on, say, Mars. There were numerous other ecological problems noted - such as the die-off of most of the animal life, insufficient food supplies, etc, etc.
More importantly 2) there's no money in space colonization. Lifting all these people, their life support equipment, their living spaces, and whatever they need to do work, into space, would be absolutely staggeringly expensive (consider that to get something just to LEO costs around $10k/kg). Oh, you want to build all that stuff on site? Then all you have to do is invent the robot machinery to do that, and send the equivalent of several automated factories to the site. That only becomes more expensive. And what can the colonists do to recoup all that money? The answer, essentially, is that they can't. There's nothing you can get in space that can't be obtained more cheaply on earth.
Bottom line: don't count your revolutions before they're hatched. We would have to figure out how it's technologically possible and even remotely cost effect to even establish such a colony first, and we're a long, long way from there.
I think we need to review the definition of the word "profit" - which means to sell something at a higher price than it costs you to get it. The asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates... the same as the earth. And they're like 200 million miles away. There is no way - ever - that you are going to be able to extract this stuff, ship it back to earth and make more money than you paid to get it - especially considering that we have an essentially unlimited supply on earth. And there's absolutely no reason to build stuff in space - no one lives there, remember? This whole "we've got to start an economy in space... so we can have an economy in space" is just another self-licking ice cream cone. There's no reason to do it, which is the real reason why no companies are champing at the bit to get started.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you have rights to an invention it it's either 1) patented, or 2) a trade secret. Not both - by definition, stuff that's patented isn't a secret anymore - you've published the design. The linked article doesn't say anything about trade secrets, just patents - it seems the mistake is in the summary.
... while others say that no, the TomTom car kit device really does contain an auxiliary GPS receiver. But in either case, the fact remains: TomTom thought it necessary to boost the GPS reception for the iPhone, because the equipment built into the phone was insufficient.
(BTW, the USPS has gone private which is one reason postage has been constantly going up...)
Not really true. It's still a government agency, the people who work there are still civil servants, etc... but their funding has to come exclusively from their own sales, and not from general tax revenue. Which is probably how it ought to be. But the USPS is not a private company.
Yes, lets give up on airport security. That will end well.
So if I understand you correctly, "replacing devices that may dangerously irradiate passengers" == "giving up on airport security"? Good to know.
Yes, I understand and am onboard with the idea that there's probably no real harm being done with the devices in use here. But the point is that we shouldn't assume they're not harmful until it's proven that they are - we should assume that they may be harmful unless it's been shown that they're not. It doesn't sound to me as if sufficient testing has been done.
As a side point, we should also admit that much of the what goes on in the name of airport security is no more than "security theater" - inconveniencing passengers by forcing them through a bunch of procedures that do little or nothing to actually improve security, but make it look like you're "doing something". I'm not sure if that's the case with the machines we're talking about here, but certainly some aspects of the screening process are a total waste of time - for example, limiting quantities of shampoo brought onboard, for example.
This would be a more serious objection if 1) you built all the wind turbines in the world in the same place and 2) this place had wild fluctuations in wind velocity. But in practice, we spread the turbines out over huge areas of the US, so if it's still in one place, it's blowing in another. And the grid issues are mitigated by the same thing. We'll use power generated in California to power California, in Texas to power Texas, off the east coast to power the east coast, etc.
Also, we tend to build wind turbines in places where the wind is rather steady and strong - mountain passes, plains, at sea, etc - so there's a lot less fluctuation in the wind than you might think.
Bottom line: yes, we'll need to be able to provide some level of baseline load, either by storing intermittent sources of energy, or by using traditional power plants such as nukes (probably we'll end up doing both). But to say that wind turbines are some kind of self-licking ice cream cone is sort of ridiculous. People aren't buying these things because they look cool - they're actually contributing useful capacity to the system.
Because "making sure you're in the top 10%" is something you have total control over. It's not like the circumstances of your birth could possibly have anything to do with it. Here's a news flash: some substantial portion of the US wasn't born with silver spoons in their mouth. Their parents don't have enough money to send them to college, and in the absence of "government bailouts", it's all but impossible to afford to go on your own. How are people in this situation supposed to just make sure there in the top 10%? To say nothing of the fact that the top 10% is, well 10%. So you're perfectly ok with the idea that 90% of the population is going to spiral into poverty. Nice.
Because, of course, it doesn't say we're giving China any missile technology. It says that authority to rule on what missile technology can be exported is now going to be done at the Department of Commerce instead of wherever it was done before. It's only unnamed "critics" of the administration who are saying that this will result in more technology transfer. Of course, given that your source is the notoriously anti-Obama Washington Times, it's not too surprising that they would provide unsourced quotes about this sort of thing.
Much of the 36k acreage could be dual-use - I've seen lots of wind farms in actively farmed fields, for example. Many others are done in places like mountain passes, where you're not building much of anything else anyway. So it's not like all this space is just being wasted.
Others have commented on issues like lack of ruggedization and local caching of maps (at least for some device/software combinations), and display size and mountability to stuff like mountain bikes. Another reason why dedicated GPS devices probably aren't going away any time soon: quality of the GPS receiver itself. The GPS receiver built into the iPhone, at least, is sort of weak sauce. While it works well enough in a car, if you get any kind of overhead obstruction at all (even a few tree branches, for example), the signal quickly drops to essentially nothing. This is why TomTom felt the need to offer an external GPS receiver as part of their iPhone car kit.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the GPS built into my iPhone, and frequently find it useful... but it's far from a complete replacement for a standalone device.
The only solution I see to this is to ban access to the built in device to all but emergency responders... If we don't write some protection laws quickly we'll surely see the end of companies like Garmin.
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. I'm being forced to pay for a GPS device built into my phone, but now you want to deny me the use of it... because it would interfere with Garmin's profit margin? Here's a news flash, partner - Garmin is not entitled to legal protection of their profits. If I bought the damn GPS, I should get to use it.
Our "vastly diminished military"? You mean the one on which we spend more than every other nation on earth... combined? Our continued pursuit of this fantasy in which we can buy absolutely anything we want for the military, and the cost doesn't count, is going to kill us.
Look, people, space exploration, etc, is a very, very expensive proposition, at least if you intend to do anything more than send small robotic probes out. If there's a case to be made that this is worth the money, then make it. But "we need to do it to keep up with the Chinese" is just plain dumb. It's either worth doing or it's not. What the Chinese, Russians, etc, are doing has (or at least should have) nothing to do with it.
If nuclear powered spacecraft are a great idea (of which I'm less than completely convinced), then great - let's go for them. But if the motivation for building what could be a very expensive and dangerous vehicle is nothing more than "but the Russians are doing it", then count me out. That would be a totally stupid reason for doing anything.
Don't you see *any* problem with THAT? Of course, no one is talking about success as a problem. Nor is anyone suggesting taxing people so much that there's no incentive to succeed. What we're talking about is taxing them until there's no incentive to provide obscenely high compensation for CEOs and the like, when their jobs evidently could be done just as well by bums off the street. Income taxes are very low now compared to what they were in, say, the fifties... and the economy during the fifties was doing just fine, thank you very much.
So, in terms of being "objective, quantitative, repeatable", etc... climatology == phrenology? Ooookay. I'll calibrate my acceptance of the rest of your argument accordingly.
... was not to provide advice to individual people about what career field they should go into. It was to provide advice to policymakers about how much they should encourage people to select a certain field. The conventional wisdom has been that there's a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country, and accordingly, career counselors, etc, have been motivated to try to get people to enter this field. Now it turns out that the conventional wisdom might be wrong. That's something career counselors would need to know. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything to YOU - obviously, the need for scientists and engineers > 0, so if that's what you need to do with your life, then knock yourself out. But you would probably also be interested in finding out if the field is less lucrative than what you thought.
Just tax the living crap out of extremely high incomes. We'd solve our budgetary problems and reduce the incentive to award obscenely huge and unjustified salaries, bonuses, etc, etc, all at one stroke.
Well you read wrong. Equality of income distribution is quantified by the Gini coefficient [wikipedia.org]. Wealth is less evenly distributed in the US than many places (ie Europe), but there's more than 40 countries ahead of us. China and Mexico for instance.
Hey, everybody! We're not as screwed up as China and Mexico! USA! USA!
Slashdot Mirror
... as with practically ANY discussion of making money from space. People latch on to this stuff because it sounds cool, and pay no attention to the fact that it's an utter cost-effectiveness fail. The next time someone talks about mining $RESOURCE from the moon, or Mars, or my personal favorite, the asteroid belt, you'll see all the same kinds of arguments. "But there's He3 on the moon!" So? "But there's enough iron on Mars to last us the whole lifetime of the universe!" Yeah, and even if Mars was made of solid platinum, you couldn't economically recover it. "But the asteroid belt is full of valuable minerals!" Yes, and they're spread out over a quadrillion cubic miles of space, most of which is filled with 1) vacuum, 2) silica, or 3) iron/nickel, and we have plenty of all that on earth, thanks. How would you even prospect for the stuff, much less get it back to earth and make money?
People's common sense goes out the window when you talk about this stuff.
Is this where I put in the "In Soviet Russia" joke?
Ok, I haven't read the book. But the protectionism stuff laid out in the summary is yet another dumb argument - it doesn't account for a number of things: 1) people aren't perfectly free to switch from line of business to another at the drop of a hat, 2) changing businesses is risky, and people like to avoid risk, so much so that they'll pay for it, but his accounting doesn't include the cost of this risk. 3) etc, etc.
Without having read the book it's hard to say for sure, but from the examples cited it seems pretty obvious that the author just wrote down his libertarian principles and then arranged his logic to support them, which makes the whole thing hard to take seriously.
He wants to prove that everything is essentially deterministic (waving his hands a bit, possibly justifiably, at the QM stuff), and claims that free will is a sort of emergent property. And does that by assuming that everything is deterministic. Um, ok.
I haven't read the book, but from the summary it seems as if it's part of a genre of books popular in recent years, in which experts in some field try to apply what they know to some other field that they don't know anything about... with sort of dubious results. The original Freakonomics, and even more so Superfreakonomics was like this. SF, in particularly, was done with a certain intellectual dishonesty, mischaracterizing the views of some of the climate scientists quoted in the climate change section, and using some fairly dubious assumptions in the section about whether to walk or drive after you've had a few too many. There was another book recently in the same vein - unfortunately, I can remember neither the author nor the title, so I can't link to it - but it was a statistician who tried to analyze climate data. He came to the conclusion that "global warming" was bunk - and was promptly (intellectually speaking) torn limb-from-limb by actual climate scientists. It turns out that blindly apply statistics to a problem you don't really understand is not necessarily the path to enlightenment.
Something to keep in mind when reading this sort of thing: books that study a problem and conclude that the intuitively obvious answer/conventional wisdom is correct... don't sell. If you want to move your book, it needs to be controversial, so there's a built-in incentive to say incendiary stuff. This particular book sounds interesting enough that I might check it out of the library, but I doubt I'd spend any money on it.
... since space colonies are utter pie-in-the-sky (so to speak). There is not the slightest chance we're going to be establishing colonies on other bodies in the solar system any time soon. 1) We don't have the technology. The few efforts we've made at establishing truly self-contained ecosystems on the surface of the earth have been failures - read up on Biosphere II, which experienced massive disturbances in its ecology, and had to "import" atmosphere from the outside world... an option that's not going to be available on, say, Mars. There were numerous other ecological problems noted - such as the die-off of most of the animal life, insufficient food supplies, etc, etc.
More importantly 2) there's no money in space colonization. Lifting all these people, their life support equipment, their living spaces, and whatever they need to do work, into space, would be absolutely staggeringly expensive (consider that to get something just to LEO costs around $10k/kg). Oh, you want to build all that stuff on site? Then all you have to do is invent the robot machinery to do that, and send the equivalent of several automated factories to the site. That only becomes more expensive. And what can the colonists do to recoup all that money? The answer, essentially, is that they can't. There's nothing you can get in space that can't be obtained more cheaply on earth.
Bottom line: don't count your revolutions before they're hatched. We would have to figure out how it's technologically possible and even remotely cost effect to even establish such a colony first, and we're a long, long way from there.
I think we need to review the definition of the word "profit" - which means to sell something at a higher price than it costs you to get it. The asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates... the same as the earth. And they're like 200 million miles away. There is no way - ever - that you are going to be able to extract this stuff, ship it back to earth and make more money than you paid to get it - especially considering that we have an essentially unlimited supply on earth. And there's absolutely no reason to build stuff in space - no one lives there, remember? This whole "we've got to start an economy in space... so we can have an economy in space" is just another self-licking ice cream cone. There's no reason to do it, which is the real reason why no companies are champing at the bit to get started.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you have rights to an invention it it's either 1) patented, or 2) a trade secret. Not both - by definition, stuff that's patented isn't a secret anymore - you've published the design. The linked article doesn't say anything about trade secrets, just patents - it seems the mistake is in the summary.
... while others say that no, the TomTom car kit device really does contain an auxiliary GPS receiver. But in either case, the fact remains: TomTom thought it necessary to boost the GPS reception for the iPhone, because the equipment built into the phone was insufficient.
But this part:
Not really true. It's still a government agency, the people who work there are still civil servants, etc... but their funding has to come exclusively from their own sales, and not from general tax revenue. Which is probably how it ought to be. But the USPS is not a private company.
So if I understand you correctly, "replacing devices that may dangerously irradiate passengers" == "giving up on airport security"? Good to know.
Yes, I understand and am onboard with the idea that there's probably no real harm being done with the devices in use here. But the point is that we shouldn't assume they're not harmful until it's proven that they are - we should assume that they may be harmful unless it's been shown that they're not. It doesn't sound to me as if sufficient testing has been done.
As a side point, we should also admit that much of the what goes on in the name of airport security is no more than "security theater" - inconveniencing passengers by forcing them through a bunch of procedures that do little or nothing to actually improve security, but make it look like you're "doing something". I'm not sure if that's the case with the machines we're talking about here, but certainly some aspects of the screening process are a total waste of time - for example, limiting quantities of shampoo brought onboard, for example.
... about how "if you have to explain the joke" probably applies here.
This would be a more serious objection if 1) you built all the wind turbines in the world in the same place and 2) this place had wild fluctuations in wind velocity. But in practice, we spread the turbines out over huge areas of the US, so if it's still in one place, it's blowing in another. And the grid issues are mitigated by the same thing. We'll use power generated in California to power California, in Texas to power Texas, off the east coast to power the east coast, etc.
Also, we tend to build wind turbines in places where the wind is rather steady and strong - mountain passes, plains, at sea, etc - so there's a lot less fluctuation in the wind than you might think.
Bottom line: yes, we'll need to be able to provide some level of baseline load, either by storing intermittent sources of energy, or by using traditional power plants such as nukes (probably we'll end up doing both). But to say that wind turbines are some kind of self-licking ice cream cone is sort of ridiculous. People aren't buying these things because they look cool - they're actually contributing useful capacity to the system.
Because "making sure you're in the top 10%" is something you have total control over. It's not like the circumstances of your birth could possibly have anything to do with it. Here's a news flash: some substantial portion of the US wasn't born with silver spoons in their mouth. Their parents don't have enough money to send them to college, and in the absence of "government bailouts", it's all but impossible to afford to go on your own. How are people in this situation supposed to just make sure there in the top 10%? To say nothing of the fact that the top 10% is, well 10%. So you're perfectly ok with the idea that 90% of the population is going to spiral into poverty. Nice.
Because, of course, it doesn't say we're giving China any missile technology. It says that authority to rule on what missile technology can be exported is now going to be done at the Department of Commerce instead of wherever it was done before. It's only unnamed "critics" of the administration who are saying that this will result in more technology transfer. Of course, given that your source is the notoriously anti-Obama Washington Times, it's not too surprising that they would provide unsourced quotes about this sort of thing.
A little less transparent propaganda, please.
Much of the 36k acreage could be dual-use - I've seen lots of wind farms in actively farmed fields, for example. Many others are done in places like mountain passes, where you're not building much of anything else anyway. So it's not like all this space is just being wasted.
Others have commented on issues like lack of ruggedization and local caching of maps (at least for some device/software combinations), and display size and mountability to stuff like mountain bikes. Another reason why dedicated GPS devices probably aren't going away any time soon: quality of the GPS receiver itself. The GPS receiver built into the iPhone, at least, is sort of weak sauce. While it works well enough in a car, if you get any kind of overhead obstruction at all (even a few tree branches, for example), the signal quickly drops to essentially nothing. This is why TomTom felt the need to offer an external GPS receiver as part of their iPhone car kit.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the GPS built into my iPhone, and frequently find it useful... but it's far from a complete replacement for a standalone device.
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. I'm being forced to pay for a GPS device built into my phone, but now you want to deny me the use of it... because it would interfere with Garmin's profit margin? Here's a news flash, partner - Garmin is not entitled to legal protection of their profits. If I bought the damn GPS, I should get to use it.
but this about made me spit out my coffee:
Our "vastly diminished military"? You mean the one on which we spend more than every other nation on earth... combined? Our continued pursuit of this fantasy in which we can buy absolutely anything we want for the military, and the cost doesn't count, is going to kill us.
Look, people, space exploration, etc, is a very, very expensive proposition, at least if you intend to do anything more than send small robotic probes out. If there's a case to be made that this is worth the money, then make it. But "we need to do it to keep up with the Chinese" is just plain dumb. It's either worth doing or it's not. What the Chinese, Russians, etc, are doing has (or at least should have) nothing to do with it.
If nuclear powered spacecraft are a great idea (of which I'm less than completely convinced), then great - let's go for them. But if the motivation for building what could be a very expensive and dangerous vehicle is nothing more than "but the Russians are doing it", then count me out. That would be a totally stupid reason for doing anything.
Don't you see *any* problem with THAT? Of course, no one is talking about success as a problem. Nor is anyone suggesting taxing people so much that there's no incentive to succeed. What we're talking about is taxing them until there's no incentive to provide obscenely high compensation for CEOs and the like, when their jobs evidently could be done just as well by bums off the street. Income taxes are very low now compared to what they were in, say, the fifties... and the economy during the fifties was doing just fine, thank you very much.
So, in terms of being "objective, quantitative, repeatable", etc... climatology == phrenology? Ooookay. I'll calibrate my acceptance of the rest of your argument accordingly.
... was not to provide advice to individual people about what career field they should go into. It was to provide advice to policymakers about how much they should encourage people to select a certain field. The conventional wisdom has been that there's a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country, and accordingly, career counselors, etc, have been motivated to try to get people to enter this field. Now it turns out that the conventional wisdom might be wrong. That's something career counselors would need to know. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything to YOU - obviously, the need for scientists and engineers > 0, so if that's what you need to do with your life, then knock yourself out. But you would probably also be interested in finding out if the field is less lucrative than what you thought.
Just tax the living crap out of extremely high incomes. We'd solve our budgetary problems and reduce the incentive to award obscenely huge and unjustified salaries, bonuses, etc, etc, all at one stroke.
Hey, everybody! We're not as screwed up as China and Mexico! USA! USA!